father, and took part in the unsuccessful siege of Montreuil. In August 1545 he was sent to the relief of Edward Poynings, then in command of Boulogne, and was made lieutenant-general of the English possessions on the Continent and governor of Boulogne. Here he gained considerable successes, and insisted on the retention of the town in spite of the desire of the privy council that it should be surrendered to France. A reverse on the 7th of January at St Étienne was followed by a period of inaction, and in March Surrey was recalled.
Surrey had always been an enemy to the Seymours, whom he regarded as upstarts, and when his sister, the duchess of Richmond, seemed disposed to accept a marriage with Sir Thomas Seymour, he wrote to her insinuating that this was a step towards becoming the mistress of Henry VIII. By his action in thwarting this plan he increased the enmity of the Seymours and added his sister to the already long list of the enemies which he had made by his haughty manner and brutal frankness. He was now accused of quartering with his own the arms of Edward the Confessor, a proceeding which, it was alleged, was only permissible for the heir to the crown. The details of this accusation were false; moreover, Surrey had long quartered the royal arms with his own without offence. The charge was a pretext covering graver suspicions. Surrey had asserted in the presence of a certain George Blage, who was inclined to the reforming movement, that on Henry’s death, his father, the duke of Norfolk, as the premier duke in England, had the obvious right of acting as regent to Prince Edward. He also boasted of what he would do when his father had attained that position. All of this was construed into a plot on the part of his father and himself to murder the king and the prince. The duke of Norfolk and his son were sent to the Tower on the 12th of December 1546. Every effort was made to secure evidence. The duchess of Richmond was one of the witnesses (see her depositions in Herbert of Cherbury, Life and Reign of Henry VIII., 1649) against her brother, but her statements were too doubtful to add anything to the formal indictment. On the 13th of January 1547 Surrey defended himself at the guildhall on the charge of high treason for having illegally made use of the arms of Edward the Confessor, before judges selected for their known hatred of himself. He was condemned by a jury, packed for the occasion, to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. This sentence was not carried out. Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 19th of the month, and was buried in the church of All Saints, Barking. His remains were afterwards removed by his son the earl of Northampton to Framlingham, Suffolk. His father, who was charged with complicity in his son’s crime, was, as a peer of the realm, not amenable to a common jury. The consequent delay saved his life. He was imprisoned during the whole of the reign of Edward VI., but on Mary’s accession he was set free, by an act which also assured the right of the Howards, as descendants of the Mowbray family, to bear the arms of the Confessor.
Surrey’s name has been long connected with the “Fair Geraldine,” to whom his love poems were supposed to be addressed. The story is founded on the romantic fiction of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, or Life of Jack Wilton (1594), according to which Surrey saw in a magic glass in the Netherlands the face of Geraldine, and then travelled throughout Europe challenging all comers to deny in full field the charms of the lady. At Florence he held a tournament in her honour, and was to do the same in other Italian cities when he was recalled by order of Henry VIII. The legend, deprived of its more glaring discrepancies with Surrey’s life, was revived in Michael Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1598). Geraldine was the daughter of the earl of Kildare, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who was brought up at the English court in company with the princess Elizabeth (see James Graves, a Brief Memoir of Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, 1874). She was ten years old when in 1537 Surrey addressed to her the sonnet “From Tuskane came my ladies worthy race,” and nothing more than a passing admiration of the child and an imaginative anticipation of her beauty can be attributed to Surrey. “A Song . . . to a ladie that refused to daunce with him,” is addressed to Lady Hertford, wife of his bitter enemy, and the two poems, “O happy dames” and “Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile,” are addressed to his wife, to whom, at any rate in his later years, he seems to have been sincerely attached.
