Sir Thomas Wyatt (Archive Episode)

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Hello, Simon here, the producer of In Our Time.

Since Melvin announced he stepped down from In Our Time after almost 27 years, the reaction's been overwhelming and heartwarming.

And thank you to everyone who's been in touch.

Before we return with new programs and a new presenter, we're taking the time to celebrate Melvin's outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive.

This week it's Sir Thomas Wyatt, first broadcast last year.

Here's Melvin.

Hello, Thomas Wyatt, 1503 to 1542, who has been called the greatest poet of his age, and he brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet.

He was an ambassador for Henry VIII, when being close to the king was the best protection, and also the greatest danger, especially as Wyatt was allegedly too close to Anne Boleyn.

And some of his poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh, conversational and intimate 500 years after he wrote them.

We meet to discuss Thomas Wyatt, ambassador and poet, Brian Cummings, 50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York, Susan Brigden, retired fellow at Lincoln College University of Oxford, and Laura Ashe, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford.

Laura, what was Thomas Wyatt's background and what was his route to the Tudor Court?

Well, Thomas's father, Henry Wyatt, was from Yorkshire originally and from quite humble beginnings, it seems, but he cannily backed the right horse during the Wars of the Roses in that he supported Henry Tudor and was imprisoned by Richard III as a result, apparently.

And Wyatt later wrote and let it to his son that he had been tortured under imprisonment.

And there was also a family legend, in fact, that during this harsh imprisonment, he'd been lacking food and had befriended a cat who had brought him pigeons to eat.

But this kind of family legend certainly grew up.

Certainly, he was a huge supporter of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and he was well rewarded for it.

He became a privy councillor and ultimately was an executor of the will of the king and was one of the councillors in charge of advising the young king when Henry VIII came to the throne.

So then his son, Thomas Wyatt, was in line to inherit some of his duties and duly did so.

And so Thomas became, he was given various smaller offices at court from 1516 onwards when he was only a teenager.

He'd gone to St.

John's College, Cambridge,

at the age of 12, but no one knows how long he stayed there.

Certainly he started making appearances at court early on.

And by the 1524, he was clerk of the King's Jewels, which was a really useful post that he'd inherited from his father.

He'd been married, Thomas, by 1520 and managed to have a son and a daughter in quick succession, but the marriage was clearly a disaster because he separated from his wife and tried not to live with her forevermore.

And then he was a person at court, close to Henry, taking part in the sort of tournaments and pageantry of the court and writing poetry at court when that was a chief activity of the place.

There's a connection between himself and Anne Boleyn which plays right through his life.

What was that?

Well the families were distantly related and they both had family seats in Kent but more likely it was just that they met in court and they were part of a circle, an artistic circle, and was conspicuously cultured in comparison with the rest of the court because as a teenager she'd gone to the court of Margaret of Austria as a lady-in-waiting and then to the court of the King of France And by the time she came back, she was clearly very different from everyone else at court and appealed to Wyatt just as he presumably appealed to her.

What evidence do you find of the, as it were, more sexual rumours of the contact between them?

Anything?

Well, this is the question to which no one will have an answer.

There are certainly poems that he must have written to her and about her.

No one doubts that.

The question of what they may have done in private at any point is almost moot.

Um Anne was certainly a canny person by the time they met he was already married, and so there was no profit for her in pursuing an association with Wyatt.

And she may well have pursued a long flirtation because there may well have been real genuine feeling.

And certainly his poems seem to express genuine feeling and a feeling of genuine loss and betrayal, but then sincerity is also a poetic effect.

Yes.

And it was quite dangerous, wasn't it?

Because Henry VIII was, to put it mildly, a jealous, possessive, difficult, irascible, unexpected figure.

So you had to watch his step.

Absolutely, yes.

I mean,

among the things we don't know, there are several accounts that claim, not contemporary accounts, but accounts that claim that Wyatt tried to warn Henry off Anne Boleyn and that Henry, in variations, said, Thank you very much, but that never happened and you will never speak of it again.

And we just don't know.

We don't know how this worked out.

Well, let's rest.

We don't know.

That'll be fine.

Brian Cummings,

what was English, I know this is a big one, there you go, what was English poetry like in the main when about this time we're talking about when Thomas Wyatt is making an impression at court?

Well there's an enormously rich medieval tradition of poetry and lots of it Wyatt doesn't show a great deal of interest in.

So

Arthurian literature that meant a lot to Edmund Spencer later in the century doesn't really seem to have meant anything to Wyatt particularly.

The kind of chivalric poetry, even though chivalry was extremely popular in Henry VIII's court, it's not as if he shows the sort of interest that Sir Philip Sidney showed later in the 16th century in poems of knights and ladies.

And religious poetry, which is extremely rich.

Again, although Wyatt is extremely interested in religion, he doesn't seem to be interested in religious poetry that had been written before.

But the big exception is Chaucer.

And why not?

Chaucer was certainly my favourite, first favourite English poet.

And I think there are probably similarities in the sorts of things

that Wyatt would have liked about Chaucer,

the voice, or rather the many voices, he's a multi-vocal poet, the sense of humour.

Clearly, Wyatt loves laughter.

Doesn't write very funnily, but he loves laughter.

And also, I think finally, Chaucer's extreme sensitivity, his beautiful sense of emotion.

So,

Chaucer's a very varied writer.

