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A kidnapped child whispers dark secrets from his past in a language he no longer understands.
But a lost cassette will reveal the ugly truth.
From Curious Cast and Blanchard House comes a cross-continental odyssey to recover a stolen past.
This is Stop Rewind, The Lost Boy, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Hello, Simon here, the producer of In Our Time.
Since Melvin announced he stepped down from In Our Time after almost 27 years, the reaction's been overwhelming and heartwarming.
And thank you to everyone who's been in touch.
Before we return with new programmes and a new presenter, we're taking the time to celebrate Melvin's outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive.
This week, it's Sir Thomas Wyatt, first broadcast last year.
Here's Melvin.
Hello, Thomas Wyatt, 1503 to 1542, who has been called the greatest poet of his age, and he brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet.
He was an ambassador for Henry VIII, when being close to the king was the best protection and also the greatest danger, especially as Wyatt was allegedly too close to Anne Boleyn, and some of his poems, such as They Flee From Me, That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh, conversational and intimate 500 years after he wrote them.
With me to discuss Thomas Wyatt.
Ambassador and poet are Brian Cummings, 50th anniversary professor of English at the University of York, Susan Brigden, retired fellow at Lincoln College University of Oxford, and Laura Ash, professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford.
Laura, welcome.
What was Thomas Wyatt's background and what was his route to the Tudor court?
Well, Thomas's father, Henry Wyatt, was from Yorkshire originally, and from quite humble beginnings, it seems.
But he cannily backed the right horse during the Wars of the Roses in that he supported Henry Tudor and was imprisoned by Richard III as a result, apparently.
And Wyatt later wrote and alerted to his son that he had been tortured there under imprisonment, and there was also a family legend in fact that during this harsh imprisonment he'd been lacking food and had befriended a cat who had brought him pigeons to eat.
But this kind of family legend certainly grew up.
Certainly, he was a huge supporter of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and he was well rewarded for it.
He became a privy counsellor and ultimately was an executor of the will of the king and was one of the counsellors in charge of advising the young king when Henry VIII came to the throne.
So then his son, Thomas Wyatt, was in line to inherit some of his duties and duly did so.
And so Thomas became.
He was given various smaller offices at court from 1516 onwards, when he was only a teenager.
He'd gone to St John's College Cambridge, at the age of 12, but no one knows how long he stayed there.
Certainly he started making appearances at court early on.
And by 1524 he was clerk of the King's Jewels, which was a really useful post that he'd inherited from his father.
He'd been married Thomas, by 1520 and managed to have a son and a daughter married in quick succession.
But the marriage was clearly a disaster because he separated from his wife and tried not to live with her forever more.
And then he was a person at court close to Henry, taking part in the sort of tournaments and pageantry of the court and writing poetry at court when that was a chief activity of the place.
There's a connection between himself and Anne Boleyn which plays right through his life.
What was that?
Well, the families were distantly related and they both had family seats in Kent.
But more likely it was just that they met in court and they were part of a circle, an artistic circle, and was conspicuously cultured in comparison with the rest of the court.
Because as a teenager she'd gone to the court of Margaret of Austria as a lady-in-waiting and then to the court of the King of France.
And by the time she came back, she was clearly very different from everyone else at court and appealed to Wyatt, just as he presumably appealed to her.
What evidence do you find of the more sexual rumors of the contact between them?
Anything?
Well, this is the question to which no one will have an answer.
There are certainly poems that he must have written to her and about her.
No one doubts that.
The question of what they may have done in private at any point is almost moot.
Anne was certainly a canny person.
By the time they met, he was already married.
And so there was no profit for her in pursuing an association with Wyatt.
And she may well have pursued a long flirtation, because there may well have been real, genuine feeling.
And certainly his poems seem to express genuine feeling and a feeling of genuine loss and betrayal.
But then sincerity is also a poetic effect.
Yes.
And it was quite dangerous, wasn't it?
Because Henry VIII was, to put it mildly, a jealous possessive difficult irascible, unexpected figure.
So he had to watch his step.
Absolutely, yes.
I mean, among the things we don't know, there are several accounts that claim not contemporary accounts, but accounts that claim that Wyatt tried to warn Henry off Anne Boleyn and that Henry, in variation, said thank you very much, but that never happened and you will never speak of it again.
And we just don't know.
We don't know how this worked out.
Well, let's rest.
We don't know.
That'll be fine.
Brian Cummings.
What was English... I know this is a big one.
There you go.
What was English poetry like in the main about this time we're talking about when Thomas White is making an impression at court.
Well, there's an enormously rich medieval tradition of poetry, and lots of it Wyatt doesn't show a great deal of interest in.
So Arthurian literature that meant a lot to Edmund Spencer later in the century doesn't really seem to have meant anything to Wyatt particularly.
The kind of chivalric poetry, even though chivalry was extremely popular in Henry VIII's court.
It's not as if he shows the sort of interest that Sir Philip Sidney showed later in the 16th century in poems of knights and ladies.
And religious poetry, which is extremely rich.
Again, although Wyatt is extremely interested in religion, he doesn't seem to be interested in religious poetry that had been written before.
But the big exception is Chaucer.
And why not?
Chaucer was certainly my first favourite English poet.
