"Graven with Diamonds" by Nicola Shulman - review by Katherine Langrish

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber…

I’ve always loved Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, so I was delighted a couple of years ago to come across Nicola Shulman’s wonderful account of his life and poems, ‘Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy’ (Short Books, 2011).  I meant to review it then, but was distracted by other things. Having just read it for the second time with as much thrilled admiration as before, I feel impelled to tell you all about it. You have to read this book! 

What makes it so different, besides being a detailed and knowledgeable biography, is Shulman’s fascinating interrogation of Wyatt’s lyrics. It is not a literary investigation, not an analysis of how he wrote. Rather,

This is a book about the uses of Wyatt’s love poetry; why he wrote. … At Henry’s [Henry VIII’s] court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his poems were the hub and centre … and if we run the story of Wyatt’s life and times behind his lyrics, they – these apparently slight, unaddressed, undated, unadorned songs – will show us that they had more uses than we might imagine. Not all of their uses are evident to us now. Some of them would have been hidden even to Wyatt, at the outset. When Wyatt began to write poems he could not have guessed into what strange service they would be pressed by the changing times. To see their changing purpose is the purpose of this book. 

Wyatt was a courtier, but what was a courtier? Shulman recreates for us the Tudor court of the 1520s and 30s with its formalities, its hierarchies, its dependence on chivalric games and lavish spectacles to ‘fill the new and potentially dangerous longueurs of peacetime’, its love of pastime (‘Pastime and good company/I love and shall until I die’, Henry VIII wrote) and above all, its youth. Aged only 21, Wyatt was one of fifteen esquires who challenged Henry – himself still in his early thirties – at the elaborate Christmas Joust at Greenwich in 1525. After the outdoor martial entertainments, the company would proceed indoors to be entertained with ‘diversions and amusements’ on the fashionable theme of courtly love. Lyric poetry was an integral part of this. 

The primary social purpose of courtly love lyrics [was] that they and all the activity they generated were a way of dealing with sexual frustrations at court. In emulation of Francis I’s practices, attractive women were more and more visible at Henry’s court, and yet no more sexually available to the many young men in attendance than they had been before. Women were aloof, and men continually supplicated for favours that must not, under the rules of the system, ever come. The lyric operated in the gap between hope and expectation.

Wyatt’s poems circulated in what amounted to a private Facebook group ‘intended for a closed, incestuous coterie consisting of the most precocious and sophisticated men and women of the court’, and Shulman vividly recreates the context outside of which these poems lose much of their point.

            Help me to seek, for I lost it there,

               And if that ye have found it, ye that be here,

               And seek to convey it secretly,

               Handle it soft and treat it tenderly

               Or else it will plain [complain] and then appair [be damaged].

This riddling rondeau about something Wyatt has lost, which of course in the last verse turns out to be his heart, seems yawnworthy enough – but, Shulman asks, what if what’s happening here is an actual, physical game?

What if ‘mine heart’ is also an actual object, a heart-shaped envelope made of cloth with a balloon, or squeaking thing inside?  Now the poem comes to life. Under that construction, the otherwise mystifying lines ‘Handle it soft and treat it tenderly/Or else it will plain and then appair’, make sudden sense: if you are rough with it, it will pop or squeal, and go flat. 

Now we can imagine groups of giggling young people dashing about trying to smuggle an inflated heart from one room to another: a lost world in which a poem beginning ‘Comfort thyself, my woeful heart’ and includes lines such as, ‘Alas I find thee faint and weak,’ may conjure a vision of Wyatt making everyone laugh as he holds up a bladdered heart and makes it squeak. As Shulman says, 

It casts new light on a tiny Holbein drawing where a young couple in elegant dress are shown with a cup and a large heart. 

It wasn’t all sheer fun. Gossip and jealousy and spite must also have run rife through the court. Courtly love was an elaborate pretence; all the same, some young people probably really were in love – and in danger of losing their reputations.  

