Thomas Wyatt – England’s first sonneteer
Thomas Wyatt lived an extraordinary life. He was rumoured to be the alluring Anne Boleyn’s lover, contributed to foreign policy in a tumultuous time, was regularly imprisoned in the Tower of London and composed a rich body of tender songs and ballads. His greatest legacy, however, must be his importation of a form that is today synonymous with English poetry.
Born at Allington Castle, Kent in 1503, his father was a Privy Councillor to Henry VII and Henry VIII. Before attending St John’s College, Cambridge, he began his career at court as a minor functionary and returned to his royal servitude after leaving university. His first serious employment was to escort the Earl of Bedford to Rome where he was to plead with the Pope for an annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was besieging the Pope, Clement VII, at the time of Wyatt and Bedford’s arrival and so the two English emissaries eagerly assisted the father of their faith in his efforts against the Habsburg army. He and Bedford advised the Pope to seek allies in Venice and on the Pope’s behalf, Wyatt rode out of Rome and parlayed with the Venetians. It is alleged that he was captured by the Imperial army while travelling between Ferrara and Bologna; a journey he was conducting because he desired to see the major cities of Italy. After the intervention of powerful friends, he was released and went to Rome. He and Bedford finally left two days before its famous sacking on 6th May 1527.
He arrived back in England with a new knowledge of Italian literature, its styles and structures and soon translated the works of Petrarch for Queen Catherine. In an age of lascivious restraint and sensual tension, his charismatic demeanour and his record of exciting exploits abroad added to his reputation as a swashbuckling sex symbol. This inevitably attracted the attention of many women, giving him ample subject matter for his romantic verses.
In 1528, he was appointed High Marshal of Calais and between 1537 and 1540 served as ambassador to his old gaoler, Charles V. This position allowed him to travel through France, Spain and the Netherlands extensively. He was arrested in 1536 for supposedly being a lover to Henry’s next queen, the notorious Anne Boleyn yet survived the mass execution of her assumed paramours. In 1541, he was arrested again during the downfall of his patron, Thomas Cromwell, but soon received a pardon and was taken back into royal favour before suddenly dying of a fever in 1542 aged just 39.
Writing over sixty years before Shakespeare published his sonnets, Wyatt is responsible for the investment of the Petrarchan form into the English literary canon. He wanted to raise his native language to an artistic status traditionally reserved for Italian and French; he aimed to make English a natural means of sophisticated expression. His translations of Petrarch’s sonnets provided him with the necessary practice to perfect his own use of the arrangement in his mother tongue.
Petrarchan sonnets are fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, divided into four stanzas. The first eight lines are called an octave, while the following six are known as a sestet. The Petrarchan octave rhymes in a sequence of ABBA ABBA, whereas the sestet has no single Petrarchan rhyming precedent and was often ordered differently. Though Wyatt was the first to translate this particular kind of poetry into English, it was his original use of the sonnet in English that marks him out as an accomplished master.
Sonnets like ‘My heart I gave to thee, not to do it pain’ and ‘I find no peace, and all my war is done’ declare a sensitivity and wit we are accustomed to exclusively attributing to sincere and gifted poets. As the earliest user of the form, his oeuvre does not possess the satisfying conceits of Donne or the dizzying dissonance of symmetry and asymmetry, or of confusion and clarity that often shows in Shakespeare’s verse, but he does display an honest temper, equipped with an easy eloquence. These pre-existing qualities achieved a mellifluous elevation through his skilful use of the Italian lyrical complex and he offered succeeding generations a standard to surpass and an attainment to emulate.
Wyatt should always be credited with not only being the first to translate Petrarch’s sonnets into English but more importantly for using that version of verse to expand the artistic use of our language. His poetry is all that remains of a life well lived and his sonnets are the source of a sumptuous tradition.