And I think there are probably similarities in the sorts of things that Wyatt would have liked about Chaucer that the voice, or rather the many voices.
He's a multivocal poet, the sense of humour.
Clearly Wyatt loves laughter.
Doesn't write very funnily, but he loves laughter.
And also, I think, finally, Chaucer's extreme sensitivity, his beautiful sense of emotion.
So Chaucer's a very varied writer.
We mainly know him now for the Canterbury Tales, perhaps not just for the stories that they tell, but for the mode of storytelling, for the idea of storytelling that's embodied in them.
And that was very important to followers of Chaucer in the 15th century like John Lydgott.
But what Wyatt's interested in is probably more Troilus and Crusader, which is the great Trojan epic that Chaucer wrote, which is not Homeric and not Virgilian.
Instead creates a philosophical poem out of a love story about falling in love and then falling out of love, or something like that.
And that certainly seems to have touched a nerve with Wyatt.
And then also, in a way, the most forgotten part of Chaucer's oeuvre, which is his French lyrics.
So he wrote quite a lot of rondo and ballade.
And Wyatt writes in those forms repeatedly, repeatedly, whilst perhaps changing them as well.
So why do you call him the greatest poet of the age, Wyatt?
That's what interests me.
Something that's special about Wyatt immediately is conversationality and colloquiality.
I'll take a couple of examples of colloquial style from lately from me.
So, dear heart how, like you, this or I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Where part of it is and this is another thing that's very special about Wyatt is that he uses new verse forms.
He's very interested in verse form.
He's very interested in meter.
He uses terza rima and ottava rima from Italian, which are, from an English point of view, quite esoteric.
But what he chooses about them is that these are verse forms that allow you to be conversational.
You can only do it if you have a very good ear, and a very good ear for how meter works and therefore for how meter doesn't work.
So the great comparison in his own period, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is a very, very fine poet.
But from a point of view of an ear for poetry, in comparison to Wyatt...
It sounds very dull.
What Wyatt has is an ability to mix up rhythm in a way that I suppose Shakespeare becomes famous for later, particularly the way that syllabic verse is transferred into stressed verse, in the way that you mix stresses, even the numbers of stresses.
But he has a real facility for mixing up stress in the way that people do when they're in conversation.
And I suppose that then links to the thing that you mentioned in your introduction, which is this sense of intimacy.
You're talking about a culture of intimacy, in which being friends with somebody, being close to somebody, is extremely important.
Thank you very much, Susan.
Susan Brigden.
We're talking about why now has become has become an ambassador.
How did you become an ambassador and what sort of ambassador was he?
Well, he becomes an ambassador because he's the most brilliant young man in England, Wyatt A Witt, a young man with a mind to mark and remember, it's said.
So he's chosen to go to the great courts of Europe.
He goes to in 1526 and 1527, he goes to France and he goes to the court of Rome, which is, of course, the greatest court there is.
And he has this sort of head-turning time.
He's in Venice, he's in Ferrara.
And he's being trained as an ambassador.
I'm intrigued by the fact that one of his many incarcerations was in an Italian jail, with Machiavelli and Guicciardini, two of the great, in different ways, describers of the Renaissance.
So this is a moment of terror for Wyatt.
So great glory, he's been sent on an embassy to Rome.
England's too hot for him, actually, so he's trying to, he's getting away for a while.
But he's going, he wants to see the country, all these places he's heard about, Florence, Venice.
And so he's riding off by himself.
He's captured by and this is terrifying he's captured by the Landsknechts who are on their way down to sack either Florence or Rome.
No one knows which.
He's captured and he's held in the camp of mutinous German soldiers.
And he's ransomed by Gonzaga princelings.
And he's then sent back to the camp of the papal army, where Machiavelli and Guicciardini are talking about the chaos that Italy has fallen into.
And in Guicciardini's correspondence, he says...
The young Englishman arrived here last night.
So there he is.
What they talked about, if they did, we can't know.
But it's one of those amazing moments in Wyatt's life.
Mm-hm.
But in 1537 he's sent to the imperial court, the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of Spain, Charles V.
Now this is a great honour, but it's also a terrible responsibility, of course, and he feels the fear that something will go wrong and it's his fault.
And he knows how dangerous his king is and that he's left enemies behind in England.
And his diplomacy has changed, because diplomacy in the age of Luther is going to be different from diplomacy in the age of Machiavelli.
He finds himself as the ambassador of a schismatic king of England at the court of the most Catholic king of Spain.
And the questions are, Will he be safe from the Spanish Inquisition?
Wyatt at this point is found in language that isn't used of any other ambassador.
He's described as pazzarello, as mad disparatissimo, very desperate, molto mal contento, pursuing this sort of lone wolf diplomacy, in the knowledge that what he's doing may displease his king and it will certainly displease the emperor.
Thank you.
Laura, let's turn to one of his finest poems.
What would you choose that to be?
For me, it would have to be They Flee From Me.
Can you give us a bit more on the first half of the first line?
May I give you the whole poem?
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 themselves in danger to take bread at my hand.
And now they range busily seeking with a continual change.
Thank 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 shoulder 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 new fangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Brian, would you like to comment on that?
What I would want to talk about is irony and irony in relation to truthfulness.
