Henry Howard, earl of Surrey

The exact relation of Surrey to Wyatt has been a matter of dispute. The accident of birth, no doubt, led to Surrey’s poems being placed before those of Wyatt in Tottel’s Miscellany, and this accident may have induced commentators to regard Surrey as the master of Wyatt, rather than to take the probably more truthful view, that each influenced the other, but that Wyatt was the pioneer. He was, at any rate, an older man than Surrey, who was born in 1516 (?). Henry Howard was the eldest son of lord Thomas Howard, son of Thomas, earl of Surrey and duke of Norfolk, and himself became, by courtesy, earl of Surrey in 1524, on his father’s succeeding to the dukedom. From a poem to which reference will be made later it seems possible that he was educated with the duke of Richmond, Henry VII’s natural son, who, later, married his sister. At any rate, he was brought up in all the virtues and practices of chivalry, which find a large place in his poems. He visited the Field of the Cloth of Gold with the duke of Richmond, possibly accompanied him thence to Paris to study and lived with him, later, at Windsor. In 1536, the duke died, and the same year saw the execution of Surrey’s cousin, Anne Boleyn. In 1540, we find him a leader in the tournament held at the marriage of Anne of Cleves, and, after a mission to Guisnes, he was appointed, in 1541, steward of Cambridge university. Part of the next year he spent in the Fleet prison, on a charge of having sent a challenge; but, being soon released on payment of a heavy fine, he began his military career by joining his father in an expedition against the Scots. On his release, he was sent, in October, 1543, to join the English troops then assisting the emperor in the siege of Landrecy; and, in 1544, he won further military honour by his defence of Boulogne. On his return, he was thrown into prison at Windsor, owing to the intrigues of his father’s enemy, Jane Seymour’s brother, the earl of Hertford; was released, again imprisoned, and beheaded in January, 1546/7.

In his military prowess, his scholarship, his position at court, his poetry and his mastery in chivalric exercises, Surrey is almost as perfect a knight as Sidney himself. And what strikes the reader most forcibly in the love poems which form the bulk of his work is their adherence to the code of the chivalric courts of love. There is not to be found in Surrey the independence, the manliness or the sincerity of Wyatt. In his love poems, he is an accomplished gentleman playing a graceful game, with what good effect on English poetry will be seen shortly. Surrey was formally married at 16; but the subject of many of his poems was not his wife, but his “lady” in the chivalric sense, the mistress whose “man” he had become by a vow of fealty. Setting aside the legends that have grown up about this fair Geraldine, from their root in Nashe’s fiction, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), to the sober “biography” of Anthony à Wood and others, the pertinent facts that may be regarded as true are no more than these: that Elizabeth Fitz-Gerald was a daughter of the IX earl of Kildare, and, on her father’s death in the Tower, was brought up in the household of princess Mary, becoming one of her ladies of the chamber. That she was a mere child when Surrey first began to address poems to her confirms the impression received by the candid reader: these poems, in fact, are the result, not of a sincere passion, but of the rules of the game of chivalry as played in its decrepitude and Surrey’s youth. Like Wyatt, he takes his ideas from Petrarch, of whose sonnets he translates four completely, while Ariosto provides another; and his whole body of poetry contains innumerable ideas and images drawn from Petrarch, but assimilated and used in fresh settings. The frailtie and hurtfulnesse of beautie; Vow to love faithfully howsoever he be rewarded; Complaint that his ladie after she knew of his love kept her face alway hidden from him; Description of Spring, wherin eche thing renewes, save onelie the lover; Complaint of a lover, that defied love, and was by love after the more tormented; Complaint of a diyng lover refused upon his ladies injust mistaking of his writyng —such are the stock subjects, as they may almost be called, of the Petrarchists which Surrey reproduces. But he reproduces them in every case with an ease and finish that prove him to have mastered his material, and his graceful fancies are admirably expressed. Earlier we quoted Wyatt’s translation of a sonnet by Petrarch. Let us compare with it Surrey’s version of the same:

Love that liveth, and reigneth in my thought, That built his seat within my captive brest, Clad in the armes, wherin with me he fought, Oft in my face he doth his banner rest. She, that me taught to love, and suffer payne, My doutfull hope, and eke my hote desyre, With shamefast cloke to shadowe and refraine, Her smilyng grace converteth straight to yre. And cowarde Love then to the hart apace Taketh his flight, whereas he lurkes, and plaines His purpose lost, and dare not shewe his face. For my lordes gilt thus faultlesse byde I paynes. Yet from my lorde shall not my foote remove, Swete is his death, that takes his end by love.

