Henry VIII's Last Victim (51 page)

^fn4
recure
: regain health.

^fn5
aye
: ever.

^fn6
This was one of the marks of difference used to distinguish the arms of the father from those of his sons. The eldest son used a label of three points, the second son a crescent, the third a mullet, the fourth a martlet, the fifth an annulet and so on. The colour of the mark of difference was a matter of preference and, although it is commonly assumed that from 1340 the silver label was reserved for royalty, this was never officially delineated (A. C. Fox-Davies,
A Complete Guide to Heraldry
, rev. and annot., J. P. Brooke-Little (1969), p. 373, n. 222).

^fn7
‘A special exemption had to be procured to enable him to accept the honour as the officials of the College of Arms were legally ineligible for such distinctions, and on no other member of the college before or since has a like dignity been conferred’ (
DNB
).

17

CONDEMNED FOR SUCH TRIFLES

SURREY WAS OBLIVIOUS
to the goings on beyond his cell. His interrogations would have given him an inkling of the charges against him, and the people who had traduced him, but only on the day of his trial would he discover the precise nature of the indictment. Until then, he had to wait and wonder, his mind swirling with hypothetical conspiracies and poisoned by thoughts of revenge.

A record of the Lieutenant of the Tower’s expenses for this period reveals that Surrey was made as comfortable as possible in the circumstances. He was allowed two attendants, who served him meals on plate borrowed from the King’s Jewel House. He slept on a feather bed with two pillows, sheets, a pair of fustian blankets and a quilt. The winter chill and the lacerating Thames draughts were minimised by five tapestries which were hung around his cell. He also had a fire that consumed two loads of coal during the thirty-nine days of his confinement. In addition to five dozen candles, Surrey must also have had access to writing materials, for it was during this period that he undertook his last literary enterprise.
¹

Within the Tower, Surrey made paraphrase translations of psalms 88, 73 and 55.
²
The psalms appealed to sixteenth-century men and women for many reasons. They offered models for introspective contemplation, springboards to spiritual edification and, in the case of the seven penitential psalms, which Wyatt had versified, they gave direction to those wishing to go on the difficult journey through repentance to absolution. The psalms mined the depths of human emotion and offered a mirror to men’s souls. People identified with the lyrical voice in the Book of Psalms more readily and more completely than with any other form of
biblical expression. ‘Whosoever take this book in his hand,’ St Athanasius declared, ‘he reputeth and thinketh all the words he readeth . . . to be as his very own words spoken in his own person.’
³

By the mid-sixteenth century, translation of the psalms was seen predominantly, though not exclusively, as an evangelical act of faith. When Surrey translates ‘sapientia’ as ‘grace’ and ‘filiorum tuorum’ as ‘thy chosen’, his psalms, like Wyatt’s, ‘breathe the language of the reformers’.
⁴
But Surrey did not work on the psalms purely for his own edification. They were meant for public consumption and he had a specific audience in mind. Two verse prologues accompanied his versions of psalms 73 and 88. They were addressed to George Blagge and Sir Anthony Denny, two men at the vanguard of English reform. In the first, Surrey tries to reach out to his former friend Blagge. He admits to, and attempts to justify, his once faltering faith, but assures Blagge that the psalms of David have shown him the light:

The sudden storms that heave me to and fro

Had well-near pierced faith, my guiding sail,

For I, that on the noble voyage go

To succour truth and falsehood to assail,

Constrained am to bear my sails full low

And never could attain some pleasant gale,

For unto such the prosperous winds do blow

As run from port to port to seek avail.

This bred despair, whereof such doubts did grow

That I gan faint, and all my courage fail.