And this seems to go absolutely to the heart of the Henrician court in one sense and how you speak within a court society where everybody's words are so closely observed by other people, where there is a kind of premium placed on sincerity within that.
And yet everybody knows that sincerity is itself something which is fabricated and that you can't trust.
You can't trust somebody else's sincerity.
You perhaps can't trust your own sincerity.
So I think that's one of the reasons why the poem works so well in different ages, because that kind of circumstance of how you are seen versus how you feel you are yourself versus how you feel other people seem to you is something which is put under the question.
Laura?
What I think White is doing here, which is so revolutionary, is he is breaking into a set genre, a genre that Petrarch promulgated as classic.
And in the first stanza, he appears to be talking about a standard line.
He was a powerful man who many loved and many pursued, and now they've abandoned him.
But already there's a sense of ambivalence about this because they were stalking him.
And he can say they put themselves in danger, but clearly they were free.
They've now fled.
They've left him.
And then it all turns out to be nonsense, because in the second stanza it's not about his many loves at all.
It's about this one love, love this one woman who stole his heart completely and something completely revolutionary happens, which is she speaks.
She speaks directly through the poem to us.
We hear her and we don't know the tenor of her words.
We don't know if they were teasing or loving, or scared or warm, but then neither does he anymore, because it's in the past.
And one of the questions that Wyatt is always asking is if someone loved you once and loves you no more, then what is truth?
You, You know who are you.
Who are they?
What did they mean?
What does any of it mean?
And so then we come to our final stanza, and the pain expressed in since that I so kindly am.
So you know the double meaning of kindly.
It's both sarcastic and it also means according to nature, perhaps according to women's nature.
Maybe they're fickle or perhaps according to his nature.
Maybe he should be betrayed.
And the lack of force, the gentleness, and yet also the pleading in the last line.
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Is that the plea of the betrayed lover?
Was this right?
Is there a punishment here?
But he still loves her.
And then there's all the technique of it the way that he establishes iambic pentameter in the first line and then changes it, toys with it.
He cuts short lines to make you pause.
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss is two beats short.
You have to pause on the kiss.
You can't not.
It's an absolute masterpiece.
I suppose what people feel about Wyatt.
What I say about Wyatt is that he does have this modern voice.
And my private joke about.
They Flee From Me that sometimes we see it's Ezra Pound wrote it, that he translated something from Provençal or from Italian, that he got some arty friend to imitate Wyatt's hand in writing in the British Museum and then, you know, sent it along to TS.
Eliot, and they made a sort of sniggering joke about it, because the poem does feel as if it could have been written last week.
Thank you.
Humanism was taking hold at that time, or had taken hold, notably promulgated by Erasmus but taken up in the early days by Luther, and on and on it went.
What bearing did that have on Wyatt and his work?
Well, I suppose, first of all, we probably should just acknowledge that there's a time lag here.
So Petrarch is a humanist, but Petrarch is before Chaucer.
OK Italy, the sunshine's better and the coffee is sharper.
And you know, maybe people just think more quickly.
And so they're about 200 years ahead.
But the rest of Europe took a long time to acquire the kind of sophistication of humanist culture that existed in Italy.
And then England.
I suppose you could say symbolically humanism begins in 1499, when Erasmus came to England and met Thomas More.
And then the pair of them went to the court in Greenwich and were presented to Henry VII and to the very young Henry VIII.
In terms of understanding what humanism is.
On the one hand, it's an enormously important educational theory how you learn life through various kinds of literary methods.
And you know, the fruits of that are things which turn the 16th century into something different from before, particularly because it's also a way of life, if you like.
So Erasmus is famous for his literary methods.
He's famous for his interpretation of the Bible.
But the book everybody wants to own by Erasmus is The Adages, which is a very peculiar book.
And it's a kind of a key to the mystery of the classics.
But it also plays with the idea of meaning in such a way that you acquire it, as it were, for yourself.
So this is a book that you can see why it has got on his shelf.
You can see that he's using it applied to the street life of everyday Tudor life, as it were.
And in that he takes proverbs and Erasmus is using them as a way of trying to interpret where meaning comes from, how metaphorical meaning is, how figurative it is, how it plays with your mind as well as you playing with it.
And it's in that sense, I think, that Wyatt is a humanist as well.
He wants to be that kind of person, that kind of intelligence.
Thank you.
Susan, he was sent to the Tower in 1536.
What was that for and how dangerous was it?
Well, it was completely terrifying because there's a new law, the law of words.
Be a strange world as words are made treason.
But now for saying that Henry was a tyrant, a usurper, schismatic.
This would bring the death penalty.
Not by encompassing rebellion, but by saying these things.
On the 1st of May 1536, Anne Boleyn and Wyatt's friends from the King's Privy Chamber are taken suddenly at the May Day tournament and they're put in the tower.
And a week later, Wyatt follows.
And Wyatt has information about them and they have information about him.
And they're kept secret apart.
So he's got no idea what's being said about him.
And Here is a man who holds to the idea of friendship, but now he's being made to betray his friends.
He's freed after 10 days or so, probably by the agency of Thomas Cromwell and by some deal.
But he's in the tower and this marks him.
It marks his poetry too.
There's a A verse in the Bell Tower.
He's in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London.
The Bell Tower showed me such sight that in my head sticks day and night.
