Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry Howard
Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard painted by an unknown Italian artist. c. 1546.
Coat of arms	200px Arms of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, KG
Spouse(s)	Frances de Vere
Issue Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton Jane Howard, Countess of Westmorland Katherine Howard, Lady Berkeley Margaret Howard, Lady Scrope
Noble family	Howard
Born	c. 1517 Hunsdon, Hertfordshire
Died	19 January 1547 (aged 29–30) Tower Hill, Tower of London, London
Buried	First at the Church of All Hallows, Tower Street, London and then at Church of St Michael the Archangel, Framlingham, Suffolk
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Religion Roman Catholic

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/1517 – 19 January 1547), KG, was an English nobleman, politician and poet. He was one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry and was the last known person executed at the instance of King Henry VIII. He was a first cousin of the king's wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. His name is usually associated in literature with that of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Owing largely to the powerful position of his father, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, Surrey took a prominent part in the court life of the time, and served as a soldier both in France and Scotland. He was a man of reckless temper, which involved him in many quarrels, and finally brought upon him the wrath of the ageing Henry VIII. He was arrested, tried for treason and beheaded on Tower Hill.

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Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, painted by Hans Holbein between about 1541 and 1543.

Origins

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Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Elizabeth Stafford, Henry's parents

He was born in Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, eldest son of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk with his second wife, Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of the 3rd Duke of Buckingham. He was thus descended from King Edward I on his father's side and from King Edward III on his mother's side.

Howard received a careful education from the best tutors of the time; as a young boy he was making translations from Latin, Italian and Spanish into English. Howard has been described as a "reckless, arrogant man", being very different from the rest of the family: "Most early sixteenth century Howards were dull dogs: hard, hard-nosed and dourly efficient. Howard was quite different. There was something in him of his paternal uncle, the Admiral Edward Howard, killed in action against the French in April 1513. There was more, however, of the darker inheritance of his maternal grandfather, Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who was executed in May 1521. Howard inherited all Buckingham's grand pride in blood and aristocracy, and all his determination that noblemen should once more come into their own. Perhaps it was from his mother's side too that he got his most dangerous trait: a rashness and a violence that bordered on madness. He also had a great intelligence that was both penetrating and fast and the result was one of the most remarkable men of the age".

Career

He was brought up at Windsor Castle with Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the illegitimate son of King Henry VIII. He became a close friend, and later a brother-in-law of Fitzroy, following Fitzroy's marriage to his sister Mary. Like his father and grandfather, he was a soldier, serving in Henry VIII's French wars as Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land.

Howard was repeatedly imprisoned for rash behaviour: on one occasion for striking a courtier, and on another for wandering through the streets of London breaking the windows of houses whose occupants were asleep. He assumed the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey in 1524 when his grandfather died and his father became Duke of Norfolk. Being the eldest son and heir to the 3rd Duke, Surrey was destined to be the future 4th Duke.

In 1532 he accompanied Anne Boleyn (his first cousin), King Henry VIII, and the Duke of Richmond to France, staying there for more than a year as a member of the entourage of King Francis I of France. 1536 was a notable year for Howard: his first son Thomas was born, Anne Boleyn was executed on charges of adultery and treason, and the Duke of Richmond died at the age of 17 and was buried at Thetford Priory, one of the Howard properties. That same year, Howard accompanied his father in the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Catholic rebellion that had broken out in the north of England against the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Religiously, Surrey had reformist leanings but was Catholic like his father, who was the premier Catholic nobleman of England. The Howards remained loyal to Catholicism during the Reformation. Surrey was educated and raised in the traditional religion and one of the causes of his fall from grace was his Catholicism. Years later, his eldest son Thomas would also fall out of favour and be executed for conspiring against Elizabeth I with the intention of replacing her with Mary, Queen of Scots and thus restore Catholicism to England.

Marriage and progeny

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Frances de Vere, by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1535

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Thomas, Henry and Margaret, Lady Scrope, children of Surrey and Frances de Vere

In early 1530, Anne Boleyn, Surrey's first cousin, promoted a marriage between him and Henry VIII's daughter, the Princess Mary. The Duke of Norfolk was very enthusiastic about the match as it might give him greater political influence and put his family closer to the throne of England. Boleyn may have considered the match to be a way of neutralising the threat Mary posed to the succession of any children Anne might have by the King. But she changed her mind, fearing that the Duke could use the match to support Mary's claim to the throne and support Catherine of Aragon in the divorce proceedings which were still continuing, and prevent the English Church's break with Rome from being consummated. By October 1530, Boleyn persuaded her reluctant uncle to arrange instead for Surrey to marry Frances de Vere, one of the daughters of John de Vere, 15th Earl of Oxford with his second wife, Elizabeth Trussell.

In April 1532, Surrey therefore married Frances de Vere, although due to the couple's young age, they did not begin to live together until 1535. Although the marriage was celebrated according to Catholic rites, there were religious differences between the families: Frances's father was a supporter of the Reformation and was the first Protestant Earl of Oxford, whereas Surrey's father the premier Catholic nobleman of England.

Surrey had with his wife two sons and three daughters:

• Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who on his grandfather's death in 1554 inherited the Dukedom of Norfolk. He was married three times: (1) Mary FitzAlan (2) Margaret Audley (3) Elizabeth Leyburne.
• Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton, who died unmarried.
• Jane Howard, who married Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland.
• Katherine Howard, who married Henry Berkeley, 7th Baron Berkeley.
• Margaret Howard, who married Henry Scrope, 9th Baron Scrope of Bolton. She was born after her father’s execution.