We mainly know him now for the the Canterbury Tales perhaps, for the not just for the the stories that they tell, but for the mode of storytelling, for the idea of storytelling that's embodied in them.

And that was very important to followers of Chaucer in the 15th century, like John Lydgate.

But what Wyatt's interested in is probably more Troilus and Crusader, which is the

great Trojan epic that Chaucer wrote, which is not Homeric and not Virgilian, instead creates a philosophical poem out of a love story about falling in love and then falling out of love, or something like that.

And that certainly seems to have touched a nerve with Wyatt.

And then also,

in a way, the most forgotten part of Chaucer's oeuvre, which is his French lyrics.

So he wrote quite a lot of rondeau and ballad,

and Wyatt writes in those forms repeatedly, repeatedly, whilst perhaps changing them as well.

So why do you call him the greatest poet of the age, Wyatt?

That's what interests me.

Something that's special about Wyatt, immediately, is conversationality and colloquiality.

I'll take a couple of examples of colloquial style from Lately From Me.

So, Dear Heart, how like you this, or I would fain know what she hath deserved,

where part of it is, and this is another thing that's very special about Wyatt, is that he uses new verse forms.

He's very interested in verse form, he's very interested in meter.

He uses tetsarima and ottavarima from Italian, which are, from an English point of view, quite esoteric.

But what he chooses about them is that these are verse forms that allow you to be conversational.

You can only do it if you have a very good ear and a very good ear for how metre works, and therefore for how metre doesn't work.

So the great comparison in his own period, Henry Howard, who's Earl of Surrey, is a very, very fine poet.

But from a point of view of an ear for poetry, in comparison to Wyatt, it sounds very dull.

What Wyatt has is an an ability to mix up rhythm in a way that I suppose Shakespeare becomes famous for later, particularly the way that syllabic verse is transferred into stressed verse, in the way that you mix stresses, even the numbers of stresses.

But he has a real facility for mixing up stress in the way that people do when they're in conversation.

And I suppose that then links to the thing that you mentioned in your introduction, which is this sense of intimacy.

You're talking about a culture of intimacy in which being friends friends with somebody, being close to somebody, is extremely important.

Thank you very much, Susan.

Susan Brigdon.

We're talking about Wyatt now

has become an ambassador.

How did he become an ambassador, and what sort of ambassador was he?

Ah, well, he becomes an ambassador because he's the most brilliant young man in England, Wyatt A.

Witt, a man, you know, a young man with a mind to mark and remember, it's said.

So he's chosen to go to the great courts of Europe.

He goes to, in 1526 and 7, he goes goes to France and he goes to the court of Rome, which is of course the greatest court there is.

And he has this sort of head-turning time.

He's in Venice, he's in Ferrara, and he's being trained as an ambassador.

I'm intrigued by the fact that he was in one of his many incarcerations who was in an Italian jail with Machiavelli and Guicciadini, two of the great indifferent ways describers of the Renaissance.

So this is a moment of terror for Wyatt.

So great glory.

He's been sent on an embassy to Rome.

England's too hot for him, actually, so he's trying to, he's getting away for a while.

But he's going, he wants to see the country, all these places he's heard about, Florence, Venice.

And so he's riding off by himself.

He's captured by, and this is terrifying, he's captured by the Lansknechts who are on their way down to sack either Florence or Rome, no one knows which.

He's captured and he's held in the camp of

mutinous German soldiers and he's ransomed by Gonsaga princelings and he's then sent back to the camp of the Papal army where Machiavelli and Guicciadini are talking about the chaos that Italy has fallen into.

And in Guicciadini's correspondence

he says the young Englishman arrived here last night.

So there he is.

What they talked about, if they did, we can't know.

But it's one of those amazing moments in Wyatt's life.

But in 1537, he's sent to the Imperial Court, the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of Spain, Charles V.

Now, this is a great honour, but he's also, I mean, it's also a terrible responsibility, of course, and he feels that the fear that something will go wrong and it's his fault, and he knows how dangerous his king is, and that he's left enemies behind in England.

And his diplomacy has changed because diplomacy in the age of Luther is going to be different from diplomacy in the age of Machiavelli.

He finds himself as the ambassador of a schismatic king of England at the court of the most Catholic king of Spain.

And the questions are: will he be safe from the Spanish Inquisition?

Wyatt, at this point, is found in language that isn't used of any other ambassador.

He's described as pazzorello, as mad, disparatissimo, very desperate, molto malcontento, pursuing this sort of lone-wolf diplomacy in the knowledge that what he's doing may displease his king, and it will certainly displease the emperor.

Thank you.

Laura, let's turn to one of his finest poems.

What would you choose that to be?

For me, it would have to be They Flee From Me.

Can you give us a bit more than the first half of the first line?

May I give you the whole poem?

They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek, with naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, that now are wild, and do not remember that sometime they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand, and now they range, busily seeking with a continual change.

Thank be fortune, it hath been otherwise twenty times better, but once in special,

in thin array, after a pleasant guise, when her loose gown from her shoulder did fall, and she me caught in her arms long and small, therewithal sweetly did me kiss, and softly said, Dear heart, how like you this

It was no dream, I lay broad waking, but all is turned thorough my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking,

and I have leave to go of her goodness, and she also to use new fangledness.

But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Brian, would you like to comment on that?

What I would want to talk about is irony and irony in relation to truthfulness.

