Thomas
followed his father to court after his education at St John's College,
Cambridge. Entering the King's service, he was entrusted with many important
diplomatic missions. In public life, his principal patron was Thomas Cromwell,
after whose death he was recalled from abroad and imprisoned (1541). Though
subsequently acquitted and released, shortly thereafter he died. His poems were
circulated at court and may have been published anonymously in the anthology
The Court of Venus (earliest edition c. 1537) during his lifetime, but were not
published under his name until after his death;[3] the first major book to
feature and attribute his verse was Tottel's Miscellany (1557), printed 15
years after his death.
Early life
Thomas
Wyatt was born at Allington, Kent, in 1503, the son of Sir Henry Wyatt by Anne
Skinner, the daughter of John Skinner of Reigate, Surrey. He had a brother
Henry, assumed to have died an infant, and a sister, Margaret who married Sir
Anthony Lee (died 1549) and was the mother of Queen Elizabeth's champion, Sir
Henry Lee.
Education and diplomatic career
Wyatt
was over six feet tall, reportedly both handsome and physically strong. He was
an ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, but he entered Henry's service in
1515 as "Sewer Extraordinary", and the same year he began studying at
St John's College, Cambridge. His father had been associated with Sir Thomas
Boleyn as constable of Norwich Castle, and Wyatt was thus acquainted with Anne
Boleyn.
Following
a diplomatic mission to Spain , in 1526, he accompanied Sir John Russell, 1st
Earl of Bedford, to Rome to help petition Pope Clement VII to annul Henry
VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, in hopes of freeing him to marry Anne
Boleyn. Russell being incapacitated, Wyatt was also sent to negotiate with the
Republic of Venice. According to some, Wyatt was captured by the armies of
Emperor Charles V when they captured Rome and imprisoned the pope in 1527, but
he managed to escape and make it back to England.
From
1528 to 1530, Wyatt acted as high marshal at Calais. In the years following he
continued in Henry's service; he was, however, imprisoned in the Tower of
London for a month in 1536, perhaps because Henry hoped he would incriminate
the queen. He was knighted in 1535 and appointed High Sheriff of Kent for 1536.
At this time, he was sent to Spain as ambassador to Charles V, who was offended
by the declaration of Princess Mary's illegitimacy; he was her cousin and they
had once been briefly betrothed. Although Wyatt was unsuccessful in his
endeavours, and was accused of disloyalty by some of his colleagues, he was
protected by his relationship with Cromwell, at least during the latter's
lifetime.
Wyatt
was elected knight of the shire (MP) for Kent in December 1541.
Marriage and issue
In
1520, Wyatt married Elizabeth Brooke (1503–1560). A year later, they had a son
Thomas (1521–1554) who led Wyatt's rebellion some 12 years after his father's
death. In 1524, Henry VIII assigned Wyatt to be an ambassador at home and
abroad, and he (who? Henry or Wyatt?) separated from his wife soon after on
grounds of adultery.
Born
around 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent, England, Wyatt was the son of Sir
Henry Wyatt of Yorkshire and Anne Skinner Wyatt of Surrey. Imprisoned more than
once by Richard III, Sir Henry had become under Henry VII a powerful, wealthy
privy councillor, and he remained so after Henry VIII’s accession. John Leland
writes that Wyatt attended Cambridge, and although there is no record to
confirm the statement, it seems plausible that he did. It is often assumed that
in 1516 he entered Saint John’s College, Cambridge, but his name may have been
confused with another Wyatt matriculating there. After marriage to Elizabeth
Brooke, daughter of Thomas, Lord Cobham, in 1520 and the birth of a son in
1521, Wyatt progressed in his career at court, as esquire of the king’s body
and clerk of the king’s jewels (1524). He probably acquired these posts through
a combination of innate abilities and his father’s influence. Stephen Miriam
Foley suggests in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1990) that the positions were more
significant than their titles might imply, for they helped to entrench him in
the king’s household. Members of that household sought power, struggling with
the king’s councillors to influence the king.
Sometime
after the birth of his son, perhaps around 1525, Wyatt seems to have become
estranged from his wife; all editors and biographers assume the reason to be
her infidelity, for such were the rumors during his life. The Spanish Calendar,
for instance, gives this detail: “Wyatt had cast [his wife] away on account of
adultery.” It is certain that in 1526, when Sir Thomas Cheney embarked for the
French court on an official delegation, Wyatt accompanied him.
Around
1527 Queen Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII, asked Wyatt to
translate Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae. Wyatt translated in its
place a piece he found less tedious, Guillaume Budé’s Latin version of
Plutarch’s De tranquillitate et securitate animi. It was soon published by
Richard Pynson as The Quiet of Mind (1528), and as several scholars have
pointed out, the echoes of “quiet mind” in Wyatt’s poetry indicate that the
piece continued to hold philosophical importance for him. From around 1528 or
1529 to November 1530, Wyatt held the post of high marshal of Calais, and in
1532 he became commissioner of the peace in Essex. Around 1536 Wyatt formed an
attachment to Elizabeth Darrell, who became his mistress for life. Some of his
poems, such as “A face that should content me wondrous well” and “So feeble is
the thread,” almost surely allude to this relationship.
Wyatt's poetry and influence
Through
and in this milieu he created a new English poetics by experimenting with meter
and voice and by grafting Continental and classical forms and ideas to English
traditions. Wyatt wrote the first English sonnets and true satires, projecting
through them the most important political issues of the period: the Protestant
Reformation and the centralization of state power under the reigns of the
Tudors. For this combination of formalistic innovation and historical
reflection, he is today considered the most important poet of the first half of
the sixteenth century.
