Henry VIII's Last Victim (29 page)

Since that a lion’s heart is for wolf no prey,

with bloody mouth of simple sheep go slake your wrath I say.

Surrey’s poem tells us what he wanted to say rather than what he did say and even then he writes ‘with more despite and ire than I can now express’. But is he protesting a little too much? Two of his cousins had been officially condemned as harlots and the Howard name was bespattered with their blood. Many other Howards were languishing in the Tower. They would be pardoned the following year, but no thanks to Surrey’s father, who had sold them out to save himself. Norfolk’s letter to the King made him no better than the fawning, cowardly she-wolf that the lion savages. Surrey himself had attended the trials of Dereham and Culpepper and had watched the execution of his cousin without objection. His role in the affair was passive, but embarrassing nonetheless. Rewards even came his way in the aftermath of the scandal. Surrey retained his post as Henry VIII’s cupbearer and his patent as a Norfolk JP was renewed. In December 1541 he even received a grant from the King for the rectory, manors and possessions of Rushworth College in Norfolk.
⁷¹
If the Seymours had drunk innocent blood, then the Howards had allowed them to do so.

In his allegory, Surrey seems to recognise this hypocrisy even as he fights against it. The lion prancing about with contrived chivalric mannerism is a parody. When he beats his tail and flashes his eyes at the wolf, the figure of litotes is employed to expose the pomposity of his reaction: ‘I might perceive his noble heart much moved by the same.’ The Howard heir, with his inflated ego and arrogant swagger, was in danger of becoming a preposterous figure at Court. Surrey was aware of this, but nevertheless cultivated the image in order to shield himself from his enemies. The poem might be seen as a kind of protective self-satire. The lion’s outrage camouflages his insecurity. Attack becomes the best form of defence.

Under the cover of allegory, Surrey could flout convention and convey his malice towards the Seymours and his disgust at the mores of the Court. He could even champion his family’s destruction of a crowned king, albeit a Scottish king. He had found, in poetry, a new and exciting form of expression.

^fn1
Reginald Pole had been raised at Court alongside Henry VIII but had opposed the Break with Rome and had been living in voluntary exile ever since. Evading Henry VIII’s secret assassins, Pole petitioned the powers of Catholic Europe to force England back to the papal fold. Pole’s opposition was especially threatening to Henry VIII because he was a descendant of the House of York and a possible claimant to the throne. His mother Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, was the niece of Edward IV. Both Margaret and Lord Montagu had recently been in touch with Pole, while the Marquis of Exeter had been muttering for some time against the current regime. Henry VIII, always paranoid about threats to the succession, more so now that he had the interests of his baby son to protect and a potential invasion to confront, was easily convinced that a conspiracy was afoot to depose him.

   Montagu and Exeter were arrested in November 1538 and beheaded the following month. Many of their associates including Sir Edward Neville and Sir Nicholas Carew were also executed. Exeter’s wife and his twelve-year-old son were imprisoned in the Tower as was Montagu’s young son who subsequently perished there. Two-and-a-half years later, Pole’s sixty-eight-year-old mother was executed by an inexperienced headsman who resorted to hacking wildly at her writhing body. Pole remained in exile for the rest of Henry VIII’s reign and throughout the reign of his son. On the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553, he returned to England and was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He was finally able to realise his dream, the restoration of papal authority in England, but it would prove short-lived.

^fn2
In the early days of the tourney, ‘virtually no holds were barred (though the use of bolts and arrows seems to have been frowned on).’ Keen,
Chivalry
, p. 85.

^fn3
The pretexts for the divorce were Anne’s previous engagement to the Duke of Lorraine and her non-consummation with Henry. She raised no objection and her co-operation was rewarded with a generous settlement. She spent the rest of her life in the English countryside, occasionally returning to Court where she was welcomed as Henry VIII’s ‘beloved sister’. She died in July 1557 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

^fn4
make
: mate.

