The Sir Thomas Wyatt pub by London Road in Allington near Maidstone (a place, incidentally, that figured in Ian Fleming’s `Moonraker’) is one of the more visible monuments to a literary life at least started in Kent, even if the main events of that life did not happen here. This hostelry remains popular to today. Nearby, along the riverside walk back to Maidstone, one can spy through the trees the building in which the eponymous Thomas Wyatt himself was born in 1503 – the grey stone walls of Allington Castle. Since its first construction in the 12th century this has had a chequered history. Existing as a private manor house till 1554, after the abortive attempt to rebel against Mary, the reigning Queen then, by Thomas’s son of the same name, it was seized by the crown. Over the next few centuries, it slowly fell into ruin. Restored in the early 20th century, from 1949 it belonged to the Carmelite religious order. I remember visiting on school trips in this era in the 1970s, and going again in the early 1980s to meet a Catholic priest to talk about theology. Since 1999 it has belonged once more to a private owner – Sir Robert Worcester of the MORI opinion poll organisation.
Wyatt the poet’s life weaved inside and alongside that of Henry VIII, the king from the time he was six. His career from young adulthood was largely spent either in London, or undertaking diplomatic missions abroad. He was reportedly part of the group which went in 1527 to petition Pope Clement VII to grant the dissolution of the marriage of Henry to Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry another native of Kent, Anne Boleyn of Hever. Imprisonment while on this mission did not end up in his perishing after this failed assignment (a failure which had monumental consequences), nor, remarkably, did his association with Anne herself and accusations he had had an affair with her, despite being imprisoned in the Tower of London twice. One of these times in 1536 was possibly when Anne herself was executed.
Wyatt typified the cosmopolitan outlook in England at a time when it was dramatically readjusting its relations with the European mainland, and in particular with the Church in Rome. He is credited partially with introducing the sonnet form from the Italian of Petrarch into English. It was the intimate, lyrical intensity of the language of these which allowed suggestions of his own personal life, and the feelings he had for someone like Anne. `They Flee From Me’ from around 1535 is one of the most celebrated, with its recollection of the moment of delicate tenderness between two lovers:
`Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise,
Twenty time better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, `dear heart, how like you this?’
This poem alone has had immense cultural and literary impact, and figures in a study by Peter Murphy published only in 2019, `The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt’, (Stanford University Press). As Dan Chiasson wrote in a review of this in the New York Review of Books on February 12th 2020, this is `arguably the greatest lyric poem of the sixteenth century.’ In view of the fact that this century included Spencer and Shakespeare and their work in this particular format, this is high praise!
Wyatt had formal links to Kent through being appointed High Sheriff of the county in 1536, and Knight of the Shire in 1541. Married at the age of 17 to Elizabeth Brooke, from whom he subsequently separated due to adultery after the birth of their son, and who was later linked to Henry as a potential bride, Wyatt’s main skill, at least politically, was clearly simply to survive. His incarceration due to the claimed dalliance with Anne in 1536 was resolved because of the powerful patronage of the King’s key advisor, Thomas Cromwell ( a figure who has become much better known in recent times due to Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about his rise and fall). Imprisoned astonishingly a second time in 1540, again because of links to the King’s increasingly complex marital affairs, he was pardoned and liberated, and rewarded with Boxley Abbey, on the North Downs in Kent, the monastic status of which had been terminated during the dissolution of the church estate in Britain after the break with Rome. He died in 1542, still not yet 40, but of natural causes rather than through displeasing the King once more.
Many of Wyatt’s exquisite poems survive in the Egerton manuscript. One of these announces:
`But here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme,
Where if thou list, my Poyntz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.’
(`Sir Thomas Wyatt, `Collected Poems’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975, 104)
Wyatt’s poetry is strikingly modern, at least in the way in which it announces and explores sentiments, emotions, and the power of subjectivity. Their lucidity and freshness sits beside the tight discipline of their internal balance and organisation, showing a truly remarkable intellect alive to its own experiences and the imperative to at least try to make sense of them. An undated sonnet from the Egerton manuscript talks of the `heart’s forest.’ Many talk of lack of fidelity and the entrapment of lies. `The mind hideth by colour contrary,’ one sonnet declares,
`With feigned visage now sad now merry,
Whereby if I laughed any time of season,
It is for because I have no other way
To cloak my care but under sport and play.’
These are feelings to reflect on while sitting in the sunshine gazing at the form of Allington Castle through the trees across the other side of the river, while the sound of people talking and eating in the nearby Malta Inn drifts down.