Wyatt's
professed object was to experiment with the English language, to civilise it,
to raise its powers to equal those of other European languages. His poetry may
be considered as a part of the Petrarchism movement within Renaissance
literature. A significant amount of his literary output consists of
translations and imitations of sonnets by Italian poet Petrarch; he also wrote
sonnets of his own. He took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his
rhyme schemes are significantly different. Petrarch's sonnets consist of an
"octave" rhyming abba abba, followed by a "sestet" with
various rhyme schemes. Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common
sestet scheme is cddc ee. Wyatt experimented in stanza forms including the
rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs, and satires, as well as with
monorime, triplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and
rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas, and the French forms of douzaine and
treizaine . He introduced the poulter's measure form, rhyming couplets composed
of a 12-syllable iambic line (Alexandrine) followed by a 14-syllable iambic
line (fourteener), and he is considered a master of the iambic tetrameter.
Wyatt's
poetry reflects classical and Italian models, but he also admired the work of
Geoffrey Chaucer, and his vocabulary reflects that of Chaucer; for example, he
uses Chaucer's word newfangleness, meaning fickleness, in They Flee from Me.
Many of his poems deal with the trials of romantic love and the devotion of the
suitor to an unavailable or cruel mistress. Other poems are scathing, satirical
indictments of the hypocrisies and pandering required of courtiers who are
ambitious to advance at the Tudor court.
Wyatt's
poems are short but fairly numerous. His 96 love poems appeared posthumously
(1557) in a compendium called Tottel's Miscellany. The noteworthy are 31
sonnets, the first in English. Ten of them were translations from Petrarch,
while all were written in the Petrarchan form, apart from the couplet ending
which Wyatt introduced. Serious and reflective in tone, the sonnets show some
stiffness of construction and a metrical uncertainty indicative of the
difficulty Wyatt found in the new form. Yet their conciseness represents a
great advance on the prolixity and uncouthness of much earlier poetry. Wyatt
was also responsible for the important introduction of the personal note into
English poetry, for although he followed his models closely, he wrote of his
own experiences. His epigrams, songs, and rondeaux are lighter than the
sonnets, and they reveal the care and the elegance typical of the new
romanticism. His satires are composed in the Italian terza rima, again showing
the direction of the innovating tendencies.
Every
aspect of Wyatt’s poetry has been widely debated: the canon, the texts, the
prosody, the occasion, the personae or voices, the significance of French and
Italian influences, and the representation of court life. Wyatt’s poems
circulated widely among various members of Henry’s court, and some may first have
been published in a miscellany or verse anthology, The Court of Venus, of which
three fragments survive. In most of his poetry Wyatt worked both with English
models, notably Geoffrey Chaucer, and Continental sources. This combination
gives his poems their peculiar characteristic of following the conventions of
amour courtois yet implicitly rejecting those conventions at the same time. His
canon falls into two subgenres: courtly poetry and religious poetry. The
courtly poetry may be divided, with some difficulty, between the love poems and
the satiric poems. The love poetry predominates and includes work in several
forms, such as sonnets, epigrams, and what have traditionally been called
songs. Many of Wyatt’s Petrarchan sources had been set to music by the early
sixteenth century, but recent scholars have doubted whether he wrote his poems
for musical accompaniment.
Most
scholars recognize the importance of the “courtly” context for Wyatt’s oeuvre.
According to scholar Raymond Southall, the love complaints, besides being
personal expressions of love or pain, may also be stylized verses designed to
win the favor of court ladies who could offer political advancement to a
courtier. Southall notes that many of Wyatt’s poems repeatedly stress the
insecurity of a man’s fortunes, an attitude consistent with the realities of
court life. Others have suggested that love poetry masks the pursuit of power
at court, and it now seems clear that Wyatt’s metaphors serve a double purpose.
This courtly context has been filled in by historicist scholars, who have more
thoroughly explored the role-playing, submission to authority, and engaging in
intrigue required for success at Henry VIII’s court.
One
of Wyatt’s greatest poetic achievements is his adaptation of the sonnet form
into English. Although he has been criticized by modern scholars for imitating
the self-conscious conceits (extended comparisons) and oxymora (oppositions
such as “ice / fire”) of his sources, such language and sentiments would have
found an appreciative audience at the time. A clear example of this type of
sonnet is his translation of Petrarch’s Rime 134, “Pace non trovo e non ho da
far guerra.” Wyatt’s poem (no. 17) begins:
I
find no peace and all my war is done.
I
fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice.
I
fly above the wind yet can I not arise.
And
naught I have and all the world I seize on.
Each
succeeding line expresses a contradiction in the lover’s situation: he feels
both freedom and constraint; he wishes both life and death; he is both blind
and seeing, mute and complaining, loving another and hating himself, sorrowful
and joyful. The last line of this poem is typical of Wyatt in indicating that
such internal divisions derive from the beloved: his “delight is causer of this
strife.”
By
far the most widely held view is that when Wyatt’s poetry defies the beloved
and denounces the game of love, or rejects the devotion to love found in his
models, it approaches the anti-Petrarchism of the sort evident later in
Elizabethan poetry. His sonnet beginning “Was I never yet of your love grieved
/ Nor never shall while that my life doth last” (no. 12), a translation of
Petrarch’s Rime 82, ”Io non fu’ d’ amar voi lassato unqu’ anco,” declares that
“of hating myself that date is past” and ends with the lines that project the
speaker’s disdain:
If
otherwise ye seek for to fulfill
Your
disdain, ye err and shall not as ye ween,
And
ye yourself the cause thereof hath been.
