"Parsons, you who were so great in the springtime of life, how great you might have been in the autumn...." Thus did a contemporary and colleague mourn the untimely passing of composer Robert Parsons. Though he apparently was writing music as early as the 1549 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Parsons was dead at the beginning of 1570, probably younger than 40. Despite the resulting paucity of his surviving music, Parsons' style and skill are often compared to that of the younger, and eventually far more famous William Byrd; Byrd may even have met Parsons in Lincolnshire. Biographers have also speculated that Parsons shared Byrd's deep and abiding, yet recusant Catholic faith. Both the musical substance and the possible extra-musical context for Parsons' five-voiced motet on Ave Maria support such a claim.

The manuscript partbooks that preserve Parsons' Ave Maria for posterity immediately hint at a personal level of interaction with the overtly Catholic music. Two of the books contain different marginal epigrams, which expound the power of music to move "all who live," and to "gladden the heart." With this background, Parsons crafts a delicate but extremely careful setting of the common antiphon in praise of the Virgin Mary. The opening acclamation to Mary transpires in three phrases, as the melody line gracefully steps up only six notes of the scale; the other four support the uppermost voice as if on contrapuntal angels' wings. The phrase calling her "blessed among women" arrives with close and intense syllabic declamation in all voices. The final text, "and blessed be the fruit of thy womb," Parsons sets to two iterations of a learned and reverent Point of Imitation (much as Tallis often repeats a climactic phrase), exploiting the rich harmonic cross-relations between E flat to E natural. A lengthy "Amen" in continuous imitation between all voices follows.

Parsons omits, perhaps tellingly, the name of Jesus after the mention of Mary's womb. Though the name of Jesus was not common in English Ave Maria settings of the time, some commentators have suggested Parsons actually intended this piece for the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. She was educated on the Continent and would appreciate the piece's more continental style; she had to leave England to the Protestant Elizabeth shortly before Parsons' death, and most importantly, English Catholics had placed great hopes on the fruit of her womb producing a Catholic heir to the English throne.

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