And this seems to go absolutely to the heart of the Henrician court, in one sense, and how you speak within a court society where everybody's words are so closely observed by other people where there is a kind of premium placed on sincerity within that and yet everybody knows that sincerity is itself something which is fabricated and that you can't trust you can't trust somebody else's sincerity you perhaps can't trust your own sincerity so i think the the poem work that's one of the reasons why the poem works so well in different ages because that kind of circumstance of how you are seen versus how you feel you are yourself versus how you feel other people seen to you is something which is which is put under the under the question.

Laura.

What I think White is doing here, which is so revolutionary, is he is breaking into a set genre, a genre that Petrarch promulgated as classic.

And in the first stanza he appears to be talking about a standard line.

He was a powerful man who many loved and many pursued and now they've abandoned him.

But already there's a sense of ambivalence about this because they were stalking him.

And he can say they put themselves in danger, but clearly they were free.

They've now fled.

They've left him.

And then it all turns out to be nonsense because in the second stanza, it's not about his many loves at all.

It's about this one love, this one woman who stole his heart completely.

And something completely revolutionary happens, which is she speaks.

She speaks directly through the poem to us.

We hear her.

And we don't know the tenor of her words.

We don't know if they were teasing, or loving, or scared, or warm, but then neither does he anymore because it's in the past.

And one of the questions that Wyatt is always asking is: if someone loved you once and loves you no more, then what is truth?

You know, who are you?

Who are they?

What did they mean?

What does any of it mean?

And so then we come to our final stanza and the pain expressed in since that I so kindly am so, you know, the double meaning of kindly, it's both sarcastic and it also means according to nature.

Perhaps according to women's nature, maybe they're fickle, or perhaps according to his nature, maybe he should be betrayed.

And the lack of force, the gentleness, and yet also the pleading in the last line, I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Is that the plea of the betrayed lover?

You know, was this right?

Is there a punishment here?

But he still loves her.

And then there's all the technique of it, the way that he establishes iambic pentameter in the first line and then changes it, toys with it.

He cuts short lines to make you pause.

Therewithal, sweetly did me kiss is two beats short.

You have to pause on the kiss.

You can't not.

It's an absolute masterpiece.

Brian.

I mean what's, I suppose, what people feel about Wyatt, what I say about Wyatt, is that he does have this modern voice.

And I mean, my private joke about Lafely From Me that sometimes made me sick, it's Ezra Pound Pound wrote it, that he translated something from Provençal or from Italian, that he got some artist friend to imitate Wyatt's hand in

the British Museum, and then, you know, sent it along to T.S.

Eliot, and they made a sort of sniggering joke about it, because the poem does feel as if it could have been written last week.

Thank you.

Humanism was taking hold at that time, or had taken hold, notably promulgated by Erasmus, but taken up by in early days by Luther, and on and on it went.

What bearing did that have on Wyatt and his work?

Well, I suppose, first of all, we probably should just acknowledge that there's a time lag here.

So, Petrarch is a humanist, but Petrarch is before Chaucer.

Okay, Italy, the sun shines better, and the coffee is sharper, and you know, maybe people just think more quickly, and so they're about 200 years ahead.

But the rest of Europe took a long time to acquire the kind of sophistication of humanist culture that existed in Italy.

And then, England, I suppose you could say symbolically, humanism begins in 1499 when when Erasmus came to England and met Thomas More and then the pair of them went to the court in Greenwich and were presented to Henry VII and to the very young Henry VIII.

In terms of understanding what humanism is, I mean on the one hand it's an enormously important educational theory, how you learn life through various kinds of literary methods and you know the fruits of that are things which turn the 16th century into something different from before, particularly because it's also a way of life, if you like.

So Erasmus is famous for his literary methods, he's famous for his interpretation of the Bible.

But the book everybody wanted to own by Erasmus is The Adages, which is a very peculiar book.

And it's a kind of a key to the mystery of the classics.

But it also plays with the idea of meaning in such a way that you acquire it, as it were, for yourself.

So this is a book that you can see why has got on his shelf.

You can see that he's using it, applied to the street life of everyday Tudor life, as it were.

And in that, he takes proverbs, and Erasmus is using them as a way of trying to interpret where meaning comes from, how metaphorical meaning is, how figurative it is, how it plays with your mind, as well as you playing with it.

And it's in that sense, I think, that Wyatt is a humanist as well.

He wants to be that kind of person, that kind of intelligence.

Thank you.

Susan, he was sent to the Tower in 1536.

What was that for and how dangerous was it?

Well, it was completely terrifying because there's a new law, the law of words, be a strange word as the world as words are made treason.

But now,

for saying that Henry was a tyrant, a usurper, a schismatic, this would bring the death penalty, not by compassing rebellion, but by saying these things.

On the 1st of May 1536, Anne Boleyn and Wyatt's friends from the King's Privy Chamber are taken suddenly at the May Day tournament and they're put in the tower.

And a week later, Wyatt follows.

And Wyatt has information about them, and they have information about him, and they're kept secret apart.

So he's got no idea what's being said about him.

And here is man who holds to the idea of friendship, but now he's being made to betray his friends.

He's freed after ten days or so, probably by the agency of Thomas Cromwell and by some deal.

But he's in the Tower, and this marks him.

It marks his poetry, too.

There's a verse in

the Bell Tower.