If
this frustration of the beloved’s satisfaction seems vengeful and petty, one
must remember that it is bred by a system that seems arbitrary in its
delegation of power and responsibility but is in fact closed and dependent on
personal loyalties.
A
sonnet often cited as an example of Wyatt’s anti-Petrarchism is one for which
no source has yet been found,”Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever” (no.
31). As the first line indicates, the speaker has renounced love; he will
replace it with the philosophy of Seneca and Plato and adopt a more Stoic
attitude toward love. He decides to set no more store by such “trifles” and
bids love “Go trouble younger hearts.” The rejection of love as a waste of
one’s time and a sure means to suffer is complete in the couplet: “For hitherto
though I have lost all my time, / Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb.”
A similar theme is sounded in another poem whose source is likewise unknown,
”There was never file half so well filed” (no. 32). Here the speaker intends to
abandon the passion or “folly” of youthful love for the “reason” of maturity.
Expressing regret for wasted time and wasted trust, the poem ends by claiming
that one who deceives should not complain of being deceived in return but
should receive the “reward” of “little trust forever.” Both these poems are
more severely critical views of the artificiality and duplicity of courtly life
than the one to be found in a translation such as “I find no peace and all my
war is done”; and yet its juxtapositions of opposites may also indicate the
underlying insecurity of that life.
Some
of Wyatt’s sourceless poems that are not sonnets, such as “My lute, awake” (no.
109), also convey a markedly anti-Petrarchan attitude. The several copies of
this eight-stanza song, including those in the Stark and Folger fragments of
The Court of Venus, suggest the extent of its popularity. It begins with the
standard lover’s complaint but then abandons the courtly love game and
pronounces what amounts to a curse on the beloved:
Vengeance
shall fall on thy disdain
That
makest but game on earnest pain.
Think
not alone under the sun
Unquit to cause thy lovers plain
Although
my lute and I have done.
May
chance thee lie withered and old
The
winter nights that are so cold,
Plaining in vain unto the moon.
Thy
wishes then dare not be told
Care
then who list for I have done.
It
is unclear whether the poem’s bitter tone is a projection by Wyatt or by the
speaker; and although its message may be traditional, it is a stark reminder of
the importance of youth in Henry’s court. These poems have an edge to them that
jars with the very concept of courtly love poetry but that matches the tone of
traditional court satire from other sources, including earlier English poets.
This rejection or theme of lost beauty is carried to a misogynistic extreme in
another of Wyatt’s better-known poems, “Ye old mule” (no. 7). Here the faded
beauty is compared to a worn-out beast of burden: she can no longer choose her
lovers but must buy what is available.
In
these and later anti-Petrarchan poems in English, the lover’s pain is blamed on
the beloved’s artifice, guile, deceit, dissembling, fickleness, and
hard-heartedness; in Wyatt’s poems the lover’s constancy is repeatedly compared
to the beloved’s lack of faith. In “Thou hast no faith of him that hath none”
(no. 6), the lover, rather than begging for mercy or favor, is angered at
having been betrayed:
I
thought thee true without exception.
But
I perceive I lacked discretion
To
fashion faith to words mutable:
Thy
thought is too light and variable.
To
change so oft without occasion,
Thou
hast no faith.
Many
of Wyatt’s poems treat mutability as an undesirable characteristic for a lover,
a servant, a patron, or a king; changefulness or betrayal is his common theme.
It is not always clear, however, whether in these poems Wyatt speaks in his own
voice or creates various personae. Some of the poems project a great deal of
venom over personal and political events and seem to reveal an intelligent
courtier struggling to define himself against a political structure he both
criticizes and enjoys. Some scholars thus see Wyatt as a rebellious figure in a
corrupt and corrupting system; others see him as hopelessly caught in that
system and its dynastic concerns.
The
leading fashion of lyric poetry at the time was very much in the tradition of
European courtly love. This had begun in the twelfth century with the songs of
the troubadours in southern France. Their poetry represented a change in the
relationship between men and women. Women began to be idealised above the
status of a mere chattel of the male and, not least in poetry, became an object
of veneration and desire. However ardently wooed, the lady remained inviolably
– and hence, from the lover’s point of view, cruelly – chaste.
Attribution
The
Egerton Manuscript is an album containing Wyatt's personal selection of his
poems and translations which preserves 123 texts, partly in his handwriting.
Tottel's Miscellany (1557) is the Elizabethan anthology which created Wyatt's
posthumous reputation; it ascribes 96 poems to him, 33 not in the Egerton
Manuscript. These 156 poems can be ascribed to Wyatt with certainty on the
basis of objective evidence. Another 129 poems have been ascribed to him purely
on the basis of subjective editorial judgment. They are mostly derived from the
Devonshire Manuscript Collection and the Blage manuscript. Rebholz comments in
his preface to Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, "The problem of
determining which poems Wyatt wrote is as yet unsolved".. However, a
solution was already at hand and is now in place. Rebholz adopted the canon of
285 poems ascribed to Wyatt in his edition wholesale from the 1969 edition by
Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson. This was the third edition of Wyatt issued
by Muir (the first in 1949, the second in 1963), to each of which he added
scores of poems derived principally from the several hundred anonymous poems
included in the Devonshire Manuscript and then the newly discovered Blage
Manuscript – poems ascribed to Wyatt on no other basis than Muir’s own judgment
or whim. Already in the early 1970s Joost Daalder produced an edition (Oxford
1975) which attempts and partly succeeds in renovating the Wyatt canon to
accord with documentary facts, and also in that year Richard Harrier published
his magisterial philological study of the manuscript evidence, The Canon of Sir
Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Harvard University Press 1975). On the basis of a
meticulous scientific study of the documentary evidence Harrier establishes a
fact-based canon of Wyatt’s poems. Later studies by other scholars (Helen
Baron, 1989 and 1994, and Jason Powell, 2009) confirm the outlines and tenor of
Harrier’s analysis. On the basis of Harrier’s analysis, 101 of the 285 poems
included in Rebholz’s edition are demonstrated to be not Wyatt’s work.