Downfall and death

The Howards had little regard for the "new men" who had risen to power at court, such as Thomas Cromwell and the Seymour family. Howard was less circumspect than his father in concealing this disdain. The Howards had many enemies at court. Howard himself branded Cromwell a 'foul churl' and William Paget a 'mean creature' as well as arguing that 'These new erected men would by their wills leave no nobleman on life!'

Henry VIII, consumed by paranoia and increasing illness, became convinced that Howard planned to usurp the crown from his son, the future King Edward VI. Howard suggested that his widowed sister Mary should seduce the ageing king, her father-in-law, and become his mistress, to "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King". Mary, outraged, said she would "cut her own throat" rather than "consent to such villainy".

She and her brother therefore fell out, and Mary later gave testimony against Henry that helped lead to his trial and execution for treason. The matter came to a head when Surrey quartered on his own coat of arms the attributed arms of King Edward the Confessor. John Barlow had once called Howard "the most foolish proud boy that is in England". Through his great-grandfather John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk (1483 creation), Surrey was a descendant of Thomas of Brotherton, 1st Earl of Norfolk, the sixth son of King Edward I, and the arms of the Howard ancestor, Thomas de Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk (1397 creation), show that Surrey was entitled to bear Edward the Confessor's arms, but doing so was an act of pride, and provocative in the eyes of the Crown. Religious reasons were also one of the causes of Surrey's fall from grace. Henry VIII, very possibly influenced by the Seymours, supporters of Protestantism, believed that the earl and his father were going to usurp the Crown to reverse the Reformation and thus return the English Church to Roman jurisdiction.

In consequence, the King ordered Surrey's imprisonment on a charge of treasonably quartering the royal arms, and also that of his father. They were sentenced to death on 13 January 1547. Howard was executed on 19 January 1547. His father's execution was scheduled for 28 January but did not take place because Henry VIII died in the early hours on that day. The Privy Council made a decision not to inaugurate the new reign with bloodshed, but Howard remained a prisoner in the Tower of London for the next six years, with most of his titles and property forfeited to the Crown, until he was released and pardoned in August 1553 upon the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary I. Surrey's son Thomas Howard, became heir to the dukedom of Norfolk in place of his father; he inherited the title upon the 3rd Duke's death in 1554.

Burial

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The arms for which Howard was attainted (Edward the Confessor's attributed arms are in the fifth quarter with a label of three points plain Argent).

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Tomb of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and his wife, Frances de Vere, displaying the coats of arms of the Howard and De Vere families

Surrey was first buried in the Church of All Hallows in Tower Street, although his remains were later moved to St Michael the Archangel's Church, Framlingham, Suffolk, where his spectacular painted alabaster tomb survives, richly decorated with the coats and heraldic animals of the Howard and De Vere families. The tomb was erected in 1614 at the behest of Surrey's youngest son, the Earl of Northampton.

The Latin inscription on the earl's tomb refers to Surrey as being the son of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, technically a new creation, but treated for all practical purposes as a recreation of the forfeited title held by Surrey's great-grandfather, the 1st Duke, therefore both the 2nd and 3rd Duke would be numbered correctly.

Surrey's tomb is not a religious example, unlike his father's tomb which is richly decorated with religious iconography, but rather extolling the virtues of its subjects. Effigies of his two sons kneel at the foot and at the head his three daughters.

In the 1970s the funerary monument was in very poor state of preservation, sagging in the centre and with the ends collapsing. The restoration of the tomb was entrusted to John Green. During the restoration and cleaning, it was found that there were holes of the dowel where a coronet had once been placed (not worn on the head, since Surrey died in disgrace). A new coronet was made of lead casting with large fish weights for the baubles, painted, gilded, and placed in position.

Literary activity and legacy

He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt may be considered as followers of the Petrarchism movement within the Renaissance literature. They were the first English poets to write in the sonnet form which Shakespeare later used, and Howard was the first English poet to publish blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in his translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid. Together, Wyatt and Howard, due to their excellent translations of Petrarch's sonnets, are known as "Fathers of the English Sonnet". While Wyatt introduced the sonnet form into English poetry, Howard gave it the rhyming metre and the division into quatrains which characterise the sonnets written in a way variously named English, Elizabethan, or Shakespearean sonnets. Surrey deserved to be called the English Petrarch.

Tottel's Miscellany, printed in 1557, contains 40 poems written by Henry Howard. Among the poems ascribed to Surrey is a loose translation of Martial 10:47, as "The means to attain happy life". A different version is preserved in MS. (Add. 36259). Another version of the translation had been printed ten years earlier in William Baldwin's Treatise of Morall Phylosophie (January 1547/8).

"The Things That Cause a Quiet Life" was written by Surrey:

My friend, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthy life;
The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no dainty fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;

The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Content thyself with thine estate,
Neither wish death, nor fear his might.

In popular culture

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was portrayed by the actor David O'Hara in The Tudors, a television series which ran from 2007 to 2010.

Further reading

•  
•  – with a memoir by the editor
• (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

External links

• Works by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "Complaint of the Absence of Her Lover Being upon the Sea" set to music Archived 3 February 2010 at the Wayback Machine From the 1990 concept album "Tyger and Other Tales”