Behold Our Affliction spans a century of English sacred music and highlights some of the Tudor period’s most passionate musical expressions of suffering and lamentation. In his Cantiones sacrae publications, William Byrd (c.1540-1623) gravitates toward penitential texts in which despair and consolation are intertwined. Of the four selections presented here, Letentur celi provides a contrast in affect in its sense of hopefulness and collective rejoicing. Representing the often overlooked pre-Reformation period, an anonymous Stella celi petitions Mary and Christ for protection from the plague, and an astonishing yet little-known setting of Stabat mater in the Eton Choirbook by Richard Davy (c.1465-1538) emphasises Mary’s grief at the Crucifixion and culminates in a kaleidoscopic ‘Amen’. The English variant text of the Stabat mater ends with a request that, in the face of such great sorrow, Christ ‘might firmly plant in us the gifts of grace’. Robert White’s (c.1538-1574) beloved five-voice setting of six verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah evokes with stunning clarity the pain and emptiness in the words, but the closing prayer leaves us with an encouraging charge: ‘return to the Lord your God’.