Henry VIII's Last Victim (56 page)

‘With a king’s son my childish years did pass, In greater feast than Priam’s sons of Troy.’
Henry Vlll’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond.

‘Active games of nimbleness and strength’: hunting,

… real tennis …

… and knights-in-training learning to joust.

The Embarkation of Henry VIII at Dover, 1532 (?)

The French Court. Antoine Macault reads his translation of Diodorus Siculus to Francis I, his three sons (on his right), pet monkey, dog and assembled courtiers.

Politics in the 1530s. Howard stock rose when Surrey’s cousin Anne Boleyn became Queen, but fell after her execution engineered by the Howards’ inveterate enemy, Thomas Cromwell.

Thomas Cromwell

Fragment of the cartoon for the mural on the Privy Chamber wall at Whitehall by Holbein, 1537.

Holbein’s drawings of Surrey and …

… Sir Thomas Wyatt. For the Elizabethan George Puttenham, they were ‘the two chief lanterns of light to all others that have since employed their pens upon English poesy’.

The first two stanzas of Surrey’s poem ‘O happy dames’, inscribed by his sister Mary, Duchess of Richmond, into the courtly anthology known as the Devonshire Manuscript.

Mary, Duchess of Richmond