He's in the bell tower of the Tower of London.

The bell tower showed me such sight that in my head sticks day and night, for there did I see out of a grate that for all favour, glory, and might, that yet, circa regna tonat, it thunders around thrones.

This is a moment of terror.

Nora, you want to come in?

Yes, just on that poem, that it is an astonishing moment in another verse in the same poem when he says, These bloody days have broken my heart.

Yes.

My lust, my youth, lust then depart.

It was was a titra court, wasn't he?

I mean, two syllables could be the end of you.

Yes, precisely.

And what's striking is that even in this poem, which is so vividly about the horror of this and a turning point of his life, even so, it's still euphemistic.

He doesn't tell us what he saw.

And the refrain of the poem, as you said, Circa Regna Turnat, is a classical refrain.

It's from Seneca's Phaedra.

You know, this is using the general idea of learnedness to express what purports to be an abstract idea, but in the same poem is clearly not an abstract idea.

His heart is broken.

But in this great tragedy, the Queen dies, her brother Rochford dies, Norris dies, Brereton, Western.

And they die for...

Of course, if they really have had sexual relations with the Queen, this would taint the succession.

But it's doubtful that they had.

What they did do, flirting with the Queen in the game of courtly love is to say things which were dangerous.

So when the queen says to Norris, you look for dead men's shoes, that's to compass the death of the king.

Or, if anything happened to the king, you would look to have me.

This is to dare to talk about the king's death.

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Do you think that the diplomacy, the being in prison after prison, do you think that rather interfered with this poetry?

I don't know.

I think you could almost put it the other way around.

I mean, I think there was a really interesting question about the atmosphere of treachery and treason around Henry VIII's court.

The English are stupidly obsessed with Henry VIII and present him in a way as some kind of jolly old devil who had six wives.

Well, you know, we're talking about somebody who is a serious psychopath at some level, and he certainly becomes a tyrant at some level.

And Wyatt's ability to write within that is an interesting thing.

I mean, I, like I'm sure all of us have, have just been to the fantastic Holbein exhibition at

what's now the King's Gallery, where, you know, in the Royal Family, there's this incredible collection of Holbein's drawings from life of people at the Tudor Court.

And to borrow a phrase from a previous Conservative Prime Minister,

they're all bastards, except perhaps for Thomas Wyatt, who at the same time, he's not a cheery bloke, he's looking sidelong to one side, he's clearly worried, but he's working out a way of being in that court where it is almost impossible to be.

So, you know, Richard Southell, you know, just nearby him in the exhibition, you know, he just betrays everybody that's going

and sticks up for the old religion, but then profiteers off the new religion.

And even comes up with a witty Latin

motto for himself in doing so, sap it qui sustanet.

You know, basically, if you know how to look after yourself,

you can do anything in life.

I'm very roughly translating the Latin there.

Wyatt is not

clearly absolutely not naïve, and he's not an innocent.

But he does have a sophisticated understanding that in this world where privacy and the public are so often confused with each other, that you still have to maintain some kind of line.

And that's a rebuke to just about everybody else who's operating in the Tudor Court.

He's also incredibly brave.

In one of his letters to Henry, while he's at the Spanish court, the Holy Roman Emperor's court, he recounts a conversation he had with the emperor in which the emperor, he says, said to him, kings are not kings of tongues,

and if men give cause to be spoken of, they will be spoken of.

That's an incredibly brave thing to write back to the king because it's an available overt criticism of the Treason Act of 1534, the idea that you can rule people's speech.

And he just puts it in there, and I think that's astonishingly brave.

Thank you.

Susan, Susan Brigham, Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540.

He does to some extent been Wyatt's protector.

Did Wyatt feel defenceless without him?

You know, this is one of the great heartbreaks, really, for Wyatt, I think, that Thomas Cromwell and he had been friends in the sternest sense, and Cromwell had been Wyatt's protector, certainly his patron.

It's Cromwell's agency that frees Wyatt from the Tower in 1536.

And Cromwell writes letters advising Wyatt all the time that he's in embassy.

But in 1540, Cromwell's enemies are poised to strike against him.

On the 10th of June, 1540, he's arrested.

He's accused of treason and

it's not clear whether he'll die as a traitor or a heretic.

Now, in this fall, there's also foreign politics involved, as there always is for kings, because they're most interested in what other kings think of them more than what their people think of them.

And so, on the very day that Cromwell's arrested, Wyatt is given an enormous grant of land.

He becomes one of the richest men in England.

So,

there's more than coincidence there, and it may be that Wyatt had had to bring evidence against Cromwell as part of a new.

Yeah, he betrays his protector.

And in what's called the elegy for Cromwell, the poem, The Pillar Perished Is Whereto I Lent the Strongest Day of Mine Unquiet Mind,

we find the I, the speaker in the poem, talking about I myself, myself all way to hate.

Till dreadful death doth end my doleful state.

Yes.

So it looks as if

Wyatt has been collusive in bringing down Cromwell, but what else could he do with this, you know, with the king so minotary and so suspicious?

Laura, do you want to come in here?

Yeah, just it is an astonishing path that Wyatt tries to walk.

He's obsessed with the idea of truth and honesty, and of course, that obsession is bound to be double-edged, as Brian has been saying, that it's an obsession that everyone is supposed to have.

He writes to his son, honesty, honesty is all.

