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The office of lord lieutenant had its origins in the needs of Tudor monarchs to strengthen their military forces against possible invasion from France or Spain and to guard against internal revolt. Lieutenants were first created by Henry VIII in 1545 to muster the county militias for the defence of the realm. Before that time, Sheriffs had been responsible for maintaining order in counties and for using whatever military measures were required to defend counties and their inhabitants. Lord lieutenants had powers to lead the militia in the field and to raise forces locally. The lord lieutenant’s role was literally to ‘stand in’ for the king, on the battlefield and elsewhere. Important parts of the role were to act as an unpaid recruiting sergeant for the king and to play a major part in keeping law and order by both appointing and managing magistrates. The lord lieutenant was also responsible for looking after state documents in his county and informing the king of what was going on. From 1569 lord lieutenants could appoint deputy lieutenants to assist them in this role. In 1586 Queen Elizabeth I, alerted by invasion threats from Spain, began appointing lord lieutenants more widely. By the time the Spanish Armada arrived in 1588, lord lieutenants had been appointed in almost every county. Under James I and Charles I, sometimes two men would hold the office jointly; certainly this was the case for Surrey.
⇨ According to the OED, any of these forms of the plural is correct: lords lieutenant, lord lieutenants, lords lieutenants.

Names in Chronological Order

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1551-1553?  William Parr, marquess of Parr (1513–1571). In 1543, unable to divorce his wife, Parr began an affair with one of the queen’s ladies, Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of George Brooke, Baron Cobham.
His sister Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII enabled his elevation to the earldom of Essex in 1543. Upon the king’s death Parr aligned himself with the duke of Somerset, and was created marquess of Parr in 1547. His divorce stalled by Cranmer, Parr secretly married Elizabeth Brooke, resulting in his expulsion from the privy council in 1548.
With the earl of Warwick, Parr led the moves to oust Somerset in 1549. His connections with powerful allies like John Dudley, as well as with his sister the queen and his brother-in-law the earl of Pembroke, enabled him to exert an influence on the course of political events greater than his natural talents might have permitted. During the period 1549-1553 he also served as lord lieutenant, not only of Surrey but for several other counties, including Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Berkshire.
Bitterly opposed to the succession of princess Mary, Parr joined the faction attempting to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. For this he was committed to the Tower and arraigned for treason by the new queen, Mary. She stripped Parr of his lands and titles, but in 1554 they were mostly restored. Shortly after the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 Parr was officially reinstated as marquess of Parr. Suffering acutely from gout, Parr died childless in 1571.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1553-1559:  The post was vacant.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1559-1573:  William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham (c. 1510–1573), naval commander, fourth son of Thomas Howard, the second duke of Norfolk. Active diplomatically during the 1530s, Howard married in 1535 and had two sons, one of whom, Charles Howard, succeeded him as second Lord Howard of Effingham.
With the death of queen Jane Seymour in 1537, Howard was asked to find suitable candidates to be Henry VIII’s fourth wife, among them Anne of Cleves. In 1541 he was sentenced to life in prison for concealing the adulteries of his niece Katherine Howard; but king Henry pardoned him immediately following his conviction.
Though not directly implicated, Howard was undoubtedly harmed by the fall of his nephew Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in 1547. He joined Warwick’s coup against the Somerset administration in October 1549; Warwick’s gratitude brought Howard several properties, including the manor of Effingham, Surrey, in 1551. In the following year Warwick (now duke of Northumberland) had him appointed lord deputy and governor of Calais.
In February 1554 Howard held Ludgate against Thomas Wyatt and his rebels. In 1554 he was made Baron Howard of Effingham and lord admiral. Upon her accession in 1558, Elizabeth made Howard lord chamberlain and a member of her privy council. She also appointed him lord lieutenant of Surrey and of the Borough of Southwark, as well as Custos Rotulorum of Surrey, positions which he held until his death.
