2 - Sacred Judgment

Summary

After reading the preface of Tallis and Byrd's Cantiones, the panegyrically minded audience, in moving on to the main body of the work, would expect to hear an amplified narrative extolling the deeds of the set's honorand. Tallis and Byrd supply this, but only obliquely, by showing Elizabeth a lofty example based on the deeds of Christ the Judge. The outlines of that narrative, at its most condensed, appear in the Apostles’ Creed, as follows:

I believe in God … and in Jesus Christ … who

Was crucified, dead, and buried:

He descended into hell;

The third day he rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,

And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead (italics added).

Before writers as influential as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare brought interrelated stories about Calvary, the Descent, and Last Judgment into Elizabethan literature, English homilists from Anglo-Saxon times onwards had seized on the more elaborately told tales about the importance of Christ's power and judgment not only at his return, but also on Good Friday, when, at the time of his death at Calvary, Christ judged two thieves, and during Holy Saturday's descent, when he judged all those who predeceased him from Adam onwards. The literary theme was thus featured in the earliest of Old English Christian writings, such as the Dream of the Rood, and other works by and associated with Cynewulf, Alfric of Eynsham, and the Venerable Bede on through the Middle English Cursor Mundi and William Langland's Piers Plowman.

Visually, the three acts of judgment themselves were most vividly featured sequentially in stained glass on the walls of certain chapels where Tallis and Byrd often performed liturgical music that contained such themes (see figs. 2.1–3). In these glazed works, English Tudor royalty played a featured, if understated, role just as in Tallis and Byrd's narrative, and thus it is to an early Tudor masterpiece of similar scope, sequential structure, and purpose, to which we now turn.