Take heed betime lest ye be spied,

Your loving eyes you cannot hide,

At last the truth will sure be tried,

Therefore take heed!

For some there be of crafty kind

Though ye show no part of your mind,

Surely their eyes ye cannot blind,

Therefore take heed!

A poem like this could have been an uncomfortable thing to encounter, passed around and recited, as malicious smiles and sideways glances picked out the blushing subjects. Wyatt’s carefulness to name no names, the apparent anonymity and deliberate ambiguity of his verse, was as much a protection for himself as it was for others. He left it possible for himself always to protest innocence.

            For what I sung or spake

               Men did my songs mistake.

There was a fine line to be trodden between amusing people, and making enemies – a line which, once Anne Boleyn was queen, became a matter of life and death.  

Shulman argues convincingly that Thomas Wyatt had, once, been in love with Anne Boleyn. In a sonnet written long after Anne’s disgrace and death, Wyatt declares himself to be in love again, this time with a blonde woman, someone very different from ‘Brunet that set my wealth [my well-being] in such a roar.’ 

‘Brunet’ is Anne Boleyn. There can be very little doubt about this, because Wyatt originally wrote,

Her that did set our country in a roar.

Then he thought better of it and amended the line in his own handwriting. In place of the too-explicit reference he put one word, ‘Brunet’ – just enough to invoke Anne, but only to those people at court who knew both that Wyatt was the author of this poem and that he had once pursued Anne Boleyn.

Unpicking the ambiguities of Wyatt’s verse to reveal the secret life of the court, Shulman shows how the elegant game of courtly love, played by young courtiers to unwritten rules which everyone understood, was ripped into coloured shreds by Thomas Cromwell. Flirting with the queen and her ladies had been de rigeur, la politesse, the correct behaviour for a courtier who wished to shine. (And it was later to be revived by Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, for her own political purposes, once she became queen.)

Cromwell … knew perfectly well how the courtly bargain worked in the case of a queen: amorous protestations were paid in, and favours paid out in grants, offices and promotions, not sex. 

Choosing, deliberately, to interpret all those courtly flirtations literally and legalistically, Cromwell brought Anne and her coterie to the block – and Wyatt to the Tower, though he escaped deeper involvement because Cromwell rather liked him, and there were enough other victims. And yet Wyatt wasn’t silenced. Shulman shows again and again how, for those who knew how to read his ever-ambiguous lyrics, Wyatt speaks out – candidly, boldly, sometimes in anguish – about the tragic and dangerous events in which he found himself embroiled. To all fans of Thomas Wyatt, as well as to all lovers of poetry and history, I recommend this brilliant and fascinating book.

Picture credits

Courtly couple, Hans Holbein the Younger, Kunstmuseum, Basle, wikimedia commons 

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Hans Holbein the Younger, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Anne Boleyn, artist unknown, National Portrait Gallery London, wikimedia commons

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, Hans Holbein the Younger, Frick Collection, public domain

AGES OF MEMORY by H.M. Castor

I’ve just completed a two-week tour to mark the publication of the paperback edition of my Tudor novel VIII. It took me to all sorts of places – Ipswich & Bramhall, Oxford & Hampton Court – and among them was my old childhood stamping ground of Leamington Spa & Warwick, neighbouring towns that have spread so close to one another that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, you can’t see the join. Here, Keith & Frances Smith, the lovely owners of the independent bookshops ‘Warwick Books’ and ‘Kenilworth Books’ (see their website) arranged for me to speak at an evening event alongside Nicola Shulman and Prof. Eric Ives, at the most wonderful venue imaginable…


'These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating... One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present...' J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The week before last, early on the Wednesday evening, a taxi deposited me outside an ancient building in the town of Warwick. I walked up to the imposing gate. Since it was well past 5 o’clock, a notice beside the gate said ‘Closed’ but, feeling rather Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, I thought I should try the door anyway. I turned the giant handle (above) and stepped inside. 

