The title of Duke of Surrey was created in 1397 by King Richard II of England for his nephew, Thomas Holland, 3rd Earl of Kent. Following Richard's deposition, his successor, Henry IV deprived his predecessors' supporters of many of their titles, including this one, which has never since been recreated.
Henry Howard was the eldest son of lord Thomas Howard, son of Thomas, earl of Surrey and duke of Norfolk, and himself became, by courtesy, earl of Surrey in 1524, on his father’s succeeding to the dukedom.
Surrey was formally married at 16; but the subject of many of his poems was not his wife, but his “lady” in the chivalric sense, the mistress whose “man” he had become by a vow of fealty.
That she was a mere child when Surrey first began to address poems to her confirms the impression received by the candid reader: these poems, in fact, are the result, not of a sincere passion, but of the rules of the game of chivalry as played in its decrepitude and Surrey’s youth.
Surrey and his brother Thomas worked and played with a number of young relations whom the Duke received into his household as pupils and pages; among these were Henry, George and Charles Howard, sons of Lord Edmund and brothers of Catherine; and Norfolk's half brothers, William and Thomas; and a more distant cousin, Richard Southwell.
Surrey had always been an enemy to the Seymours, whom he regarded as upstarts, and when his sister, the Duchess of Richmond, seemed disposed to accept a marriage with Sir Thomas Seymour, he wrote to her insinuating that this was a step towards becoming the mistress of Henry VIII.
Surrey had asserted in the presence of a certain George Blagge, who was inclined to the reforming movement, that on Henry's death, his father, the duke of Norfolk, as the premier duke in England, had the obvious right of acting as regent to Prince Edward.
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