The previous chapter establishes some of the practices used, particularly by women writers, to express and preserve position-taking verse in the Devonshire Manuscript; earlier sections have established the broader system of which this position-taking was a part. Now, we return to the exchange and the incident with which this work opens: the Douglas-Howard exchange. This incident provides a distillation of the paranoia and anxiety caused by the shifts that occurred under Henry VIII’s reign: the increasing centralization of power and the increasing surveillance associated with the drive to protect that power. In response, both Douglas and Howard, or at least the voices apparently assigned to them in the Devonshire, use elements of the same performances imposed on them by this surveillance culture to express their resentment and resistance. Using the same gender and hierarchical roles that Henry himself had partially defined, Douglas and Howard define the legitimacy of their relationship and express the necessity of its primacy and privilege even in the face of official opposition. Using the rules of courtly love, Douglas and Howard both lay claim to an older and earlier system of fidelity. As David R. Carlson summarizes, Henrician court poetry ‘concerns itself with what it meant at the moment to be a courtier’ and with, more specifically, ‘the loss of the fundamental aristocratic prerogative’.