Religious reformations played out across much of Thomas Tallis’ long life, throughout which he skillfully trimmed his professional sails as a composer and royal servant. The England of his childhood was seen as a bastion of Roman Catholicism, a holy place of monasteries, shrines, and pilgrimage centres. Tallis, born around 1505, started his career in the 1530s as an organist, employed by monastic communities in Kent and at Waltham Abbey, institutions soon to be dismantled as part of Henry VIII’s seismic break with the Church of Rome. His earliest compositions, the monumental votive antiphon Salve intemerata and the exquisitely beautiful motet Sancte Deus among them, grew from the awe-inspiring legacy of late medieval English sacred music. He joined the Chapel Royal in the early 1540s, perhaps on the recommendation of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and went on to serve four monarchs for over 40 years. Tallis parked his personal religious allegiances, most likely to the Catholic faith, to create some of the first and finest pieces for the austere sacred services of Edward VI’s Protestant Anglican Church. He responded enthusiastically to the return of Catholicism under Mary Tudor, for whom he composed the mass Puer natus est nobis, probably first performed on Advent Sunday 1554 in the presence of the Queen and her husband, the future Philip II of Spain, and adapted to the musical demands of Elizabeth I’s Church of England. Tallis upheld national pride with his 40-part motet, Spem in alium, written around 1570 to outdo a comparable work by the Italian aristocrat Alessandro Striggio. Before his death in 1585, Tallis supplied Latin motets such as O nata lux de lumine and Salvator mundi for Elizabeth’s private devotions alongside stirring psalm settings and English anthems for the new official rituals of her reformed Church.