HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY 1516-1547 (short bio)
Henry Howard was descended from kings on both sides of his family tree.
He was reared at Windsor with Henry VIII's illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy,
1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and they became close friends and,
later, brothers-in-law. He became Earl of Surrey in 1524 when his
grandfather died and his father became Duke of Norfolk.
In 1532 he accompanied his first cousin Anne Boleyn, the King, and the Duke
of Richmond to France, staying there for more than a year as a member of
the entourage of Francis I of France. In 1536 his first son, Thomas (later
4th Duke of Norfolk), 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 one of the Howard homes, Thetford Abbey. That was also the
year Surrey — who took after his father and grandfather in military
prowess — served with his father against the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion
protesting the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
[edit] Literary activity and legacy
He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt were the first English poets to write in
the sonnet form that Shakespeare later used, and Surrey was the first
English poet to publish blank verse in his translation of the second and
fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid. Together, Wyatt and Surrey, due to their
excellent translations of Petrarch's sonnets, are known as "Fathers of the
English Sonnet". While Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was
Surrey who gave them the rhyming meter and the division into quatrains that
now characterizes the sonnets variously named English, Elizabethan or
Shakespearean sonnets.
Henry VIII, consumed by paranoia and increasingly ill, became convinced
that Surrey had planned to usurp the crown from his son Edward. The King
had Surrey imprisoned - with his father - sentenced to death on 13 January
1547, and beheaded for treason on 19 January 1547 (his father survived
impending execution only by it being set for the day after the king happened
to die, though he remained imprisoned). Surrey's son Thomas became heir to
the Dukedom of Norfolk instead, inheriting it on the 3rd Duke's death in
1554.
He is buried in a spectacular painted alabaster tomb in the church of St
Michael the Archangel, Framlingham.