He said, if you will seem honest, be honest, else seem as you are.

And in his epistolary satires, which are all about courts are a terrible and corrupt place, and you shouldn't want to be there, I don't want to be there, he has lines like, I cannot with my words complain and moan and suffer naught, nor smart without complaint, nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone, which is a direct lie because he spent his life turning the word that from his mouth was gone.

And very specifically,

he was, once Cromwell had fallen, letters turned up in Cromwell's papers in which a man called Edmund Bonner had accused Wyatt of treason, saying that he had encompassed the king's death by words.

And what he was supposed to have said regarding the agreement made between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France was that the king would fall out of the cart's arse on this one.

And Bonner claimed that this expressed that he thought that the king would be taken to execution in a cart and that therefore this was the king's death.

And Wyatt painstakingly explained in a long letter, no, this is a proverb.

It means when a thing is negligently taken heed of and therefore falls out of consideration and is forgotten.

And besides, I doubt I said it because I wouldn't have been rude.

And

he was released from the tower.

Who knows whether it was because of this exoneration.

But this constant line of danger is absolutely petrifying.

Brian, you want to come in?

Yeah, it's about that moment when Bonner tries to accuse Wyatt very directly and tries to extract very direct meaning from a phrase, which, of course, Wyatt then says is a proverb.

But it's also Wyatt says, well, but you're trying to make it out that I'm a Catholic here, whereas everybody's saying I'm a Lutheran.

How can that be?

And I think he's also probably getting at Bonner there.

Bonner himself is a famous turncoat, you know,

who becomes a bishop, but who can play any side you like,

as long as it looks as if the odds are good on his side.

I think Wyatt is both

able to see

that two-facedness, if you like, but he also can see the danger of occupying either side.

So one of the things I think that's most interesting about him is his ventriloquism.

He's able to occupy the voice of another person.

That's something, again, that he can get from Chaucer, who can do that so, so easily.

And it comes out even in his religious work.

So

in his

version of the penitential psalm, when he's thinking it, when he's talking about penitence, of course, the great thing about quoting from the Bible is that nobody can actually execute you for that.

But nonetheless, there is a real question about exactly in what way you are inhabiting that.

So when he says, Oh, happy are they that have forgiveness, God, of their offence, not by their penitence as by merit, which recompenseth not, he is both paraphrasing the Psalms and getting quite close to saying more or less exactly what Luther is saying.

But he can get away with it because, well it's the Psalms.

Can you just tell the listeners how this is working its way through if it is in his poetry and just give us two or three lines if it is at how that's happening?

The question then is how can you be true to yourself in terms of everything you say only means what the king says it says.

So I think there's an interesting intersection with religious faith.

In the paraphrase of the penitential Psalms, there's a moment when he pictures David thinking, you know, what have I been saying?

Who's said this?

I, sinner, I.

And he says, that God's goodness may within my song entreat, let me again consider and repeat.

And so he doth, but not express by word.

But in his heart he turneth and poiseth each word which est his lips did forth afford.

And I think that's an astonishing moment of if you could just keep your words in your heart, only in silence do you actually own your own meaning.

And of course, God transcendently can see the words in your heart, whereas words you've spoken are open to the king's interpretation, they're open to anyone's interpretation and could be construed in any way.

Susan, Susan Brigham, what were the circumstances of his final months?

Well, he's in the tower again in January 1541 and

he's really not thought likely to survive this time.

And in this in the tower in January 1541, he writes this extraordinary defence of himself.

Anyway, he does survive, probably because Henry's new queen, Catherine, has interceded for him.

But he then goes into a sort of rural reclusion for a while.

And I think it's probably then that he's paraphrasing the penitential psalms.

But he's finally caught.

He's like a moth to the flame and still wanting court life.

And he's called then for what turns out to be one last service.

He rides furiously down to Devon to collect some foreign diplomat and catches a fever and dies.

So he dies in the Royal Service.

Laura, his poetry in his day is regarded by his peers highly.

Yes.

What's happened since to his reputation?

Immediately after his death, Surrey, his younger compatriot and fellow poet, did a massive job of attempting to praise him and establish him as a figure of English poetry.

So Surrey says he was a hand that taught what might be said in rhyme that reft Chaucer the glory of his wit.

So for Surrey he's establishing Wyatt as, you know, he's stolen the crown from Chaucer and of course now Wyatt is dead there's very much a vacancy

and so there's a lot of fashioning of poetry as something which he also says he wrote to Britain's gain.

So this is Surrey fashioning him as a poet of Britain, of the nation, in a very studied way.

And both a lot of Surrey's and a lot of Wyatt's poems were published in 1557 in a collection now known as Tottle's Miscellany.

Publisher Richard Tottle, who had clearly got access to some of the manuscripts in which these poems had circulated, only in manuscript up until then.

And this was fabulously popular.

It went through two editions in a year and a further seven editions before the end of the century.

But what Tottle did do, unfortunately, was he was obsessed with regular metre and scansion.

So he just freely changed Wyatt's poems to make them scan evenly and as a result, changed the meaning of them and made them less good.

And nonetheless, thoroughly successful.

In 1589,

George Putnam published The Art of English Poesy, in which he praised Wyatt and Surrey as a pair, as the two lanterns, the two chief lanterns of light of English poetry.

