This month marks four centuries since the death of William Byrd, the great Elizabethan composer, and one of the most remarkable composers of the Renaissance. He was a Catholic, certainly from the 1570s, who contrived to weather the religious persecution of the era while working at the heart of Elizabeth I’s court; it may have been the Queen’s favour that saved him from persecution. Indeed the serenity of his motets, composed for performance in recusant houses where both priest and congregation were at risk of death for their Catholic worship, must have constituted a kind of spiritual refuge from the threats all around them.