Life in Henry VIII's court was never going to be a pushover. Thomas Wyatt found himself in a delicate situation early on when not only favoured by the first Queen Katherine but also, aware that Henry saw Anne Boleyn as his second wife, had to decide whether to explain to the king that he had had intimate relations with the new prospect before he married her or to gamble on him not finding out afterwards. Either way, Wyatt's head could conceivably become separated from his body. In the event, he decided to make Henry aware of the situation before it could become any more complicated but Henry wouldn't have it. She was not that sort of girl to a despot if that is what a despot wanted to believe. After a pause, he said she was 'of untainted virtue', although he did have her executed for adultery a little while later.
Anne's sister, Mary's, romantic adventures, we are told,
were notorious, even in France
as if that is some special category of notoriety. But Susan Brigden's account of Wyatt never threatens to descend into a BBC costume drama of flesh and libido. It is a thoroughly engaging examination of the poet's role as courtier, ambassador, spy and bigshot in the treacherous, shifting politics and 'theology' of C16th Europe.
It is not done precisely chronolgically as an account of the life. Wyatt's childhood is mentioned briefly on page 70, after chapters that set us off in search of the elusive 'real Wyatt'. While he condemns the flattery and duplicity of the court, his position is increasingly and forever compromised by the need for expediency and questions of friendship when it is difficult to trust anybody else, especially if they are to be interrogated with a view to their own execution of for evidence to justify one's own.
Wyatt's great strengths are his charm and erudition and so he advances in his career, firstly in London and then even more dangerously as ambassador to Spain, representing the English king who is heading towards schism with Rome, among Catholic kings, Emperors and, of course, the Pope.
Meanwhile, his poetry is full of restlessness and insecurity, fleeting and evasive, but also inventively trying new forms while owing a great debt to Petrarch. He refers time and time again to an unnamed 'they', as in his most famous poem, They flee from me, and perhaps wisely we are never told exactly who they are but we are offered some informed guesses.
Susan Brigden is a historian and the detail of the political machinations is impressive at this distance but her literary exegesis is excellent, too.
The book builds to a gripping climax as Wyatt prepares his own Defence when finally out of favour and in the Tower and his days look numbered. He produces a brilliant document, full of all the devices of rhetoric and argument, finally pointing out that,
Should the jury be fearful of freeing him, this would be tantamount to denying that their king was a prince of mercy and justice.
Which, in the circumstances, are fine words from someone whose integrity is beyond reproach but what else can you do. In a book about Wyatt, we are inevitably somehow on Wyatt's side but there is the ever present sub-text that this was an upwardly mobile society man on the make who remained suspiciously conservative in religion while working for probably the greatest tyrant that ever ruled these islands,
'I think I shoulde have more adoe with a great sorte in Inglande to purge my selffe of suspecte of a Lutherane than of a Papyste.'
He is not brought to trial but, ironically in a story full of paradoxes, dies not long after, catching a fever while riding to Cornwall, back as a trusted emissary of Henry. He has spent a lot of time dashing long distances on horses in his short but eventful life and dies in a way that befits him, having been clever enough to escape the demise that saw off so many of his peers, like Thomas Cromwell, for instance, whose grisly end may or may not have come about while Wyatt preserved himself.
Part of his acquittal involved a bargain in which he took back his first wife, Elizabeth Brooke, who he had never forgiven, and that had sad repercussions for Bess Darrell, his genuine love, whose precarious position is presumably saved by the provision he makes for her in his will, like 'Montacute Priory in Somerset, with all its manors and lands.'
But Wyatt's legacy, beyond the immensely dodgy dealings and maneouverings of his life in domestic and international politics, was a 'new poetry', attributed to him and Surrey.
It is not a book to be undertaken lightly but it is immensely rewarding and highly readable, the retention of Tho. Viat's orygynale spellinges enhancing the period atmosphere if sometimes needing some deciphering nearly 600 years later. I'll miss it now I've finished it.