But now, my Blagge, mine error well I see:

Such goodly light King David giveth me.
⁵

Whether the sentiments are genuine or not, Surrey’s
apologia
is a cry for help. But once again, he underestimates the gravity of his plight. A vigorous protestation of faith and a show of repentance could not save him now. In his second psalm prologue, Surrey attempts to win over Sir Anthony Denny, the Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and purveyor of the King’s dry stamp:

When reckless youth in an unquiet breast,

Set on by wrath, revenge and cruelty,

After long war patience had oppressed,

And justice wrought by princely equity;

My Denny, then mine error, deep impressed,

Began to work despair of liberty,

Had not David, the perfect warrior, taught

That of my fault thus pardon should be sought.
⁶

There is a scrappy desperation to these two prologues, but even now, Surrey is not quite able to shake off his aristocratic hauteur. He writes of ‘mine error’ and ‘my fault’, but his contrition lacks depth. Indeed, he seems to have learnt nothing from his previous incarcerations. His prologues share the same grudging remorse evident in the letter that Surrey had sent from the Fleet in 1542. Now (at the age of twenty-nine), as then (at twenty-five), ‘reckless youth’ is presented as justification. Surrey has undertaken a ‘noble voyage’. He is determined ‘to succour truth’ and attack falseness. The psalms of David have made him realise that he should seek a pardon, but the inference is that Surrey, like ‘David, the perfect warrior’ with whom he identifies, fully deserves that pardon.

Surrey’s sense of injustice is even more pronounced in his ensuing psalms. Here any sense of humility or regret is overridden by far more powerful feelings of terror, anger, alienation and despair. The psalms, it was said, could be the ‘particular prayers of particular persons, in particular griefs’.
⁷
Languishing in his cell, Surrey eschewed the traditional penitential psalms in favour of psalms 88, 73 and 55. Here the psalmist, like Surrey, is more sinned against than sinning. He is the victim of persecution and betrayal, the righteous witness to vice and sin. He suffers a profound trial of faith. In his paraphrases, Surrey identifies with the psalmist’s voice so completely that he elides it with his own. The psalms thus become vehicles for Surrey’s ‘particular griefs’.

Sometimes he stayed close to the original Vulgate Latin; sometimes he strayed from its strict sense, and at other times, especially in psalm 55, he departed from it entirely. He drew on other sources, including Wyatt’s psalms, Coverdale’s ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 and the Latin paraphrases produced by the Dutch Lutheran, Johannes Campensis. But Surrey made the psalms his own. His choice of metre – unrhymed hexameters for psalm 55, poulter’s measure for 73 and 88 – allowed for long, discursive lines that gave room for amplification. His adoption of blank hexameters, an innovation in English poetry, may be seen as
an attempt to inject an epic quality into his version of psalm 55, while his resort to the ‘infernal jog-trot’
⁸
of poulter’s measure for psalms 88 and 73 set up a dramatic contrast between the lilting, lulling rhythm and the raw immediacy of Surrey’s words. Frequently his images are more vivid than the original, his sentiments more intense, his fury more violent.

In psalm 73, Surrey picks up from where he left off in his prologue to Blagge:

Though, Lord, to Israel thy graces plenteous be:

I mean to such with pure intent as fix their trust in thee;

Yet whiles the faith did faint that should have been my guide,

Like them that walk in slipper paths my feet began to slide,

Whiles I did grudge at those that glory in their gold,

Whose loathsome pride rejoiceth wealth, in quiet as they would.

The speaker attributes his spiritual backsliding to the prosperity of the wicked, those,

Whose glutton cheeks sloth feeds so fat as scant their eyes be seen.

Unto whose cruel power most men for dread are fain

To bend and bow with lofty looks, whiles they vaunt in their reign.

And in their bloody hands, whose cruelty doth frame

The wailful works that scourge the poor without regard of blame.

The Vulgate condemns the ungodly for their villainy, but makes no distinction between those who wield power and those who fawn before it. Surrey’s interpretation was influenced by the work of Campensis,
^fn1
but his lines are even more stinging than the Dutch reformer’s. Was Surrey thinking of Henry VIII, whose piggy little eyes, so vividly depicted in Cornelis Matsys’ portrait
(
plate 27), were sunken deep within his bloated face? Surrey does seem to be evoking the circumstances of a tyrannical Court: the subordination of public good to private pleasure,
the shedding of innocent blood, the ‘cruelty’ of one who vaunts in his ‘reign’ and the obsequiousness of fearful courtiers.
⁹

‘In terror of the just,’ Surrey’s speaker continues, ‘thus reigns iniquity, / Armed with power, laden with gold, and dread for cruelty. / Then vain,’ he admits, ‘the war might seem that I by faith maintain / Against the flesh, whose false effects my pure heart would distain.’ Eventually, though, the speaker overcomes his crisis of faith in the knowledge that he is not alone:

Alas, how oft my foes have framed my decay;

But when I stood in dread to drench,
^fn2
thy hands still did me stay.

