Henry VIII's Last Victim (31 page)

. . . 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 nor strife;

No charge of rule nor governance;

Without disease the healthful life;

The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no delicate fare;

Wisdom joined with simplicity;

The night discharged of all care . . .
²⁹

Other writers, most notably Wyatt, also sought ‘the quiet mind’, but it proved more elusive for Surrey with the light of nobility constantly shining upon him, always ready to illuminate his failings. His fellow courtier Ralph Vane recognised this in the postscript of a letter to Henry Knyvet in 1543, where he expressed his wish for ‘honour, long life and quiet minds’ to Lady Margaret Douglas, to Surrey’s sister Mary, ‘and no less to my Lord of Surrey’.
³⁰

Surrey’s most celebrated literary achievement is his translation of Books II and IV of the
Aeneid
. Virgil’s tale is epic, but at its heart is the very human story of one man’s struggle to fulfil his destiny in a time of uncertainty. In his Windsor elegy Surrey saw himself, like Aeneas, as a ‘son of Troy’ and, like Aeneas, he found himself tested by extremes of fortune and conflicts of loyalty once his childhood idyll had been destroyed. In Book VIII, Aeneas shoulders the great shield upon which Vulcan has hammered the future deeds of Aeneas’ descendants. It was a burden which the Howard heir would have recognised only too well.

It is interesting to speculate why Surrey only translated Books II and IV of the
Aeneid
(if, indeed, this is the case and the other books were not translated by him and subsequently lost). The former tells the story of the fall of Troy, the latter of Aeneas’ desertion of Dido and her subsequent suicide. It is possible that Surrey was drawn to the idea of the noble but isolated hero and to the theme of female abandonment as he seems to have been in some of his other lyrics, but ultimately it can only ever be speculation. There are so many reasons why Surrey may have undertaken his translations. He may have wanted to honour his King as Virgil had honoured Emperor Augustus; he may have wanted to impress his peers by taking on the two best-known books of the greatest work of ‘the King of Latin poets’.
³¹
He may have been specifically attracted by Virgil’s classical hexameters and wanted to represent them in English; Books II and IV, the most intense sections of Virgil’s work, certainly tested his artistry in this respect. On the other hand, Surrey had read Gavin Douglas’ Scottish
Eneados
, a work on which he drew for his own version, and he may, as one critic has suggested,
have tackled the
Aeneid
as a way of bettering the Scots as his ancestors had done at Flodden.
³²
In Book VI, Virgil wrote that poets of true integrity ‘civilised life by the skills they discovered’.
³³
Whatever Surrey’s motives in translating Books II and IV of the
Aeneid
, he too discovered an extraordinary skill.

Surrey’s translation technique had been well honed since his early schooling at Kenninghall.
Imitatio
– the imitation of the Classics – was one of the most valued aspects of the humanist curriculum. It served a didactic purpose in teaching the moral truths of antiquity and an artistic one in developing the rhetorical skills necessary for eloquence. John Clerke, the Duke of Norfolk’s secretary, dedicated one of his own attempts at ‘traduction’ to Surrey in 1543. In his preface, Clerke praises Surrey for keeping to the spirit of his sources and announces that his own attempt will, ‘according to your accustomed fashion, regard and consider the witty devise of the thing, the manner of locutions, the wise sentences and the subtle and discreet answers made on both parties.’
³⁴

This organic approach is evident in Surrey’s Virgilian translations, where he attempts to communicate the effect of the
Aeneid
by consciously imitating the author’s form and style. Not only did Surrey adopt Virgil’s phrasal units and verse paragraphs, his syntax and many of his rhetorical patterns, but he also strove to approximate Virgil’s diction and concision.
³⁵
It was largely this fidelity to his author’s means as well as his meaning that prompted Thomas Warton in 1781 to hail Surrey as ‘the first English classical poet’.
³⁶
It also led Surrey towards a startling innovation. For in attempting to represent Virgil’s classical hexameters, and thereby his heroic style, Surrey introduced blank verse to English poetry.
³⁷

