Henry VIII's Last Victim (32 page)

His strategy succeeded. The
Miscellany
was an instant best-seller, going through nine editions (with omissions and additions) in thirty years. It became the ‘golden treasury’ of English lyricism and inaugurated a blitz of anthologies, many with such extravagantly alliterated titles as
The Paradise of Dainty Devices
(1576),
A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions
(1578) and
The Arbor of Amorous Devices
(1597). Shakespeare owned a copy of Tottel’s
Songes and Sonettes
and incorporated one of the poems into the gravedigger’s song in
Hamlet
.
In
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, Master Slender ‘had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of
Songes and Sonettes
here’. According to the latest editor of Tottel’s
Miscellany
, ‘the beginning of modern English verse may be said to date from its publication in 1557.’
⁵²

Thus Surrey became the face of English poetry as marketed by Tottel and his followers. But this was a distinctly polite and romantic brand of poetry, one that can certainly be applied to Surrey’s work, but not exclusively so. Not only did Tottel omit all Surrey’s biblical and Virgilian translations in the
Songes and Sonettes
, but he also revised and ‘polished’ his poems and gave them artificial titles, fashioning an image of Surrey as a noble Petrarchan who penned lyrics to win the hearts of fair ladies.
⁵³
It proved remarkably resilient and was reinforced countless times in the Elizabethan age, most notably by Thomas Sackville, Philip Sidney and George Puttenham. The latter even assumed in
The Arte of English Poesie
that Surrey had travelled to Petrarch’s fatherland in order to acquire ‘the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian Poesie’.
⁵⁴
The image was further conflated by Thomas Nashe in
The Unfortunate Traveller
(1594), where the incidents of Surrey’s life were seized upon and mythologised. Surrey’s prowess at the tournament in May 1540 gave enough truth behind the lie that he was the most skilled knight in Europe. The single sonnet to Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was developed into an epic love story. Nashe’s novel was a burlesque; he was ridiculing the pedestal upon which Surrey had been placed and the romantic tradition he was thought to embody. But Nashe’s successors took his account at face value. ‘Who has not heard of Surrey’s fame?’ Sir Walter Scott enquired in his
Lay of the Last Minstrel
of 1805:

His was the hero’s soul of fire,

And his the bard’s immortal name,

And his was the love, exalted high

By all the glow of chivalry.
⁵⁵

It is not necessary to buy into the artificial branding of Surrey to appreciate his role in the development of English poetry. The beauty of his poems lies in the occasional nature of their composition and the plurality and ambiguity of their motives, not in one all-encompassing, Geraldine-worshipping impulse. He did indeed draw inspiration from Europe, but also from the native tradition; he penned conventional love
lyrics, but also adopted female voices and celebrated male bonding. He could write with studied grace, but also produced sparks of unrestrained vitriol, class anger, religious zeal and political suggestiveness.

By experimenting with native forms and styles and by adapting classical and foreign ones to the vernacular, Surrey discovered new avenues through which he could articulate his conflicting emotions. In this way, he helped lay the groundwork for much of what was to follow. Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, for example, or the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson, or Gray’s elegy of heroic quatrains, showed what could be achieved when Surrey’s innovations were taken to the next level.

^fn1
unparfited for time
: unperfected for want of time.

^fn2
A verse form characterised by alternate lines of twelve and fourteen syllables, so-called because the poulterer would often throw in a couple of extra eggs on the purchase of a second dozen.

^fn3
During this period much vernacular verse was deeply entrenched within an elitist culture. The dissemination of one’s work among the masses was conventionally seen as otiose, undesirable, even shameful, as if the act of printing somehow undermined the virtues of the poem. That Surrey should compose an elegy on Wyatt, a man of a lower social status than he, and then allow it to be published, was a bold acknowledgement and celebration of Wyatt’s achievement. W. A. Sessions sees the published elegy as part of Surrey’s attempt to establish ‘a new cultural hegemony’ in which the role of the poet would be raised to an exalted plane. This perhaps overstates the case. Surrey’s elegy was undeniably significant, but it was the only poem he allowed to be printed and it was done so anonymously. If he did envisage a revolution for the poet in society, it does not seem to have been a vision that he pursued with any vigour throughout the rest of his life. (See J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print. A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’,
Essays in Criticism
, 1/2 (1951); Sessions, ‘Surrey’s Wyatt: Autumn 1542 and the New Poet’, in
Rethinking the Henrician Era
, ed. Herman; Burrow,
LRB
, p. 14.)

^fn4
Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143 (Vulgate: 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142).

^fn5
targe
: shield.

^fn6
sprete
: spirit.

^fn7
From the outset, however, it is necessary to insert a caveat. So much of Surrey’s verse is ambiguous, and deliberately so, that interpretation can only be speculative and dependent as much on the reader as the poet. Indeed the nature of manuscript compilation and transmission in Surrey’s time suggests that contemporaries could have collaborated in the composition of some lyrics or appropriated them for their own purposes. Furthermore, as many of Surrey’s poems are translations or paraphrases of foreign, classical and biblical works, any search for authorial intention within them may invite charges of reductionism. Nevertheless, the choice of source and the way it was adapted by the poet is in itself revealing and themes emerge that suggest, to this reader at least, a degree of self-revelation in Surrey’s work. Certainly there is no single way to read his poetry and the presentation of one reading by no means precludes the possibility of others.

^fn8
weed
: clothes.

^fn9
unwroken
: unavenged.

^fn10
Tully
: Cicero.

