Surrey had always been an enemy to the Seymours, whom he regarded as upstarts, and he thwarted the proposed marriage of his sister, the duchess of Richmond, with Sir Thomas Seymour. He thus increased the enmity of the Seymours and added his sister to the already long list of the enemies which he had made by his haughty manner and brutal frankness. He was now accused of quartering with his own the arms of Edward the Confessor. The charge was a pretext covering graver suspicions. Surrey had de clared that his father, the duke of Norfolk, as the premier duke in England, had the obvious right of acting as regent to Prince Edward. He also boasted of what he would do when his father had attained that position. This boast was magnified into a plot on the part of his father and himself to murder the king and the prince. The duke of Norfolk and his son were sent to the Tower on Dec. 12, 1546. The duchess of Richmond was one of the witnesses (see her depositions in Herbert of Cherbury, Life and Reign of Henry VIII., 1649) against her brother, but her statements added nothing to the formal indictment. On Jan. 13, 1547 Surrey defended himself at the Guildhall on the charge of high treason for having illegally made use of the arms of Edward the Confessor, before hostile judges. He was condemned by a jury, packed for the occasion, to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. This sentence was commuted to beheading. Surrey was executed on Tower Hill on the 19th of the month.
Surrey's name has been long connected with the "Fair Geral dine," to whom his love poems were supposed to be addressed. The 'story is founded on the romantic fiction of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, or Life of Jack Wilton according to which Surrey saw in a magic glass in the Netherlands the face of Geraldine, and then travelled throughout Europe challenging all corners to deny in full field the charms of the lady. At Florence he held a tournament in her honour, and was to do the same in other Italian cities when he was recalled by order of Henry VIII. The legend, deprived of its more glaring discrepancies with Sur rey's life, was revived in Michael Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles (1598). Geraldine was the daughter of the earl of Kil
dare, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who was brought up at the English court in company with the princess Elizabeth. (See James Graves, a Brief Memoir of Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, 1874.) She was ten years old when in 1537 Surrey addressed to her the sonnet "From Tuskane came my ladies worthy race," and nothing more than a passing admiration of the child and an imaginative antici pation of her beauty can be attributed to Surrey.
His poems, which were the occupation of the leisure moments of his short and crowded life, were first printed in Songs and Son ettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and other (apud Richardum Tottel, 1557). A second edition followed in July 1557, and others in 1559, 1565, 1567, 1585 and 1587. Although Surrey's name, probably because of his rank, stands first on the title-page, Wyat was the earlier in point of time of Henry's "courtly makers." Surrey, in deed, expressly acknowledges Wyat as his master in poetry. His sonnets, his elegy on Wyat and his lyrics served as models to generations of court poets.
As their poems appeared in one volume, long after the death of both, their names will always be closely associated. Surrey's con tributions are distinguished by their impetuous eloquence and sweetness, and he introduced new smoothness and fluency into English verse. His chief innovation as a metrician lies out side the Miscellany. His translation of the second and fourth books of the Aeneid into blank verse—the first attempt at blank verse in English—was published separately by Tottel in the same year Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter.