Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503-1542)
During Thomas Wyatt’s brief, 39-year lifespan, English men and women served two kings; three lord chancellors were executed; England waged war in four other lands (Scotland,Wales, Ireland, and France); and Henry VIII married five of his six wives, most of whom met sorry ends. Wyatt lived his entire adult life in service to the court, amidst the political intrigue and turmoil that accompanied the reign of King Henry VIII, and was twice imprisoned in the Tower of London. A few of his poems portray an idyllic life in the countryside away from the machinations of the king and his courtiers, yet they can carry a subtext about the ambient political disorder or the court’s political dramas. One of his most famous poems, “Whoso list to hunt,”based on a sonnet written by Petrarch (1304–74), is thought to express longing for Anne Boleyn, Henry’s future second wife.Wyatt wrote in many poetic forms, but he is best known for the artistry of his satires and songs and, along with Henry Howard,Earl of Surrey (1517–47), for introducing the Italian sonnet to England.
Son of Anne Skinner and Sir Henry Wyatt, Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503 into wealth and status at Allington Castle in Kent, England. His later career as a statesman followed that of his father,as did his political trials and tribulations. Henry Wyatt had been imprisoned and tortured for over two years by the court of King Richard III for his loyalty to the Tudors. When Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, the elder Wyatt was made a Privy Councillor, and he was later knighted by HenryVIII.
Although it is not certain, it appears that Thomas Wyatt entered St. John’s College, Cambridge at age twelve, and that he may have graduated by the age of sixteen. He was a man of many accomplishments, adept at music and poetry as well as politics, and he soon became a valued member of King Henry’s court. After serving in various minor positions, Wyatt began his diplomatic career in 1526 with missions to France, Rome, and Venice, where, we may surmise, he acquired his knowledge of Italian sonnets. (At about this time Wyatt became estranged from his wife, Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, whom he had married at a young age.) He was knighted in 1536 but soon afterward had his first falling out with King Henry and was imprisoned in the Tower o London. Wyatt might have been under suspicion of having had an affair with Anne Boleyn when she was still unmarried; Henry VIII had divorced Catherine of Aragon for Boleyn and thereby provoked England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. Although Anne and five (almost certainly wrongly accused) lovers were all executed, Wyatt was released after a month.
Most of Wyatt’s work to this point had been love poems, often containing themes of disappointment or unrequited love but rarely dark in tone. By contrast, poems written after his imprisonments can express bitterness.
Wyatt eventually regained both the king’s favor and his diplomatic status. Unfortunately, though,he lost a great ally upon the fall and execution of the statesman Thomas Cromwell, in 1540, and in1541 he was imprisoned again, this time on trumped-up charges of treason. Once again he was spared and was briefly in favor with the king. Wyatt succumbed to fever the next year, however, and died in Dorset in 1542.
Few of Wyatt’s poems were printed in his lifetime, but many appeared in Richard Tottel’s 1557
volume Songes and Sonettes (later to become known as Tottel’s Miscellany); a third of the volume is
made up of Wyatt’s work. Some years later, the Elizabethan critic George Puttenham summarized
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s importance to the English literary tradition in terms that remain broadly
accepted today: “[Wyatt and Surrey] travailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweet and stately
measures and stile of the Italian Poesie as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste
and Petrarch. They greatly pollished our rude & homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had been
before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English meetre and stile.”