For there did I see out of a great that, for all favour, glory and might that, yet circa regna tonat, it thunders around thrones.
This is a moment of terror.
Nora, you want to come in?
Yes, just on that poem, that it is an astonishing moment.
In another verse in the same poem when he says, these bloody days have broken my heart.
Yes.
My lust, my youth, must then depart.
It was a tightrope it caught, wasn't it?
I mean, two syllables could be the end of you.
Yes, precisely.
And what's striking is that even in this poem, which is so vividly about the horror of this and a turning point of his life, even so it's still euphemistic.
He doesn't tell us what he saw.
And the refrain of the poem, as you said, Circa Regna Turnat, is a classical refrain.
It's from Seneca's Phaedra.
You know this is using the general idea of learnedness to express what purports to be an abstract idea, but in the same poem is clearly not an abstract idea.
His heart is broken.
But in this great tragedy the Queen dies, her brother Rochford dies.
Norris dies, Brereton, Western.
And they die for, of course, if they really have had sexual relations with the Queen, this would taint the succession.
But it's doubtful that they had.
What they did do flirting with the Queen in the game of courtly love is to say things which were dangerous.
So when the Queen says to Norris, you look for dead man's shoes...
That's to compass the death of the king.
Or if anything happened to the king, you would look to have me.
This is to dare to talk about the king's death.
A kidnapped child whispers dark secrets from his past in a language he no longer understands.
But a lost cassette will reveal the ugly truth.
From Curious Cast and Blanchard House comes a cross-continental odyssey to recover a stolen past.
This is Stop Rewind, The Lost Boy.
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you find your favourite podcasts.
Do you think that the diplomacy, the being in prison, after prison, do you think that rather interfered with his poetry?
I don't know.
I think you could almost put it the other way around.
I mean, I think there was a really interesting question about the atmosphere of treachery and treason around Henry VIII's court.
Six wives.
Well, you know, we're talking about somebody who is a serious psychopath at some level and who certainly becomes a tyrant at some level.
And Wyatt's ability to write within that is an interesting thing.
I mean I like.
I'm sure all of us have just been to the fantastic Holbein exhibition at the what's now the King's Gallery, where you know, in the royal family.
This is an incredible collection of of Holbein's drawings from life of people at the Tudor court.
And you know, to borrow a phrase from from a previous conservative prime minister.
You know they're all bastards, except perhaps for Thomas Wyatt who, at the same time, you know he's not a cheery bloke.
He's looking side long to one side.
He's clearly worried, but he's working out a way of being in that court where it is almost impossible to be.
So you know Richard Southall, you know just nearby him in the exhibition.
You know he just betrays everybody that's going and sticks up for the old religion but then profiteers off the new religion.
And he even comes up with a witty Latin, you know, motto for himself in doing so.
Sapit qui sustenet.
You know basically, if you know how to look after yourself, you can do anything in life.
I'm very roughly translating the Latin there.
And that's a rebuke to just about everybody else who's operating in the judicial court.
He's also incredibly brave.
In one of his letters to Henry, while he's at the Spanish court, the Holy Roman Emperor's court, he recounts a conversation he had with the emperor, in which the emperor, he says, said to him kings are not kings of tongues.
And if men give cause to be spoken of, they will be spoken of.
That's an incredibly brave thing to write back to the king because it's an available overt criticism of the Treason Act 1534 the idea that you can rule people's speech.
And he just puts it in there.
And I think that's astonishingly brave.
Thank you.
Susan, Susan Brinkman, Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540.
He doesn't, to some extent, have been Wyatt's protector.
Did Wyatt feel defenceless without him?
You know, this is one of the great heartbreaks really for Wyatt.
I think that Thomas Cromwell and he had been friends in the sternest sense and Cromwell had been Wyatt's protector, certainly his patron.
It's Cromwell's agency that frees Wyatt from the Tower in 1536.
And Cromwell writes letters advising Wyatt all the time that he's in embassy.
But in 1540, Cromwell's enemies are poised to strike against him.
On 10 June 1540, he's arrested.
He's accused of treason, and it's not clear whether he'll die as a traitor or a heretic.
Now, in this fall, there's also foreign politics involved, as there always is for kings, because they're most interested in what other kings think of them more than what their people think of them.
And so on the very day that Cromwell's arrested, Wyatt is given an enormous grant of land.
He becomes one of the richest men in England.
So there's more than coincidence there, and it may be that Wyatt had had to bring evidence against Cromwell as part of a new wind blowing.
In other words, betray his protector.
Yeah, he betrays his protector.
And in what's called the Elegy for Cromwell, the poem...
The pillar perished is whereto I lent the strongest day of mine, an unquiet mind.
We find the I, the speaker in the poem, talking about I myself, myself, all way to hate.
Till dreadful death, then my doleful state.
Yes.
So it looks as if, you know, Wyatt has been collusive in bringing down Cromwell.
But what else could he do with this, you know, with the king so minor tree and so suspicious?
Yes.
Nora, do you want to come in here?
Yeah, just it is an astonishing path that Wyatt tries to walk.
He's obsessed with the idea of truth and honesty.
And, of course, that obsession is bound to be double edged, as Brian has been saying that it's an obsession that everyone is supposed to have.
He writes to his son, honesty, honesty is all.
