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The creation of an audience at Surrey House or at any of the other Howard mansions took shape as the historical lives of the poet earl and his friends at court intertwined. By 1542, lyrics and lives as one had already begun to identify the Surrey world, particularly in the self-dramatized love story of Lady Margaret Douglas and Surrey's young uncle Thomas. Special circles of friends not only read and recited but sang poetic texts. The nature of their turbulent worlds could only be understood, so they felt, in the symbolic and intertextual language of poetry, and this circle which sought such language for its own violent histories became increasingly concentric with the Earl of Surrey himself, as three sets of evidence demonstrate.

Although the normal temptations for a young ambitious nobleman of the highest rank were for Earl of Surrey a kind of continuous snare, the poet earl suffered another kind of imprisonment relatively new to his culture. The bad behaviour and fury exhibited on occasion by Surrey at court, the dangerous violent encounters, sprang, at least on one level, from the nature and inevitable sensitivity of Surrey as poet, whatever the slow entrapment of him by the court of Henry VIII. What might have been allowed and even expected of a Romantic or 12th-century poet could not be tolerated in the reign of Henry VIII, especially from the heir of the Howards. His building of Surrey House may have resulted in part from a desire to alleviate this new kind of frustration and psychic enclosing.

This chapter examines the translations of Petrarch's poetry in English. It discusses different translations of Petrarch from the early Renaissance period to the twentieth century including the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey and Robert M. Durling. It also describes the author's own translation and explains the rationale and problems behind his own version and situates these within the broader context of the British preference for the more ‘concrete’ poetry of Dante, Michelangelo and Montale.

The Strict Baptist James Wells ministered in Southwark, South London, an area of acute poverty and social need. When the Surrey Tabernacle was rebuilt as the New Surrey Tabernacle in Walworth, Wells attracted congregations that numbered over 1,500 primarily through preaching an experiential high Calvinism. There were also active social concern projects, and although Wells was not politically active, his political theology was that of a tolerant Dissenter. Whilst there were many elements of continuity with the work of high Calvinists in Manchester, the wider context of London masked the acuteness of some local needs, and did not provoke the intensity of response found in William Gadsby's ministry.

This chapter considers how Wyatt’s poetry was received and renewed. John Leland and Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey) commemorate Wyatt’s literary activities by reweaving echoes from his writing in their laments. These acts of verbal reuse and textual renewal are located in a broader paradigm, which draws upon theories of literary practice in the early sixteenth century. The chapter discusses the impact of Erasmian hermeneutics, Reformation theology, pedagogic methods, and humanist strategies of translation on the literary practice and ‘grammar’ which underwrite Wyatt’s texts. Wyatt’s writing—especially his two prose apologias—can be understood against the backdrop of a shift from a referential to a relational semiotics; an Erasmian appeal to usage; invitations for readers to construct meaning by collating texts; a literary theory predicated on the unfolding of infolded meaning; and the practice of readerly rewriting by which the introduction of new text performs or reifies extant words

This chapter focuses on Henry Howard, the poet Earl of Surrey, his refashioning of Wyatt’s reputation and legacy after his death, and his own representation of himself as the heir to Wyatt’s poetic and cultural legacy. It examines the remarkable poetic career of Surrey himself, his dangerous mixture of political and social ambition, and his death on the orders of the king whom he so savagely condemned in a number of his later works. It examines the depths and contradictions in Surrey’s own religious position as well as those implicit in his attempts to position Wyatt as a champion of evangelical reform.

What is remarkable about the Earl of Surrey's blank verse is that it has no clear origin except within one personality and one life-story. Whatever conceptions and techniques Surrey developed from specific literary sources, whether Geoffrey Chaucer, the French, the Italians, or Gawain Douglas, finally and mysteriously the blank verse originated out of a single person — Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Before Surrey, in English, as an astute editor of Thomas Wyatt has observed, there had been ‘nothing quite like it’. Blank verse with its flexibility, its ‘readiness’, in T. S. Eliot's term, surprised everyone. It had not evolved with time but was suddenly, ‘immediately’, invented — by a young man, not always mature, at a specific time and place terrible in their dislocations.