The gate from the inside

I had come to speak at an event in this most august of venues: the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Alone inside the gateway, I hesitated. As anyone who has had the misfortune to wait for a train with me would confidently predict, I was early. No one else was in sight. What should I do? Ah, what? Loiter, of course! Loiter and look about me and feel the privilege of spending some time alone in this flabbergastingly gorgeous place.

The Westgate of Warwick (left), with chantry chapel above, and The Lord Leycester Hospital (right)

The Hospital’s own website (here) offers this potted history:

The Lord Leycester Hospital is not now, and has never been a medical establishment. The word hospital is used in its ancient sense meaning "a charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy, infirm or aged".

The Hospital is an historic group of timber-framed buildings dating mainly from the late 14th Century clustered round the Norman gateway into Warwick with its 12th Century Chantry Chapel above it. Hidden behind the ancient buildings is the tiny but delightful Master's Garden.

For nearly 200 years it was the home of Warwick's mediaeval Guilds. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it became a place of retirement for old warriors. So it remains today as an independent charity providing a home for ex-Servicemen and their wives.

I loitered my way into the galleried courtyard, passing beneath this bear and ragged staff – an emblem that has been associated with the Earls of Warwick since at least the 14^th century, and was used by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I (whose father & brother were Earls of Warwick). It was Dudley who, having bought these buildings in 1571, set them up as a home for aged or injured soldiers.

Inside the courtyard, on the façade of the Master’s house, I spotted other bears standing guard along with a marvellous bristling porcupine (the porcupine was an emblem of the Sidney family, who were linked by marriage with the Dudleys).

The Master of the Hospital himself, Lt. Col. Gerald Lesinski, soon emerged from the door you can see on the left above. He would have been well within his rights if he'd asked me brusquely what I thought I was doing, peering at his house after closing time… but, on the contrary, he was all graciousness & generosity. He had, he told me, just been looking through the Hospital’s guest book and had found Oscar Wilde’s signature. “I knew we had Dickens and Darwin,” he said, “but I didn’t realise we had Wilde too!”

Oscar Wilde… Dickens… Darwin… I looked at the buildings about me with fresh eyes. The Lord Leycester, I reflected, is not only a medieval place, a Tudor place… it has been a Victorian place too. And a Georgian one, and an Edwardian and an everything-in-between-and-since.

Of course, you simply cannot stand here without thinking of the past in some fashion. But often I tend to think of the past in slices, rather than taking in the scale of the whole it… So, I look at these buildings and automatically estimate when they were built… and then, a few moments later, I try to picture them during my favourite period, the 16^th century.

And in so doing, I tend not to think of the sheer length of time the buildings have stood here and all that has happened in that time - the enormous well these buildings represent, filled up with ages of memory.

A short time later, as I looked across the street from the Lord Leycester, instead of defining the (wonderfully wonky) half-timbered building opposite (above) solely by the era in which it was built, I thought instead about all the changes it must have seen, and how it had stood there while the brick houses that you can just make out on the right were being constructed. And I realised that I’ve often looked at rows of buildings of different dates as if they were simply different cakes lined up in a cake shop window: this is 14^th century flavour, this is 18^th century flavour…

...instead of recognising that the 14^th century one is a building that, perhaps, stood alone before it acquired neighbours - or perhaps had other, different neighbours and stood solid even as they were demolished and replacements built.


It’s rather like a child’s view of the people around them, i.e. Granny happens to be a wrinkly person whose job is to be my grandmother, rather than Granny has seen so much! She was my age once, and then my mum's age too, and has lived through so many more days & years than me…

Now I began to think: the Lord Leycester Hospital buildings are medieval & stood here as the Wars of the Roses raged... but they stood here during the Civil War too – and during the Napoleonic Wars and the Russian Revolution and the Blitz. I began to think: these buildings were lived in by soldiers who fought in the Crimea, and on the Somme (perhaps). These buildings have seen all those days and months, those decades and centuries, and they will be here – I very much hope – when I am in my grave.

