A short life of the author
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1517 – 19 January 1547) was an English nobleman and poet who, with his elder contemporary Sir Thomas Wyatt, transformed English poetry in the 1530s and 1540s by introducing Continental forms — particularly the Petrarchan sonnet — and by inventing blank verse, the unrhymed iambic pentameter that would become the dominant metre of English dramatic and epic poetry. He was beheaded for treason at approximately thirty years old, one of the last victims of Henry VIII’s tyranny, and his poetry was published posthumously in Songes and Sonettes (1557), better known as Tottel’s Miscellany — the most influential poetry anthology of the English Renaissance.
Life
Surrey was born into one of the most powerful families in England. His father was Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and Surrey grew up at the centre of Tudor court life. He was a companion to Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, and was educated at Windsor Castle. He was brilliant, arrogant, hot-tempered, and extravagant — he was repeatedly imprisoned for brawling, for breaking windows in London with a stone-bow, and for eating meat during Lent.
His position at court was always dangerous. The Howard family’s fortunes rose and fell with the king’s marriages — two of Henry VIII’s queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, were Surrey’s cousins. After Catherine Howard’s execution in 1542, the Howards were in peril. Surrey served with distinction in the French wars but alienated the king with his pride and his quartering of the royal arms on his own coat of arms — an act that was construed as implying a claim to the throne.
In January 1547, with Henry VIII dying and factions manoeuvreing for control of the coming regency, Surrey was tried for treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. His father, the Duke of Norfolk, was saved only by Henry’s death the night before the scheduled execution. Surrey was approximately thirty years old.
The Sonnet
Surrey adapted the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet form that Wyatt had imported into English, modifying its rhyme scheme to create what is now called the “English” or “Shakespearean” sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). This modification was consequential. The Italian sonnet’s octave-sestet structure works naturally in Italian, with its abundance of rhymes, but is difficult in rhyme-poor English. Surrey’s three-quatrain structure solved the problem elegantly, creating a form that allowed for three parallel developments of an idea and a concluding epigrammatic turn — the pattern that Shakespeare would exploit to perfection fifty years later.
Surrey’s sonnets are less psychologically complex than Wyatt’s — they lack Wyatt’s rough immediacy and personal urgency — but they are smoother, more polished, and more musically accomplished. They established the formal standard that the Elizabethans would inherit.
Blank Verse
Surrey’s most far-reaching innovation was the invention of blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — in his translation of Books II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid (composed c. 1539–1546, published posthumously 1554–1557). No English poet before Surrey had written sustained verse without rhyme. The decision to abandon rhyme in favour of a flexible, dignified, unrhymed line was revolutionary.
The consequences were immense. Blank verse became the metre of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587), Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Wordsworth’s Prelude, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Robert Frost’s dramatic monologues. Surrey could not have foreseen any of this, but his technical innovation — made in the service of translating Virgil’s hexameters into an English equivalent of comparable dignity — gave the English language its greatest poetic instrument.
The Aeneid translation itself is accomplished but uneven. Surrey captures Virgil’s epic gravity in passages — the fall of Troy, the death of Priam — but lacks the sustained power of later blank-verse masters. The translation’s significance is historical and technical rather than literary: it is the proof of concept that made everything after it possible.
Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)
Surrey’s poems were published ten years after his death in Songes and Sonettes, printed by Richard Tottel — the first major anthology of English poetry and one of the most influential books in English literary history. The collection contains forty poems by Surrey, ninety-seven by Wyatt, and poems by other courtier-poets. It went through nine editions by 1587 and was the primary vehicle through which the English-reading public encountered the new Continental-influenced poetry.
Surrey’s contributions to Tottel’s Miscellany include love lyrics, elegies, paraphrases of Psalms, and satires. His elegy for Wyatt (“W. resteth here, that quick could never rest”) is one of his finest poems — a tribute to his predecessor that combines personal grief with literary judgement.
Critical Standing
Surrey has always lived in multiple shadows — Wyatt’s, as the more original poet; Shakespeare’s, as the greater sonneteer; Marlowe’s and Milton’s, as the masters of the verse form he invented. His own poetry is admired more for its technical accomplishment than for its emotional depth or intellectual complexity.
Yet his historical importance is difficult to overstate. He gave English poetry two of its most important tools — the English sonnet form and blank verse — and without either, the great flowering of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature would have taken a different and diminished form. He is one of those figures whose contribution is best measured not by what he himself achieved but by what he made possible for others.
Collecting Surrey
Surrey’s poems exist in only a handful of early printed editions. Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) is extremely rare — a first edition is a major antiquarian prize. The 1554 and 1557 editions of the Aeneid translation are even rarer. Modern scholarly editions — Emrys Jones’s Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1964) — are the standard texts. Facsimile editions of Tottel’s Miscellany are available from specialist presses.