Francis Tregian the Younger (1574–1619)[1] was the son of the Catholic exile Francis Tregian the Elder (1548–1608).
He was educated in France, and in 1592 obtained a position in Rome as chamberlain to Cardinal William Allen. On Allen's death in 1594 he returned to England to reclaim his father's estates in Cornwall, but in 1609 he was accused of recusancy with a debt of £200; his lands were seized and he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison in London, where he remained up to his death in 1619. It has been noted that with Tregian's family connections to the houses of Arundel, Baron Stourton, Stanley and Grey it would be unlikely that he would have been under continual imprisonment.[2]
Francis Tregian the Younger is widely believed to have been the main copyist of three vast musical anthologies, of which the most renowned is the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,[3] although the attribution, confirmed by comparisons with autograph mss known to be by Tregian,[4] has lately been disputed. One of the other Tregian Manuscripts (British Library, British Library MS Egerton 3665) has been published in facsimile.[5] A third, the Sambroke Manuscript formerly in the Joseph William Drexel collection, is conserved in the New York Public Library.[6]