Antony Holborne apparently moved freely among the higher echelons of the Elizabethan court. He was known to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, herself, and called himself a "gentleman and servant to her most excellent Majestie." Robert Cecil called upon Holborne to run errands abroad in the Low Countries, and the composer's two printed collections of music include dedications to Thomas, Lord Burgh, and Richard Champernowne. Dedications of individual pieces contain hints of other power relationships, such as the pavan Speravi (the motto of Philip Sidney), Mr. Southcote's Galliard, Walter Earle's Pavan, and the Countess of Pembroke's Paradise.

The latter personage seems to have played a large role in Holborne's life and career; she not only received the Paradise dance from his pen, but may have had a hand in the galliard Teares of the Muses, which phrase comes from Spenser's Complaints, which is dedicated to her. Yet the most poignant, and perhaps most personal, dedication to the Countess is Holborne's pavan The Funerals: in another source, this same piece is called "The Countess of Pembroke's Funerals." Most commentators have argued this means he wrote the piece in or around the year 1586, the year in which the Countess suffered the deaths of her brother as well as both parents.

Perhaps first seeing the light of day as an intimate lute solo, The Funerals both alludes to and affectively subverts the well-known Elizabethan dance form of the pavan. It does adopt the pavan's three repeated strains and its slower duple meter, but all three strains take different phrase lengths (the final one may be undanceable) and a syncopated and harmonically unstable chord in the very first measure throws the duple meter immediately off its footing. Indeed, all rhythmic expectations in the first strain are cast off by the composer's extension of many unstable chords, by his arrival on one deceptive cadence on an odd measure, and a half cadence on another. The plangent pitch of E flat, in fact, dominates both harmony and melody in both outer strains, making the otherwise expected emphasis on D major in the middle strain feel more lost. Holborne penned this dance in rich sympathy with the noblewoman's grief.

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