Henry Howard was born almost five hundred years ago in 1517… I wonder how many poets of today will still be read in five hundred more years time? He was the Earl of Surrey and died tragically young at the age of thirty. He was descended from King Edward I on his father’s side of the family and from King Edward III on his maternal side. he was cousin to Anne Boleyn and living in those fraught times with a paranoid King upon the throne, it is no surprise that he met his death by execution on Henry VIII’s orders.
He was a great poet and credited as being one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry.
Love that doth reign and live within my thought
And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
But she that taught me love and suffer pain,
My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire
With shamefaced look to shadow and refrain,
Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.
And coward Love, then, to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and ‘plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain,
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove,
–Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
Lois Elsden 