Harrier's researches establish that another 33 poems from other sources (besides
The Egerton Manuscript and Tottel's) can be ascribed to Wyatt on the basis of
solid documentary evidence and plausible editorial judgment. A new edition of
Wyatt’s poetry reflecting these established facts is needed.
Assessment
Critical
opinions have varied widely regarding Wyatt's work. Eighteenth-century critic
Thomas Warton considered Wyatt "confessedly an inferior" to his
contemporary Henry Howard, and felt that Wyatt's "genius was of the moral
and didactic species" but deemed him "the first polished English
satirist". The 20th century saw an awakening in his popularity and a surge
in critical attention. His poems were found praiseworthy by numerous poets,
including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Yvor Winters, Basil
Bunting, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. C. S. Lewis called him "the
father of the Drab Age" (i.e. the unornate), from what he calls the
"golden" age of the 16th century. Patricia Thomson describes Wyatt as
"the Father of English Poetry".
Rumoured affair with Anne Boleyn
It
is possible that Wyatt became involved with Anne Boleyn before she married
Henry VIII. Wyatt’s service as High Marshal of Calais during 1528
to
1530 could have been his exile from court imposed by the King for his suspected
association with Anne Boleyn. What is certain is that in May
1536
Wyatt was arrested and sent to the Tower on suspicion of adultery with Anne at
the time she was arraigned on the charge of adultery with
five
other men, including her own brother. In that month Queen Anne and her five alleged
lovers were beheaded and the King married Jane Seymour. Wyatt, however, was
subsequently released without charge. He may have been within a hair’s breadth
of losing his head.
The
woman with whom Wyatt has been notoriously associated, however, is Anne Boleyn,
second queen of Henry VIII. Careful scholars acknowledge that although Wyatt’s
poetry is suggestive, the hard evidence for his role as Boleyn’s lover, or
scorned lover, is so bedeviled by legend and rumor as to affect even the most
cautious statements. One poem long considered to allude to Boleyn is the riddle
“What word is that that changeth not” (no. 54), for its solution (anna) is
penned above the poem in the Egerton manuscript (though not in Wyatt’s or the
scribe’s hand and, it seems, after the poem was copied there.) The third line
of the poem puns on the solution: “It is mine answer” (mine Anne, sir). There
is nothing, however, to indicate that the poem is about any specific Anne.
Although anecdotes have circulated of the rivalry between Wyatt and Henry, it
is very difficult and perhaps even impossible to gauge the extent of Wyatt’s
relationship with Boleyn, especially when Henry decided to divorce Catherine
and marry her. Henry’s doing so resulted in the Act of Supremacy (1534),
whereby he broke from the hegemony of the pope and the Catholic church and
proclaimed himself head of the church in England. This move had severe domestic
and international consequences, and in 1536 Wyatt was arrested a few days after
the arrests of Anne and five men alleged to have been her lovers.
Many
have conjectured that Wyatt fell in love with Anne Boleyn in the early- to
mid-1520s. Their acquaintance is certain, but it is not certain whether the two
shared a romantic relationship. George Gilfillan implies that Wyatt and Boleyn
were romantically involved. In his verse, Wyatt calls his mistress Anna and
might allude to events in her life:
And
now I follow the coals that be quent,
From
Dover to Calais against my mind
Gilfillan
argues that these lines could refer to Anne's trip to France in 1532 prior to
her marriage to Henry VIII and could imply that Wyatt was present, although his
name is not included among those who accompanied the royal party to France.
Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso List To Hunt" may also allude to Anne's relationship
with the King:
Graven
in diamonds with letters plain,
There
is written her fair neck round about,
"Noli
me tangere [Do not touch me], for Caesar's I am".
In
still plainer terms, Wyatt's late sonnet "If waker care" describes
his first "love" for "Brunette that set our country in a
roar"—presumably Boleyn.
Imprisonment on charges of adultery
No
poet represents the complexities of the British court of Henry VIII better than
Sir Thomas Wyatt. Skilled in international diplomacy, imprisoned without charges,
at ease jousting in tournaments, and adept at writing courtly poetry, Wyatt was
admired and envied by his contemporaries. The distinction between his public
and private life was not always clearly marked, for he spent his life at
various courts, where he wrote for a predominantly aristocratic audience who
shared common interests.
In
May 1536, Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London for allegedly committing
adultery with Anne Boleyn. He was released later that year thanks to his
friendship or his father's friendship with Thomas Cromwell, and he returned to
his duties. During his stay in the Tower, he may have witnessed Anne Boleyn's
execution (19 May 1536) from his cell window, as well as the executions of the
five men with whom she was accused of adultery; he wrote a poem which might
have been inspired by that experience.
Around
1537, Elizabeth Darrell was Thomas's mistress, a former maid of honour to
Catherine of Aragon. She bore Wyatt three sons.