He said, if you will seem honest, be honest, else seem as you are.
And in his epistolary satires, which are all about courts are a terrible and corrupt place and you shouldn't want to be there.
I don't want to be there.
He has lines like I cannot with my words, complain and moan and suffer nought, nor smart without complaint, nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone, which is a direct lie, because he spent his life turning the word that from his mouth was gone.
And very specifically he was, once Cromwell had fallen, letters turned up in Cromwell's papers in which a man called Edmund Bonner had accused Wyatt of treason, saying that he had encompassed the king's death by words.
And what he was supposed to have said regarding the agreement made between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France was that the king would fall out of the cart's arse on this one.
And Bonner claimed that this expressed that he thought that the king would be taken to execution in a cart and that therefore, this was the king's death.
And Wyatt painstakingly explained in a long letter, no, this is a proverb.
It means when a thing is negligently taken heed of and therefore falls out of consideration and is forgotten.
And besides, I doubt I said it because I wouldn't have been rude.
Right.
And he was released from the tower.
Who knows whether it was because of this exoneration.
But this constant line of danger is absolutely petrifying.
Ryan, you want to come in?
Yeah, it's about that moment when Bonner tries to accuse Wyatt very directly and tries to extract very direct meaning from a phrase which, of course, Wyatt then says is a proverb.
But it's also Wyatt says well, but you're trying to make it out that I'm a Catholic here, whereas everybody's saying I'm a Lutheran.
How can that be?
And I think he's also probably getting at Bonner there.
Bonner himself is a famous turncoat.
You know who becomes a bishop.
But you know he can play any side you like, as long as it looks as if the odds are good on his side.
I think Wyatt is both able to see that two-facedness, if you like, but he also can see the danger of occupying either side.
So one of the things I think that's most interesting about him is his ventriloquism.
He's able to occupy the voice of another person.
That's something, again, that he can get from Chaucer, who can do that so, so easily.
And it comes out even in his religious work.
So in his version of the Penitential Psalm, when he's thinking, when he's talking about penitence, of course, the great thing about quoting from the Bible is that nobody can actually execute you for that.
But nonetheless, there is a real question about exactly in what way you are inhabiting that.
So when he says oh, happy are they that have forgiveness God, of their offence, not by their penitence as by merit, which recompenseth not.
He is both paraphrasing the Psalms and getting quite close to saying more or less exactly what Luther is saying.
But he can get away with it because, well, it's the Psalms.
Can you just tell the listeners how this is working its way through, if it is, in its poetry?
And just give us two or three lines, if it is, of how that's happening.
The question then, is how can you be true to yourself in terms of everything you say only means what the king says.
So I think there's an interesting intersection with religious faith.
In the paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms there's a moment when He pictures David thinking.
You know what have I been saying?
Who's said this?
I, sinner I, And he says that God's goodness may within my song entreat.
Let me again consider and repeat.
And so he doth, but not express by word.
But in his heart he turneth and poisons each word which est his lips did forth afford.
And I think that's an astonishing moment of if you could just keep your words in your heart.
Only in silence do you actually own your own meaning.
And, of course God transcendently, can see the words in your heart, whereas words you've spoken are open to the king's interpretation.
They're open to anyone's interpretation and could be construed in any way.
Susan, Susan Brinkman, what were the circumstances of his final months?
Well, he's in the Tower again in January 1541 and he's really not thought likely to survive this time.
And in this, in the Tower, in January 1541, he writes this extraordinary defence of himself.
Anyway, he does survive, probably because Henry's new queen, Catherine, has interceded for him.
But he then goes into sort of rural reclusion for a while.
And I think it's probably then that he's paraphrasing the penitential psalms.
But he's finally caught.
He's like a moth to the flame and still wanting caught life.
And he's called then for revenge.
What turns out to be one last service.
He rides furiously down to Devon to collect some foreign diplomat and catches a fever and dies.
So he dies in the royal service.
Laura, his poetry in his day is regarded by his peers highly.
Yes.
What's happened since to his reputation?
Immediately after his death Surrey, his younger compatriot and fellow poet, did a massive job of attempting to praise him and establish him as a figure of English poetry.
So Surrey says he was a hand that taught what might be said in rhyme, that reffed Chaucer the glory of his wit.
So for Surrey, he's establishing Wyatt as, you know, he's stolen the crown from Chaucer.
And of course, now Wyatt is dead, there's very much a vacancy there.
And so there's a lot of fashioning of poetry as something which he also says he wrote to Britain's gain.
So this is Surrey fashioning him as a poet of Britain, of the nation, in a very studied way.
And both a lot of Surrey's and a lot of Wyatt's poems were published in 1557 in a collection now known as Tottle's Miscellany publisher Richard Tottle, who had clearly got access to some of the manuscripts in which these poems had circulated only in manuscript up until then.
And this was fabulously popular.
It went through two editions in a year and a further seven editions before the end of the century.
And but what Tottle did do, unfortunately, was he was obsessed with regular meter and scansion.
So he just freely changed Wyatt's poems to make them scan evenly and as a result changed the meaning of them and made them less good and nonetheless thoroughly successful.
In 1589 George Putnam published The Art of English Poesy in which he praised Wyatt and Surrey as a pair, as the two chief lanterns of light of English poetry.
