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
