Was the great composer William Byrd secretly a traitor to England?

Was William Byrd a traitor? It seems an incredible question to ask of the man who could be England’s greatest composer. In quantity and quality, Byrd’s output over the 60 years of his active life almost beggars belief. From 1572 he was at the heart of the new Anglican musical establishment as a member of the Chapel Royal, and went on to become one of the greatest composers for the new Anglican liturgy, writing music that is still sung in churches up and down the land.

But Byrd, who is the subject of a week-long season on Radio 3, wrote far more church music in Latin, for the Catholic liturgy. And there’s the rub, because for the whole of Byrd’s working life, Catholicism was a proscribed religion. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she imposed the Protestant faith on a country that had already endured three changes of state-enforced religion in just over 20 years.

After so much upheaval, it seemed unlikely that the new Protestant dispensation would last long, and so English “recusants” – Catholics who were not willing to convert – had two options. They could practice their faith out of the public eye, pay the fines levied by the Government for refusing to attend Protestant churches, and hope for the restoration of the true faith. Or they could collaborate with the numerous powerful forces in England and abroad who were determined to bring back the old religion. (Elizabeth had to face several plots to bring down her reign, including the Spanish Armada.)

We know for a fact that Byrd was a recusant, because unlike the more cautious Catholic noblemen, he didn’t bother to hide his sympathies. As early as 1569, when he was working as organist and choirmaster in Lincoln, he was ticked off by the church authorities for his “Popish” way of playing the organ, i.e. too long and florid. In 1584 he was named on a list of recusants and fined ￡200, a huge sum in those days. What made his “Popishness” visible and audible was his stubborn attachment to Latin church music. Throughout the 1570s and 1580s, he kept on composing elaborate Latin motets for private performance in Catholic houses. He even published them, brazenly putting his name on the title page.

Composing Catholic music was not in itself a treacherous act, at least not in Elizabeth’s eyes. She did not like to intrude on matters of conscience. But there’s a definite political tinge to Byrd’s church music which made it more questionable. He often focused on texts referring to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, a clear reference to the “bondage” of Catholics in England. He even used so-called “gallows texts”: lines from Psalms or other Biblical texts that were proclaimed by Catholic martyrs in their final speech in the hangman’s cart.

But did Byrd actually commit treacherous acts such as harbouring Jesuit priests? We don’t know for sure, but in 1580 his name was included on a government list of “relievers of papists and conveyors of money and other things unto them”.

Byrd could so easily have been damned by association with people who fell foul of the regime, as well as his own questionable activities. That he actually survived to the ripe old age of 83 owes much to his self-confident, stubborn, shrewd personality. He was canny at cultivating powerful connections, especially Catholic noblemen, but he didn’t neglect Protestant ones. He enjoyed the Queen’s favour largely because he was such an ornament to her Chapel Royal, where ornate, Latin “Popish” music was permitted as a way of showing foreign dignitaries that England was still a tolerant place.

In 1575 the Queen granted Byrd and his mentor Thomas Tallis a monopoly on the printing of music, and in return Byrd composed the first madrigal in the English language in her honour, and an anthem giving thanks for the defeat of the Spanish Armada. For an unknown state occasion he created the grandest piece of music ever devised for the new English church, the Great Service.

Like most other recusants, Byrd eventually acknowledged the new religion was here to stay. He retired from the Chapel Royal to Essex in 1591 and continued to compose Catholic music, but it had now lost its political edge. It was simply beautiful, the expression of a man “naturally disposed to gravity and piety”, as a contemporary described him. By the time of his death in 1623, he had lived through five reigns, four changes of religion, and was acknowledged as the “father of English music.” And most remarkable of all, he had survived.

William Byrd is Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 from July 19–23, and his life is portrayed in Drama on 3 on July 19, 20 and 21. Info: bbc.co.uk