Thomas Tallis

John Harley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317010357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

John Harley's Thomas Tallis is the first full-length book to deal comprehensively with the composer's life and works. Tallis entered the Chapel Royal in the middle of a long life, and remained there for over 40 years. During a colourful period of English history he famously served King Henry VIII and the three of Henry's children who followed him to the throne. His importance for English music during the second half of the sixteenth century is equalled only by that of his pupil, colleague and friend William Byrd. In a series of chronological chapters, Harley describes Tallis's career before and after he entered the Chapel. The fully considered biography is placed in the context of larger political and cultural changes of the period. Each monarch's reign is treated with an examination of the ways in which Tallis met its particular musical needs. Consideration is given to all of Tallis's surviving compositions, including those probably intended for patrons and amateurs beyond the court, and attention is paid to the context within which they were written. Tallis emerges as a composer whose music displays his special ability in setting words and creating ingenious musical patterns. A table places most of Tallis's compositions in a broad chronological order.

Chapter 1
The Reign of Henry VIII: Biographical and Historical Background

Thomas Tallis’s date of birth, his family origins, and where he received his education are unrecorded. In Grove’s Dictionary of music and musicians, William H. Husk wrote that Tallis ‘is supposed to have been born in the second decade of the 16th century’.¹ Henry Davey at first thought he was ‘probably born about 1510’, though he later changed his mind to ‘about 1500–10’.² Judging by the date when Tallis is known to have been employed at Dover Priory (see below), he is unlikely to have been born much later. In 1928 E.H. Fellowes proposed that the date should be pushed back to ‘four or five years earlier’ than 1510,³ and that is where it has remained. The editors of the Tudor Church Music edition of Tallis’s Latin-texted music gave it as ‘about 1505’,⁴ though even this may be a little late. Much depends on the dating of his early works, and whether an accomplished piece like Salve intemerata, apparently the last of his early antiphons, could have been circulating before he reached his mid-twenties (see p. 30). All that is certain is that Tallis grew up in the reign of King Henry VIII, who was born in 1491 and came to the throne in 1509. He went on to serve not only Henry, but his three children who followed him to the throne. It is an understatement to say that Tallis lived through a period of great change.

Tallis’s only known relation, apart from those gained through marriage (see pp. 93–4), is named in his will as his ‘Cosen John Sayer dwelling in the Ile of Thanet’ in Kent (‘cousin’ had a range of meanings). Sayer was a common name in Thanet, and during the second half of the sixteenth century it was recorded frequently in parish registers throughout the Isle, but John Sayer appears to have lived at or near Margate.⁵ There is thus some reason for thinking that Tallis may have been born in Kent, where during his lifetime the name Tallis could be found in the registers of places as widely spread as Canterbury, Elham and New Romney.

It is very likely, though of course not certain, that wherever Tallis gained his musical training, it was as a chorister. He would have become familiar with the daily and seasonal devotions of the church and the chants associated with them. As he progressed he undoubtedly learned to play the organ, and perhaps the viol as well. His general schooling, too, was probably of a kind received by choristers.⁶ It would be easy to allow speculation to run riot, but one cannot help wondering whether a clue to his training may lie in his early employment by the Benedictine priory at Dover. The priory had a song school, but as nothing is known of it beyond the fact of its existence and that it had a master, it is impossible to say whether Tallis could ever have been one of its pupils. More tellingly, perhaps, Dover Priory was not far from Christ Church, Canterbury, of which it had once been a cell. Christ Church was a larger Benedictine priory, with a cathedral church where Tallis might well have been a chorister.⁷ All the same, there is no record of him before 1531, when ‘Thomas Tales’ was named in the accounts of Dover Priory as its ‘joculator organorum’ (organ player). Other sixteenth-century musicians, such as William Byrd, Robert White and Thomas Morley, held cathedral posts in their early or middle twenties, so it is possible that Tallis was no older when he was appointed to his position at Dover. The title he is given in the accounts echoes the description of visiting minstrels like those of the King, Lord Bergavenny and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. Tallis can hardly have been unaware of the songs and tunes these men brought with them, or of those played by the waits of Canterbury, but if he absorbed anything from them there seems to be little trace of it in his own music.⁸

The religious community was small – a dozen or so monks presided over by an abbot – although the priory church appears to have been unusually large.⁹ Throughout most of Tallis’s employment the prior was William, concerning whom there is almost no information. About 1529 he was succeeded by Thomas Lenham, who was in turn succeeded by John Lambert (or Folkestone), to whom fell the task, completed in 1535, of surrendering the priory to the Crown.¹⁰ By then the priory was not what it had once been. At the end of the fourteenth century it had owned a library of several hundred books, the catalogue of which has been well examined.¹¹ But when Archbishop Warham made a visitation in 1511, he found the monks’ knowledge wanting. He ordered that a teacher should be appointed to instruct them in grammar (presumably Latin), and that the novices among them should attend a grammar school on three days each week.¹² In Tallis’s time the community does not seem to have been notably wealthy, and the balance sheet for 1530–31, drawn up by Abbot Thomas, shows an expenditure considerably greater than the income.

