Thomas Wyatt

Courtier, diplomat, poet

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – ) is a politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature. He was born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent, though the family was originally from Yorkshire. His family adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. His mother was Anne Skinner, and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a Privy Councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509.

You are a turbulent spirit.
We think of you as the greatest poet of your era, but your contemporaries don’t see you that way; every gentleman pens verse. To your peers, you are one of the King’s gang of young gentlemen, his regular tennis partner, more volatile and risk-taking than most, with apparently no sense of self-preservation. You get into debt. You are involved in an affray where a man is killed. You fall out with the powerful Duke of Suffolk, who will be trying to ruin you for the rest of your life. No one would be surprised if you were killed in a street fight or broke your neck in the tiltyard. You are in your late twenties when this story starts and it’s time you grew up.
Anne Boleyn is your damnation and Thomas Cromwell is your salvation.

Hilary Mantel, Notes on characters

The story so far…

Week 5: Make or Mar / Three-Card Trick

The first mention of the poet-courtier Thomas Wyatt. Mark Smeaton says everybody knows Wyatt “has had” Lady Anne.

Cromwell takes this information to the Italian merchant Antonio Bonvisi: why did Wyatt run off to Italy three years ago? Bonvisi:

It wasn’t diplomacy took him out of England. It was that she was torturing him. He no longer dared be in the same room with her. The same castle. The same country.

Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)

Was that Wyatt, at the farce at Hampton Court?

“Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you’d have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.”

Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)

“Be a father to him?” asks Henry Wyatt of Thomas Cromwell.

Wyatt is twenty-eight. He has women wherever he goes, and he goes everywhere. Italy mostly. “When all’s said, there is no braver boy than my boy.”

On New Year, Cromwell is up early, getting Wyatt and his friends out of jail. It is a year since Cromwell thought he was under arrest. Not religion, or treason, this time: “smashing windows” and “leaping over bonfires.”

‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus my Redeemer.’ Thomas Wyatt stands in the bright snowy light, rubbing his head. ‘Never again.’

Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)

Wyatt comes to see Cromwell to apologise about New Year’s. “I’m too old for such behaviour. But too young to lose my hair.”

He wants to tell Cromwell that he never slept with Anne Boleyn. He tells Cromwell: “that is Anne’s tactic, you see, she says yes, yes, yes, then she says no.” And she makes it sound like she is boasting that she says yes to others.

Cromwell says this is “her own sport” to torment men while she arranges her career. “You’ve been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.”

When Cromwell mentions the story about the lion, Wyatt says: “Nowadays… it doesn’t seem to me like a thing I would do. Stand still, in the open, and draw it on.” He pauses. “More like something you would do, Master Cromwell.”

Week 11: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 2) / Early Mass

Wyatt, who may still love Anne Boleyn, sings “Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?” with Henry, who definitely loves Anne. Then Wyatt sings Scaramella with Cromwell.

In Calais, Cromwell is with Wyatt. He suggests everyone has slept with Mary Shelton, including himself. And perhaps the king, although not recently. Later, Cromwell “wonders where Tom Wyatt is, and in what sort of trouble.”

Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)

Still in Calais: “Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris get drunk together in a low tavern. They swear eternal friendship. But their followers have a fight in the inn yard and roll each other in mud.”

Back in England, Anne can’t keep a secret. She’s the “hidden Queen of England” and “breaks free” to say in public, in front of Chapuys, that she may be pregnant. Wyatt is there: “Anne, hush, sweetheart.” He holds her fast.

Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye

Wyatt visits Cromwell. He can’t stay away from court and Anne. “Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.”

“Send me back to Italy,” he says to Cromwell. Wyatt feels sorry for himself. Anne doesn’t want him. The king doesn’t need him.

Week 28: Master of Phantoms (Part 4/5)

Everyone wants to know why Wyatt isn’t in the Tower with the rest of Anne’s reputed lovers. Cromwell asks to see him; he finds him at Whitehall, trying to make peace with Brandon. The safest place for him is the Tower; Cromwell promises him that he will come out alive.

Cromwell says, ‘He leaves us all behind.’ Wyatt is the cleverest man in England, for his words escape all meaning.

Cromwell visits him in the Tower; he is playing dice with himself, his worst self against his best self. ‘You can guess who wins.’ He asks Cromwell, where is the evidence to convict the other men? Cromwell tells him not to admit anything; he must provide evidence against Anne’s character, and afterwards, he promises everything will be destroyed.

Week 29: The Book of Phantoms (Part 5/5) / Spoils

The king tells Cromwell that Wyatt will not be killed. Richard wants to give him hope when he sees him looking down at the others dying. But he doesn’t know how.

Week 30: Wreckage (I)

Cromwell visits Wyatt in the Tower. He has been up late at night with paper and ink. But he has written nothing. He looks close to confessing something and Cromwell has to stop him. His evidence was not used in court and he, Cromwell, gives him the papers to destroy. Wyatt still doesn’t trust Thomas Cromwell.

Week 32: Salvage (Part 2/3)

In the Tower, Thomas Wyatt is reading Petrarch. He wants to be free and put on the road, but the mood at court is still carnivorous, and he, Cromwell, wants Wyatt to live. Wyatt says he is in love with Bess Darrell, Katherine’s former maid of honour, and she is carrying his child. He vows to follow Cromwell, even to the underworld.

In the distraction caused by Reginald Pole’s book, Wyatt is released from the Tower and sent down to Kent to keep his head low.

Week 41: The Image of the King (Part 1/2)

Wyatt comes to see him at the Rolls House. They discuss Mary’s marriage prospects and Cromwell’s too. He sends Wyatt to Europe to the court of the emperor. ‘The king needs a friend in Europe.’

The role needs honest force and honeyed words, and a certain willingness to obfuscate about the intentions of the King of England: and as Wyatt says that to him nothing is ever clear, and no truth is a single truth, he seems the man for the job.

Wyatt has not forgotten last summer. It abrades him. ‘You know much about women that is hidden from the rest of us,’ he tells Cromwell. ‘How to advance them. How to undo them.’

Week 44: Corpus Christi (Part 1/2)

Early June, 1538. Thomas Wyatt is back from his embassy at the imperial court, complaining about Spain, his king’s lack of trust, and Cromwell’s little man, Edmund Bonner. He’s seen Pole close enough to kill him. He, Cromwell, opens a gift of beavers from Danzig and bids Wyatt stay for supper.

‘I think it was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world. Such lies are written of me, in and out of cipher, that I think, this time Thomas Cromwell will show me the door. But you do not.’

Wyatt wants to see Bess Darrell. He talks of going down to Allington to settle his affairs.

He returns to Europe and reports back that France and the Emperor have made a truce. ‘The king has been left out of the cart’s arse,’ he tells Cromwell.