Thomas Tallis and William Byrd wrote music on a balance beam between Catholics and Protestants. Queen Elizabeth, though placing England irrevocably on the Protestant side, tolerated recusant Catholics within her realm to an extent and allowed some worship in the old tongue of Latin. Thus it could come to pass that two of the most talented musicians in the land might receive a Royal monopoly to print music in 1575 and could respond with a collection of Latin motets as their first market endeavor. Tallis and Byrd took great care not to offend the more rigidly Catholic factions in Elizabeth's court and made other gestures to the crown such as including exactly 17 pieces in the collection printed in the seventeenth year of Elizabeth's reign. They did, on the other hand, print a collection of Latin sacred works whose liturgical and emotional content far better served the underground Catholics in Elizabethan England. Even a relatively simple motet such as Tallis' "In manus tuas" breathes passionate faith, if underground faith.

Tallis' text for the motet consists of two verses: one of Jesus' last words on the Cross, "Into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46) and the hopeful words of Psalm 31:5 ("Thou hast redeemed me, O God of truth"). The composer reflects the binary structure by presenting contrasting textural approaches to each half. The first, commending the speaker's spirit into the hands of God, adopts a much richer imitative polyphony on two motives: "Into thy hands" gets eight statements of a supplicant's upward musical leap, while the commending of the spirit is sung always to a balanced downward motive. The full-textured pervasive imitation gives the impression of the great congregation all chanting an invocation. For the assertion that the Lord has redeemed the same individuals, however, Tallis chooses first a sudden chordal homophony, calling attention to the importance of the text; even when he recapitulates the text after another passage on the "commending" motive, he gathers the disparate voices of the singers into antiphonal chords and concludes in strongly unified cadences.

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