Henry VIII's Last Victim (30 page)

But if Wyatt covered his tracks, Surrey determinedly retraced them, leaving his own heavy prints with the kind of reckless abandon and lack of regard for consequences that characterised his whole life. In a sonnet in praise of Wyatt, Surrey claims to have known ‘what harboured in that head’.
¹³
In another he explicitly states the parallels between Wyatt’s David and present-day ‘princes’ and ‘rulers’. It is in Wyatt’s psalms, Surrey announces:

Where rulers may see in a mirror clear

The bitter fruit of false concupiscence,

How Jewry bought Urias’ death full dear.

In princes’ hearts God’s scourge yprinted deep

Might them awake out of their sinful sleep.
¹⁴

There was a long classical tradition of associating poetry with prophecy and esteeming the divine character of the poetic gift. Virgil was popularly thought to have been a magician and Dante chose him
as his guide to the mysteries of the afterlife in
The Divine Comedy
. ‘Among the Romans,’ wrote Sir Philip Sidney, ‘a poet was called
vates
, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet.’
¹⁵
It is the numinous wisdom of Wyatt’s verse that Surrey celebrates and assumes for himself in the above poem. Just as the prophet Nathan admonished King David, so Surrey, through the agency of Wyatt’s psalms, administers his own providential warning. And his message is dangerously clear. The whole of society pays for the sins of rulers, like David, who abuse their power by succumbing to ‘false concupiscence’. Sinful leaders in Surrey’s age must look into themselves, as David did, and learn from his penitential example before it is too late for them and for their people.

Tyranny was an issue that preoccupied many of Surrey’s contemporaries. Humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Starkey thought long and hard about its nature and effect. Both writers, informed by classical ethics, regarded the salient feature of tyranny to be the subordination of public welfare to private pleasure, and pondered the argument that under such circumstances subjects had a right, even a duty, to depose the tyrant.
¹⁶
It is with this contemporary debate in mind that one should read Surrey’s next sonnet, about Sardanapalus, the King of Assyria:

Th’Assyrians’ King, in peace with foul desire

And filthy lust that stained his regal heart,

In war that should set princely hearts afire

Vanquished did yield for want of martial art.

The dent of swords from kisses seemed strange,

And harder than his lady’s side his targe
^fn5
;

From glutton feasts to soldier’s fare a change,

His helmet far above a garland’s charge.

Who scarce the name of manhood did retain,

Drenched in sloth and womanish delight,

Feeble of sprete,
^fn6
unpatient of pain,

When he had lost his honour and his right,

Proud time of wealth, in storms appalled with dread,

Murdered himself to show some manful deed.
¹⁷

Sardanapalus, a spineless, effeminate king, has betrayed the code of chivalry. Instead of conquering enemies in war, he allows his people to
perish while he revels in a corrupt Court. He is the very embodiment of tyranny and has sacrificed ‘his honour and his right’ to rule over his people. The historical Sardanapalus committed suicide. For Surrey’s speaker, it was his only ‘manful deed’.

Of course, Surrey is only referring to an ancient, eastern ruler and his sonnet, he could argue, is part of a long literary tradition. Previous writers, including Gower and Lydgate, had also cited Sardanapalus as an
exemplum
of degenerate kingship. But for them Sardanapalus was one in a long list of many; Surrey singles him out.
¹⁸
The Earl’s use of language – ‘foul desire’, ‘filthy lust’, ‘glutton feasts’ – was risky considering his own King’s carnal and culinary appetites. Nor, as we know from Surrey’s previous sonnet, was he averse to drawing parallels between past and present rulers. But he stops short of doing so here. Any allusions that might be drawn, Surrey could have argued, between Sardanapalus and Henry VIII are coincidental. It is entirely up to the reader how he interprets the poem just as it was when it first circulated throughout the Tudor Court.

‘A poet,’ Percy Shelley would write three centuries after Surrey, ‘is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.’
¹⁹
Although one should always be wary of seeing self-revelation in poetic fiction, some themes are so prevalent and so intense that they surely point to the preoccupations of the poet.
^fn7
Above all, as with Shelley’s nightingale, is Surrey’s sense of isolation. So many of his lyrics build up a picture of harmony and rest only for it to be disturbed by a refrain of alienation; all is well, ‘but I’, ‘save I’, ‘not I’. Surrey’s adoption of the Petrarchan method of contrasting external image with internal effect, allows him, as in the following poem, to convey this sense of loneliness:

If care do cause men cry, why do I not complain?

If each man do bewail his woe, why show I not my pain?

Since that amongst them all, I dare well say is none

So far from weal, so full of woe, or hath more cause to moan.

For all things having life sometime have quiet rest;

The bearing ass, the drawing ox and every other beast.

The peasant and the post, that serve at all assayes,

The ship boy and the galley slave have time to take their ease,

Save I, alas, whom care of force doth so constrain

To wail the day and wake the night continually in pain;

From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears,

From tears to painful plaint again; and thus my life it wears.

No thing under the sun that I can hear or see,

But moveth me for to bewail my cruel destiny.

For where men do rejoice, since that I cannot so,

I take no pleasure in that place, it doubleth but my woe.

And when I hear the sound of song or instrument,

Me think each tune there doleful is and helps me to lament.

And if I see some have their most desired sight,

Alas, think I, each man hath weal save I most woeful wight.

Then as the stricken deer withdraws himself alone,

So do I seek some secret place where I may make my moan.

There do my flowing eyes show forth my melting heart,

So that the streams of those two wells right well declare my smart . . .
²⁰

The poem is about the speaker’s longing for his absent lady – Surrey’s wife Frances, some have suggested, though there is no way of knowing – and it concludes with a statement of constancy. Despite the anguish of separation, the speaker will stand fast to his lady, ‘yea rather die a thousand times than once to false my faith’. He will serve her till his last breath and then ‘bequeath my wearied ghost to serve her afterward’.

