Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) was an English poet and diplomat in the service of Henry VIII, and one of the first writers to bring Italian poetic forms, above all the sonnet, into English. His work marks the beginning of Petrarch's influence on English Renaissance poetry, and he is often seen as a starting point for Elizabethan verse.

He was born in 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent, into a family that had originally come from Yorkshire and had sided with the Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses. His father, Henry Wyatt, had served Henry VII as a privy councillor and stayed a trusted adviser under Henry VIII, so Thomas moved into court circles early. He entered the king's service in 1515 and began his studies at St John's College, Cambridge the same year. His career was mainly diplomatic. He went to Rome with Sir John Russell to press for the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, later worked at Calais, and was sent as ambassador to Spain. His proximity to power brought danger as well as advancement: he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1536 and again in 1541, and on both occasions he regained his freedom. He witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn, and he recorded the experience in a poem.

His verse centres on courtly love, with devoted lovers and distant or cruel mistresses, and often carries a tone of complaint and bitterness. Some poems are satires on the flattery and hypocrisy of court life. Wyatt worked to give English the polish of the Romance languages: he adopted the Petrarchan octave but gave the closing lines rhyme patterns of his own, and he tried rhyme royal, terza rima and other stanza forms. Much of his poetry circulated in manuscript and was not printed in his lifetime. His reputation grew through Tottel's Miscellany (1557), fifteen years after his death.

His legacy lies in opening the way for poets such as Surrey, Sidney and Spenser, and in establishing forms that became part of the English poetic tradition. He also appears in popular culture, as a character in the television series The Tudors.