Tallis’s annual wage of two pounds in 1531 was one mark (13s 4d) less than the wage received by the ‘scole master of the song scole’ and the ‘scole master of the grammar scole’ at the time of the priory’s dissolution.¹³ This suggests that the priory schools provided two levels of education, with boys being taught reading and plainsong before they went on to the serious study of Latin.¹⁴

One of the schoolmasters, whom Haines supposed to be the master of the song school, was provided with a meagrely furnished room, but an inventory made at the dissolution makes no mention of accommodation for the organist. Tallis’s main task at Dover was probably to direct the singing of chants, substituting the organ for voices as required.¹⁵ The priory’s connection with the large church of St Martin at Dover, and the existence of its song school, raise the question of whether he may have had unrecorded musical resources at his disposal. So does the likelihood that before he left Dover he had composed several sizeable antiphons (see p. 25). It is difficult to guess how he continued his early training and developed his abilities as a composer. He may have been able to visit the cathedral, talk to its musicians, and hear his music performed by a skilled choir;¹⁶ but it was not the only source of musical expertise in the county. The composer John Dygon, for example, was the prior of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, from 1528 until it was dissolved 10 years later.¹⁷

This was a period when radical alterations were being made to the relationship between the church in England and the government. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals (April 1533),¹⁸ also called the Ecclesiastical Appeals Act, was passed to prevent Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, appealing to the Pope after Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s annulment of their marriage.¹⁹ The Act made the King in Chancery the final court of appeal, and it was afterwards illegal to accept the authority of the Pope or to follow papal rulings. The first Act of Supremacy followed in November 1534.²⁰ In December the monks of Dover Priory acknowledged the King’s supremacy in matters of religion, even before he assumed the title of Supreme Head of the Church on 15 January.²¹

Commissioners were appointed in January to assess the value of church properties and revenues (the Valor Ecclesiasticus), with a view to completing the work by the end of May. In July Thomas Cromwell, as vicar-general, launched a programme of visitations which included religious houses in the Dover area. On 23 October Cromwell’s unpleasantly ambitious agent Richard Layton submitted a report typical of those he supplied. His remarks about Dover Priory were brief and to the point: ‘The prior of Dover and his monkes be evyn as other be _/ but he the worste _/ sodomites ther is none for they nede not they have no lake of women’.²² Was it true? One suspects that Layton was not instructed to investigate fully and make a wholly objective report. The priory was surrendered on 16 November 1535.²³ Its buildings fell into long years of disrepair, and Turner’s watercolour of about 1793, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows what is believed to be the refectory in use as a barn. The surviving buildings are today part of Dover College, founded in 1871. A memorial to Tallis, in the form of a plaque, was installed by the Dover Society at the College gate in 2013.

St Mary-at-Hill

Tallis’s whereabouts for the next few months are obscure, and it may be that he was given temporary shelter by the priory at Canterbury until he found a new post. He next became a conduct (singer) at St Mary-at-Hill in London, the largest church in the Billingsgate ward, and one with a strong musical life. Possibly the well-connected Alan Percy, the rector of St Mary-at-Hill from 1521 to 1560, secured Tallis’s services for his church, but this is not recorded.²⁴ Tallis was paid the usual wage of the church’s permanent conducts, of whom there appear to have been four at any one time, though other singers might be brought in for special occasions. He received four pounds for half a year in each of the accounting periods 1536–37 and 1537–38. Since the accounts ran from Michaelmas to Michaelmas (29 September), he must have been paid for the year leading up to Lady Day (25 March) in 1538.

It seems likely that, besides singing, Tallis sometimes played the organ, as doubtless did his colleague Richard Wynslate, who became the master of the choristers and organist at Winchester Cathedral (1541–72).²⁵ The date of Tallis’s appointment means he was not at St Mary-at-Hill when Robert Okeland was the organist there (1533–35), but he afterwards found himself serving alongside Okeland as a member of the Chapel Royal.²⁶ What duties any of th...