Oxford. In 1591 he was appointed organist in Queen Elizabeth's chapel in
succession to Blitheman, from whom he had received his musical education.
In 1592 he received the degree of doctor of music at Cambridge University;
and in 1596 he was made music professor at Gresham College, London. As he
was unable to lecture in Latin according to the foundation-rules of that
college, the executors of Sir Thomas Gresham made a dispensation in his
favour by permitting him to lecture in English. He gave his first lecture
on the 6th of October 1597. In 1601 Bull went abroad. He visited France and
Germany, and was everywhere received with the respect due to his talents.
Anthony Wood tells an impossible story of how at St Omer Dr Bull performed
the feat of adding, within a few hours, forty parts to a composition
already written in forty parts. Honourable employments were offered to him
by various continental princes; but he declined them, and returned to
England, where he was given the freedom of the Merchant Taylors' Company in
1606. He played upon a small pair of organs before King James I. on the
16th of July 1607, in the hall of the Company, and he seems to have been
appointed one of the king's organists in that year. In the same year he
resigned his Gresham professorship and married Elizabeth Walter. In 1613 he
again went to the continent on account of his health, obtaining a post as
one of the organists in the arch-duke's chapel at Brussels. In 1617 he was
appointed organist to the cathedral of Notre Dame at Antwerp, and he died
in that city on the 12th or 13th of March 1628. Little of his music has
been published, and the opinions of critics differ much as to its merits
(see Dr Willibald Nagel's _Geschichte der Musik in England_, ii. (1897), p.
155, &c.; and Dr Seiffert's _Geschichte der Klaviermusik_ (1899), p. 54,
&c.). Contemporary writers speak in the highest terms of Bull's skill as a
performer on the organ and the virginals, and there is no doubt that he
contributed much to the development of harpsichord music. Jan Swielinck
(1562-1621), the great organist of Amsterdam, did not regard his work on
composition as complete without placing in it a canon by John Bull, and the
latter wrote a fantasia upon a fugue of Swielinck. For the ascription to
Bull of the composition of the British national anthem, see NATIONAL
ANTHEMS. Good modern reprints, _e.g._ of the Fitzwilliam _Virginal-Book_,
"The King's Hunting Jig," and one or two