Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life.

W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xvi + 31 pls. + 448 pp. $95. ISBN: 0-19-818624-X

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, has puzzled scholars. Although praised by literary scholars as the inventor of blank verse and other innovative forms, he has usually been dismissed by historians as typical of an outmoded aristocracy out of touch with political reality to the point of paranoia. In this carefully documented "cultural biography" W. A. Sessions attempts to reconcile these views by examining what the poet was doing at the time he was writing, and by doing so reveals a Surrey far more complex than previously depicted.

Sessions organizes his study into three parts, following the model of Virgil's Aeneid. "The Burning City," discusses Surrey's family background and life until 1537. Its dominant theme is Surrey's growing friendship with Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. Aside from the scandal when his mother refused to acknowledge Anne Boleyn and his father's subsequent liaison with Bess Holland, it was the most peaceful period in his short, turbulent life. "Building a New Rome," examines Surrey's poetry and his portraits to demonstrate that with the deaths of his friend Richmond and his cousin Anne Boleyn, and the collapse of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Surrey saw himself as Aeneas, the sole survivor who had to create a new aristocratic culture. The last section, "Enough Survives," describes Surrey's fall, from the military disaster at St. Etienne in January 1546 to his execution a year later. It discusses the curious charge against the poet -- that he had misused the signs of honor -- and shows that it captured the heart of Su rrey's treason: his refusal to accept the new vision of monarchy that demanded complete allegiance from its subjects.

Surrey's world was one of violent upheaval, and what engages Sessions' imagination is how the poet created new poetic forms in the midst of it. It was only after the relatively calm period of his life that "Surrey became a poet" (71). In mid-1537, while under a form of house-arrest at Windsor, Surrey invented the English sonnet form and heroic quatrain when he wrote of his sense of loss in Fitzroy's death and England's loss in the decay of its aristocracy. He would continue to invent new forms, mostly notably blank verse, and be imprisoned three more times in the final decade of his life.

Sessions shows that Surrey had an aversion for "newly erected men," particularly Edward Seymour, who stood in his way, but that he was more than "another power-hungry aristocrat" with damaged pride (226). Analysis of his poetry and of the portraits Surrey had commissioned reveals that he had developed a new concept of honor and a new role for the blood nobility on what he perceived as a Roman model. To underscore this ideal he adopted the term "Britain" and had his portrait sketched "exactly like a bust of a Roman emperor" (151).

Surrey's hopes were dashed when his second Howard cousin was executed. Rather than assume the wait-and-see attitude of his father, he adopted an attitude of attacking his enemies, building Surrey House as a center for the new culture he espoused, and engaged in a "race for the succession" (334). Sessions demonstrates that Surrey's target was not the Crown itself, but to be Protector to Prince Edward. But if his actions were aimed at displacing Seymour, they also threatened the dying king, and Surrey was doomed. All that remained was to find a pretext to bring him to trial. This was found by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, fittingly from a line of heralds. Surrey was accused of misusing the signs of honor: he had commissioned both a coat of arms and a portrait calling attention to his own royal antecedents, and these were threats to the monarchy. Treason was easily constructed in Henrician England, of course, but as Sessions's carefully argued text shows, Surrey's view of the role of the aristocracy was incompat ible with the new concept of monarchy, and therefore he was as much a traitor as the aristocratic rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace.