All things considered, Queen Elizabeth I was rather tolerant of the Catholic religion. After the dissolution of England's ecclesiastical ties to Rome (and the seizure of all monastic property) under Henry VIII, after the reformation of the liturgy under Edward, after the violent return to Latin Catholicism under Mary Tudor, Elizabeth began her reign with the Protestant Act of Settlement (1559), but apparently allowed some recusant Catholic families to practice their faith underground, and allowed her musicians to continue composing (and selling to the public) their Latin-texted church music. Many of Thomas Tallis' Latin liturgical pieces may have been composed in this somewhat more liberal environment, and some of them may even have been inoffensive enough to be sung by Elizabeth's Chapel Royal. Others, however, were less tolerable in Elizabethan England. Tallis' five-voiced motet "In jejunio et fletu," probably one of the last pieces he ever wrote, has often been compared to his other late motet, "Derelinquit impius," and to his "Lamentations." All three present much more aggressively Catholic sentiments in their texts, and all three dress in much more personal and affective musical garments.

Before he wrote a single note, from the very selection of his motet text, Tallis may have been making Catholic waves. He chose to set a lush penitential text from the Roman Rite for the First Sunday in Lent; its text describes priests "fasting and weeping," and more pertinently, begging the Lord to spare His people from having their (Catholic?) heritage destroyed. The music he writes for such a passionate scene perhaps betrays his own sympathy with prayers on behalf of an oppressed priesthood. Turning from the pervasively imitative textures that inhabit much of his other Latin music, Tallis concentrates instead on richly chromatic blocks of homophonic sound. From the opening pair of phrases, each of which descends through musical space and extends a basically Phrygian cadence, Tallis sets the priests' cries for mercy to another downwardly mobile passage, which passes from the higher registers through painful cross-relations, and finally drops to a distant cadence (from an opening C chord to a C sharp cadence!). After a second framing passage, still harmonically unstable, he proceeds into a rich and extended chorus of further prayers: three times in a descending sequence, all five voices cry without ceasing for mercy, from the highest vocal register through chords on most every pitch of the scale to a completely unpredictable and completely anguished final cadence.

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