By
1540, he was again in the king's favour, as he was granted the site and many of
the manorial estates of the dissolved Boxley Abbey. However, he was charged
once more with treason in 1541; the charges were again lifted, but only thanks
to the intervention of Queen Catherine Howard and on the condition of
reconciling with his wife. He was granted a full pardon and restored once again
to his duties as ambassador. After the execution of Catherine Howard, there
were rumours that Wyatt's wife Elizabeth was a possibility to become Henry
VIII's next wife despite the fact that she was still married to Wyatt. He
became ill not long after and died on 11 October 1542 around age 39. He is
buried in Sherborne Abbey.
Wyatt
was soon restored to favor, though, made sheriff of Kent, and asked to muster
men and to attend on Henry VIII. In November 1536 his father died, and in 1537
he once again undertook a diplomatic mission, this time as ambassador to the
court of Emperor Charles V. On his journey Wyatt wrote to his son, advising him
to emulate the exemplary life of Sir Henry Wyatt rather than Wyatt’s own: “And
of myself I may be a near example unto you of my folly and unthriftness that
hath as I well deserved brought me into a thousand dangers and hazards,
enmities, hatreds, prisonments, despites, and indignations.” He further
admonished his son to “make God and goodness” his “foundations.” An epigram in
Wyatt’s hand in the Egerton manuscript, “Of Carthage he, that worthy warrior,”
ends with a reference to Spain: “At Monzòn thus I restless rest in Spain” (no.
46). Henry VIII wished to prevent Charles V from forming what would amount to a
Catholic alliance with Francis I and thus to prevent a concerted attack on
England. Wyatt returned home in mid 1538; but when Charles and Francis, without
Henry, reached a separate accord at Nice, the danger of an attack against
England grew more grave. Wyatt’s poem in ottava rima, “Tagus, farewell” (no.
60), probably dates from this period. With this poem, as with the letter to his
son, scholars have tried to establish Wyatt’s character. Despite his sufferings
and despite his criticisms of the king and his court, he was a loyal servant to
Henry VIII. In the last lines the speaker looks forward to returning to London:
“My king, my country, alone for whom I live, / Of mighty love the wings for
this me give.”
Once
more ambassador to the emperor in 1539, Wyatt was to watch his movements
through France and to ascertain his intentions regarding England. But by mid
1540, after Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves threatened to create a
Protestant league, and in the event of growing distrust between Charles and
Francis, the danger of an attack against England was no longer imminent, so
Wyatt returned home. On 28 July his patron, Cromwell, was executed. Historians
attribute Cromwell’s fall in part to factional resistance to his foreign and
religious policies and in part to Henry’s severe dislike of Anne of Cleves. He
had married her sight unseen and claimed that descriptions of her beauty were
untrue (historian John Guy notes that he called her “the Flanders mare”). An
account found in the Spanish chronicle claims that at the execution Cromwell
asked Wyatt to pray for him but that Wyatt was so overcome by tears he could
not speak. Cromwell’s papers were investigated after his execution, and in 1541
Wyatt was arrested and imprisoned on the weight of old allegations that he had
met with the traitor Reginald Pole and had otherwise misrepresented the king’s
interests. Wyatt had been cleared of those charges in 1538, but Cromwell’s
death left him open to further attack from his court enemies.
A
poem addressed to Sir Francis Brian (no. 62) has traditionally been dated to
this last period of incarceration:
Sighs
are my food, drink are my tears;
Clinking
of fetters such music would crave.
Stink and close air away my life wears.
Innocency
is all the hope I have.
Besides
its graphic depiction of the speaker’s suffering and humiliation—“this wound
shall heal again / But yet, alas, the scar shall still remain”—this poem echoes
“Who list his wealth and ease retain” in its claim of the speaker’s innocence.
Wyatt had in 1536 suffered imprisonment in the Tower and, if scholarly dating
is correct, had written of it. “Sighs are my food,” though shorter, is more
bitter in tone than the earlier poem. When commanded to answer in writing the
accusations against him, Wyatt provided a declaration of his innocence. He
insisted that “for my part I declare affirmingly, at all proofs whereby a
Christian man may be tried, that in my life in crime toward the Majesty of the
King my master or any his issue, in deed, word, writing or wish I never
offended, I never committed malice or offense, or (as I have presently said
before you) done thing wherein my thought could accuse my conscience.” He then
prepared a lengthy, sharply worded defense of his actions, turning the case
against his accusers. At its end he declares: “Thus much I thought to say unto
you afore both God and man to discharge me, that I seem not to perish in my own
fault, for lack of declaring my truth; and afore God and all these men I charge
you with my innocent truth that in case, as God defend, you be guilty of mine
innocent blood, that you before his tribunal shall be inexcusable.” No evidence
of a trial survives; but the Privy Council later mentioned Wyatt’s confession and
pardon, both of which may have been wrought from this defense. At the time, the
pardon was believed to have been urged by Queen Catherine Howard and to have
rested on the removal of Elizabeth Darrell and the reinstatement of Wyatt’s
wife. In 1541 Wyatt made his will, providing for Darrell and their son,
Francis, and for his legitimate son, Thomas. There are indications that Wyatt
was restored to favor, for later in 1541 he received some of the awards of
Thomas Culpepper, who was charged with adultery with Queen Catherine Howard,
and made an advantageous exchange of property with Henry VIII. Early in 1542
Wyatt was probably member of Parliament for Kent, and it is possible that he
was to be made vice admiral of a fleet. On 11 October 1542, on his way to Falmouth
to meet and escort to London the Spanish envoy, he died of a fever at the home
of Sir John Horsey at Sherborne in Dorset.
Descendants and relatives
Long
after Wyatt's death, his only legitimate son Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger led a
thwarted rebellion against Henry's daughter Mary I, for which he was executed.
