ABSTRACT
This chapter draws out the potential significance of one particular occasion in Surrey's biography, and its relationship to one of Surrey's best-known poems, London, hast thou accused me'. It concerns the intersections between literature and diplomacy, the inclusion of Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey', might appear rather counter-intuitive. Puttenham's thinking on Wyatt and Surrey is itself tacitly indebted to Tottel's volume. This memorialization of Surrey the courtly maker' was, however, surely produced in large part by the rendering of him in Richard Tottel's Songs and Sonnets. Lutheranism, fast-breaking, and vandalism may not, like a corrosive scepticism about the Mass or an antipathy towards the papal Antichrist', be correlative in a strict sense with evangelical sympathies. But when transformed into the apocalyptic satire of Surrey's verse, they might imaginatively at least become endowed with the aggressive self-determination which conservatives feared and stigmatized in more thorough-going reformers.
