Glass Houses: Surrey, Petrarch, and the Religious Poetics of the ‘London’ Invective

Abstract

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey responded to his incarceration in 1543 for Lenten misrule with an invective against London. This article traces how the division of critical opinion over this poem is related to its rhetorical instability, especially where Surrey's perceived religious convictions have been sought or supplied. However, Surrey's related poetics of elegy, complaint and ostensible confession, tend towards an entrenched isolation of lament reflecting a conflict between the genealogies of dynastic and literary authority. Reformers were ever distrustful of the son of the Duke of Norfolk, yet Surrey's purposeful literary association with Wyatt alienated him from conservatives. His London poem—part satirical, part apocalyptic—manifests his profoundly unresolved nature, one that finally rendered him a political liability. Furthermore it asks important questions of how religious commitments are to be understood from such writing. Those who find an evangelical Surrey in his poetry appeal to his use of fervent prophetic language. The mediation of these biblical voices by Petrarch's Rime sparse has previously ignored the commentary Vellutello included in the edition that was perhaps the most influential at the Henrician court. This commentary is shown to complicate our understanding of Petrarch's moral and anti-curial, rather than proto-evangelical, exemplarity, to show the arch-humanist occupying the same ambiguous terrain of the early Reformation as the poet earl.