John Bull (composer)

[3] More recent research by Susi Jeans suggests that Bull was born in the Radnorshire parish of Old Radnor within the Diocese of Hereford, although no birth records have yet been discovered.

In 1591, following the death of John Blitheman, he became organist at the Chapel Royal; in 1592 he received his doctorate from Oxford, and in 1596 he became the first professor of music at Gresham College on the recommendation of Queen Elizabeth, who admired him.

There is some evidence that she sent Bull on espionage missions: his eighteen-month trip to the continent in 1601–02, ostensibly for health reasons, has never been satisfactorily explained, and his whereabouts there, apart from a visit to Brussels, then in the Spanish Netherlands, remain a mystery.

Ten years later, he was forced to leave his post at Gresham College on 20 December 1607, after he fathered a child pre-maritally with an Elizabeth Walter, thus losing his best source of income as well as his quarters.

[citation needed] Just after publishing seven keyboard pieces in Parthenia, Bull left England for good, secretly and with great haste in October 1613.

William Trumbull, the English envoy in the Low Countries, after first attempting to cover for him – but later fearing for his own position if he continued to do so – wrote to the King in early 1614: Bull did not leave your Majesties service for any wrong done unto him, or for matter of religion, under which fained pretext he now sought to wrong the reputation of your Majesties justice, but did in that dishonest matter steal out of England through the guilt of a corrupt conscience, to escape the punishment, which notoriously he had deserved, and was designed to have been inflicted on him by the hand of justice, for his incontinence, fornication, adultery, and other grievious crimes.

Bull wrote a series of letters while in Flanders, including one to the mayor of Antwerp, claiming that the reason he left England was to escape religious persecution.

Bull was one of the most famous composers of keyboard music of the early 17th century, exceeded only by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in the Netherlands, Girolamo Frescobaldi in Italy, and, some would say, by his countryman and elder, the celebrated William Byrd.

His first (and only) publication, in 1612 or 1613, was a contribution of seven pieces forming part of a collection of virginal music entitled Parthenia, or the Maydenhead of the First Musicke That Ever Was Printed for the Virginalls, dedicated to the 15-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who was his student, on the occasion of her betrothal to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine.

Much of his music was lost when he fled England; some was destroyed, and some was stolen by other composers, though occasionally such misattributions can be corrected today based on stylistic grounds.