The Italians and the French had previously experimented with unrhymed verse (Surrey was certainly influenced by Italian
versi sciolti
and had probably read Alamanni’s
Opere Toscane
, which was published during Surrey’s sojourn in France), but poetry without rhyme or structural alliteration was alien in England. When Surrey’s translation of Book IV was first published seven years after his death, the printer called it ‘a strange metre’, referring not only to its perceived oddness but also to its foreign nature.
³⁸
Yet Surrey’s verse paragraphs of iambically patterned pentameters, enhanced as they are by a range of prosodic variants and rhetorical devices, maintain rhythm without the need for
rhyme. Through plays of alliteration (rhetorical rather than structural), classical devices like
anastrophe
and
asyndeton
, the use of ‘phonetic echoes’ and differing levels of accent, and the occasional introduction of run-on lines, trochees and varied caesuras, Surrey captures much of the dignity, fluidity and momentum, if not quite the sonority, of Virgil’s original.
³⁹
Consider, for example, the following extract from Book IV. Aeneas has been forced to choose his duty over his love for Dido and has abandoned her on the shores of her native Carthage. Her despair drives her to suicide:

But trembling Dido all eagerly now bent

Upon her stern determination,

Her bloodshot eyes rolling within her head,

Her quivering cheeks flecked with deadly stain,

Both pale and wan, to think on death to come,

Into the inward wards of her palace

She rusheth in, and clam up as bestraught

The burial stack, and drew the Trojan sword

Her gift sometime, but meant to no such use.

Where when she saw his weed
^fn8
and well knowen bed,

Weeping a while, in study gan she stay,

Fell on the bed, and these last words she said:

Sweet spoils, whiles God and destiny did permit,

Receive this spirit, and rid me of these cares.

I lived and ran the course fortune did grant,

And under earth my great ghost now shall wend.

A goodly town I built, and saw my walls,

Happy, alas too happy, if these coasts

The Trojan ships had never touched aye.

This said, she laid her mouth close to the bed.

Why then (quoth she) unwroken
^fn9
shall we die?

But let us die for thus, and in this sort

It liketh us to seek the shadows dark.

And from the seas the cruel Trojan eyes

Shall well discern this flame, and take with him

Eke these unlucky tokens of my death.

As she had said, her damsel might perceive

Her with these words fall pierced on the sword,

The boiling blood with gore and hands imbrued.
⁴⁰

Surrey’s translation is raw and unperfected, but there is much here that anticipates the progress of later writers and it is a tribute to Surrey’s creative foresight that his ‘strange metre’ is now considered the staple of the long English poem and much verse drama. It is the metre of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
and Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. It is the medium through which any shade of sentiment can be expressed and sustained. Towards the end of the nineteenth century J. A. Symonds wrote:

English blank verse is, perhaps, more various and plastic than any other national metre. It is capable of being used for the most commonplace and the most sublime utterances; so that, without any alteration in the vehicle, we pass from merely colloquial dialogue to strains of impassioned soliloquy, from comic repartee to tragic eloquence, from terse epigrams to elaborate descriptions . . . There is no harmony of sound, no dignity of movement, no swiftness, no subtlety of languid sweetness, no brevity, no force of emphasis beyond its scope. In hearing good blank verse, we do not long for rhyme; our ears are satisfied without it; nor does our sense of order and proportion require the obvious and artificial recurrence of stanzas, when the sense creates for itself a melodious structure, and is not forced into the mould of any arbitrary form. So much can hardly be said for any other metre.
⁴¹

