William Byrd's career as a keyboard composer is bookended by pavans and galliards—courtly dance music—he contributed a complete modal cycle of them to My Lady Nevells Booke early in his life, and his later works appear in the published anthology Parthenia, or the Mayden-head much later. He took the dance form from the hands of early Italian immigrants to the Elizabethan court, and immediately showed his mastery. Byrd's earlier pavans already followed a peculiarly English form, distinguished by regular trios of repeated 16-bar strains, but also by their use of imitation and harmonic sequence. Byrd even went so far following contemporary trends that he used canonic writing in his Pavans. The younger generation of Bull and Gibbons brought more rapid runs and passagework into the Pavan; Byrd still contributed likewise. His utter facility in the genre is best seen in the variety of his late works, from the late canonic "Echo" Pavan and Galliard, to the elegant—even old-fashioned—simplicity of his Pavan and 2 Galliard set for the Earl of Salisbury.

Though Byrd often dedicated instrumental music to courtly friends and patrons, the Earl of Salisbury Pavan and Galliards is one of the few sets of his for which an actual date can be suggested. Robert Cecil was made Earl in 1605, and died on May 24, 1612, just months before the compilation of Parthenia. This historical coincidence, and the noted conservative character of the Pavan and Galliards, suggest a memorial composition for Cecil. Indeed, the Pavan for the Earl of Salisbury contains many musical singularities: it is the only such piece Byrd wrote with only two strains (instead of the usual three), it is the only one for which Byrd did not write ornamentations for the repeats, and it is the only late Pavan in the more clipped eight-bar phrases. Yet in its simplicity, the Pavan shows elegant proportions, with a solemn progression in a minor only briefly lightened by inner-voice imitation, sequences, and a flash of the relative major at the start of the second strain. The first Galliard, as is typical, mirrors the Pavan's proportions and takes on a similar motivic cast; it does venture further afield harmonically. The second Galliard begins even closer in melodic resemblance to the Pavan, but strict imitation in the lower voice quickly sends the music off toward different regions; the second Galliard is peppered with cross relations, syncopation, and more virtuosic finger-work, as well as a third strain.

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