Wyatt: Satirist in Secret

Abstract

IN 1541, THOMAS WYATT (c.1503-42) – once a diplomat and now a political prisoner – composed a highly strategic declaration of innocence which has often caught the attention of his biographers and editors: I, as God iudge me, lyke as I was contynually imagininge and cumpassinge what waye I myght do beste service, so restede I not day nor nyght to hunte owte for knowledge of those thynges. I trotted contynually vp and downe that hell throughe heate and stinke from councelloure to embassator, from on frende to an other, but the thynges then were ether so secretly handlede or yett not in couertore that I with all myne acquayntance, and myche les theye my colloquies for anie pollice or industrie that I sawe them vuse, could not gett anye knowledge.1 This document had been requested by Henry VIII’s Privy Council. The council also wanted information about Wyatt’s possible contact with traitors and conspirators while he was on a diplomatic mission in Nice and Villefranche in May 1538: the initial cause for concern. Unfortunately, Wyatt’s secret work in the ‘hell’ of foreign courts had become suspicious, as had the work of other diplomats (who were arrested along with Wyatt and locked in the Tower). As part of his defence, Wyatt clearly wanted someone to believe that ignorance constituted innocence. Everything was ‘so secretly handlede’, he claims, that he ‘could not gett anye knowledge’.2 Alternatively, Wyatt might have been hoping that some official declaration of ignorance might be enough to extinguish the need for further enquiry (such statements do not necessarily require a full commitment on the part of the statement-maker, or the statement-maker might be entirely conscious of his own false logic – hoping that it might not be noticed by others). However, anyone who claims that he ‘could not gett anye knowledge’ while abroad on state business is guaranteed to attract the very scrutiny he officially wants to discourage. Whether that is a false step or a careful piece of suggestion in this case is not entirely clear. It remains uncertain, too, what actually went on in the ‘heate and stinke’ of that ‘hell’.