Although his most famous, blank verse was not Surrey’s only creation. As we have seen, he invented the so-called ‘Shakespearian’ or ‘English’ sonnet, as well as the innovative heroic quatrains that lent themselves to a new genre of personal elegy. Surrey also experimented with other forms, including unrhymed hexameters, poulter’s measure, sapphics and the
frottola, strambotto
and
capitolo
of Italy. He composed songs and sonnets, elegies and epitaphs, orations, verse epistles, satires, epigrams, biblical paraphrases and epic translations. As one would expect from anything experimental, not all Surrey’s attempts are successful. ‘Of thy life, Thomas’, for example, an adaptation of Horace’s ode on the Golden Mean, has none of the fluidity of the classical epigram that Surrey translated from Martial. Instead the imagery is petrified within a thicket of Latinised inversions and mangled syntax.
⁴²
H. A. Mason, who
regarded Surrey as a mere foil for Wyatt’s ‘isolated superiority’, criticised Surrey’s resort to ‘the infernal jog-trot’ of poulter’s measure and claimed that it led him ‘away from the language of passion into an artifice that makes only for banality and monotony’.
⁴³
Other critics dispraised Surrey’s Virgilian translations for being too regular, too stiff, and consequently too formal; ‘It is Virgil in corsets,’ C. S. Lewis memorably wrote.
⁴⁴
Indeed for Lewis, none of Surrey’s compositions, not even his intensely vivid elegies, could save the period from being the ‘Drab Age’ of English poetry.

Yet the sense of order and proportion that Surrey brought to vernacular verse was seen as a necessary virtue in his time. By the beginning of the Tudor period the English language had experienced monumental phonological changes. Not only had the old inflectional system and the syllabic final ‘e’ disappeared, but new words had been introduced, many of which were of Latin origin or Anglicised versions of French, the original language of the Court. Chaucer’s Middle English, and with it much of his prosody, fell into desuetude. Pronunciation grew chaotic, versification unsettled, and much of the ensuing poetry was diffuse and inelegant.
⁴⁵
There was a need for the kind of dignity and measure that was inherent in classical verse and had been developed along classical lines on the Continent.

This Surrey appreciated perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, even Wyatt. By rejecting the ‘aureate and mellifluate’ in favour of more moderate diction, he contributed to the evolution of a clearer, more natural form of discourse.
⁴⁶
In his smoother, steadier metres (particularly his fourth syllable caesural pattern), he encouraged the prosodic standards of the next generation. He was painstaking in his method of composition. In Surrey’s poems, George Turberville observed in 1567, ‘each word in place with such a sleight is couched, / Each thing whereof he treats so firmly touched.’ It was this precision, this control of form and concern for context, balance and total effect that was Surrey’s peculiar strength.
⁴⁷
Mason and Lewis may not have approved, but many of Surrey’s immediate beneficiaries did. ‘What should I speak in praise of Surrey’s skill?’ Turberville enquired,

Unless I had a thousand tongues at will;

No one is able to depaint at full,

The flowing fountain of his sacred skull.

. . . .

A mirror he the simple sort to train,

That ever beat his brain for Britain’s gain.
⁴⁸

George Puttenham celebrated Surrey as a pioneer, who ‘greatly polished our rude & homely manner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had been before’; John Cheke praised ‘the happy head of wit, the tongue well set to speak / the skilful pen in hand to paint the wit’s device’; while for Thomas Churchyard,

More heavenly were those gifts he had, than earthly was his form;

His corpse too worthy for the grave, his flesh no meat for worm.

An Earl of birth; a God of sprite, a Tully
^fn10
for his tongue,

Me think of right the world should shake, when half his praise were rung.
⁴⁹

Because Surrey was the heir to one of the noblest families in England, his legacy was magnified. He was, according to the antiquarian William Camden, ‘first among the nobility of England [who] conjoined the honour of learning to the honour of high parentage’.
⁵⁰
This combination proved irresistible to later editors. On 5 June 1557 Richard Tottel issued the first printed anthology of English verse. It contained 271 poems by various authors, only 40 of which were attributed to Surrey.
^fn11
Nevertheless, Tottel gave Surrey top billing, entitling his anthology,
Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other
. In his preface, Tottel praised ‘the honourable style of the noble Earl of Surrey’ and exhorted his ‘unlearned’ readers ‘to purge that swine-like grossness, that maketh the sweet majoram not to smell to their delight’.
⁵¹