24 Facts About Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent, though the family was originally from Yorkshire.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's family adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of Roses.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's mother was Anne Skinner, and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a Privy Councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509.

Sir Thomas Wyatt had a brother Henry, assumed to have died an infant, and a sister Margaret who married Sir Anthony Lee and was the mother of Queen Elizabeth's champion Sir Henry Lee.

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Sir Thomas Wyatt was over six feet tall, reportedly both handsome and physically strong.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, but he entered Henry's service in 1515 as "Sewer Extraordinary", and the same year he began studying at St John's College, Cambridge.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's father had been associated with Sir Thomas Boleyn as constable of Norwich Castle, and Wyatt was thus acquainted with Anne Boleyn.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was knighted in 1535 and appointed High Sheriff of Kent for 1536.

In 1524, Henry VIII assigned Sir Thomas Wyatt to be an ambassador at home and abroad, and he separated from his wife soon after on grounds of adultery.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's professed object was to experiment with the English language, to civilise it, to raise its powers to equal those of other European languages.

Sir Thomas Wyatt took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme schemes are significantly different.

Sir Thomas Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee.

Sir Thomas Wyatt experimented in stanza forms including the rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs, and satires, as well as with monorime, triplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas, and the French forms of douzaine and treizaine.

Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the poulter's measure form, rhyming couplets composed of a 12-syllable iambic line followed by a 14-syllable iambic line, and he is considered a master of the iambic tetrameter.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry reflects classical and Italian models, but he admired the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, and his vocabulary reflects that of Chaucer; for example, he uses Chaucer's word newfangleness, meaning fickleness, in They Flee from Me.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was responsible for the important introduction of the personal note into English poetry, for although he followed his models closely, he wrote of his own experiences.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's satires are composed in the Italian terza rima, again showing the direction of the innovating tendencies.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poems were found praiseworthy by numerous poets, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Yvor Winters, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen.

Many have conjectured that Sir Thomas Wyatt fell in love with Anne Boleyn in the early- to mid-1520s.

Gilfillan argues that these lines could refer to Anne's trip to France in 1532 prior to her marriage to Henry VIII and could imply that Sir Thomas Wyatt was present, although his name is not included among those who accompanied the royal party to France.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was released later that year thanks to his friendship or his father's friendship with Thomas Cromwell, and he returned to his duties.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was granted a full pardon and restored to his duties as ambassador.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an ancestor of Wallis Simpson, wife of the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII.