Henry VIII's Last Victim (8 page)

Surrey’s education focused on the liberal arts considered most likely to instil the correct moral and political virtues. He studied rhetoric – the art of eloquent speaking – ostensibly to encourage his King to virtue and dissuade him from bad counsel. By translating Cicero and other Latin authors, both into English and then back again into the original, and by producing his own literary compositions in imitation of the ancients, Surrey developed a thorough grasp of the language and grammar of Latin, through which, it was believed, the noblest thoughts of mankind were articulated. Moral philosophy taught Surrey the principles of virtuous conduct, while history, literature (Virgil and Martial being his favourites) and the Scriptures furnished him with examples of its application or abuse.
¹⁵

Surrey’s studies also aimed at fashioning him into the perfect courtier. In many ways, the Howard household was a court in miniature and much of what other Tudor children had to study – manners, graceful carriage, social polish, heraldry, the importance of hierarchy and precedence – Surrey simply absorbed as a way of life. However, he did have
to learn French, Italian and Spanish, so that he would be able to converse freely with foreign rulers and ambassadors. He was also taught the various dances of the Tudor Court, including the stately
pavane
and more energetic
galliard
, and he learnt how to carry them off gracefully, without the ‘unclean motions of countenances’ that the humanist Thomas Elyot believed would ‘irritate the minds of the dancers to venereal lusts’.
¹⁶
A measured singing voice and an ability to play the lute and virginals
^fn6
were also valued at Court. Surrey’s poems, some of which were later set to music, testify to an innate grasp of rhythm and harmony.

Curiously, none of the names of any of Surrey’s schoolmasters has survived. There is only one entry to ‘m. Scole m.’ in the household book of 1526–7 and it provides no clue as to his identity apart from the fact that he dined with ‘my Lord Surrey’s servants in my Lord Surrey’s chamber’, his status not being great enough for him to eat with the family.
¹⁷
Thomas Elyot advised in his book
The Governor
(1531) that the ideal schoolmaster ‘should be an ancient and worshipful man, in whom is approved to be much gentleness, mixed with gravity, and, as nigh as can be, such one as the child by imitation following may grow to be excellent’. But having outlined a long list of requirements – including a mastery of languages, poetry, music, astronomy and philosophy – Elyot admitted that the reality often fell far short. ‘Behold,’ he lamented, ‘how few grammarians after this description be in this realm.’
¹⁸

It is likely, though, that Surrey’s tutor or tutors would have fulfilled at least some of Elyot’s criteria. The Howards were generous patrons of literature and learned men. Works dedicated to Surrey’s father and grandfather include Alexander Barclay’s French grammar, John Harding’s
Chronicle
, and Andrew Boorde’s
Dyetary of Helth
. Surrey himself would later receive a romance, a devotional work and a medical treatise. Hovering in and out of the Howard orbit was an eclectic group of writers and scholars: men like the antiquarian John Leland, the humanist John Palsgrave, the Poet Laureate John Skelton, and Nicolas Bourbon, Anne Boleyn’s French protégé. Through their extensive network of blood and marital relations, the Howards could claim as kin Lord Berners, the famed translator of Froissart, and Henry Parker, Lord Morley, the first man to render Petrarch’s
Trionfi
into English verse.

Some of Surrey’s past biographers have suggested that he was tutored by the Catholic writer John Clerke, who later served as the Duke of Norfolk’s secretary. This is on the basis of a book entitled
L’Amant Mal Traité de Sa Mie
, translated by Clerke in the spring of 1543 and dedicated by him to Surrey. In the dedication, he writes:

Knowing by long experience not only the great wisdom and singular judgement wherewith God, the disposer of all things, hath most abundantly endowed you, but also the exceeding great pains and travails sustained by yourself in traductions [translations], as well out of the Latin, Italian as the Spanish, and French, whereby your Lordship surmounteth many others not only in knowledge but also in laud and commendation . . . I humbly beseech your Lordship to take these my little labours and great good will in acceptable part and as the monument of my poor hearty affection always borne to the same.
¹⁹

It is possible that ‘the exceeding great pains and travails’ taken by Surrey in his translations could have been observed by Clerke in the classroom, but it is far more likely that Clerke was referring to Surrey’s more adult translations and the imitations that shaped much of his poetry. At no time did Clerke refer, as one might expect in a dedication of this sort, to a master–student relationship between himself and Surrey, nor is there any evidence to suggest that Clerke served in the Howard household before 1538. By the time of his dedication in 1543, five years had passed. This could easily account for the ‘long experience’ that Clerke felt he had gained of Surrey’s skills. One thing is certain: if Clerke ever had played a part in Surrey’s education, by the time of his own somewhat torturous translation in 1543, the pupil’s talents far outstripped those of the master.

Surrey was a precocious child. Even Norfolk was impressed by his Latin compositions and took to gloating over them at Court. Despite his obvious talents, or perhaps because of them, Surrey was occasionally beaten. The favoured tool of punishment was a sturdy branch of birchwood that branded a stinging welt across the backside. ‘My buttocks doth sweat a bloody sweat,’ one young victim cried, while in London’s markets the instruments were hawked with the words: ‘Buy my fine Jemmies! Buy my London Tartars!’
²⁰
Surrey’s beatings were probably occasioned by insolence or minor rebellions against his tutor. He rarely responded well to authority imposed by someone of inferior
rank and he could behave quite appallingly if he sensed that his honour had been touched. It is possible that Surrey’s behaviour was also brought on by sheer boredom. If, as is likely, Surrey studied alongside his brother and his father’s wards, then his budding genius would have been held back by their more pedestrian efforts. Learning was too easy and the lessons too tedious to hold Surrey’s attention for long.

