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Modern History – Histoire Contemporaine

speculations continue throughout the book. It would be impossible to understand Surrey’s life without placing him firmly within his times, and this is done extremely effectively. Faction, of which the Earl was ultimately a victim, is a key theme of this book, and the final section, on Surrey’s fall, is a powerful exposé of the dangers of court life. Religion inevitably played an important part in the life of any courtier of the 1530s and 1540s, and Childs’s argument that Surrey developed reformist leanings in the last decade of his life is convincing. Indeed, it would have been interesting to see this developed in even greater detail. Such in-depth consideration of contemporary themes in relation to Surrey would perhaps be of greater value (at least to the academic reader already familiar with the period) than the vast amounts of background detail which are included for the benefit of the general reader. At times the narrative seems perilously close to losing sight of its subject, and being taken over by Henry VIII. Although this is not a literary biography, Surrey’s poetry is quoted at length, and used to provide valuable insights into his life and personality. Using verse as a historical source, however, is always a difficult exercise, and Childs’s approach sometimes seems a little too uncritical. Surrey’s poems, she says, offer us, if not the truth, then ‘a poetic truth: a truth about the speaker’, which reveals ‘Surrey’s tastes and values, his aspirations and ideals’. Poetry is even seen, in an uncomfortably anachronistic passage, as a ‘kind of therapy’ for the Earl. The tendency to assume that Surrey’s poetry was invariably about his own life and emotions, although tempting, is historically a little dangerous. A tendency to introduce jarringly modern phrases is the only real flaw in Childs’s writing style, which is otherwise fluid and extremely readable. When, however, she tells us that ‘Norfolk had vowed to shock and awe the Scots into submission’, the phrase carries too many connotations to be an effective description of sixteenth-century warfare. References to the charges against Anne Boleyn being ‘sexed up’ and to court ambassadors waiting, ‘quill at hand, for the latest scoop’, seem similarly ill-placed. Overall, Childs’s book is an important corrective to the tendency, particularly in popular history, to focus on Henry VIII and his wives – even if her title draws on this trend. Surrey was clearly far more than Henry VIII’s Last Victim, and this biography serves as an important reminder of the value of studying individual lives of this period, both for their own sake and for the light they shed on the issues, events and people which dominated England in the Tudor age.