The early Tudor poets John Skelton (c.1460–1529), Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503–42) and Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) span a period of dramatic historical, social and cultural change. Skelton began his career in the service of Henry VII just after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Surrey lost his head for treason days before the death of Henry VIII. Under these two centralising Tudor monarchs, policy, prosperity and the increasing influence of humanism caused major social changes. England became a significant European power, and, after Skelton’s death, broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. The work of all three poets is marked by a sense of significant cultural change and the need to develop new poetic forms and voices. Above all, each poet’s work is shaped by his uneasy relationship to a dominant, often tyrannical royal court.

The careers of the three poets were very different. Skelton seems to have risen through his academic and rhetorical abilities, recognised in the academic title of laureate, to an early position as tutor to the infant Henry VIII. In 1503, however, he was pensioned off to the rectory of Diss in Norfolk, and spent much of the rest of his life trying, largely unsuccessfully, to regain an official post at court as poet and propagandist for the King. Without a ready-made courtly audience, he made use of the new technology of printing. Wyatt was a courtier and diplomat who eschewed print publication, circulating his verse among an elite readership in manuscript. Twice imprisoned by Henry VIII, he also served as the King’s ambassador at foreign courts. Surrey was an aristocrat, the eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, fatally conscious of his ancestry and its traditional privileges, but open, after a year spent at the dazzling court of France, to new Renaissance forms and models.