And this then had established them fully, when Chaucer seemed so far in the background by then, established them as at the beginning of a new kind of English poetry which was taken up in the sonneteering of Sidney and of Spencer and then of Shakespeare.
Would you like to come in here?
Yeah, I think that the Wyatt-Surrey comparison then somehow takes over the field.
And for a long time, Surrey tended to get the benefit.
In the 18th and 19th century, Surrey was much more admired than Wyatt.
I think Wyatt's just one of those interesting cases of a poet in some ways who comes into his own in the 20th century.
There are quite a few Renaissance poets of that kind.
Dunne is the most obvious other example.
And there's something in the inflection, something in the contrariness, something in the difficulty which appeals in the 20th century in a way that doesn't appeal in the 18th and 19th centuries.
And I think that's what's partly given why this new vogue.
And for Wyatt, Laura talked about Tottle smoothing Wyatt.
Well, Wyatt hated smoothness.
Wyatt wanted roughness.
And Puttenham recognised that, that Wyatt's an experimenter.
He wants to break the rhythms.
I mean, I think you know, here we also get to the kind of the Shakespeare myth and the Shakespeare kind of domination.
There's an interesting relation between Wyatt and Shakespeare on this, which is around iambic, pentameter and around how verse relates to metre.
And there's a kind of...
There's so much rubbish that's been written about the iambic pentameter.
And so many people try to make Shakespeare sound.
Actually, they make him sound terrible because they're trying to regularise what he says into what they think iambic pentameter should be like.
Actually, in Shakespeare, there's lots of missed stresses, as you were saying.
You can have four stress lines.
You can have even three stress lines that should have five.
You sometimes get hypermetric six stress lines when you're not quite expecting them.
Actually, Wyatt does that a lot.
And I think that's one of the ways in which Wyatt is prefiguring something about the mobility and flexibility that really great poetry has against the kind of thing that is often taught as good poetry, which is didum didum didum didum, and it's got to rhyme.
So in a way, there's a real conflict about what poetry really should be like.
Yes.
But Wyatt, you know, he does break the mould.
And there's a point where we find Wyatt saying in a poem me list no more to seeing of love, nor no such thing.
Or whether he's just he plays playing to the courtly company, you know, who are obviously in the background saying, oh no, do carry on.
But he also, you know, has tired of the old plaints.
And the old, you know serve stir deserve feign, vain kind of rhymes.
He wants to do, he knows he's doing something different.
He's following the new poets of the Italian, Alamanni, Aretino, Serafino.
But also, I think one of the most astonishing things he does is when he's translating, and translating closely.
He nonetheless will put a crowbar in and crack something open.
So in one of his sonnets, it's quite a close translation of Petrarch.
The line in Petrarch is just, I hate myself and I love another.
And in Wyatt, this becomes, I love another and thus I hate myself.
And that is a transformed line.
That's an idea that to love another is to be alienated from oneself.
To love another is to fundamentally give up on oneself, to be lost to something.
And he's created that with a word.
And, by the way Tossall, when he printed that poem, just deleted thus because it was one too many syllables.
Another moment.
He translates a bit of Seneca into an astonishing epigram called Stand Whoso List Upon the Slipper Top of Court's Estates.
And this is a short little piece of verse about how it's terrible to be at court because terrible things happen to you.
And in the original, the meaning is, you know, you serve other people and you forget who you are.
But it's all Wyatt to have his final lines here.
For him, death grips right hard by the crop that is much known of other and of himself alas, doth die unknown, dazed with dreadful face.
And that's the kind of moment that pierces through time.
He was just translating a stock abstract, but astonishingly.
But I wanted to say too that Wyatt, who's so trained as a diplomat to speak Latin and this Aureate diction so often speaks deliberately Anglo-Saxon.
To be steadfast, that's what he wants.
What makes him so readable 500 years on?
Everything we've been talking about the immediacy, the speech likeness of his verse, the conversational aspect of it.
But I also think that he is doing something quite astonishing in his poetry.
Very often he's talking about love, but whereas love poetry for centuries had involved creating a persona for the poet.
You know, there's no one else there in Petrarch's sonnets.
There's Petrarch and then there's the abstract idea of Laura or of the public poet.
But in Wyatt we repeatedly feel there are other people there in existence, just out of reach, people over whom he has no control but whose existence matter profoundly.
And that's an astonishing effect.
I think of Wyatt as someone who's got such high ideals of how you should live and then he falls so short of them.
And there's the agony of that, what veileth truth and by it to take pain.
I think one of the things that I really love Wyatt for but I also think is an important thing about him now is the way that he gives expression to complexity of emotion.
So it's become very much our thing now to think we always want transparency, that we always expect people to be able to say what they feel very directly.
And Wyatt lives in a world where expressing yourself directly is very dangerous, but perhaps also not entirely possible.
And what I really admire about him is the ability to construct himself, fabricate himself, perhaps also, as we've said, sometimes to hate himself, and to do that with a kind of honesty.
But at the same time, it's an honesty through the understanding that life actually is not as simple as we think it is, that it does involve dissimulation all the time and that irony might be the biggest gift that we have.
We live in a world which is increasingly antipathetic to irony, and we have never needed irony more.
Thank you very much.