By 1572 Howard’s health had so deteriorated that he could not discharge the duties of lord chamberlain. Recognizing this, Elizabeth relieved him and made him lord privy seal, a potentially lucrative but physically sedentary office. According to Holinshed (the only authority), Howard died at Hampton Court on 12 January 1573.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1573-1585:  Edward Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln (1512-1585).  Clinton succeeded his father as 9th baron Clinton in 1517. As he was only five years old when his father died, he was made a royal ward in the Court of Wards, and in 1530, at age eighteen, was married to the King’s former mistress, the 30-year-old Elizabeth Blount.
Clinton joined the retinue of King Henry VIII at Boulogne and Calais in 1532. He sat in the House of Lords in 1536 and later served in the Royal Navy from 1544 to 1547. He was knighted 1544. He fought in France 1544-1545 and was sent as one of the peace commissioners to France in 1545.
Clinton commanded the English fleet during the invasion of Scotland in 1547 and provided naval artillery support for battles there, but arrived too late to support the siege of St Andrews Castle. In 1548 he sailed into the Firth of Forth and scattered French and Scottish ships near Leith. Appointed as Governor of Boulogne in 1547, Clinton successfully defended the city against a French siege from 1549 to 1550.
That same year, jointly with Henry Manners, 2nd earl of Rutland, he was appointed lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire and of Nottinghamshire and served as lord high admiral under king Edward VI from 1550 to 1553, and again in the reign of queen Elizabeth from 1559 to his death in 1585. He was a privy councillor from 1550 to 1553 and briefly served as an envoy to France in 1551. In that same year he was elected a knight of the Garter.
After his appointment as lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire in 1552, Clinton took part in the defeat of Wyatt’s Rebellion in Kent in 1554. With Ambrose Dudley, 3rd earl of Warwick, Clinton was in joint command of a large army during the Northern Rebellion; however, the army was still being assembled when the rebellion was defeated in January 1570. He was created earl of Lincoln in 1572, and served as ambassador to France.
He was appointed lord lieutenant of Surrey in 1573, a post he held until his death in 1585. He took over the role from William Howard, 1st baron Howard of Effingham, and in 1585 was succeeded by Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham. Clinton died in London on 16 January 1585.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1585-1624:  Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham and first earl of Nottingham (1536–1624), naval commander, eldest son of William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham (d.1573). Experience at sea, under the guidance of his father, may have led his cousin queen Elizabeth to think of him as nautically experienced. Perhaps the same assumption led Richard Hakluyt to dedicate the 1598 edition of Principal Navigations to him.
Knighted in 1554 and elected to parliament for Surrey in 1562, Howard married lord Hunsdon’s eldest daughter Katherine Carey, the queen’s second cousin and her most intimate female companion.
Having earlier served as acting lord chamberlain, in 1584 Howard was appointed lord chamberlain and privy councillor, and soon after was appointed lord high admiral of England. In 1585 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Surrey and also of Sussex; he surrendered the Sussex post in 1608 but remained lord lieutenant of Surrey until his death. He was a commissioner for the trial of Mary Stuart, whose execution no doubt hastened the attack in 1588 of the Spanish armada, in which battle Howard played a leading role, providing a calming influence upon Drake and others.
Howard participated in the 1596 attack upon Cadiz, though the knighting en masse of every senior officer in the English force there somewhat overshadowed the achievement. Upon his return he was made earl of Nottingham. In mid-1599 Howard was appointed ‘Lord Lieutenant-General of all England’ – an unprecedentedly powerful commission which he discharged with appropriate gravitas, if little active service. In 1601 he took command of the soldiers massed to defend London against the rebelling earl of Essex, defeating him in the field, and acting as a commissioner at the earl’s trial.
As Elizabeth lay dying in March 1603 it was to Howard that she finally confirmed her successor, James VI of Scotland. Howard was involved in judging the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. In 1619 Howard sold his office to Buckingham, and from then until his death he wholly retired from public life. He died in 1624, at Haling, Surrey. His son Charles succeeded him as second earl of Nottingham.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1621-1642:  Charles Howard, 2nd Earl of Nottingham (1579-1642). A Member of Parliament under Elizabeth I and James I before succeeding to the peerage upon his father’s death in 1624, Howard entered Parliament in 1597 at age eighteen, representing Bletchingley and Surrey. He was also, in 1597, knight of the shire for Surrey, prior to any formal legal training at an inn of court. In 1601, he was elected MP for Sussex, one of the few Elizabethan MPs to represent two counties across his career. In that same year he acted as justice of the peace for Surrey and Sussex. He represented Sussex again in 1601 and 1604, and New Shoreham later. Knighted by James I in 1603, he served as vice-admiral of Sussex from at least 1608, handling coastal defenses and naval matters in the region.