His poems, which were the occupation of the leisure moments of his short and crowded life, were first printed in Songs and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and other (apud Richardum Tottel, 1557). A second edition followed in July 1557, and others in 1559, 1565, 1567, 1574, 1585 and 1587. Although Surrey’s name, probably because of his rank, stands first on the title-page, Wyat was the earlier in point of time of Henry’s “courtly makers.” Surrey, indeed, expressly acknowledges Wyat as his master in poetry. As their poems appeared in one volume, long after the death of both, their names will always be closely associated. Wyat possessed strong individuality, which found expression in rugged, forceful verse. Surrey’s contributions are distinguished by their impetuous eloquence and sweetness. He revived the principles of Chaucer’s versification, which his predecessors had failed to grasp, perhaps because the value of the final e was lost. He introduced new smoothness and fluency into English verse. He never allowed the accent to fall on a weak syllable, nor did he permit weak syllables as rhymes. His chief innovation as a metrician lies outside the Miscellany. His translation of the second and fourth books of the Aeneid into blank verse—the first attempt at blank verse in English—was published separately by Tottel in the same year with the title of Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter. It has been suggested that in this matter Surrey was influenced by the translation of Virgil published at Venice by Ippolito de’ Medici in 1541, but there is no direct evidence that such was the case. His sonnets are in various schemes of verse, and are less correct in form and more loosely constructed than those of Wyat. They commonly consist of three quatrains with independent rhymes, terminating with a rhyming couplet. But his sonnets, his elegy on the death of Wyat, his lover’s complaint cast in pastoral form, and his lyrics in various measures, served as models to more than one generation of court poets. Both in form and substance Surrey and his fellow poets were largely indebted to Italian predecessors; most of his poems are in fact adaptations from Italian originals. The tone of the love sentiment was new in English poetry, very different in its earnestness, passion and fantastic extravagance from the lightness and gaiety of the Chaucerian school.
See Professor E. Arber’s reprint of Songs and Sonettes (English Reprints, 1870); the Roxburghe Club reprint of Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis (1814); Dr G. F. Nott, The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1815); and The Poetical Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Aldine edition, 1866). The best account of Surrey’s life is in Edmond Bapst’s Deux Gentilhommes-poêtes de la cour de Henry VIII. (1891), which rectifies Dr Nott’s memoir in many points. See also Brewer and Gairdner, Letters and State Papers of Henry VIII.; Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Life and Raigne of Kinge Henry the Eighth (1649); J. A. Froude, History of England (chs. xxi. and xxii.); W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry (1897), vol. ii. ch. iii., where the extent and value of Surrey’s innovations in English poetry are estimated; F. M. Padelford, The MS. Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1906); O. Fest, “Über Surreys Virgilübersetzung,” in Palästra, vol. xxxiv. (Berlin, 1903).
SURREY, a south-eastern county of England bounded N. by the Thames, separating it from Buckinghamshire and Middlesex, E. by Kent, S. by Sussex, and W. by Hampshire and Berkshire. The administrative county of London bounds that of Surrey (south of the Thames) on the north-east. The area is 758 sq. m. The north Downs are a picturesque line of hills running east and west through the county somewhat south of the centre (see Downs). Leith Hill, south-west of Dorking (965 ft.), is the highest summit, and commands a prospect unrivalled in the south of England; Holmbury Hill close by reaches 857 ft., and the detached summit of Hindhead above Haslemere in the south-west reaches 895 ft. At Guildford the Wey breaches the hills; and at Dorking the Mole. These are the chief rivers of the county; they reach the Thames near Weybridge and at East Molesey respectively. The Wandle is a smaller tributary in the north-east of the county. Surrey is thus almost entirely in the Thames basin. In the south-east it includes head streams of the Eden, a tributary of the Medway; and in the south a small area drains to the English channel. Three types of scenery appear—that of the hilly southern district; that of the Thames, with its richly wooded banks; and, in the north-west, that of the sandy heath-covered district, abundant in conifers, which includes the healthy open tracts of Bagshot Heath and other commons, extending into Berkshire and Hampshire. Possessing these varied attractions, Surrey has become practically a great residential district for those who must live in the neighbourhood of London.
