Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, pursued his stormy relationship with Queen Elizabeth I for 17 years before his execution. From his first appearance at the court of England's great "Virgin Queen" in 1584, his personal ambition and fiery emotional temper threw him into innumerable quarrels and reconciliations with the Queen. When out of favor, the Earl would sulk, threaten, plead, or cajole the Queen. Once, at least, he is known to have flattered her ears with a sonnet; when the poem was sung before Queen Elizabeth, she ignored the efforts of his rivals to supplant him at court and restored him to favor. The very poem used as his instrument may survive, along with a second, very similar song. That second song, Can she excuse my wrongs, was published by none other than John Dowland, the English musician who understood as well as the Earl how difficult an Elizabethan courtier's plight could be.

Dowland's song Can she excuse my wrongs was published in his First Booke of Songes in 1597. He enjoyed, at the time, a reputation as one of the greatest English songwriters and lutenists, but had to be content with employment in exile on the Continent. Its text, in which a male speaker laments the now-denied joys of his lady's favor, could apply thus equally well to the composer and to the courteous and unhappy Earl. Yet the connection to Essex continues in the later history of the song. In 1603, after both Essex and the Queen were dead, Dowland re-arranged the song for English viol consort, publishing it in his Lachrimae or Seaven Teares as Earl of Essex, his Galliard. Can she excuse my wrongs retained the explicit connection to Essex when it was again reissued in 1610 by Dowland in his A Varietie of Lute-lessons. It subsequently enjoyed a wide popularity in other instrumental arrangements in English, Dutch, and even German manuscripts and printed collections.

As a Galliard, the music of Can she excuse my wrongs demonstrates a highly supple alternation of 3/4 and 6/8 rhythmic patterns. The composer reflects the series of antitheses in the poetic lines by molding his melody in parallel phrases (the third set of which quotes a well-known folk song). The song proceeds from its solemn opening leaps upwards almost exclusively in D minor, yet shifts imperceptibly in each last section to a hint of major tonality, as the text concludes on the poet's fruitless yet faithful love.

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