Yet it would be quite wrong to assume that his life had become monotonous. The Duke of Norfolk frequently hired minstrels and players to give musical and dramatic performances. On holy days a bear warden would sometimes come and delight his audience by baiting his bears into ‘dancing’ on their hind legs or fighting with savage dogs. At Thetford Priory, where the Flodden Duke was buried, there were two recorded appearances of ‘the man with the camel’ and it is quite possible that Surrey may have seen this strange humpbacked creature on one of these occasions.
²¹
A boy of Surrey’s imagination would have had little difficulty in filling his spare time. In order to revive the practice of archery, a law had been passed in 1512 ensuring that every boy over the age of seven had his own bow and arrow.
²²
Surrey could have fashioned other weapons from wood or bone and staged re-enactments of the Battle of Flodden around the grounds of Kenninghall. The poet Alexander Barclay, who was close to the Flodden Duke, observed that when pigs were slaughtered in the winter, children would stuff the bladders and use them for various ball games. The slaughter house at Shelfhanger Farm could have proved useful in this respect, as it might also have done after a heavy frost when the lakes and ponds around Kenninghall iced over; from as early as the twelfth century, it had been noted that children ‘slid, and skated on the legbones of some animal, punting themselves along with an iron-shod pole, and charging one another’.
²³
Surrey also had the run of the family tennis court and, in the Dining Chamber, there was a little board where he could play chess
²⁴
– a game whose parallels to the politics of the Tudor Court were not lost on contemporaries.

He was happiest outside where he could escape from the stultifying regimens of the household. Although a sociable person – so much so that his father claimed to have summoned him to the North in 1537 for the purpose of entertaining his servants there – Surrey could also be solitary. His lyrics reveal an almost masochistic preoccupation with his sense of aloneness. The following sonnet is an example of this, but
also reveals Surrey’s sensitivity to nature. Like Chaucer, whose influence is evident, Surrey possessed an inspired eye for nature’s movements: for animal behaviour, plant growth and the transformative effects of the seasons. He based his poem on Petrarch’s sonnet, ‘Zefiro torna’, but his observations are peculiarly English:

The
^fn7
soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,

With green hath clad the hill and
^fn8
eke the vale;

The nightingale with feathers new she sings;

The
^fn9
turtle to her make hath told her tale.

Summer is come, for every spray now springs;

The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;

The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;

The fishes float with new repaired scale;

The adder all her slough away she slings;

The swift swallow pursueth the flies
^fn10
smale;

The busy bee her honey now she
^fn11
mings;

Winter is worn that was the flowers’ bale.

And thus I see among these pleasant things

Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
²⁵

If anything could be relied upon to rouse Surrey from his moments of despondency, it was the cry of the hounds. He loved to hunt. As an adult he would exasperate his father by arranging costly meets that reduced Kenninghall’s deer population to dangerously low levels. Fortunately hunting with the hawk and the hound was seen as an honourable sport and a good grounding for war. ‘Surely this manner of hunting,’ wrote Thomas Elyot,

may be called a necessary solace and pastime, for therein is the very imitation of battle; for not only it doth show the courage and strength as well of the horse as of him that rideth – traversing over mountains and valleys, encountering and overthrowing great and mighty beasts – but also it increaseth in them both agility and quickness; also sleight and policy to find such passages and straits, where they may prevent or entrap their enemies. Also by continuance therein they shall easily sustain travail in wars, hunger and thirst, cold and heat.
²⁶

Hunting presented a further attraction to Surrey: it allowed him to spend quality time with his father. On 16 September 1526 the Duke of Norfolk, ‘in a cheerful, jolly mood’, took Surrey and his younger brother Thomas to a hunting party at Scuttegrove Wood in East Suffolk. Having spent the night at nearby Butley Priory, they rose early the next morning and chased the fox all day, through the fading light, until ten o’clock at night. The next day Surrey and Thomas accompanied their father as he went about his ducal business, surveying Staverton Park and ordering the desalination of the salt marshes at Hollesley. Three years later, on 23 July 1529, Norfolk returned to the area, this time taking only Surrey and his servants with him and, again, they stayed the night at Butley Priory.
²⁷
On such occasions – and there must have been many more for which no records have survived – Norfolk prepared his heir for his future responsibilities.

If Surrey’s childhood resembled, to some extent, a gilded cage, it also produced many of his fondest memories. In a poem that dwells on the mutability of life and the nature of man to be forever dissatisfied with his lot, Surrey’s speaker lies on his bed and reflects on the various ages of man:

I saw the little boy, in thought how oft that he

Did wish of God to scape the rod, a tall young man to be.

The young man is himself desperate to race towards old age, where he hopes to find ease and contentment. But suddenly, he is stricken by a vision of his future self in ‘withered skin’ with ‘toothless chaps’ and ‘white and hoarish hairs’ and he realises that he will never be able to resurrect the blissful ignorance of youth:

Where at I sight,
^fn12
and said: Farewell, my wonted joy;

Truss up thy pack, and trudge from me to every little boy,

And tell them thus from me, their time most happy is,

If, to their time, they reason had to know the truth of this.
²⁸

Just after midnight, one day early in December 1529, the Duke of Norfolk escorted the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, to his London lodging. Earlier in the evening, the Duke had hosted a supper and shown the ambassador an epistle that the twelve-year-old Surrey had composed. It was ‘in very good Latin,’ Chapuys recalled, and Norfolk ‘was much pleased with the youth’s proficiency and advancement in letters’. But Norfolk had no desire to encourage his son’s literary talents. His sole interest lay in Surrey’s potential as a Howard asset. Now, as he accompanied the ambassador through the streets of London, Norfolk revived the conversation. ‘I told you that I was on many accounts delighted to see my son making so much progress in his studies and following the path of virtue.’ His next sentence reveals why: