Though Thomas Tallis' salary as a Gentleman of the English Chapel Royal gave him a respectable living at first, by 1575 inflation had apparently debased his income. It was in that year that Tallis and William Byrd successfully petitioned Queen Elizabeth for a source of extra income: a printing license. Her grant allowed the two men to exercise a monopoly on music printing in England. Later in the same year (the 17th of Elizabeth's reign) they responded with the Cantiones sacrae, a collection of 17 motets by each composer. Despite England's officially protestant religion, this print offered to English Catholics a treasury of Latin devotional music. In addition, it allowed both Tallis and Byrd to give vent to their own personal Catholic faith. In Tallis' confessional motet Absterge Domine, like his similar Suscipe quaeso and Mihi autem nimis, his unusually close engagement with the penitential text shows a depth of personal feeling behind the notes.

The text of Absterge Domine, evoking the Psalms, calls upon a God who alone is the hope of mankind. The speaker, penitent in the midst of deep sinfulness, calls God his "only hope," his "health," and begs God to hear his sorrows, his tears, and his prayers. Tallis sets the text with deep and reverent care. He constructs the opening, in which the text cries out to God, in two passages based upon imitation of a miserable little motive; he routinely avoids cadences until each's mournful plagal close. Tallis gives an upward motive to the text that claims God knows the penitent, as if the music itself is sending imploring hands to heaven; there follows a flood of melismatic motion upwards on "You are my God." The composer highlights the phrase "In you alone is my trust" by syncopation, and the following "you are my health" by reiteration of the phrase. After two extended recitations of the speaker's sorrows, which are set to a passage rich in harmonic cross-relations, all voices sing an emphatic and declamatory instruction that God "remember" them, "for the sake of [His] mercy." Tallis later uses a similar motive to this one as each voice asks God to hear their prayers. The final aspirant passage asking God to whisk the pentinent's spirit into His presence repeats again and again. The composer prays, and those who sing his motet pray twice. Englishmen of all faiths loved the piece enough to set four separate English texts to it, as well.

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