^fn5
trow
: trust.

^fn6
wist
: knew.

10

POET WITHOUT PEER

Oh, it was a right noble lord, liberality itself, if in this iron age there were any such creature as liberality left on the earth, a prince in content because a poet without peer.

Jack Wilton, in mock-praise of the Earl of Surrey, in Thomas Nashe’s
parody of Petrarchism,
The Unfortunate Traveller
, 1594

POETRY IN THE
first half of the sixteenth century, as the opening line of one of Henry VIII’s own efforts reveals, was commonly regarded as a form of ‘pastime with good company’.
¹
Every courtier worth his salt was expected to have some skill in ‘balet-making’. It was a sign of refinement, a polite accomplishment, another arrow in the quiver of courtly excellence. Lyrics were circulated freely – sometimes altered or augmented in the process – and were often recited or sung, with varying degrees of success, to a sophisticated coterie of lords and ladies.

Not that poetry was a frivolous exercise. The Court was the heartland of politics and society, and its literature was invariably shaped by that context. Under a dynastic monarchy, especially one in which the King would marry six times, public and private were inextricably linked. Consequently the vocabulary employed to express attachment within both spheres became fused. A suitor would pay court to his mistress, desiring her favour and professing himself her faithful servant, just as he would to his master for patronage. When Cardinal Wolsey petitioned the King for access to the Court in 1527, he expressed himself in terms that would not have seemed overwrought to his contemporaries: ‘There
was never lover more desirous of the sight of his lady, than I am of your most noble and royal person.’
²
At the Tudor Court, where relationships were governed by ‘the common infection of feigned friendship’ and where increasingly repressive treason laws ensured that ‘for fear no man durst either speak or wink’, decorum and discretion were the rule.
³
But courtiers found in this culture of ‘linguistic borrowing’
⁴
a useful way of circumventing, even subverting, the prevailing codes. In the hands of a skilled poet like Sir Thomas Wyatt, the language of love could be deployed to give voice to the tensions inherent in life at Court.

Wyatt’s imitations of the works of Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) and his treatment of the theme of unrequited love had a particular resonance in this period, when the fickle favours of the King were constantly sought but seldom attained. In one famous example of Wyatt exploiting the Petrarchan antitheses of attraction and repulsion, hope and despair, power and impotence, his speaker, an honourable suitor, finds himself beguiled by his mistress, but humiliated by her ‘strange fashion of forsaking’. He is contemptuous of her ‘newfangleness’, yet remains drawn to her in spite of himself. It has been suggested that the themes of this poem ‘may displace wider frustrations and resentments arising from the contradictions, for male courtiers, inherent in courting itself, an activity perceived in the Henrician period as glamorous and shameful, its rewards both desirable and unstable’.
⁵

As a pioneering poet, who introduced new styles and forms to English verse, Wyatt was greatly admired by his contemporaries and by none more than Surrey, who was fourteen years his junior and friends with his son. For Surrey, Wyatt possessed ‘heavenly gifts’. He had

A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme;

That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit;

A mark the which, unparfited for time,
^fn1

Some may approach, but never none shall hit.
⁶

Wyatt’s poems provided lessons in technique and style. They also demonstrated
what might be said in rhyme
. They showed Surrey how to create façades and manipulate language in order to articulate feelings that he had hitherto been forced to suppress. In Surrey’s tale of
the lion and the wolf, for example, the scornful wolf, like Wyatt’s lady, represents a ‘craven courtly power’ that elicits paradoxical emotions of desire and revulsion from her noble suitor.
⁷
In another poem that draws on Ariosto and Petrarch and is wrought by Surrey in poulter’s measure,
^fn2
the speaker expresses his frustration with the ‘wayward ways’ of Love. ‘Deceit is his delight,’ Surrey writes, ‘and to beguile and mock / the simple hearts which he doth strike with froward diverse stroke.’ The speaker knows that he is entirely dependent on the omnipotent power of Love. In order to survive he has to seek Love’s uncertain favour and adapt to his environment, where rivals will seek to undo him. The consequent pressures felt by the speaker are palpable:

He lets me to pursue a conquest well near won,

To follow where my pains were spilt or that my suit begun.