A sonnet of Surrey’s beginning ‘Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green’, concludes with a similar resolution. Through a series of Petrarchan antitheses the speaker challenges his lady to test his fidelity. She can subject him to any extreme – of temperature, status, weather, age, health, ‘in earth, in heaven, or yet in hell, / In hill, in dale, or in the foaming flood; / Thrall, or at large, alive whereso I dwell’ – and he will stay true to her:

Yours will I be, and with that only thought

Comfort myself when that my hap is nought.
²¹

The speaker’s confidence in his own integrity, his inner virtue, consoles him in the face of life’s cruel tests. Whatever happens, he will never change; he will always uphold the ideals of constancy and fidelity proper to the code of chivalry. Indeed it is these very values that have reduced him to such a febrile state. If he were more like others, more prone to slippage, then he would not suffer so. This is his ‘cruel destiny’. Much of Surrey’s poetry, like his self-styled public image, sets out to champion this solipsistic representation of the isolated but noble hero.
²²

All his life Surrey played a role: the son of the Duke of Norfolk, the Howard heir, the friend of the Duke of Richmond, the cousin of two Queens. He was expected to fulfil a pre-ordained plan created for him by others. Even his Christian name was a reminder that he existed for the sake of his family and King. The dedication sent to him when he was a fifteen-year-old in France had declared, ‘we have great hope that you will be like your father and grandfather’.
²³
Such high expectations invariably carried concomitant pressures. ‘If a gentleman strays from the path of his forebears,’ Castiglione had warned, ‘he dishonours his family name and not only fails to achieve anything but loses what has already been achieved.’

Noble birth is like a bright lamp that makes clear and visible both good deeds and bad, and inspires and incites to high performance as much as fear of dishonour or hope of praise; and since their deeds do not possess such noble brilliance, ordinary people lack both this stimulus and the fear of dishonour; nor do they believe that they are bound to surpass what was achieved by their forebears. Whereas to people of noble birth it seems reprehensible not to attain at least the standard set them by their ancestors.
²⁴

Surrey’s vaunting of a noble identity, in life and in poetry, is, in part, his attempt to convey the requisite ‘brilliance’ and stave off the ‘fear of dishonour’. But he struggled to uphold the image under the ‘slippery’ conditions of the Henrician Court and the constant restlessness that pervades his work may be a symptom of his search for a persona that will ease his anxiety, for a natural identity as opposed to a
carefully crafted façade. In his extended dramatic soliloquy, ‘The sun hath twice brought forth the tender green’, Surrey’s lover finds himself out of step with nature:

. . . What cold again is able to restore

My fresh green years that wither thus and fade?

Alas, I see nothing to hurt so sore

But time sometime reduceth a return;

Yet time my harm increaseth more and more,

And seems to have my cure always in scorn.

Strange kind of death, in life that I do try:

At hand to melt, far off in flame to burn;

And like as time list to my cure apply,

So doth each place my comfort clean refuse.

Each thing alive that sees the heaven with eye

With cloak of night may cover and excuse

Himself from travail of the day’s unrest,

Save I, alas, against all others use,

That then stir up the torment of my breast

To curse each star as causer of my fate.

And when the sun hath eke the dark represt

And brought the day, it doth nothing abate

The travail of my endless smart and pain.
²⁵

Surrey’s speaker seems estranged not only from his lady, not only from society, but also from his own sense of self. He longs for the solitude of the night so that he can lament ‘more covertly’ and ‘withdraw from every haunted place’:

And with my mind I measure pace by pace

To seek that place where I my self had lost.

This image of the tortured poet, losing his bearings in the landscape of his memory, is a far cry from the self-confident, brash young man that the majority of Surrey’s contemporaries supposed him to be.

An outward manifestation of this conflict between self-assertion and self-doubt can be seen in Surrey’s portraits. He sat more often than any other Tudor courtier.
²⁶
In each sitting, he assumed a different guise: there is Surrey the pensive poet dressed in black; Surrey the military
commander in his red sash; Surrey the bohemian artist with an unkempt beard; Surrey in profile, bare-headed like a Roman emperor; Surrey the urbane cosmopolitan, clad in Italian fashions, adorned with the insignia of the Garter and wrought in the Mannerist style of Fontainebleau. There is a natural flamboyance, even narcissism, to this role-playing, but there is also something sad about it, as if Surrey truly believed that if he reinvented himself enough times, he might yet be able to find himself.

Some of his most powerful lyrics are those that assume the voices of women abandoned by their lovers. He is extraordinarily adept at conveying their sense of loss and helplessness and it is possible that he found in this gender-swapping a cathartic outlet for his own suppressed feelings of vulnerability and passivity. Like sixteenth-century women, Surrey had to conform to a stereotype; his literary ventriloquism allowed him, if only momentarily, to alleviate the pressure of having to play the role of the aristocratic alpha male at Court. In other lyrics, he comes close to hinting that his high calling might be more of a curse than a privilege. In an inventive paraphrase of psalm 73, written towards the end of his life, Surrey’s speaker, a member of God’s ‘elect’, ultimately triumphs through faith, but only after he has suffered a profound crisis of faith, brought on by the prosperity of the wicked:

For I am scourged still, that no offence have done,

By wrath’s children; and from my birth my chastening begun.

When I beheld their pride and slackness of thy hand,

I gan bewail the woeful state wherein thy chosen stand.
²⁷

In another biblical translation, this time of the second chapter of Ecclesiastes, the speaker is wistful for ‘the idle life / that never charged was with care, nor burdened with strife’,
²⁸
while in a beautiful sonnet translation of one of Martial’s epigrams, the poet advocates the Golden Mean: