Introduction

Ask any music lover to identify a great British composer whose career was centred on Worcester, giving as an extra clue that he was married to a lady whose name was Alice, and the reply will almost certainly be Sir Edward Elgar. And yet there was another musician who spent sixty years of his life in Worcester, whose wife Alice was dearly loved, and who has a distinctive claim to be remembered as the last great composer of the 'golden age' of British music: Thomas Tomkins. The chapter presents the lives of Thomas Tomkins and his family into historical context in such a way as to interest the general reader, music lover and musician alike. It explores the technical information contained in the biography and have, in the main, modernized sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation, leaving archaisms only where they add authenticity and flavour to the text.