Life at Henry VIII’s court was dangerous, particularly for a glamorous and sexually driven man like Wyatt; and yet, despite flying close to the sun on numerous occasions, he survived to die of old age. From our point of view he is most important as the man who took Petrarch’s new sonnet form and introduced it properly into English verse. In Wyatt’s writing there is a specificity of description, and a humane directness, which make it sound as if it comes from a different century, almost a different planet, from Skelton’s. The metaphor of timid deer for women might seem offensive, but quickly collapses, in an almost Shakespearean way:
They flee from me that sometime 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 themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked 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 shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewith all 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 newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Well-travelled on the Continent and a multilingual Cambridge scholar, Wyatt also introduced the Horatian ode into English, and his address to his friend and fellow courtier John Poynz has all the easy intimacy of Horace himself. The theme is the familiar one of the poet retiring from court and explaining that he must do so because he’s had it with double dealing, oily hypocrisy and the other necessities of life around the powerful. But in Wyatt’s hands, what could be a mere poetic exercise feels like a genuine plaint by a living courtier in the cold climate of Henry’s England: farewell to all the doublespeak of politics:
The friendly foe with his double face
Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;
And say that Favel hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and cruelty to name
Zeal of justice and change in time and place;
And he that suffer’th offence without blame
Call him pitiful; and him true and plain
That raileth reckless to every man’s shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;
The lecher a lover; and tyranny
To be the right of a prince’s reign.
I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,
A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.
This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,
And in foul weather at my book to sit;
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.
And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,
Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.
No force for that, for it is ordered so,
That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.
I am not now in France to judge the wine,
… Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey
For money, poison, and treason at Rome –
A common practice used night and day:
But here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;
Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.
In its easy eloquence, its self-confidence, this is not so far removed, is it, from the great soliloquies we will soon be hearing on the Elizabethan stage? The Tudor court was a highly artificial human experience; but it produced an intensity of feeling, a closeness and a directness, which would soon be heard by the masses in makeshift theatres around the land. Grandees like Wyatt were confident enough to address their peers with a familiarity unknown in British poetry before. But it would spread.
So far, we’ve seen a misogynistic attack on women, and women presented as nervy, nibbling as the game for the courtly male hunter, but we haven’t actually heard from any woman. Anne Askew was born in Lincolnshire in 1520, and became one of the best-known and most spectacular of Protestant martyrs. Her family was relatively wealthy, in land at least. Arranged marriages were common in Tudor England, largely for economic reasons. Girls were often married off as early as fourteen, and some of these unions would have been, by modern standards, forced marriages. Anne’s father had planned to marry her older sister Martha to another local landowner, Thomas Kyne, but Martha died and Anne was substituted, aged fifteen. She bore Thomas two children, her first duty.
It wasn’t a happy marriage; they disagreed about religion in particular. Although Henry VIII’s long struggle with the papacy over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was driving England towards the Protestant camp, there was still huge uncertainty and division over precisely what mix of traditional Catholic teaching and the new teaching of the reformers England would end up with. Relatively small doctrinal differences could become politically toxic. On this spectrum, Anne was a hard-core reformer; her husband was Catholic. While she was still little more than a teenager, Kyne kicked Anne out of the marital home. When she arrived in London she tried to divorce him on the grounds that he was an infidel, and that therefore the marriage could not be legal. Gutsy, but she failed.
A determined woman, Anne spoke out on the streets as a female preacher, and disseminated Protestant literature. Some of it came into the hands of courtiers, and probably also reached
