Another famous émigré was Alfonso Ferrabosco (1543–88), a Bolognese composer whom Elizabeth
hired in 1562. According to a Venetian intelligence report a dozen years later, Alfonso had become “one
of the grooms of the Queen’s privy chamber, [who] enjoys extreme favour with her Majesty on account of
his being an excellent musician.”^17 Royal favor meant royal protection, which could be a critical matter
for Catholics like Alfonso—and like Byrd, who was able to hold high official positions, at least for a
while, without converting to the new faith (although he did furnish it with some excellent music, including
a Great Service for “Evensong,” the Anglican Vespers-plus-Compline).
Even later, though cited for recusancy, and perhaps fined (and although at least one recusant was
actually arrested for owning one of Byrd’s late books), he was never greatly troubled by the law—
although, as we shall see, he gave good cause for trouble—because Elizabeth did not think it impossible
for her favorites (such as the Earl of Worcester, one of Byrd’s patrons) to be “a stiff papist and a good
subject.”^18 Despotisms have arbitrary beneficiaries as well as victims.
Alfonso’s impact on the new English church music was particularly pronounced, as Byrd’s first
important publication makes clear. This was a volume of motets called Cantiones quae ab argumento
sacras vocantur, which Byrd published jointly with his mentor (and possible teacher) Tallis in 1575, five
years after his appointment as organist to the royal chapel. (Tallis’s “O nata lux,” quoted in Ex. 16-15,
comes from this book.) Amazingly enough, it was the first book of Latin-texted music ever printed in
England, and Tallis and Byrd were themselves literally the publishers, having been granted a patent from
the queen giving them a monopoly on English music-printing and staved manuscript paper.
Dedicated (naturally) to Elizabeth (and, it follows, probably used in her chapel), the volume opens
with a series of prefatory and dedicatory poems that positively trumpet rapprochement between the
musicians of England—formerly insular and print-shy but now aggressively modern and entrepreneurial
—and the great names of ecumenical Europe: Gombert, Clemens, even the relative newcomer Orlando
(de Lassus; see the next chapter), and their ambassador, as it were, to the English, “Alfonso, our