The rebellion's aim was to set on the throne the Protestant-minded Elizabeth,
the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Wyatt was an ancestor of Wallis Simpson, wife of
the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. Thomas Wyatt's great-grandson
was Virginia Colony governor Sir Francis Wyatt.
Sir
Thomas Wyatt, (born 1503, Allington, near Maidstone, Kent, Eng.—died Oct. 6,
1542, Sherborne, Dorset), poet who introduced the Italian sonnet and terza rima
verse form and the French rondeau into English literature.
Wyatt
was educated at St. John’s, Cambridge, and became a member of the court circle
of Henry VIII, where he seems to have been popular and admired for his
attractive appearance and skill in music, languages, and arms. Wyatt’s fortunes
at court fluctuated, however, and his association with the Boleyn family, as
well as a rumoured affair with Anne Boleyn, likely contributed to his first
arrest and imprisonment, in 1536; he was again arrested (1541) after the
execution of his ally Thomas Cromwell. During his career, he served a number of
diplomatic missions and was knighted in 1537, but his fame rests chiefly on his
poetic achievements, particularly his songs. His poems are unusual for their
time in carrying a strong sense of individuality. They consist of Certayne
Psalmes…drawen into Englyshe meter (1549); three satires, and Songes and
Sonettes, published in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557); and songs identified in
manuscript, published in 19th- and 20th-century editions.
When
not engaged in diplomatic duties abroad, there was not much for Wyatt to do at
court. It was a small community of probably not more than a hundred or so men
and women, with little to engage them except each other’s company. Apart from
jousting and other manly pursuits, poetry, music and (inevitably) flirtation
were pleasing distractions from an otherwise boring existence. With the
possible exception of flirting, Wyatt, it seems, was good at all of them.
It
must have been sometime during the 1520s that Wyatt discovered his poetic
vocation. As a good example of his early work, here is the beginning (in
modernised spelling) of Song XClX in the Penguin Complete Poems edited by R. A.
Rebholz (1978).
Heaven and earth and all that hear me plain
Do well perceive what care doth cause me cry,
Save you alone to whom I cry in vain,
‘Mercy, madam, alas, I die, I die!’ . . .
It is the last trouble that ye shall have
Of me, madam, to hear my last complaint.
Pity at least your poor unhappy slave
For
in despair, alas, I faint, I faint.
There
it all is, the helpless male suitor and the cruel, unyielding lady, stuck
forever in the convention like something petrified on Keats’s Grecian Urn. How
much of this was simply conforming with the courtly love tradition, and how
much was Wyatt’s own real experience, only his poetry can tell us.
Wyatt’s
foreign excursions and his gift for languages gave him an entrée to Italian
verse, especially that of Petrarch, whose innovative work was making the
running in European poetry at the time and with which Wyatt was much impressed.
It was largely Wyatt’s translations that introduced the poetry of Petrarch and
other Italians into England, notably though not exclusively in the sonnet form,
which greatly helped the development of English verse.
Lyric
poetry in mid-Tudor England was, of course, a much more enclosed and restricted
practice than it is today. These poems were invariably handwritten, considered
unsuitable for airing weighty subjects and not written for publication. For the
most part they were light, personal ditties circulated among fellow courtiers
with an element of open secrecy which added a certain piquancy to their
contents. They were usually written on single pieces of paper and passed, often
surreptitiously, from hand to hand.
Because
the court was a closed and intimate society in which everyone knew everyone
else, even if a poem was unsigned the author would almost certainly be
identified from its style and characteristics and, often, so would the lady
involved. It was all part of the courtly game; the lady was supposed never to
acquiesce and thus her ostensible chastity was preserved. It was a practice in
which thwarted desire might, at least outwardly, be relieved. Inevitably these
games would, at times, be merely a cover for the real thing.
We
owe our possession of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poems today partly to their
merit and partly to chance. They were clearly a cut very much above the
run-of-the-mill verses circulated at court, which explains why many of them
were copied into the commonplace books of courtiers, some of which have
survived to this day. In 1557 a publisher, Richard Tottel, produced a book
entitled Songs and Sonnetts containing many of Wyatt’s poems along with some by
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and others. This book, known as Tottel’s
Miscellany, was republished many times in Elizabeth’s reign and became widely
popular, ensuring that Wyatt’s work would not be forgotten.
But
Tottel, like others since, assumed that Wyatt’s ‘rough’ texture and scansion was
due to lack of skill and ventured to ‘improve’ and regularise
many
of his lines. Some scholars and critics, however, by examining Wyatt’s own
corrections, have demonstrated that he could have written his
lines
in regular metre if he’d wanted to, and indeed originally did so, but preferred
to express himself in less-regular rhythm the better to re-present
his
experience. It is not difficult to see that the irregular rhythm of the verse,
just as Wyatt wrote it, contributes significantly to the overall effect.
Two
poems by Wyatt should make clear the qualities that have elevated his work
above the average level of early Tudor verse. The first is Song XCVl in the
Rebholz Complete Poems.
Madam,
withouten many words
Once
I am sure ye will or no.
And
if ye will then leave your bourds
And
use your wit and show it s0
And
with a beck ye shall me call.
And
if of one that burneth alway
Ye
have any pity at all
Answer
him fair with yea or nay.
If
it be yea I shall be fain.
If it be nay friends as before.
Ye shall another man obtain
And I mine own and yours no more.
What
should strike the reader, even at first reading, is the direct, nononsense
attitude of the language. Can this really be a courtly love poem?