And this then had established them fully when Chaucer seemed so far in the background by then, established them as at the beginning of a new kind of English poetry, which was taken up in, you know, the sonneteering of Sydney and of Spencer and then of Shakespeare.

Would you like to come in here?

Yeah, I think that the Wyatt-Surrey comparison then somehow takes over the field.

And for a long time, Surrey tended to get the benefit.

In the 18th and 19th century, Surrey was much more admired than Wyatt.

And I think Wyatt's just one of those interesting cases of a poet in some ways who comes into his own in the 20th century.

There are quite a few Renaissance poets of that kind.

Dunn is the most obvious other example.

And

there's something in the inflection, something in the contrariness, something in the difficulty which appeals in the 20th century in a way that doesn't appeal in the 18th and 19th centuries.

And I think that's what's partly given Wyatt this new vogue.

And for Wyatt,

Laura talked about Tottle smoothing Wyatt.

Well, Wyatt hated smoothness.

Wyatt wanted roughness.

He wanted, and Puttenham recognised that,

that Wyatt's an experimenter, he wants to break the rhythms.

I mean, I think, you know, here we also get to the kind of the Shakespeare myth and the Shakespeare kind of domination.

There's an interesting relation between Wyatt and Shakespeare on this, which is that, which is around iambic pentameter and around how verse relates to metre.

And there's a kind of you know, there's so much rubbish which has been written about the iambic pentameter.

And so many people try to make Shakespeare sound, actually they make him sound terrible because they're trying to regularize what you know what he says into what they think iambic pentameter should be like actually in Shakespeare there's lots of missed stresses as you were saying you can have four stress lines you can have even three stress lines that should have five you sometimes get hypermetric six stress lines when you're not quite expecting them actually Wyatt does that a lot and I think that's one of the ways in which Wyatt is

prefiguring something about the mobility and flexibility that really great poetry has

against the kind of thing that is often taught as good poetry, which is de-dum-di-dum-di-dum-didum, and it's got to rhyme.

So

there's a real, in a way, there's a real conflict about what poetry really should be like here.

Yes, but Wyatt, you know, he does break the mould, and there's a point where we find Wyatt saying, well,

in a poem, me list no more to sing of love, nor no such thing.

Or whether he's just, he plays, he's playing to the courtly company, you know, who are obviously in the background saying, oh, no, do carry on.

But he also, you know, has tired of the old plaints and the old, the, you know, serve, stirve, deserve, feign, vain kind of rhymes, you know, hain on it.

He wants to do, he knows he's doing something different.

You know, he's following the new poets of the Italian, Alamanni, Aretino, Arafi, Serrafino.

But also, I think one of the most astonishing things he does is when he's translating and translating closely, he nonetheless will put a crowbar in and crack something open.

So in one of his sonnets, that is quite a close translation of Petrarch, the line in Petrarch is just, odi meste so etamo lautri,

I hate myself and I love another.

And in Wyatt, this becomes, I love another and thus I hate myself.

And that is a transformed idea.

That's an idea that to love another is to be alienated from oneself.

To love another is to fundamentally give up on oneself, to be lost to something.

And he's created that with a word.

And by the way, Tottle, when he printed that poem, just deleted thus because it was one too many syllables.

But another moment, he translates a bit of Seneca into an astonishing epigram called Stand Whoso List upon the Slipper Top of Courts Estates.

And this is a short little piece of verse about how it's terrible to be at court because terrible things happen to you.

And in the original, the meaning is, you know, you serve other people and you forget who you are, but it's all Wyatt to have his final lines, for him death grips right hard by the crop, that is much known of other, and of himself, alas, doth die unknown, dazed, with dreadful face.

And that's the kind of moment that pierces through time.

He was just translating a stock abstract, but astonishingly.

But I wanted to say, too, that Wyatt, you know, who's so trained as a, you know, as a diplomat to speak Latin and this Oriate diction, so often speaks deliberately Anglo-Saxon, to be steadfast.

That's what he wants.

What makes him so readable 500 years on?

Everything we've been talking about, the immediacy, the speech-likeness of his verse, the conversational aspect of it.

But I also think that he is doing something quite astonishing.

In his poetry, very often he's talking about love, but whereas love poetry for centuries had involved creating a persona for the poet, you know, there's no one else there in Petrarch's sonnets.

There's Petrarch, and then there's the abstract idea of Laura or of the public.

But in Wyatt, we repeatedly feel there are other people there in existence, just out of reach, people

over whom he has no control but whose existence matters profoundly.

And that's an astonishing effect.

I think of Wyatt as someone who's got such high ideals of how you should live and then he falls so short of them and there's the agony in of that what veileth truth and by it to take pain

I think one of the things that I really love Wyatt for but I also think is an important thing about him now is the way that he gives expression to complexity of emotion so

it's become very much our thing now to think we always want transparency that we always expect people to be able to say what they feel very directly And Wyatt lives in a world where expressing yourself directly is very dangerous, but perhaps also not entirely possible.

And

what I really admire about him is the ability to construct himself, fabricate himself, perhaps also, as we've said, sometimes to hate himself, and to do that with a kind of honesty, but at the same time, it's an honesty through the understanding that life actually is not as simple as we think it is, that it does involve dissimulation all the time, and that irony might be the biggest gift that we have.

We live in a world which is increasingly antipathetic to irony, and we have never needed irony more.

Thank you very much.

That was terrific.

Thank you.

