Byrd's Patrons at Prayer

We are fortunate to have a number of devotional manuscripts and commonplace books made by William Byrd's patrons. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, to whom Byrd dedicated the Mass and Office Propers of the 1605 Gradualia, produced a large collection of pseudo-liturgical 'offices', a self-contained ritual universe that little resembled either the Roman or the Anglican rite. John, Lord Lumley, Elizabethan bibliophile and patron of Byrd's 1591 Cantiones sacrae, kept a pocket-sized devotional notebook featuring Savonarola's meditation Infelix ego, set to music by Byrd and published in the motet book dedicated to Lumley. Documents of this sort shed some new light on Byrd's Latin-texted music and its patrons, their preoccupations, and their often divided religious loyalties.