And in each voyage that I took to conquer sin,

Thou wert my guide, and gave me grace to comfort me therein.

The godless men will fall, their glory will fade and the ‘sword of vengeance shall / Unto their drunken eyes, in blood disclose their errors all.’ By contrast, the speaker, God’s fearless witness, can look forward to the time of reckoning for he has put his trust in God and, in another departure from the Vulgate, he has assumed grace:

Where I, that in thy word have set my trust and joy,

The high reward that longs thereto shall quietly enjoy.

And my unworthy lips, inspired with thy grace,

Shall thus forspeak thy secret works in sight of Adam’s race.
¹⁰

This final resolution recalls Surrey’s earlier Petrarchan lyrics, where the speaker laments his restless state and attempts to draw strength from an internal sense of worth: his morality, his fidelity, his ability to triumph through language. But just as doubt and desperation crept into those lyrics, so the speaker’s resolution lacks conviction in the biblical paraphrases. In psalm 88, ostensibly the hymn of repentance promised to Denny, there is a sense of betrayal, not only by friends, but also by God. Time is running out:

My soul is fraughted full with grief of follies past;

My restless body doth consume and death approacheth fast.

Yet God forsakes the speaker:

Oh Lord, thou hast cast me headlong to please my foe,

Into a pit all bottomless, where as I plain my woe.

The burden of thy wrath it doth me sore oppress,

And sundry storms thou hast me sent of terror and distress.

The faithful friends are fled and banished from my sight,

And such as I have held full dear have set my friendship light.

Why, the speaker asks, has God abandoned him? He has never stopped asking for ‘thine aid’ and he sings forever of mercy and faith. ‘The flesh,’ he warns ‘that feedeth worms cannot thy love declare.’ Surrey’s speaker is more doubtful of salvation than the biblical psalmist. He tries desperately hard to convince himself that God’s mercy is still obtainable:

The lively voice of them that in thy word delight

Must be the trump that must resound the glory of thy might.

Wherefore I shall not cease, in chief of my distress,

To call on thee till that the sleep my wearied limbs oppress.

But an anguished apostrophe draws him back to his lament: ‘Within this careful mind, burdened with care and grief, / Why dost thou not appear, Oh Lord, that shouldst be his relief?’

It is not hard to see why Surrey chose this psalm, with its themes of treachery, persecution, alienation and tested faith. He identifies with the psalmist’s despair and joins him in concluding bitterly:

The dread, lo, of thine ire hath trod me under feet;

The scourges of thine angry hand hath made death seem full sweet.

Like to the roaring waves the sunken ship surround,

Great heaps of care did swallow me and I no succour found.

For they whom no mischance could from my love divide

Are forced, for my greater grief, from me their face to hide.
¹¹

In psalm 55, probably the last that he worked on, Surrey’s anguish is even more palpable. It wells and surges with a fury that the metre cannot sustain and, ultimately, his innovative hexameters collapse under the strain. He cannot even bring himself to finish his paraphrase. Instead,
he pulls himself up with an abrupt couplet and resorts to the original Latin where he claims to find ‘ease’ in God’s love. Yet the vitriol that scorches the body of Surrey’s verse might seem to challenge that conclusion. Here he lambasts the ‘unbridled tongues’, the ‘conjured league’ and ‘the bloody compacts of those / That prelooked on with ire to slaughter me and mine.’ Here, too, he rages against the devastating betrayal of the ‘friendly foe’ and calls once again for divine vengeance. Perhaps with a thought to his seemingly inescapable appointment with the headsman, Surrey reminds his enemies that God’s wrath is ‘more sharp than any tool can file’.