Thanks, Susan Brigden, Laura Ashe, and Brian Cummings, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, Philippa Foote, one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, also known for posing the trolley problem.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Starting with you, Laura, what did you not have time to say you'd like to have said?

There are just always other bits of Wyatt I would have loved to have discussed.

So one is an amazing few lines.

Alas, not of steel, but of brickle glass, I see that from my hand falleth my trust, and all my thoughts are dashed into dust.

So a beautiful image, a complex image, and on the face of it, a simple one about betrayal.

I've been betrayed, my trust is gone.

Except that for something to fall from your hand, you do have to open your hand, you do have to choose.

And why should your trust be made of steel?

The world around you isn't made of steel, the world is not constant.

He's obsessed with the idea of I could be constant if only the world would be constant to me, and the impossibility of that.

And it comes through everywhere in the poetry

in many, many different images, and it's just always obsessively worth digging into.

One of the things that Wyatt is noted for is bringing Petrarch into the question of English verse, the Italian, the great Italian writer, his sonnets transferred into what became English sonnets, what became Shakespeare's sonnets, what became the sounding voice of some of the greatest of our poems.

Well, I think Wyatt has a life among these very grand merchant princes in London, the Bardi and Cavalcanti, and I think he probably gets all his Italian writers from them before ever he goes to Italy.

They talk about master Francis Petrarch, and he's the idol in a way.

And what Wyatt's doing is engaging in this very high and creative form of Renaissance imitation, where imitation is a splendid thing to do.

You're like a bee buzzing from flower to flower.

And so there's Petrarch that he's transmuting.

It's a sort of alchemical process.

And behind Petrarch, there are other texts as well.

What is he most attracted to?

He's attracted to the rhythms and the beauty, but what he does is to...

Petrarch's most the love poetry, the Rime Sparse, the scattered rhymes, speak of Petrarch's love for Laura, his chaste love through in her life and in her death, and where he sees her, Petrarch sees her sort of transfigured in the landscape through the laura, the breeze, and then in the laurel, the alloro.

So Wyatt, in a poem like Whoso List to Hunt, Wyatt is transform

using Petrarch's Una candida cerva, which is his account of a white doe in a beautiful green landscape who's been wrapped from Petrarch in death.

Her Caesar Caesar has made her free.

And Wyatt does something extraordinary.

He turns the account of the doe, the white doe, into a deer who's being chased in a brutal, secular hunt.

And Wyatt himself is one of the huntsmen.

And this is a deer that's alive.

She's captured, but she's been made free.

So Petrarch is talking of a white doe on the green grass when the sun is rising in the unripe season.

And Wyatt, this is his, whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.

But as for me, alas, I may no more.

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore.

I am of them that furthest cometh behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore, fainting, I follow.

I leave off, therefore,

So these themes of impotence and the wearied mind and hopeless following and wildness are quintessentially Wyatt's.

He's transforming Petrarch and he does it again and again.

Let's talk about the Reformation.

How does that intertwine with what's going on?

Well, I suppose first we need to make a kind of exception in the sense that we can't really talk about Protestantism yet.

We don't really know what Protestant versus Catholic means yet exactly.

These are terms which are coming into being.

When we get the Act of Supremacy from Henry VIII,

we're some way towards it, aren't we?

But what we have there is a political reformation, a political reformation of religion, and it's an authority-driven version of the Reformation.

So what Henry's concerned about is how his power

originally that starts with just his freedom to marry in the way that he chose for the succession,

but also increasingly in relation to all sorts of other areas of state power, how the church infringed upon that.

And so he creates the conditions for a kind of totalitarianism over religion, that he decides what religion will be.

And then the doctrine kind of comes in after.

And that's what makes it very peculiar.

And I think it also makes it extremely dangerous.

So that Henry uses doctrinal conflicts that exist between people in order to create a kind of pecking order of who's in and who's out

and who gets extruded and who doesn't.

But he changes that

from not quite from day to day, but certainly from month to month.

And in some cases,

just to make sure that everybody sees how

equal he is, he'll execute four of one side and four of the other side on the same day, just to keep everybody as nervous as possible.

Or as he thinks as happy as possible.

Or as happy as possible.

But all of that is in the context of a period which is going through great changes in understanding of religion and a great anxiety about religion.

So if we can't talk about Protestantism yet, we can talk about something we might call an evangelical piety, which is very, very popular among urban classes, among an intelligentsia, and at quite high levels of court life and among aristocrats.

I mean, Anne Boleyn went to the French court and at the French court met other women who, Marguerite de Navarre or

the Queen Claude,

who were highly interested not in a different doctrine or a new religion that was anti-Catholic, but in a different kind of party that was learned,

that wanted to understand the New Testament in Greek, but through that also had a sense that the individual had a personal capacity to interpret.

Now Luther becomes very, very famous for that, but you need to remember as well that although Luther was cantankerous and difficult and bilious and increasingly angry, he was also enormously creative intellectually, and certainly in his first years.

And if you look at his writing and his thinking in his early years, he's changing his mind all the time.

He's creating a weird kind of paradox that at the same time says we are passive to the will of God and therefore don't have freedom, and yet we are individually responsible for everything in our own heads and so we have an intense self-scrutiny.

Now that I think those two things together are a very powerful cocktail and you get some sense of why these ideas are so powerfully interesting to people but then they get into trouble for those things because of course they have to come up against church doctrine and what it is that you're supposed to believe and what you're not supposed to believe.

