Relatively little is
known about Tallis's life, particularly about his early
years. His year of birth is usually taken to be about
1505 making him eighty years old at his death on 23rd
November 1585; he had described himself as "very
aged" eight years before. Since his entire career
was spent in London and southern England he was probably
born in the south, perhaps in Kent. In any case this
was the county of his first known appointment,
Dover
Priory, and the location of the Manor of Minster,
the house later leased to him by Mary Tudor.
Tallis in Dover
The first record of Tallis dates from 1532,
as organist of
Dover
Priory, a small Benedictine monastery consisting
of about a dozen monks. It is not know whether Tallis's
duties were restricted to organ-playing, or whether
he also had the opportunity to work with professional
singers. The more affluent monastic houses of the period
certainly endeavoured to participate in the fashionable
cultivation of elaborate church music by employing a
small choir of professional lay singers; such a choir,
which was quite distinct from the monks' own choir,
would usually have performed in the Lady Chapel of the
monastery, because this was often the only part of the
monastic church to which the laity had access.
Dover Priory, however,
was far from wealthy. In the early 1530s its annual
income was about £170, less than a tenth of that
of a major Benedictine house, and it can hardly have
been in a position to spend lavishly on music. On the
other hand, the fact that the priory employed a lay
organist at all could be taken to imply quite a serious
commitment to music. In addition, Dover was a cell or
dependent house of Canterbury Cathedral, which was itself
a Benedictine priory. The cathedral had a long and lively
musical tradition involving not only the maintenance
of a professional Lady Chapel choir but also the encouragement
of the monks' own musical talents; it seems quite possible
that this could have assisted the exploitation of music
at Dover. Even so, any choir available to Tallis at
Dover Priory must surely have been tiny. There seems
to be no record of Tallis's departure from Dover, but
the priory itself was dissolved in the autumn of 1535.
Later Life
Tallis appears in records again in 1537-8 in
London, where he is employed (it is not clear whether
as a singer or as organist) by the parish church of
St Mary-at-Hill in Billingsgate, a little to the west
of the Tower of London. The next reference to Tallis
is in 1540 at the Augustinian abbey of Holy Cross at
Waltham Abbey in Essex where he was a senior gentleman.
On March 23, 1540, Waltham became the last English abbey
to be dissolved. After the dissolution of the monasteries
Tallis was a Lay Clerk (i.e. a singing gentleman) at
Canterbury Cathedral.
Tallis’s final appointment was as a senior gentleman
at the Chapel Royal from around 1543 onwards. During
his time in the royal household Tallis served four monarchs,
Henry VIII to 1547, Edward VI from 1547 to 1553, Mary
I from 1553 to 1558 and Elizabeth I from 1558 onwards.
Thomas Tallis was fortunate in that he was in Queen
Elizabeth's favour although he was a Catholic during
a period of religious unrest in English history, resulting
in the state religion of England switching from Catholic
to Protestant. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth granted Tallis
and William Byrd (Tallis’s pupil) a monopoly in
England on printing music.
Rather late on in his life, in or around 1552, Tallis
married a woman named Joan. He died on 23rd November
1585 leaving his house in Greenwich to his wife who
survived him by four years. He was buried in St. Alphege,
Greenwich.
Tallis’s Music
Tallis’s early works were written for
the Sarum rite, the liturgy in use in England until
the Reformation. The music is large ritual music for
the Catholic mass and office hours. The Reformation
and with it the new prayer book of 1549 created the
need for simpler music and settings of vernacular texts,
a need to which Tallis was quick to respond.
The accession of Mary Tudor who re-introduced the Catholic
rite enabled Tallis to return to the large scale English
Catholic style of composition, although works from this
period clearly show Tallis’s more developed style
and the first signs of continental influence which was
to affect all English composers in the second half of
the 16th century.
The act of settlement introduced by Elizabeth in 1559
abolished the Catholic rite for ever and Tallis reverted
to writing English services and anthems for public use,
though he continued to produce settings of Latin texts
which were allowed for devotional use.
In all this, Tallis demonstrated a most remarkable versatility,
changing and adapting his style to suit the prevailing
political environment. Viewed as a whole his music holds
up a mirror to the political and religious changes of
the sixteenth century.
