Tillyard was born in
Cambridge. His father Alfred Isaac Tillyard had served as
mayor of Cambridge, and his mother Catharine Sarah née Wetenhall was a proponent of higher education for women. The author and mystic
Aelfrida Tillyard (1883–1959) was an older sister. He was educated at
the Perse School and Jesus College. He was interested in the classics and archaeology, and in 1911 went to Athens to study at the
British School of Archaeology. He also received the
War Cross from Greece. Following the war, he returned to Cambridge and devoted himself to the newly established English School. According to
The Times: "Although not one of the Founding Fathers of the School, he rapidly became one of its central figures and its leading statesman—a position which, in spite of many changes in organization and personnel, he never really lost until his retirement from his University Lectureship in 1954. His influence was not mainly due to his very considerable gifts as a University politician; it was essentially the result of his whole-hearted devotion to the cause of English. Others may have won more widespread celebrity as scholars or as critics, but everyone in Cambridge knew that Tillyard, because of his selfless and unremitting thought and care for the good of the School, was its chief mainstay." Tillyard was a Fellow in English (1926–1959) at Jesus College, later becoming
Master (1945–1959). He is known mainly for his book
The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), as background to
Elizabethan literature, particularly
Shakespeare, and for his works on
John Milton. He is credited with having put forward the view that Elizabethan literature is not representative of "a brief period of
humanism between two outbreaks of
Protestantism" (viz., the
English Reformation and the
Thirty Years' War), but rather representative of a
theological bond in England that allowed for a continuation of the
medieval view of
World Order. His historical scholarship and contextual analysis informed the study of 16th-century literature and became the foundation for much of what Cambridge undergraduates would study in preparation for their examinations. ==Personal life==