The advance in workmanship is obvious at a glance. There is no need to count Surrey’s syllables on the fingers, and the caesuras are arranged with variety and skill. The first line contains one of the very few examples in Surrey’s poems of an accented weak syllable (livèth), and there, as in nearly all the other cases, in the first two feet of the line. It will be noticed, however, that, whereas Wyatt was content with two rimes for his octave, in Petrarchian fashion, Surrey frankly makes up his sonnet of three quatrains and a couplet, which was the form the sonnet mainly took in the hands of his Elizabethan followers. Once or twice, Surrey runs the same pair of rimes right through his first twelve lines; but gains, on the whole, little advantage thus. Whichever plan he follows, the result is the same: that, improving on Wyatt’s efforts, he makes of the sonnet—what had never existed before in English poetry—a single symphonic effect. It is worth nothing, too, that, though his references to Chaucer are even more frequent than Wyatt’s, Surrey polishes and refines, never leaving unaltered the archaisms which Wyatt sometimes incorporated with his own language.

His clearest title to fame, however, rests on his translations from the Aeneid of Vergil into blank verse. There is unrimed verse even in Chaucer (Tale of Melibeus); and the movement against rime as a piece of medieval barbarity, which was supported, later, by Gabriel Harvey and even by Campion and found its greatest exponent in Milton, had already begun. Still, it is most likely that it was from Italian poetry (possibly Molza’s translation of Vergil, 1541) that Surrey immediately drew the idea. The merits of the translation do not very much concern us; the merit of having introduced to England the metre of Tamburlaine the Great, The Tempest, Paradise Lost and The Excursion is one that can hardly be overrated. Surrey’s own use of the metre, if a little stiff and too much inclined to make a break at the end of each line, is a wonderful achievement for his time, and a further proof of his genuine poetical ability. We have referred to Surrey as a perfect knight; and, in one of his poems, which all readers will possibly agree in thinking his best and sincerest, he gives a picture of his youth which shows in little all the elements of the courtier-knight. This is the Elegy on the duke of Richmond, as it has been called (So cruell prison how coulde betide, alas), which he wrote early in 1546 during his imprisonment in “proude Windsor,” the scene of his earlier and happier days. In this, he draws a picture of the life led by himself and his friend. We hear, first of all, of the large green courts whence the youths were wont to look up, sighing, to the ladies in the Maidens’ Tower; then of the dances, the tales of chivalry and love; the tennis-court, where the ball was often missed because the player was looking at the ladies in the gallery; the knightly exercises on horseback and on foot; the love-confidences exchanged; the stag-hunt in the forest; the vows of friendship, the bright honour. Here is as clear and complete a picture of the standard of knighthood as any that exists; and chivalry, decaying and mainly reminiscent as it may even then have been, was the inspiration of Surrey’s life and of his poetry. It must be noted of him, too, that he shows a fresh and original delight in nature, and was probably the author (as stated in England’s Helicon) of the famous pastoral Phylida was a fayer mayde.

That the remainder of the authors in Tottel’s Miscellany are declared “uncertain” does not, necessarily, mean that they were unknown. Men, and sometimes women, wrote for the amusement of themselves and their friends, not for publication. Their verses were handed round, copied out into the manuscript books, of which many survive in public and private libraries, and admired in a small circle. Tottel’s Miscellany is the first symptom of the breaking down of this bashful exclusiveness, under the desire for poetry felt by lovers and by those outside the court circle who had begun to share in the spread of knowledge and taste due to the renascence. It was the “book of songs and sonnets” the absence of which Master Slender lamented in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Reading had gone some way towards taking the place of listening to the bard or jongleur, and Tottel was enterprising enough to attempt to satisfy the new demand. But the authors—living and dead—remained, in many cases, anonymous. The reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and, to a great extent, the latter part of that of Henry VIII, were not favourable to the growth of poetry; and we find the fellows and successors of Wyatt and Surrey content to carry on their tradition without improving on the versification of the latter or adding to the stock of subjects and ideas. Some of the authors, clearly, were familiar with the work of Boccaccio—the story of Troilus and Cressida is a favourite reference—and one poem contains the earliest English translation of a passage of Ovid, the letter of Penelope to Ulysses. As regards the metres, “poulter’s measure” is the most prominent; decasyllables and eights are common, and the rimes are often on the scheme of the rime royal stanza. Alliteration, which Grimald favoured to some extent, is more common among the “uncertain” authors than in Wyatt and Surrey.

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