Composer, Organist. A major English musician of the Jacobean and Stuart periods. Born in St. David's, Pembrokeshire, into a musical family of Cornish descent, he studied privately with composer William Byrd and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He received a Bachelors degree at Oxford in 1607 and a Doctorate in music in 1622. Tomkins' professional career began in 1597 when he was appointed organist of Worcester Cathedral, and for much of his life he shuttled between that city and higher-profile positions in London. He supplied music for the coronations of James I (1603) and Charles I (1625), became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1618, and was organist of the King's Chapel from 1625 to 1628. After 1630 he more or less settled in Worcester. During the English Civil War, Tomkins lost his job at Worcester Cathedral when Parliamentary forces suspended musical activity there; reduced to poverty and deprived of his audience, he continued to write masterful keyboard pieces for himself. In 1654 his son Nathaniel married a wealthy widow and the elderly composer was able to spend his last two years in comfort at the village of Martin Hussingtree, where he was buried. Nathaniel faithfully preserved his father's liturgical music, which would have been destroyed under Cromwell's Commonwealth rule, and eventually published it in the monumental volume "Musica Deo Sacra" (1668). Tomkins has been called "The last of the Elizabethans" because he continued to work in the High Renaissance tradition of Byrd long after it had become unfashionable. Polyphony and the madrigal were the foundations of his style, and he consciously avoided the early Baroque influences that were making their way from Italy. Yet for all his conservatism he produced music of great power and inventiveness. Tomkins was England's most prolific 17th Century creator of church anthems; over 100 are extant and many continue to be sung in the Anglican repertory, among them "When David Heard," "O God, The Proud Are Risen Against Me," "Woe is Me," and "Almighty God, The Fountain of All Wisdom." Of his five Service settings the Third (nicknamed "The Great" during his lifetime) is comparable with the very best of Byrd. The virginal pieces, products of his old age, show Tomkins still in full command of his art. They include "A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times" (a lament on the 1649 execution of King Charles), "Fortune My Foe," "Worcester Brawls," and "What If a Day." Most of his madrigals and some anthems appeared in the book "Songs" (1622).