True,
in the second stanza he confesses to being always burning with love for the
lady and asks if she has any pity for him in that condition. But of the
‘plaining’ and dejection of the helpless lover there is no sign. He is
determined to be rid of all play-acting and pretence and, in their courtship,
to
give as good as he gets.
In
the first stanza he makes clear that neither he nor the lady should fob each
other off with unnecessary words. To hell with courtly love – he
wants
a plain answer, yes or no. To that end, will she please give up her jokes and
amusing prevarications (bourds) and make such intelligence as
she
has (wit) manifest (show it so). If she wants him (yea) she only has to beckon
and he’ll be hers. But if she doesn’t (nay), for heaven’s sake let her say so
plainly and let neither of them bear any umbrage in reverting to being ‘just
good friends.’
This
second poem is Ballade LXXX in the Rebholz Complete Poems.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better, but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking.
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
This
is Wyatt’s best-known poem and turns up almost unfailingly in anthologies of
English verse. It is also, by common consent, the best thing
he
ever wrote and is therefore worth considering in detail. Despite its
conversational flow, it is not a poem written spontaneously in the heat of the
moment.
It is a scrupulously crafted piece of work using the stanza known as rhyme
royal, a strict verse form first employed by Chaucer, consisting of seven
five-stressed lines with the line-end rhyme scheme ababbcc. Wyatt, however,
handles the pentameter line with some flexibility. All these qualities would
have been well-appreciated by Wyatt’s readers at court.
Subtle
though its threads of thought are, its main rational import is not hard to
grasp. Although the poem begins with the word ‘They’, the emphasis in the poem
is unmistakably on one woman and Wyatt may have used the plural to help
disguise the woman’s identity. She is represented in terms of a number of birds
or other creatures who in the past amorously sought his company but who now
shun him. At that time they came compliantly to do his bidding but have since
grown uncontrollable and hostile. They have seemingly forgotten how they once
even took risks to receive his favours. Now they are off in all directions in
search of ever-new liaisons.
With
a touch of defensive boastfulness, he is grateful to have known amorous
relationships ‘Twenty times better’ than this one. He remembers one particular
occasion when his then mistress (no doubt ‘With naked foot stalking in my
chamber’) wearing very little, probably after a court game of dressing up (‘a
pleasant guise’), and behaving very amorously, letting her gown fall from her
shoulders, taking him in her ‘arms long and small’ (slender), kissing him
tenderly and asking how he liked her erotic approaches. This is startlingly modern
and hardly fits the courtly love image in which the initiative was the male
prerogative.
So
unresponsive is she now, he or anyone reading his poem might think that he had
dreamed it all. He is, however, adamant that he was not dreaming; he ‘lay broad
waking’. He thinks it likely that she was turned off him ‘thorough my
gentleness’, that being because he lacked macho aggression (apropos Sylvia
Plath’s comment in her poem ‘Daddy’ ‘Every woman adores a fascist’). As a
gentleman of the court he has to abide by the rules of the game and, though not
without a touch of bitter sarcasm, accept her rejection of him and leave her
free ‘to use newfangleness’, that is, to pursue her promiscuous ways. But he is
smarting at what he believes has been her selfish and unfeeling treatment of
him and wonders what her just deserts might be. It is not known when the poem
was written but it is tempting to think that he might have had Anne Boleyn in
mind.
When
one considers the amount of experience Wyatt has managed to re-present in these
twenty-one lines within the demanding and highly wrought verse structure, which in itself
contributes to the tension in its rhythm and movement, one realizes what a high
quality achievement it is. What Wyatt’s poem really laments is the lack of interest
among women of his acquaintance in a loving and lasting partnership in life,
preferring the thrill of the chase in short-term flirtatious liaisons typical
of superficial life at court.
It
has been shown that some of Wyatt’s poems express themselves differently from
his standard courtly love pieces. In the former, though he is still rejected,
Wyatt had abandoned the courtly love tradition because he had found a truer and
better way of re-presenting his experience without it. In this he was reaching
forward to the seventeenth century and the greater achievements of Shakespeare
and the Metaphysical poets.
It
would not have taken Wyatt long to discover the many drawbacks of being one of
Tudor England’s diplomats. One reason why Henry VIII or his chief minister
would have had to pick only wealthy men for the job was that those appointed
had to meet their own expenses. Although they were there On His Majesty’s
Service, His Majesty was not willing to pick up the tab. After his father’s
death in 1537 Wyatt became one of the richest men in England but until then he
must often have needed, and presumably received, a hefty family bailout. Even
when vastly wealthy in his own right, Wyatt was notoriously poor at handling
money and often ran into financial difficulties. One can only suppose that he
went on serving the King in order to stay in the latter’s notoriously fickle
favour.
In
1526 Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheyney on a diplomatic mission to France and
acquitted himself well. In the following year he joined Sir John Russell on an
important mission to the papal court in Rome. After a few weeks there Russell
was injured in a fall, leaving Wyatt to conduct the mission alone. While
visiting some of Italy’s major cities Wyatt was taken prisoner by the
Imperialist forces of the Emperor Charles V. The huge ransom for his release
was eventually paid by Henry VIII who held Wyatt liable for the money. Russell
and Wyatt failed in their main mission to prevent Charles V’s conquests in
Italy. After his return to England Wyatt probably learned of the King’s serious
interest in Anne Boleyn.
Some
commentators have drawn attention to a small number of Wyatt’s poems which
could be construed as possible evidence of a liaison between him and Anne. But
this is to overlook the nature of courtly love poetry. There is no existing
documentary evidence that a sexual relationship did occur between Wyatt and
Anne Boleyn. Wyatt had several enemies at court and King Henry was capable of
believing anything, especially if it suited his purpose. Unless valid proof
ultimately comes to light, the question must remain unanswered.
