The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
One of the victims sacrificed by Mr. Froude on the altar of his Moloch
even he must have reluctantly brought to the temple, and have offered
up with a pang, but whose character he has blackened beyond all
redemption, as if he had used upon it all the dirt he has so
assiduously taken from the character of his royal favorite. There are
few names or titles of higher consideration than that of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey. It is sufficient to name Surrey to be reminded of the
high-born scholar, the gallant soldier, one of the founders of English
literature, and a poet of equal vigor of thought and melodiousness of
expression. His early and violent death, at the behest of a tyrant,
who himself had not ten days to live when he stamped--for he could no
longer write--the death-warrant of his noblest subject, has helped to
endear his memory for three centuries; and many a man whose sympathies
are entirely with the Reformation and the "new men" of 1546, regrets
the untimely death of the Byron of those days, though the noble poet
was at the head of the reactionary party, and desired nothing so much
as to have it in his power to dispose of the "new men," in which case
he would have had the heads of Hertford and his friends chopped off as
summarily as his own head fell before the mandate of the King.
Everything else is forgotten in the recollection of the Earl's youth,
his lofty origin, his brilliant talents, his rank as a man of letters,
and his prompt consignment to a bloody grave, the last of the legion of
patricians sent by Henry to the block or the gallows. Yet it is Surrey
upon whom Mr. Froude makes his last attack, and whom he puts down as a
dirty dog, in order that Henry VIII may not be seen devoting what were
all but his very latest hours to the task of completing the judicial
murder of one whom he hated because he was so wonderfully elevated
above all the rest of his subjects as to be believed capable of
snatching at the crown, though three of the King's children were then
alive, and there were several descendants of two of his sisters in both
Scotland and England. Because, of all men who were then living, Surrey
most deserved to reign over England, the jealous tyrant supposed there
could be no safety for his youthful son until the House of Howard had
been humiliated, and both its present head and its prospective head
ceased to exist. Not satisfied with attributing to him political
offences that do not necessarily imply baseness in the offender, Mr.
Froude indorses the most odious charges that have been brought against
Surrey, and which, if well founded, utterly destroy all his claims to
be considered, we will not say a man of honor, but a man of common
decency. Without having stated much that is absolutely new, Mr. Froude
has so used his materials as to create the impression that Surrey, the
man honored for three centuries as one of the most chivalrous of
Englishmen, and as imbued with the elevating spirit of poetry, was a
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