Thomas Weelkes

According to the biographer David Brown, circumstantial evidence points to the possibility that Weelkes was a son of John Weeke, rector of Elsted in Sussex and his wife Johanne.

[2] In the preface to his first volume of madrigals (1597) Weelkes states that he was a very young man at the time of their composition – "my yeeres yet unripened" – which, in Brown's view, confirms that he was born in the middle or later 1570s.

[3][4] By 1597 Weelkes, by his own account, had enjoyed the "undeserved love, and liberall good will" of George Phillpot, who lived at Compton, near Winchester.

[5] On the title page of Weelkes's fourth and final volume of madrigals, published in 1608, he refers to himself as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.

The records at the Chapel Royal do not mention him, but the musicologist Walter S. Collins observes, "one would hardly dare publish such a claim if it were not true".

As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it, Weelkes "was not the only disorderly member of the cathedral establishment, though in due course he would become its most celebrated.

"[4] In 1609 he was charged with unauthorised absence from Chichester, but no mention of drunken behaviour is made until 1613, and in The Musical Quarterly John Shepherd has suggested caution in assuming that Weelkes's decline began before that date.

He was reinstated and remained in the post until his death, although his behaviour did not improve; in 1619 he was again reported to the bishop: Dyvers tymes & very often come so disguised eyther from the Taverne or Ale house into the quire as is muche to be lamented, for in these humoures he will bothe curse & sweare most dreadfully, & so profane the service of God … and though he hath bene often tymes admonished … to refrayne theis humors and reforme hym selfe, yett he daylye continuse the same, & is rather worse than better therein.

[3] Some of Weelkes's madrigals were reprinted in popular collections during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but none of his verse anthems were printed until 1966, since when he has become recognised as one of the most important church composers of his time.