Luther didn't realize he was a heretic really until he was told he was a heretic.

But once he was told that he was a heretic, he said, okay, I'm a heretic.

And then you just ratchet on from there to the next case and so on.

Do you want to go into it?

Yes, I suppose I think of Wyatt as someone who's been absolutely brought up

in this ethical way and writes when he's very young a book, The Quiet of Mind, that he dedicates to Queen Catherine at a time when she really needs support.

This is the moment when her marriage is finished.

He talks in the quiet of mind about

how you sustain yourself against the blows of fortune and also the seductions of success.

And so,

this is the philosophy that he's going to live by.

It's probably taught to him by Queen Catherine's supporters, like the Points brothers, John Points, to whom he writes two verse epistles.

This sort of paradox of

your high ideal and of speaking truth and being true, and

yet, well, everything countermands it, is at the heart of Wyatt, and

it's at the heart of his verse epistles, which are the closest to an intimate conversation that we find in Wyatt.

And in fact, you know, we have in Wyatt

more evidence than we have about anybody else.

We've got the

paraphrase of the Psalms, we've got portraits, portraits of his family, we've got all his letters, we've got all this poetry.

It's an extraordinary amount of evidence.

And yet, as Brian says, you know, he's needing to be secret.

He knows that a small, a syllable different makes a great difference, he says.

In the epistles, there is a moment when we have a glimpse of this Stoic ideal, you know, that you could be self-sufficient, withdraw from court, not need to lie and flatter, and instead be whole unto yourself.

He says, Then seek no more to find the thing that thou hast sought so long before, for thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind.

But he doesn't tell us what the thing is.

We can't know what the thing is.

We just have to keep searching.

But that epistolary satire verse epistle ends in an extraordinary way.

So often in Wyatt's letters and in his poetry, there is this mysterious they, they they flee from me, that sometimes, and

the end of My Mother's Maids, which is one of his verse epistles to points, ends with one of the most bitter things in literature, which is, he says,

Henceforth, my points, this shall be all and sum.

These wretched fools shall have naught else of me, but to the great God and to his high doom, none other pain pray I for them to be, but when the the rage doth lead them from the right, that looking backward, virtue they may see, even as she is so goodly fair and bright.

And whilst they clasp their lusts in arms across, Grant them, good Lord, as thou mayest of thy might,

to fret inward for losing such a loss.

There's a very dark line which echoes They Flee From Me, but must be from a later poem, and it's about when his friends have abandoned him and he thinks he's going to be executed.

And he says that those who used to like his company,

like lice from a dead body, they crawl.

I want to talk about something that we reflected on earlier, but perhaps from a slightly different angle.

So

everybody knows about Wyatt's petrarchism, and there is a little bit of a tendency in terms of trying to write about poetry in relation to translation of always using the one language against the other and to imply a sort of a sense of improvement through translation.

And I think something that's very interesting about Wyatt and he's obviously very topical now is how European a writer he is even as he is an English writer.

It's not a distinction in him.

You know, he travels in the Low Countries, he travels in Italy, he travels in France and he travels in Spain and

he understands something from those cultures,

something that's distinctive, something that an English person can learn to be more interestingly English through doing that.

And in that way, I think his poetry broaches something that we're finding increasingly hard to do in a very polarised world, of being able to speak within one language, but with a kind of internationalism.

And I think he does that very, very, very successfully.

And you can see it also in

his use of classical sources, the way that he chooses Plutarch.

Plutarch has become a rather boring source in the way that English literature historians deal with him.

They always go for the biographical biographical and for the historical in a kind of plain man's way.

But actually Plutarch is a wonderfully subtle moral writer.

You know when he writes

about anger, he's also writing about the problems of anger in yourself rather than somehow just what causes anger.

Or when he talks about flattery, he talks about friendship.

When he talks about curiosity, he's also talking about anxiety.

Now these sorts of things are things that Wyatt picks up on.

It's one of the ways in which I think he shares a lot with Erasmus, even though he may not be directly quoting from Erasmus.

And this again is something which is a European culture of the time and that we perhaps could get a bit back to.

But he determines to be thoroughly English too, doesn't he, Brian?

That he's, you know, he wants to,

in They Flee From Me, you find the juxtaposition of Romance languages guise

set against, you know, Middle English words as well.

So

he's doing this very deliberately.

Well, I suppose in that way he's following Chaucer again, who is regarded of the father of English poetry, but who was absolutely intimate with the most sophisticated French and Italian literature of his day.

I think the great mystery about Wyatt, too, is that there's a John Leland addresses

a rather clunking poem to him, Latin poem, talking about Viatus Viat or the play on words Wyatt the Traveller.

But he's suggesting that Wyatt shouldn't have too much care to sort of

Latin and decasyllables, as though Wyatt is writing Latin poetry, and I bet he did, but we don't, if he did, we don't have any.

I think our producer wants to come in with an announcement.

Does anyone want to your coffee?

Coffee, yeah, coffee, coffee, coffee.

Coffee, great coffee.

Thank you.

Coffee?

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

You're now time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inks and we're back for a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

We have our 201st extravaganza where we're going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels or something like that.

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We're doing one on potatoes.

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We've always got techno-fossils, moths versus butterflies, and a history of light.

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