George Lily

George Lily was born in London, the son of William Lily the grammarian, and his wife Agnes. He may have attended St Paul's School, where his father was High Master; and he may have become a commoner of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1528. He subsequently entered the service of Reginald Pole, and in the years that followed shared some of Pole's self-imposed exile in France and Italy. Pole awarded him, by 1535, a prebend in Wimborne Minster. Also by this date, however, he was studying at the University of Padua, under such scholars as Giovanni Battista Egnazio, Lazarus Buonamici, and Fausto da Longiano. In 1538–39 he was living in Rome; and he afterwards travelled with Pole to Viterbo. At some point before 1543 he was outlawed in England for treason, presumably on account of his connections with Pole, who was by now a Cardinal and unofficial leader of the English Catholic church in exile. Between 1549 and 1554 Lily served three terms as Pole's deputy as warden of the English Hospice in Rome. In 1554 he followed Pole to Brussels; and in November 1555 the two returned to England, now again a Catholic realm under Queen Mary I. Pole was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in March 1556; while Lily became his domestic chaplain, and was also collated to the prebend of Kentish Town or Cantlers, in St. Paul's Cathedral, on 22 November 1556, and to the first prebend of Canterbury Cathedral probably on 10 March 1558. Lily died on 14 July 1559 in Canterbury. He is thought to have been buried close to his father in the churchyard of St Paul's Cathedral.

Almost certainly intended as a companion-piece to the Descriptio Britanniae, Lily drew the first map of the British Isles (at a reasonably detailed scale) to be printed. It was engraved on two plates and published in Rome in 1546. The map is recognisably a relation of the 14th-century Gough Map, although the orientation has been reversed (West is at the top of the sheet), and many minor improvements have been made. The Scottish coastline, in particular, is considerably more accurate than that on the Gough Map, but Lily's sources for this are not known. The map was pirated on several occasions in Italy; and Lily and Pole appear to have carried the plates back to England with them, as they were reworked by the engraver Thomas Geminus for a London edition published in 1555. It has also been suggested that Lily had a hand in the large-scale "Copperplate Map" of London, printed in about 1559.

George Lily is recorded as cartographer, biographer, humanist and cleric.