Offices such as justice of the peace, or vice-admiral, suggest roles that aligned with royal administrative needs rather than a deep personal engagement with policy. Howard spent his career focused upon court and local affairs in Surrey and Sussex without rising to high office.
In 1620 he cited personal poverty and his father’s ongoing control of family estates as reasons for declining to contribute to ongoing policies such as the recovery of the Palatinate, suggesting pragmatic deference to royal appeals tempered by financial constraints.
Under Charles I, Howard’s relations with the Crown emphasized continuity in local governance. He served jointly as lord lieutenant of Surrey from 1621 and solely from March 1642 until his death, overseeing commissions for the Forced Loan in Surrey and Sussex, roles that positioned him as an executor of royal policy, including martial law enforcement in Surrey in 1626.
In early 1642, as civil conflict loomed, Howard’s actions reflected equivocation: as lord lieutenant, he summoned deputies in compliance with Parliament’s Militia Ordinance of 1642 to prepare Surrey’s forces, prioritizing local order over unqualified royal allegiance amid the breakdown of authority. This compliance, occurring before the First Civil War’s major engagements, underscores a pattern of dutiful but non-fanatical service to the Crown, constrained by age, indebtedness, and the erosion of Stuart fiscal and coercive power.
Howard died on 3 October 1642, leaving no male heirs.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1624-1626:  John Ramsay, 1st earl of Holderness (c.1580–1626), servant to king James VI of Scotland. In 1600, James being endangered by the so-called Gowrie conspiracy, the fitst to arrive to aid him was ‘his trusty servant John Ramsay’. Ramsay was knighted later that year.
Having accompanied James VI to England in 1603, Ramsay spent most of the rest of his life at court. In 1606 he was raised to the Scottish peerage with the title of viscount Haddington and lord Ramsay of Barns. His coat of arms bore the motto (in Latin) ‘This right arm saved the king and the nation’.
In 1609 he married Lady Elizabeth Ratcliffe, daughter of Robert, earl of Sussex. At the wedding celebrations the couple were honoured by the performance of a masque, specially written by Ben Jonson and performed by five English and twelve Scottish men of ‘noble birth or high position’. In 1609 he received the temporal lordship of lord Ramsay of Melrose, which he resigned in 1618.
Ramsay returned with the king to Scotland in 1617, and remained there when the king returned to England. In 1619 he appears to have retired to France in protest at having been refused an English peerage, being passed over for the earldom of Montgomery. In 1621 he returned to favour, being made baron of Kingston and earl of Holderness. He was appointed lord lieutenant of Surrey in 1624, a post he held until his death in 1626. He held this position jointly with Charles Howard, 2nd Earl of Nottingham.
Ramsay died in London in 1626 and was, according to a request in his will, buried in Westminster Abbey beside his sons James, who had died in 1618, and Charles, who had died in 1621. As he had no surviving children his titles died with him.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1627-1638:  Edward Cecil, 1st Viscount Wimbledon (1572–1638). Cecil was a grandson of queen Elizabeth’s great minister William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley. He was an English military commander and a politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1601 and 1624.
Cecil served with the English forces in the Netherlands between 1596 and 1610, and in 1601 was knighted by queen Elizabeth for his service. That same year he was elected Member of Parliament for Aldborough. During those years he made his reputation as both soldier and statesman. At court, his credit stood high. He served as the prince’s proxy at various royal baptisms abroad, and in 1613 was financier for the journey abroad of lady Elizabeth and her husband.
In 1620 he was nominated by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, to command the English troops in Germany, but was replaced by another. He was elected MP for Chichester in 1621, and supported the call in Commons to commit to military support for the Palatinate in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War. In 1624 he was elected MP for Dover.