^fn11
Surrey wrote around 55–60 poems in total. The figure is imprecise because the authorship of some is uncertain.

11

THE FURY OF RECKLESS YOUTH

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour’s at the stake.

Hamlet
, Act 4, scene 4, lines 53–6

IF POETRY PRESCRIBED
a kind of therapy for Surrey, an outlet for his frustrations and a means of self-discipline, sometimes his emotions were just too powerful and spontaneous to be confined to literary form. In the summer of 1542, when Surrey was twenty-five, the ‘foolish proud boy’ in him resurfaced. On 13 July the Privy Council issued an order to the Warden of Fleet Prison ‘to receive the Earl of Surrey to remain there prisoner during the King’s pleasure, having two of his servants to attend upon him, and to suffer none to resort to banquet with him.’
¹

As with his first confinement, the exact circumstances leading up to Surrey’s imprisonment are obscure. An entry in the Privy Council register reveals that it concerned a quarrel with one ‘Jhon a Legh’. That Surrey’s offence occasioned an imprisonment strongly suggests that he physically assaulted Legh or, as is sometimes assumed, challenged him to a duel within the environs of the Court. There are so many incidences and variants of the name Jhon a Legh in the official documents that it is impossible to uncover the identity of this man with absolute certainty. However, one likely candidate does emerge from the mass of index entries. John Leigh of Stockwell – whose surname was variously spelt
Lee, Legh, Leigh, a Lee, a Leghe, a Leigh, a Ligh and a Leyghe – was forty in 1542 and a half-brother of the late Queen Catherine Howard (their mother Jocasta married Edmund Howard after the death of her first husband Ralph Leigh).
²
The Leighs came from Stockwell in South London and belonged to the same Lambeth parish – St Mary’s – as the Howards. Their respective family chapels were both founded in 1522 and faced each other on the north and south sides of the church.

John himself was an enigmatic fellow. He seems to have grown up at the English Court and served Cardinal Wolsey for a time. Following the Break with Rome he stayed loyal to the Pope and fled to Europe. According to his epitaph, he travelled widely and was ‘to sundry countries known’.
³
In the first year of Edward VI’s reign, Leigh would be committed to Fleet Prison and only released on the condition, upon pain of a £2,000 fine, that he remain in England. Interestingly, one of Leigh’s guarantors was Thomas Pope, the same man who had accused the Duke of Norfolk of complicity with the Pilgrims of Grace in 1537.
⁴
Notwithstanding the conditions of his bond, Leigh resumed his travels and was imprisoned in the Tower on his return.
⁵
The accession of Queen Mary in 1553 heralded an upturn in his fortunes. He was, according to the French ambassador, a great favourite of the Queen and very familiar with her.
⁶
The day after Mary’s coronation, Leigh was knighted, but when Mary was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth in 1558, he fled overseas once again.
⁷

During his earlier travels in the 1530s Leigh had spent some time in Rome with Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s outlawed enemy.
⁸
On his return to England in May 1540, Leigh was sent to the Tower and interrogated by the Privy Council. A letter survives in the British Library in which Leigh gives a detailed account of the conversations he admitted to having had with Pole.
⁹
There is no mention of Surrey, nor of any Howard, but it is nevertheless possible that Leigh was questioned about Howard involvement with Pole just as the Marquis of Exeter’s wife had been when her husband was executed for his dealings with Pole two years earlier. Leigh does say in his letter that he had previously relayed other information about his links with Pole to the Council, and throughout his sojourn in Italy he had maintained contact with Thomas Cromwell and may even have acted as his agent.
¹⁰
According to Edmund Harvel, Leigh was not a malicious man, but was guilty of ‘weakness of reason and imprudency in his government’.
¹¹
This assessment is borne out by his later meddling in Queen Mary’s marriage negotiations
in 1553 and by his future moonlighting as an informant for the French ambassador.
¹²

At the beginning of 1542 a Venetian called Pasqual had been ordered to leave England on account of ‘unfitting words lewdly spoken to the London Watch touching the King’s Highness’.
¹³
It has been suggested that this man might be the same ‘Pasquil, an Italian’, who later served in Surrey’s household as a jester, but was suspected by the Earl’s enemies of being a spy.
¹⁴
Surrey was accused four years later of having another servant who ‘had been in Italy with Cardinal Pole, and was received again [by Surrey] at his return’.
¹⁵
Had Pasqual’s deportation prompted Leigh to slander Surrey? Could he have suggested that Surrey had had dealings with the traitor Pole? Or perhaps Leigh had accused the Howards of turning a blind eye to Catherine Howard’s wantonness, thereby tarnishing the reputations of all those, including the Leighs, associated with her. Whatever it was that Leigh said or did to provoke Surrey, the Privy Council decreed that the Earl’s reaction was in breach of the law and on 13 July 1542, exactly five months after the execution of Catherine Howard, Surrey was languishing in the Fleet.

Once known as the ‘Gaol of London’, the Fleet was the city’s oldest prison. It was situated on the east side of what is now Farringdon Street on the north-eastern corner of Ludgate Circus. In Surrey’s time it lay just outside the city walls, on the bank of the Fleet – the river, now bricked in, that dissected Westminster and the City. The river served as the repository for all manner of filth; it received the citizens’ rubbish and sewage, the discharge of the tanneries and the breweries, the carcasses from the slaughterhouses and even the odd corpse. Fever-bearing mists rose from its frothy surface and it was said that the miasma was so noxious that some of the prison’s inmates had died from it.