By Royal Letters Patent issued on September 1545, Henry VIII designated the poet Earl of Surrey, ‘The King's Lieutenant’ (a civil appointment) and ‘Captain-General’ (a military appointment for Boulogne-sur-Mer). In this special citation, Surrey's main task was to defend and command the key port of Boulogne on the Channel coast of northern France. The old Roman city of Boulogne had fallen to the English only a year before. The defeat of the French and the fall of the city signalled the most spectacular military triumph of Henry VIII's career, with the Tudor monarch present in the front lines outside the city walls with young Surrey and most courtiers in attendance. The surrender of 1544 had been carefully dramatized to make the decaying Henry VIII appear like Henry V on the nearby field of Agincourt.

The battle of St Etienne, a disastrous encounter between the English and French forces, turned into an episode of total dishonour for the young earl, marking the first stage of the Earl of Surrey's downfall. Three contemporary documents detail this episode. However all three documents show Surrey had been quite accurate when he had written that the French garrison and labourers at Fort Outreau suffered from want of food and other supplies. He had also been right to speak up for his men; as one of the documents notes: ‘not a penny in the pockets of the common soldiers, because the English had not been paid for nine months’. Without money, the English army had to eat what had been kept in the king's storehouse, much of it spoiled or rotten. Nevertheless, although the Privy Council sent little and Calais could not send supplies except by ship, Surrey managed to avoid the starvation that threatened the French.

Time was running out. The race for the succession, in which the winner would take all, was coming to an end. In these last months, the Earl of Surrey had his portrait painted with the symbolic theme of time and its uses. In the portrait, the poet represents himself at his most glorious, the redeemer of fleeting time — Virgil's ‘irreparabile tempus’. Unlike all the other bodies that had disappeared one after another in the reign of Henry VIII, this glorious male body rises out of the canvas towards the future of a new Renaissance — if only his audience would seize the message on the canvas. In the summer of 1546, the earl sent instructions to the painter of his final portrait with a letter to Mary Shelton, which was later seized by his betrayer, Sir Richard Southwell.

At the end of his long chronicle, the early Tudor historian Edward Hall allows himself one last burst of Burgundian gloire. Although briefer than other extravagant renditions of honour that mark his history, his account of the August 1546 reception for the French Admiral subtly completes his text that otherwise ends abruptly with the burning alive of Anne Askew and her companions in July, the beheading of Henry Howard in the following January, and the death of Henry VIII a week later. Arriving in the Thames off Greenwich with twelve great ships, the Admiral of France Claude d'Annebault, the governor of Normandy, was first greeted and escorted to London by the queen's brother, the Earl of Essex, with the Earl of Derby.

In January 1547, Henry Howard, the poet Earl of Surrey, was beheaded. His execution, the last in the reign of Henry VIII, took place on Tower Hill just north-west of the Tower of London. The young earl had walked up Tower Hill, ascended the nine steps of the scaffold, spoken, and then thrust his body forward, hands and arms outstretched and head across the block. After the executioner had raised his axe and brought it down, the poet's head, still bleeding, and his torso, cut loose and also bleeding, were thrown into a waiting wagon. The severed head and body were then taken to the nearby London church of All Hallows, Barking, where they were hastily entombed. Within weeks, the first elegy in a long line went straight to the shock of the event. In his poem, Sir John Cheke is still stunned by Surrey's execution.

Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, expressed bitterness and outburst around the spring of 1540 in the tense months before the fall of Thomas Cromwell. The father of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, had found an Exchequer clerk's pious suggestions insolent and snapped at him: ‘I have never read Scripture nor ever will read it’. An older culture had vanished before his eyes. The abstract religion of the Word, with its origins in a humanism and ‘new learning’ he would never understand, had replaced the origin of God in complex liturgy, devotions, the communal experiences of saints and festivals, and the social principles that came from these, including a Dantesque devotion to system and master. For him, these phenomena had formed ‘Merry England’. The irony was that in 1540 his son Henry, Earl of Surrey, was using the very instruments of the despised humanism to express the father's sense, however momentary, of total loss.