How easy it is to forget the accumulated weight of the past! If people’s life experience shone out of the tops of their heads like the light of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past, the elderly’s would shine tallest & brightest… (for an illustration of the ghost, see here).

In the same way, the life experience (if I can put it that way) of these buildings is awe-inspiringly huge. And they have been significant not just at the time of their 'birth', but in each period they have 'lived' through. It is not only the new buildings of any period that give the flavour of that time. Just as in Henry VIII’s inventory there are treasured old items (devotional objects that belonged to his mother or grandmother, for example, or a sword used by Henry V) as well as items from Henry's time, so too the people of each period have inhabited, used, loved (or hated) old buildings, as well as modern ones.

When the Lord Leycester Hospital itself was ‘modern’, there would have been ‘old’ buildings in Warwick, of course. Over the centuries, as the Hospital has stood firm, buildings around it have come and gone. The idea plays in my mind like a time-lapse film – like this intriguing film from 1901 (credited as the first time-lapse film, in fact) which records the demolishing of a theatre in New York (it runs first in reverse, so that the theatre seems to be being built): see the film here.

Note the beady-eyed white pigeon!

Add to all this another layer: in the Lord Leycester Hospital, for me, the sweep of history is riffle-shuffled with my own personal memories.

For example, I love the Great Hall where that evening’s event took place – & where once, as the Master told me, James I sat down to dine (they still have the chair he sat in!). I love it for its marvellous beamed roof & higgledy-piggledy lattice windows…

… but I also love it because it was the venue, 23 years ago, for the Ruby Wedding celebration for my very dear great-uncle & great-aunt, Gordon & Lucy Southeard, and I could not possibly spend a moment in that room without thinking of Lucy (who still lives in Warwick) and without remembering Gordon - a remarkable, lovely and much missed man.

Uncle Gordon & Auntie Lucy (wearing red button-holes)
 in the Great Hall 

Try to hold your attention wide, taking in all that sweep of time, and it’s as if a pack of cards is being shuffled - what you see is: now that day, now this, now – in your mind’s eye – James I, now Oscar Wilde, now (for me) Uncle Gordon… now the astonishing kaleidoscope of every moment, great and small, that this building must hold in its memory:

How many people have stood in that dark doorway on the right (above), over the centuries? For how many people has the Lord Leycester Hospital been an old friend, a part of their lives, a place past which they have walked daily?

Never mind Oscar Wilde or Robert Dudley, what about the ordinary people of Warwick who knew it in, say, the 1720s, or the 1830s, or the 1940s?

That Wednesday visit turned into a wonderful evening, and I must end this post with some book recommendations. My fellow-speaker was Nicola Shulman, author of Graven with Diamonds, which is an audacious, erudite & superbly entertaining new analysis of the poems of Thomas Wyatt, and the uses to which they were put within the claustrophobic inner circle of Henry VIII’s court.

The chair for the evening was Prof. Eric Ives, author of an absolutely brilliant biography (the biography, I'm tempted to say) of Anne Boleyn - The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Prof. Ives is also the author of (amongst other things) a fascinating analysis of the rise & fall of Lady Jane Grey: Lady Jane Grey - A Tudor Mystery. And – to be published this June – a book on the Reformation that I can’t wait to read: The Reformation Experience. See details of all 3 titles here.

(l-r) Prof. Eric Ives, Nicola Shulman, Brother Peter, me

Here we are at the steps to the chantry chapel alongside Brother Peter, one of the Hospital’s residents.

Thank you to Keith & Frances Smith of Warwick Books for arranging & supporting the evening, and to the Master for welcoming us so warmly!

The Lord Leycester Hospital is open to visitors all year round and can be contacted about hosting events (including weddings) through its website here. It relies on visitor fees to keep it going and is an independent charity well worth supporting!

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK and by Penguin in Australia. It is now available in paperback, hardback & ebook format.

H.M. Castor's website is here.