In 1625 Cecil was raised to the peerage as baron Cecil of Putney and viscount Wimbledon on the basis of his seat, Wimbledon House, in Surrey. He again commanded the English forces in the Netherlands from 1627 until 1629. He served as lord lieutenant of Surrey from 1627 to 1638 and was Governor of Portsmouth from 1630 to 1638. He died in 1638 and is buried in the Cecil Chapel at St Mary’s Church, Wimbledon. Both his titles became extinct on his death.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1635-1642:  Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585–1646). An art collector rather than as a politician, at his death Arundel left 700 paintings and large collections of sculptures, books, prints, and drawings. Most of his collection of marble carvings, known as the Arundel marbles, was left to the University of Oxford, and many of his manuscripts now form the Arundel manuscripts collection within the British Library.
His aristocratic family had fallen into disgrace during the reign of their kinswoman, queen Elizabeth I, owing to their Catholicism and involvement in plots against the queen. Arundel’s marriage, to a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury and granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick, brought him wealth, but even with a large income, his collecting and building activities led him heavily into debt.
In 1607 Arundel hosted a feast at court and had a play, The Tragedy of Aeneas and Dido, performed for the Prince de Joinville. He was created Knight of the Garter in 1611. He supported Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to Guiana in 1617 and became a member of the New England Plantations Committee in 1620.
Arundel presided over the House of Lords Committee in 1621 investigating the corruption charges against Francis Bacon. On the marriage of his son Henry to Lady Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of Esmé Stuart, 3rd Duke of Lennox) without the king’s approval, he was imprisoned in the Tower by Charles I, but was later reconciled to the king and again made a privy councillor.
In 1621 Arundel was appointed Earl Marshal and in 1623 Constable of England. In 1635 he was made lord lieutenant of Surrey. He was appointed Lord Steward of the royal household in April 1640, and in 1641 as lord high steward presided at the trial of the Earl of Strafford. This closed his public career.
He became again estranged from the court; in 1642 he accompanied princess Mary for her marriage to William II of Orange and, sensing the troubles that would lead to the Civil War, decided not to return from the Netherlands to England, and instead settled first in Antwerp and then at a villa near Padua, Italy. He died in Padua in 1646, having returned to the Roman Catholicism he nominally abandoned on joining the Privy Council, and was buried in Arundel.

Lord Lieutenant of Surrey 1636-1642:  Henry Frederick Howard, fifteenth earl of Arundel, fifth earl of Surrey, and second earl of Norfolk (1608–1652). Second but eldest surviving son of Thomas Howard, fourteenth earl of Arundel and the godson of Queen Anne, Howard was made KB at the creation of Charles, prince of Wales, in 1616. He succeeded to the courtesy title of Lord Maltravers on the death of his elder brother in 1624. In 1626 he married Lady Elizabeth Stuart, eldest daughter of Esmé Stuart, third duke of Lennox, for which marriage his father was committed to the Tower and the couple were confined at Lambeth.
In 1628 Howard was elected MP for Arundel, Sussex, and was a gentleman of the privy chamber, member of the high commission, and joint lord lieutenant of Surrey, Sussex, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, and Norfolk. He was elected to the Irish parliament as MP for Callan in 1634 and nominated as an Irish privy councillor in the same year. From 1636 he also served as deputy to his father as earl marshal of England.
Howard was returned MP for Arundel in the Short Parliament of 1640, and elevated to the Lords as baron Mowbray the same year. During the Long Parliament he absented himself during the vote on the attainder of Strafford and caused a minor stir in July 1641 when an altercation with Philip Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, at a parliamentary committee ended in blows and the committal of both men to the Tower.
On the royalist side, he fought at Edgehill, served on the council of war at Oxford, and held the post of governor of Arundel Castle. The illness of his father took him to Padua in 1645 and he stayed with him until his father's death in 1646, when he succeeded as fifteenth earl of Arundel, fifth earl of Surrey, second earl of Norfolk, and earl marshal of England. Returning to England he found his estates sequestered, on account of recusancy. He died in London, at Arundel House in the Strand, in 1652 and was buried at Arundel Castle.