That was terrific.
Thank you.
Thanks, Susan Brigden, Laura Ash, and Brian Cummings, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.
Next week Philippa Foote, one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, also known for posing the trolley problem.
Thanks for listening.
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
Starting with you, Laura, what did you not have time to say you'd like to have said?
There are just always other bits of Wyatt I would have loved to discuss.
So one is an amazing few lines.
'Alas, not of steel, but of brick or glass.
'I see that from my hand falleth my trust, 'and all my thoughts are dashed into dust'.
So a beautiful image, a complex image, and on the face of it, a simple one about betrayal.
I've been betrayed.
My trust is gone.
Except that for something to fall from your hand, you do have to open your hand.
You do have to choose.
And why should your trust be made of steel?
The world around you isn't made of steel.
The world is not constant.
He's obsessed with the idea of I could be constant if only the world would be constant to me.
Yeah, and the impossibility of that, and it comes through everywhere in the poetry, in many, many different images, and it's just always obsessively worth digging into.
One of the things that Wyatt is noted for is bringing Petrarch into the question of English verse.
The great Italian writer, his sonnets transferred into what became English sonnets, what became Shakespeare's sonnets, what became the sounding voice of some of the greatest of our poems?
Well, I think Wyatt has a life among these very grand merchant princes in London the Bardi and Cavalcanti.
And I think he probably gets all his Italian writers from them before ever he goes to Italy.
They talk about master Francis Petrarch, and he's their idol in a way.
And what Wyatt's doing is engaging in this very high and creative form of Renaissance imitation, where imitation is a splendid thing to do.
You're like a bee buzzing from flower to flower.
And so there's Petrarch that he's transmuting.
It's a sort of alchemical process, and behind Petrarch there are other texts as well.
What is he most attracted to?
He's attracted to the rhythms and the beauty, but what he does is to Petrarch's most.
The love poetry, the rime sparse, the scattered rhymes speak of Petrarch's love for Laura, his chaste love through in her life and in her death, and where he sees her, Petrarch sees her sort of transfigured in the landscape, through the laura, the breeze, and then in the laurel, the aloro.
So Wyatt?
In a poem like Whoso Lister Hunt, Wyatt is using Petrarch's Una, Candida Cerva, which is his account of a white doe in a beautiful green landscape who's been rapt from Petrarch in death.
Her Caesar has made her free.
And Wyatt does something extraordinary.
He turns the account of the doe the white doe into a deer who's being chased in a brutal secular hunt.
And Wyatt himself is one of the huntsmen.
And this is a deer that's alive.
She's captured but she's been made free alive.
So Petrarch is talking of a white doe on the green grass when the sun is rising in the unripe season.
And Wyatt, this is his, whoso lists to hunt, I know where is in hind.
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore.
I am of them that furthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer.
But as she fleeth afore fainting, I follow.
I leave off, therefore, sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
So these themes of impotence and the wearied mind and hopeless following and wildness are quintessentially Wyatt's.
He's transforming Petrarch and he does it again and again.
Let's talk about the Reformation.
How does it intertwine with what's going on?
Well, I suppose first we need to make a kind of exception, in the sense that we can't really talk about Protestantism yet.
We don't really know what Protestant versus Catholic means yet exactly.
These are terms which are coming into being.
Well, we've got the active supremacy from Henry VIII.
We're some way towards it, aren't we?
Well, but what we have there is a political reformation, a political reformation of religion, and it's an authority-driven version of the reformation.
So what Henry's concerned about is how his power...
Originally, that starts with just his freedom to marry in the way that he chose for the succession, but also increasingly, in relation to all sorts of other areas of state power, how the church infringed upon that.
And so he creates the conditions for a kind of totalitarianism over religion, that he decides what religion will be.
And then the doctrine kind of comes in after.
And that's what makes it very peculiar.
And I think it also makes it extremely dangerous.
So that Henry uses doctrinal conflicts that exist between people in order to create a kind of pecking order of who's in and who's out.
Who gets executed and who doesn't.
And who gets executed and who doesn't.
But he changes that, you know, from not quite from day to day, but certainly from month to month.
And in some cases, you know, just to make sure everybody sees how equal he is, he'll execute four of one side and four of the other side on the same day, just to keep everybody as nervous as possible.
Or as he thinks, as happy as possible.
Or as happy as possible.
But all of that is in the context of a period which is going through great changes in understanding of religion and a great anxiety about religion.
So if we can't talk about Protestantism yet, we can talk about something we might call an evangelical religion. piety, which is very, very popular among urban classes, among intelligentsia, and at quite high levels of court life and among aristocrats.
Amberlynn went to the French court and at the French court met other women who, or the Queen Claude, who were highly interested not in a different doctrine or a new religion that was anti-Catholic, but in a different kind of party that was learned, that wanted to understand the New Testament in Greek, but through that also had a sense that the individual had a personal capacity to interpret.
Now Luther becomes very, very famous for that.
But you need to remember as well that although Luther was cantankerous and difficult and bilious and increasingly angry, he was also enormously creative intellectually, and certainly in his first years.
And if you look at his writing and his thinking in his early years, he's changing his mind all the time.
He's creating a weird kind of paradox that at the same time says we are passive to the will of God and therefore don't have freedom.