If
Wyatt bore a charmed life at this time it probably had a lot to do with Thomas
Cromwell, who had become Henry VIII’s chief minister in 1534. Cromwell was a
very able lawyer who, under the King, had risen from virtually nothing to the
highest position in the land by doing everything possible to achieve what the
King wanted. To get round the problem of a uncooperative Pope, he devised the
plan to destroy Rome’s power in England by replacing it with the King’s
supremacy in the church. His establishment, in the King’s name, of the
sovereign national state brought about the English Reformation. Mentally
Cromwell was of the highest calibre, a gifted ‘fixer’, a man of wide reading
and culture and fluent in four languages. They didn’t come any smarter and he
soon recognized that Wyatt was a man of the same ilk. He moved Wyatt into his
orbit and
bestowed his protection upon him.
In
his role as England’s arch-Protestant reformer, Cromwell inevitably created
many enemies, among whom were the Roman Catholic Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of
Suffolk, the Earl of Southampton and Thomas Wriothesley, the latter a slimy and
embittered functionary who had no compunction in turning against his former
master, Cromwell. Henry VIII was notoriously ambivalent about the Protestant
Reformation. He supported it politically because it helped him to get round the
problem of the Pope’s opposition to his will, but he retained a soft spot for
the ‘old religion’ and this could be tapped into and exploited by those intent
on doing so. This factor was an important element in the alliances and enmities
of the court and, being a Cromwell man, there was no way that Wyatt could be
exempt from its effects.
In
1539 there were fears, encouraged by a renegade English cleric, Cardinal
Reginald Pole, that the emperor Charles V and Francis I of France were
intending to form an alliance in preparation for a joint invasion of England.
Wyatt was required to sound out the situation and report back. Meanwhile, after
the death of Henry’s Queen, Jane Seymour, Cromwell devised a scheme for
securing the support of German Protestant princes by inducing Henry VIII to
marry Anne of Cleves. But when King Henry met Anne he was displeased, not only
by her appearance but even more by her lack of grace, wit and sophistication.
Political considerations aside, he didn’t want a homely girl, he wanted a
captivating lover.
As
a matter of political expediency, Cromwell persuaded the King to press on with
his marriage to Anne of Cleves, which Henry reluctantly did in January 1540.
Small wonder, then, that when it became clear that Charles V and Francis I had
no intention of invading England, and therefore that German support was not
needed, Henry realised that he had been lumbered with a wife he despised for no
good reason. As always with Henry VIII, somebody had to pay, and who else but
Cromwell? Where Henry VIII was concerned, failure on his behalf was tantamount
to treason. The King had Cromwell arrested; the royal marriage to Anne of
Cleves was annulled on 12th July 1540 and on 28th July Cromwell was executed
without trial. On that same day the King married Catherine Howard.
With
Cromwell gone, Wyatt had lost his protector. Wyatt’s enemies, flushed with
anti-Reformation fever and personal animosity, closed in for what they expected
would be another kill. In January 1541 Wyatt was arrested, handcuffed, bound
and thrown into the Tower. His treatment this time was far harsher than his
previous incarceration. Edmund Bonner, soon to be Bishop of London and a
merciless scourge of Protestants and the Reformation, had in 1538 testified
that Wyatt was not only gravely immoral in his personal conduct and scornful in
his attitude to colleagues (i.e. Bonner) but had undertaken unauthorized
dealings with the traitor Cardinal Pole and valued his relationship with the
emperor Charles V more than his service to Henry VIII. These charges were now
resurrected, all of which, with further embellishment, amounted to treason.
Wyatt’s enemies must have felt they had a watertight case. Wyatt’s situation
was now dire. In response to the ‘indictment and evidence’ based on Bonner’s
accusations, Wyatt produced a defence document, the articulate comprehension
and thoroughness of which would have made his late master Thomas Cromwell
proud. He began by appealing to the judges to bear in mind what the law was
and, in examining it, to ‘listen to the words’. Here he was speaking as a poet
as well as a man of learning. He challenged the issues raised in the indictment
point by point and made out a case for dismissing those issues, not only on the
grounds of false testimony but also of its having been inspired by nothing more
than spiteful personal malice on the part of his accusers, particularly Edmund
Bonner.
It
was a document obviously prepared for a trial but there is no evidence that a
trial ever took place. Whether the King, or even the Queen, had read it is not
known. On 26th March 1541 the Privy Council issued a statement that the King,
out of his own mercy, and at the express plea of the Queen, Catherine Howard,
had pardoned Wyatt. His life had again hung by a thread and again the thread
had held. He was released in March 1541 with all his confiscated possessions
restored and soon resumed duties in the King’s service as if nothing had
happened. In February 1542 Queen Catherine and four of her associates were
executed on a charge of adultery and high treason. Five years later King Henry
was dead.
On
3rd October 1542 Wyatt was ordered by the King to make haste to Falmouth to
meet the Emperor Charles’s envoy and escort him to London. The autumn weather
was unusually warm and the hard ride caused Wyatt to become overheated. His
health had been troubling him for some time and, feeling ill, he stopped at
Clifton Maubank, the home of his friend Sir John Horsey at Sherborne in Dorset,
where he lapsed into a worsening fever. Unable to continue his journey he died,
aged only thirty-nine, in his host’s care on 11th October and is believed to be
buried in the Horsey family tomb at Sherborne.
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