Lo, by these rules I know how soon a heart can turn

From war to peace, from truce to strife, and so again return.

I know how to convert my will in others lust;

Of little stuff unto my self to weave a web of trust;

And how to hide my harm with soft dissembled cheer,

When in my face the painted thoughts would outwardly appear.

I know how that the blood forsakes the face for dread,

And how by shame it stains again the cheek with flaming red.

I know under the green the serpent how he lurks;

The hammer of the restless forge I know eke how it works.

I know to seek the track of my desired foe,

And fear to find that I do seek; but chiefly this I know:

That lovers must transform into the thing beloved,

And live (alas, who could believe?) with spryte from life removed.

I know in hearty sighs and laughters of the spleen

At once to change my state, my will, and eke my colour clean.

I know how to deceive myself withouten help,

And how the lion chastised is by beating of the whelp.

The hidden trains I know, and secret snares of love;

How soon a look may print a thought that never will remove.

That slipper state I know, those sudden turns from wealth,

That doubtful hope, that certain woe, and sure despair of health.
⁸

Surrey’s poem is ostensibly about love, but to his contemporaries, attuned to the language of the Court, a more political reading was possible. Surrey deliberately deploys the shared terminology of the private and public spheres. The lover pursues ‘a conquest well near won’; a heart can turn ‘from war to peace, from truce to strife’; the speaker presents his ‘suit’ just as a courtier would to the King, and he learns, in love as in politics, to hide his passions with ‘dissembled cheer’. ‘That slipper[y] state’ derives from Petrarch, but is also an echo of Wyatt’s translation of Seneca, beginning ‘Stand whoso list upon the slipper top / of Court’s estates’, which advises against the ‘brackish joys’ of the Court and paints a grisly picture of warning for those who intend to run its gauntlet:

For him death grip’th right hard by the crop

That is much known of other, and of himself, alas,

Doth die unknown, dazed, with dreadful face.
⁹

When Wyatt died eight months after the execution of Catherine Howard, Surrey composed his elegy and even allowed it to be published.
^fn3
In the same heroic quatrains that he had used for Richmond’s elegy, Surrey outlined Wyatt’s inner virtues through a catalogue of his physical attributes. Wyatt’s eye, he wrote, ‘whose judgement none affect could blind’, reflected ‘a mind / with virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.’ Above all, Wyatt possessed ‘a heart where dread was never so impressed / To hide the thought that might the truth advance.’
¹⁰

Yet Wyatt was always circumspect. A career diplomat and courtier, he knew the power of words and the ease with which they could be twisted. Having been imprisoned for treason in 1541, largely on the basis of words taken out of context, Wyatt was careful not to get burnt again. Even in his paraphrases of the seven penitential psalms,
^fn4
which he dramatised through a series of narrative prologues, he operated covertly.
¹¹
Wyatt’s King David has to undergo a tortuous spiritual journey from confession to contrition and penitence before he can be reborn. He relives his sins; how he wrought destruction upon ‘kingdoms and cities’ by committing adultery with Bathsheba, and sending her husband Urias to his death. This was potentially risky. Following his Break with Rome Henry VIII favoured the image of David for himself, but as David the pious, David the sage, David the giant-slaying hero.
¹²
Wyatt had shown that David was also a sinner, and a lustful, murderous one at that. But nowhere did Wyatt identify this sinning David with his own King. His subject was David’s spiritual progress; his concern was for issues of faith and salvation. He further distanced himself from any perceived judgement by drawing on a number of other people’s biblical translations and by adapting his prologues from the work of the Italian, Pietro Aretino.