The secret life of William Byrd A young Frenchman, Charles de Ligny, visiting England in 1605, found himself in a gathering of Catholic gentlemen, including "Mr William Byrd, who played the organ." On reaching London, he was arrested under suspicion of being a Catholic spy, on the evidence of possessing a book of music by Byrd, his first volume of Gradualia. During his life he had to hide at times, like the rest of Sir John Petre's dependants, when Mass was celebrated to his music, behind doors closed to the pursuivants who could have betrayed them to the law and execution. Yet, two years after the Gunpowder Plot, Byrd openly published the second volume of his Gradualia (settings of the seasonally changing parts of the Mass), dedicated to Petre, who had recently been created a peer. In his Cantiones Sacrae of 1589, appears a motet that was clearly very popular in the Elizabethan era. Dr McCarthy notes that one manuscript of it bears the comment of the copyist "Good song." It was called Ne irascaris, being a setting of verses 9-10 from chapter 64 of the Prophet Isaiah. The Authorised Version of the Bible had not then been made, but the Bishops" Bible had a royal warrant to be read in churches. It renders the verses thus: "Be not too sore displeased O Lord, and kepe not our offences too long in thy remembraunce: but consider that we all are thy people. The cities of thy sanctuarie lye waste, Sion is a wildernesse, and Hierusalem a desert. These verses in Latin were used as a penitential text (a "prose") for Advent. Even without music they poignantly express sorrow at the desolating effects of sin, the ruin of Jerusalem. "Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire," says the subsequent verse. A feeling of helplessness is emphasised by the next line in the Advent prose: "We all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away." Byrd does not set this, but it is tacitly present because of its close connection with the other verses from this chapter of Isaiah. So it is that Byrd's music, which treats the text with "solemnity and insistence" in Dr McCarthy's words, has a powerful emotional context to work upon. His motet ends with the words Hierusalem desolata, Jerusalem is desolate. This is reiterated again and again for several minutes, beyond what any contemporary singer or listener would have been likely to expect. There is no doubt that Byrd is in part expressing the anguish of his co-religionists, caught up in the destruction of their worship and hopes. As an Advent text, though, it implicitly expects salvation, as shown by the repeated versicle Rorate caeli, "Drop down ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down the just one." Like Isaiah looking forward to the Messiah, Byrd died hoping for a Christmas deliverance.