John Taverner

Life

Born: c. 1490?

Died: 25 October 1545

Biography While there was a John Taverner in London in 1514, there is no reason to assume this was the composer who surfaced at Tattershall, Lincolnshire, in 1524 and became the first choirmaster of Cardinal College, Oxford (the predecessor of Christ Church), in 1526. In 1528 he was suspected of Lutheranism but pardoned; in 1529 his employer Wolsey was disgraced and in 1530 Taverner left Oxford, settling in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he was employed by the Gild of St Mary as a lay clerk and perhaps instructor of the choristers at the church of St Botolph. By 1537 he had left this employment and later became one of the town's aldermen. The martyrologist/propagandist John Foxe wrote that Taverner did "repent him very much that he had made songs to popish ditties in the time of his blindness" but Roger Bowers in New Grove discerns stylistic features in the masses that suggest a composing career that continued well past the 1520's. The artist who gives up music for politics makes an intriguing premise for Max Davies' opera Taverner (1972), however.