Surrey was a gay and wild young
fellow--distinguished in the tournament which celebrated Henry's marriage
with Anne of Cleves; now in prison for eating meat in Lent, and breaking
windows at night; again we find him the English marshal when Henry invaded
France in 1544. He led a restless life, was imperious and hot-tempered to
the king, and at length quartered the king's arms with his own, thus
assuming royal rights and imperilling the king's dignity. On this charge,
which was, however, only a pretext, he was arrested and executed for high
treason in 1547, before he was thirty years old.
Surrey is the greatest poetical name of Henry the Eighth's reign, not so
much for the substance of his poems as for their peculiar handling. He is
claimed as the introducer of blank verse--the iambic pentameter without
rhyme, occasionally broken for musical effect by a change in the place of
the caesural pause. His translation of the Fourth Book of the AEneid,
imitated perhaps from the Italian version of the Cardinal de Medici, is
said to be the first specimen of blank verse in English.
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