And yet we are individually responsible for everything in our own heads.
And so we have an intense self-scrutiny.
Now, I think those two things together are a very powerful cocktail.
And you get some sense of why these ideas are so powerfully interesting to people.
But then they get into trouble for those things because of course they have to come up against church doctrine and what it is that you're supposed to believe and what you're not supposed to believe.
Luther didn't realize he was a heretic, really, until he was told he was a heretic.
But once he was told that he was a heretic, he said, OK, I'm a heretic.
And then you just you ratchet on from there to the next case and so on.
Do you want to go into it?
Yes, I suppose I think of Wyatt as someone who's been absolutely brought up in this ethical way and writes, when he's very young, a book, The Quiet of Mind that he dedicates to Queen Catherine at a time when she really needs support.
This is the moment when her marriage is finished.
He talks in The Quiet of Mind about how you sustain yourself against the blows of fortune and also the seductions of success.
And so this is the philosophy that he's going to live by.
It's probably taught to him by Queen Catherine's supporters, like the Points brothers John Points brothers to whom he writes two verse epistles.
This sort of paradox of you know your high ideal and of speaking truth and being true.
And yet, while everything countermands, it is at the heart of Wyatt and it's at the heart of his verse, epistles which are, you know, the closest to an intimate conversation that we find in Wyatt.
And in fact, you know, we have...
In Wyatt, more evidence than we have about anybody else.
We've got the paraphrase of the Psalms.
We've got portraits, portraits of his family.
We've got all his letters.
We've got all this poetry.
It's an extraordinary amount of evidence.
And yet, as Brian says, he's needing to be secret.
He knows that A small, a syllable different makes a great difference, he says.
In the epistles, there is a moment when we have a glimpse of this stoic ideal.
You know that you could be self-sufficient, withdraw from court, not need to lie and flatter and instead be whole unto yourself.
He says then seek no more to find the thing that thou hast sought so long before, for thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind.
But he doesn't tell us what the thing is.
We can't know what the thing is.
We just have to keep searching.
But that epistolary satire verse epistle ends in an extraordinary way.
So often in Wyatt's letters and in his poetry, there is this mysterious they.
They flee from me.
That sometimes And the end of My Mother's Maids, which is one of his verse, epistles to points ends with one of the most bitter things in literature, which is, he says, Henceforth my points.
This shall be all and some.
These wretched fools shall have naught else of me.
But to the great God and to his high doom, none other pain pray I for them to be.
But when the rage doth lead them from the right, that looking backward virtue they may see, even as she is so goodly fair and bright.
And whilst they clasp their lusts in arms across, grant them, good Lord, as thou mayest of thy might, to fret inward for losing such a loss.
There's a very dark line which echoes They Flee From Me, but must be from a later poem and it's about when his friends have abandoned him and he thinks he's going to be executed and he says that those who used to like his company, like lice from a dead body.
They crawl.
I want to talk about something that we reflected on earlier, but perhaps from a slightly different angle.
So everybody knows about Wyatt's petrarchism and there's a little bit of a tendency in terms of trying to write about poetry in relation to translation, of always using the one language against the other and to imply a sort of a sense of improvement through translation.
And I think something that's very interesting about Wyatt and is obviously very topical now is is how European a writer he is, even as he is an English writer.
It's not a distinction in him.
He travels in the Low Countries, he travels in Italy, he travels in France, and he travels in Spain.
And he understands something from those cultures, something that's distinctive, something that an English person can learn to be more interestingly English through doing that.
And in that way I think his poetry broach is something that we're finding increasingly hard to do in a very polarised world of being able to speak within one language, but with a kind of internationalism.
And I think he does that very, very, very successfully.
And you can see it also in his use of classical sources, the way that he chooses Plutarch.
Plutarch has become a rather boring source in the way that English literary historians deal with him.
They always go for the biographical and for the historical in a kind of plain man's way.
But actually, Plutarch is a wonderfully subtle moral writer.
You know, when he writes about anger, he's also writing about the problems of anger in yourself, rather than somehow just what causes anger.
Or when he talks about flattery, he talks about friendship.
When he talks about curiosity, he's also talking about anxiety.
These sorts of things are things that Wyatt picks up on.
It's one of the ways in which I think he shares a lot with Erasmus, even though he may not be directly quoting from Erasmus.
And this again is something which is a European culture of the time and that we perhaps could get a bit back to.
But he determines to be thoroughly English too, doesn't he, Brian?
He wants to in They Flee From Me.
You find the juxtaposition of romance languages guise set against middle English words as well.
And he's doing this very deliberately.
Well, I suppose in that way he's following Chaucer again, who is regarded as the father of English poetry but who was absolutely intimate with the most sophisticated French and Italian literature of his day.
I think the great mystery about Wyatt too is that John Leland addresses a rather clunking poem to him Latin poem talking about viatus viator, the play on words Wyatt the Traveller.
But he's suggesting that Wyatt shouldn't have too much care to sort of Latin Hendecker syllables, as though Wyatt is writing Latin poetry.
And I bet he did.
But we don't, if he did, we don't have any.
I think our producer wants to come in with an announcement.
Does anyone want to your coffee?
Coffee.
Thank you.
I'll have a coffee for Jane.
Thank you very much.
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.
Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
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