William Child was born in 1606 or 1607 and became a lay-clerk at St. George's Chapel, Windsor in 1630. Two years later he was appointed Organist, a post which he retained until his death in 1697. His tenure therefore extended to half a century, allowing for the period of the Commonwealth in the 1640s and 1650s. He composed a large amount of music for the Anglican rite most of which reflected the style of the earlier part of the century. Although it was widely performed in his day much of it is rather four-square and lacks inspiration and individuality.

However a group of his sacred pieces, including motets, the verse anthem Turn Thou us, O Lord and some of the shorter full anthems and psalms, reveal him as an imaginative exponent of the 'stile nuovo' which became fashionable in seventeenth-century England. O bone Jesu reflects this Italianate idiom in its chromatic writing and rhetorical approach to word setting. Child's Latin works may have been intended for private worship, and they may also demonstrate his sympathy for the Laudian high-church movement of the 1630s.