Sir Thomas Wyatt (poet)

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-42, English poet and statesman, father of Sir Thomas Wyatt. He served in various capacities under Henry VIII and was knighted in 1536. It is generally agreed he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn before her marriage to the king. Greatly influenced by the works of the Italian love poets, Wyatt produced the first group of sonnets in English, modeled chiefly after Petrarch. Besides sonnets, he wrote lyrics, rondeaus, satires, and a paraphrase of the penitential psalms. None of his poems appeared in his lifetime. Ninety-six, however, were published in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), an important early anthology.

Bibliography: See his collected poems edited by K. Muir (1949).

Wyatt, Sir Thomas (c.1521–54). Wyatt's father was a poet, courtier, and diplomat, with extensive estates in Kent. Wyatt inherited in 1542. Outraged in 1554 at Mary's decision to marry Philip of Spain, on national and religious grounds, he joined in what was intended as a national rising but finished up confined to Kent. The rebels suffered a set‐back at Wrotham Heath but recovered the initiative when the duke of Norfolk led an ill‐judged advance. Wyatt moved towards London but Mary refused to flee. Repulsed at London bridge and the Tower, he crossed the Thames at Kingston, but found Ludgate closed and his forces deserting. He was executed on Tower Hill on 11 April.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–42), held various diplomatic posts in the service of Henry VIII in France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. His first visit to Italy in 1527 probably stimulated him to translate and imitate the poems of Petrach. In the same year he made a version of a Plutarch essay, based on Budé's French translation, The Quyete of Mynde, which he dedicated to the queen (Catherine of Aragon) whom the king was in the process of divorcing. He was certainly closely acquainted with Henry VIII's next bride, Anne Boleyn, before her marriage and, according to three 16th-cent. accounts, confessed to the king that she had been his mistress and was not fit to be a royal consort. Possibly this frankness explains why Wyatt was not executed, along with Anne's other lovers, in 1536, suffering only a period of imprisonment in the Tower. He subsequently became a sheriff of Kent, and in 1537–9 was ambassador to Charles V's court in Spain. He celebrated his departure from Spain in the epigram ‘Tagus, fare well’. In 1540 the tide of Wyatt's fortunes turned, with the execution of his friend and patron Thomas Cromwell, which is probably referred to in the sonnet (based on Petrarch) ‘The piller pearisht is whereto I Lent’. Wyatt himself was arrested, on charges of treason, in July 1541; though released two months later he never fully regained favour.

Wyatt's poetry is beset by problems in three main areas; authorship, biographical relevance, and artistic aims. Though the canon of Wyatt's poems is generally taken to include all the poems in the Egerton manuscript, even this cannot be proved with certainty. The authenticated poems and translations include sonnets, rondeaux, epigrams, satires, lute songs, and a version (based on Aretino) of the seven Penitential Psalms. Tottel in his Songes and Sonettes (1557) adapted many of Wyatt's poems to conventional iambic stress, including ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’. Critical estimates of Wyatt's poetry in the 20th cent. have varied widely C. S. Lewis called him ‘the father of the Drab Age’, but others have viewed him as a complex and original writer whose love poems anticipate those of Donne.