Henry VIII's Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey by Jessie Childs

Author:Jessie Childs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-03-12T23:00:00+00:00

Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost.

The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.58

Surrey’s implication in these lines is that God took Wyatt from his countrymen as a punishment for their sins. Yet there is hope. Wyatt bequeathed his psalm paraphrases to his evangelical brethren; they are a ‘witness of faith’, a faith everlasting, a faith that true Christians will continue to uphold.

Within weeks of Wyatt’s death, the antiquarian John Leland published his Naeniae (‘funeral songs’) in honour of the late poet. He dedicated them to ‘the most learned and most noble young Earl of Surrey’. One, entitled Unicus Phoenix, called on Surrey to continue the work of his predecessor:

The world a single Phoenix can contain,

And when one dies, another one is born.

When Wyatt, that rare bird, was taken away

By death, he gave us Howard as his heir.59

It was a calling that Surrey chose to interpret in terms of religion as well as poetry. He would strive to emulate Wyatt and produce works that would stand as a ‘witness of faith’. Thus, after praising Wyatt’s psalms in another poem written around this time, Surrey exhibited his fidelity by warning contemporary rulers of ‘God’s scourge’ and praying that they might ‘awake out of their sinful sleep’.60 Surrey’s apocalyptic, threatening language chimes with that of his London satire. There he made a point of bewailing the heedlessness of Londoners; goodly preachers were, like Wyatt, ‘sent for our health, but not received so’. Unlike his Wyatt elegy, Surrey’s London satire was not published, but nor was it kept secret. It is an epideictic poem modelled along the lines of a judicial oration, which Surrey dedicated to a public figure, Sir Nicholas Poyntz, and it would resurface three years later when he once again faced investigation.61

Surrey’s Wyatt poems identify the speaker as a member of the evangelical brethren – ‘with such as covet Christ’; in his London satire he acts as God’s spokesman. In terms of faith, though not of politics, the son of the foremost Catholic peer in England had proudly and defiantly declared his allegiance to the Opposition.

Henry VIII proved remarkably forgiving. It can be assumed that Surrey was free by 11 May 1543, when he was appointed to the Commission of the Peace for Norfolk.62 The King probably dismissed the rampage as a London matter of little import. He did not even seem unduly concerned by the stories of Surrey’s allegedly royal coat of arms or the loose talk about the succession. Not yet, anyway.

We can only guess at the Duke of Norfolk’s reaction to Surrey’s behaviour. In public he remained tight-lipped. But his son had declared himself a reformer. He had suffered three imprisonments in six years. He had rebelled openly against authority and displayed little contrition thereafter. Surrey seemed to be systematically destroying all the props that defined him as a scion of the Howards. He had come a long way from the dutiful heir praised by the French princes for his ‘wisdom and soberness’. On Surrey’s shoulders rested the future of the House of Howard.

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