Mount Surrey as a legend lingered into the later Renaissance. In prose, Thomas Nashe had fully textualized the poet's life by the early 1590s and, as with many cult narratives, by giving false historical facts but getting the essential interpretation right. In poetry, Michael Drayton added to the momentum developed from Turbeville, Whitney, and Sir Philip Sidney in previous decades with more inaccurate but revealing details. Drayton's Geraldine, in fact, wrote a tribute to Mount Surrey in her epistle to her chivalric Surrey. By the 1590s in Drayton's England, re-creating the classical world of Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land had energized generations, but the process of actually making the English landscape classical, as found later in Edmund Spenser and John Milton, was a new concept in 1542.

In an unexpected turn to his life, the poet Earl of Surrey had a happy marriage at the court of Henry VIII. The aristocratic child he had first met at thirteen and married before he left for France turned out to be the woman who not only bore him five children but also helped to engender his texts, as specific poems reveal. In fact, there is no more alive a portrayal or image of Frances de Vere Howard, the countess, than in Earl of Surrey's texts that describe a faithful relationship between a young woman and a young man. His inherent solipsism, for once, was transformed in texts of love to the countess. This deep affinity of a young woman and man performs, as the poems reveal, Surrey's ultimate solution to the Petrarchan dilemma of Laura and alienation.

This chapter uses the relationship between William Cecil's father, Richard, and William Wise of Waterford, both of whom were royal servants at the court of Henry VIII, as an entrée to an exploration of society and government in the lordship of Ireland in 1520, the year of William Cecil's birth. It introduces Ireland as a territory bound to the crown of England, but which was legally and constitutionally divided between areas of English and Irish rule. This chapter will provide the necessary historical background and the political, social, and legal framework for understanding Ireland and its deepening relationship with England in the Tudor period.

Chapter 9 discusses Headen’s professional and personal life between his emigration to England in 1931 until his death there in 1957. It documents the companies he directed in Camberley, Surrey, principally Headen Hamilton Engineering Co., Ltd. (with investor George D. Hamilton) and Headen Keil Engineering Co., Ltd. (with local builder James Richard McLean Keil), and the companies that distributed the bi-fuel engine kits he patented and manufactured for automobiles, lorries, and Fordson tractors. Addressing his legacy as an inventor, the chapter also explores the contributions his products made to British agriculture in the 1930s and to the war effort in World War II, and the long-reaching impact of anti-icing methods he patented for aircraft. Finally, the chapter examines Headen’s social position in England; his service in the Surrey Home Guard; his remarriage in 1945; his adoption of a son in 1948; and his death in Frimley Green in 1957.

This chapter discusses the following: Henry VIII's developing view of his Irish lordship; the earl of Surrey as Henry's lieutenant in Ireland; the parliament of 1521; the balance sheet of intervention: reconquest judged too expensive; the replacement of Surrey by Ormond; the Kildare–Ormond conflict, 1522–34; a period of indecision and disorder; Ormond as lord deputy; the return of Kildare, 1523; attempted arbitration between Kildare and Ormond; Kildare restored, 1524; James, earl of Desmond, allies with France to aid a Yorkist restoration; Kildare called to England, 1526; Ireland neglected under weak acting chief governors; Ó Conchobhair captures Lord Delvin, 1528; Piers Butler accepts the title of earl of Ossory and is installed as lord deputy; Ossory is replaced by a commission, 1529–30; Desmond intrigues with Charles V against Henry VIII; Sir William Skeffington arrives as the king's commissioner; parliament held in 1531; and Kildare attempts to dominate Skeffington; succeeds him as lord deputy, 1532.

This chapter discusses the qualitative methodology used in the study. Fieldwork was conducted in two divisions in the Metropolitan Police and one in Surrey Constabulary. Beatbook accounts were used along with observational fieldnotes, plus interviews and group discussions conducted with officers by the research team as a comparative base for analysing community policing practice. Researchers observed over 1,200 police/public incidents in hundreds of hours of fieldwork, and interviewed officers of all ranks and functions in the three research sites. The community policing system is then described based on the data gathered.