Contributions
Eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk and cousin to two queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard), Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, belonged to the highest Tudor aristocracy. Raised alongside Henry VIII's natural son, a brilliant soldier and courtier, he was also, with his elder Thomas Wyatt, the second father of modern English lyric poetry. Surrey perfected the sonnet Wyatt had imported and gave it the form that would prevail: three cross-rhymed quatrains followed by a closing couplet — the structure Shakespeare would adopt, so that it is sometimes called the "English sonnet." Above all, translating two books of Virgil's Aeneid, he invented English blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — the very instrument on which all Elizabethan drama would rest. His poems, elegies, sonnets and paraphrases circulated in manuscript and then appeared, like Wyatt's, in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), ten years after his death.
Significance
Surrey bequeathed to English two of its most fertile poetic tools: the form of the so-called "English" or "Shakespearean" sonnet, and blank verse. That double invention, born of his work as a translator and of his ear, shaped poetry and theatre for centuries: without Surrey's unrhymed pentameter, neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare would have had their measure. He also refined a smoother, more classical poetic voice than Wyatt's. But the poet is inseparable from the great lord, and it was his noble pride that destroyed him. Proud to arrogance of his royal blood — the Howards descended from Edward I — he displeased an ageing, suspicious Henry VIII, who feared his house might seize the regency of the future Edward VI. Charged with treason on a thin pretext — quartering in his coat of arms the royal insignia of Edward the Confessor, a prerogative deemed usurped — he was tried and beheaded at the Tower on 19 January 1547. His father escaped the scaffold only because the king died nine days later. The founder of English blank verse was not yet thirty.
Influence
He fixed the English sonnet form (three quatrains and a couplet) that Shakespeare would make famous, and invented blank verse, the measure of all the great Elizabethan theatre and of English narrative poetry down to Milton. With Wyatt he is the spring from which all the lyric of the 1580s-1600s drank. He himself inherited the Petrarchan sonnet directly from Wyatt, his elder, and came to blank verse through translating Virgil's Aeneid; Italian court poetry and classical humanism fed his manner, and the example of the Continental courts shaped his aristocratic ideal.
Anecdote
What sent Surrey to the scaffold was not a plot but a coat of arms. Proud of his Plantagenet descent, the earl had the insignia of Edward the Confessor, the canonised Anglo-Saxon king, painted into his arms — a near-royal privilege. At a court where a dying Henry VIII trembled for his son's succession, the gesture looked like a dynastic claim. That point of heraldry became the heart of the treason charge. Condemned, Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill on 19 January 1547. Nine days later the king himself died: his father, the Duke of Norfolk, due to be executed the next morning, was saved in extremis by that death. The man who had given English poetry its measure perished for an ornament painted on a shield.