MASP

Born in Hudson, Hertfordshire, in 1517, Henry Howard, Count of Surrey, a county to the south-west of London, is the first of the famous line of Counts of Surrey which includes the Counts of Arundel, who were at the center of art collecting in England in the 17th century. The history of the Renaissance in England remembers Surrey for his poetic work more than for his actions or the dramatic shifts of fortune that his aristocratic connections brought him, since, along with Sir Thomas Wyat (1503-1542), who is recognized as his mentor, he introduced the work of Petrarch into his country, as well as the styles and meter of Italian humanist poetry, thus beginning the great period of Elizabethan poetry. As well as translating Certain Bookes of Virgiles Aenaeis (that is, Books II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid) in blank verse, the famous unrhymed decasyllable of English dramatic and epic poetry which he is said to have invented, Surrey was the first writer in England to develop the sonnet form, which was then used by Shakespeare. His preferences and erudition in relation to Italian culture, occasionally influenced by Fontainebleau, are shown in the Italianate touches of Mountsurrey, the mansion he built in Norfolk which was destroyed two years after his death. The son of Lord Thomas Howard, Count of Arundel and Surrey, one of the greatest collectors of Holbein (Chamberlain, 1913, II, p. 64), Henry was granted the title of Count of Surrey in 1524 when his father, a cousin of Henry VIII, became the third Duke of Norfolk, the most senior title in English nobility (Hearn 1995, p. 51). His links with the king, his family and the court, were clearly very close. While he was still a child, between 1530 and 1532, the time when the crisis between Henry VIII and Clement VII was developing, Henry lived at Windsor with the pupil of his father, Henry Fitzroy (1519-1536), the bastard son of Henry VIII and Elisabeth Blount who became Duke of Richmond after 1525. In 1532, Surrey and Richmond accompanied Henry VIII on his journey to France, where the subject of the portrait spent eleven months in the company of the children of Francis I. On returning to England a double wedding was arranged between the Howard and Tudor families: Henry’s sister married the Duke of Richmond and the marriage of Henry himself was arranged with Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The marriage was not consummated however, and Henry would eventually marry Lady Frances de Vere, then 14 years old, the daughter of the Duke of Oxford, with whom he lived only after 1535. Between 1533 and 1535 the break between Henry VIII and Rome occurred and the constant closeness of Henry Howard to the Catholic Mary Tudor raised doubts about him in the royal court. Between 1537 and 1539, Henry Howard remained effectively confined at Windsor, unjustly accused of having secretly supported the Catholic rebellion of 1536. The fifth marriage of Henry VIII to Henry’s cousin, Catherine Howard, executed in 1542, greatly improved his position at court and Henry was at the king’s service in the Scottish campaign of 1542, in France and in Flanders between 1543 and 1544, being appointed Field Marshal. On his return to England, after a defeat at Saint-Étienne in 1546, just before the death of Henry VIII, Henry’s position was threatened by his old enemies, especially the Seymours, who had already accused him of Papism in 1536. His fall was brought about by the accusation of Thomas Seymour, the uncle of Edward VI, that the Howards were threatening the Seymours’ position regarding the constitution of the regency of Edward VI, who was then only ten years of age. Accused of having quartered his soldiers alongside those of the king, which was his right, Surrey was found guilty of conspiring to overthrow Edward VI in order to take the crown, and was executed in the Tower of London at the age of thirty-one. This was only the first of the blows inflicted against the position of leadership among the aristocracy that was held by the Howards, Counts of Surrey and Arundel. In 1572 and 1595, in the reign of Elizabeth, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip, Count of Arundel, had similar fates, although the latter’s son, the great collector of sculpture and manuscripts and matchless patron of Van Dyck, Thomas Howard, fourteenth Count of Arundel, would see the fortunes of the Arundels restored under the Stuarts, whose fall in 1640 would, however, mean their final removal from power in England. Henry Howard’s poetry, written mainly during the years of his confinement at Windsor, was published posthumously in 1557. Like Petrarch’s “Laura”, Surrey wrote lines in honor of his anonymous “Geraldine”, perhaps a member of the aristocratic Fitzgerald family from Ireland since, as the poet says: “fostered she was with milk of Irish breast”. Surrey is known not only from the Masp’s portrait (The Poet Henry Howard, Count of Surrey), but also from an extraordinary full-length portrait by an anonymous painter, probably from Fontainebleau and datable to the same period as the Masp’s portrait (Hearn 1995, pp. 50-52). In 1533 Holbein himself painted a prior portrait of Surrey and his wife Frances de Vere, which is lost but of which two preparatory sketches are preserved at Windsor (Parker, W. Dr. 17, 18); one study, judged by Parker to be original, dates from the years 1535-1542. The Masp’s portrait shows Henry Howard at the age of twenty-five, that is, in 1542, therefore just before or immediately after his campaigns in Scotland, when the poet was enjoying an unrivaled position at Henry VIII’s court despite the beheading of his beautiful cousin Catherine Howard on the 13th February of that year. An engraving of the Masp’s portrait was made by Wenzel Hollar between 1637 and 1645, the years when that great Czech engraver (1607-1677) was living in London under the protection of Thomas Howard, Count of Arundel (Parthey, n. 1509). Until the World War II the portrait was known to critics only from this engraving. But it also appears in the background of a miniature showing the same Count of Arundel and his family that was painted in 1643 or immediately thereafter, by Philip Fruytiers (1610-1666), following a design by Van Dyck, which is not surprising, given the connection of the Arundels with the Counts of Surrey. In the 1655 Arundel Inventory, under the number ‘39’, is actually written: “Ritratto de Henrico Howard, Conte de Surrey”. This is one of the last portraits painted by Holbein, who died at most one year later, and it is one of the most typical examples of the extreme objectivity of his final portrait style, in harmony, as Camesasca points out (1987, p. 94) with the ideal of reserve and impassivity of the English aristocracy and its portraiture. Holbein creates a calculated tension between the oval triangles of the face, body and hands, which contrast and communicate between themselves, an abstract tension which at the same time gives the sitter’s head a luminous aspect. According to Bätschmann and Griene (1997, p. 192) a similar formal division may be found in the portrait of Christina of Denmark (1538) in the National Gallery of London, which was painted so that Henry vIII could choose his new wife: “The geometry of the face, seen in frontal position, is slightly disturbed by the three-quarter view of her gown. Here Holbein successfully applied a formula that is most conspicuous in his portrait of 1542 of the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The unusual shape of the head (...) is accentuated with great skill, producing a startling pictorial effect”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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