SOURCE: Southall, Raymond. “‘Love, Fortune and my mind’: the Stoicism of Wyatt.” Essays in Criticism XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1989): 18-28.

[In the essay which follows, Southall explores how the precarious life at court influenced Wyatt's poetry.]

Writing in these pages nearly twenty-five years ago, I argued against D. W. Harding's suggestion that Wyatt's poetry was an unconscious reflexion of his insecurity as courtier and diplomat and Patricia Thomson's opinion that it was arrogant and cynical.¹ Both of these views, it seemed to me, were likely to detract from the achievement of someone who was ‘coming to be seen as the most important figure in English poetry from the death of Chaucer to the reign of Elizabeth’.² It was not difficult to demonstrate that Wyatt deliberately, not unconsciously, translated public into private experience (guided to some extent, I suggested, by Plutarch) and that far from being arrogant and cynical he maintained a sensible grip upon actuality.

Two years later Donald M. Friedman protested that I was mistaken in relating the anxiety and insecurity of mind expressed in Wyatt's poems to the poet's experience as a courtier. According to Friedman, the poems are intent upon a condition that ‘exists only within the mind itself’.³ At the time a response to this reading seemed unnecessary, since I had already presented the evidence against it in this journal and in my recently published The Courtly Maker. However, Dr Joost Daalder, whose work on Wyatt I find otherwise admirable, has given a great deal of consideration to Friedman's argument and in a postscript to his note on Wyatt and Liberty stands by his earlier claim that it is ‘one of the most important discussions of Wyatt to have yet appeared’.⁴ This being so, it no longer seems superfluous to recall Wyatt's achievement and to challenge the solipsistic view of it.

The obvious critical facts about Wyatt can be summarised very briefly. He was an early-Tudor court poet who revitalized the conventions of courtly poetry by recourse to his own political experience as a courtier and diplomat. The themes to which he repeatedly returns are, in his own words, ‘Love and fortune and my mind’.⁵ Love is explored in the plaintive tradition of amour courtois, fortune with reference to ‘the slipper top of court's estates’⁶, and the mind as it wrestles with the uncertainties of court favour, both amorous and political. These observations stand in opposition to the tendency of Friedman and Daalder to see Wyatt's anxieties as the expression of a dissociated concern for his own mental state rather than as the inner correlatives of his public life. On the Friedman—Daalder view, Wyatt was not a courtly maker, in the sense defined above, but ‘a victim of neurosis’, someone ‘tormented’ by ‘wayward, passion-led fluctuations of mind’.⁷

There is no doubt that Wyatt's complaints of psychological insecurity have more than conventional intensity, that he would have welcomed peace of mind had it been obtainable and that his understanding of what was involved in its attainment was generally Stoical. Daalder has maintained that this understanding was largely acquired from the prose works of Seneca, although he briefly acknowledges that Petrarch, Plutarch and Boethius ‘helped to shape’ it.⁸ His emphasis upon Seneca's Epistulae Morales, however, obscures what is actually known of the origins of Wyatt's interest in Stoicism, which is that they lie in his service to his liege-lady. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that the clearest evidence of Senecan influence in Wyatt's poetry is an anti-Stoical Epicureanism, derived from the Roman's tragedies, not his prose works, at a time when the poet's political hopes had been dashed.

Wyatt was only twenty-four, but already a successful courtier and budding diplomat, when Queen Katherine, whom Henry VIII had already decided to divorce, asked him to translate Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae for her in 1527. Finding Petrarch's dialogues tediously repetitive, he set them aside and turned instead to Plutarch, assuring the Queen that Quiet of Mind contained all ‘that your highness desired of Petrarch’.⁹ The translation was presented to Katherine at the beginning of 1528 as a New Year's gift and printed, probably later the same year, by the King's printer, Richard Pynson. It is not possible to say what comfort she obtained from it, but the Stoicism of Plutarch obviously impressed Wyatt and as Charles Read Baskervill observed,

Wyat's interest in Stoic philosophy—a support doubtless needed by anyone who followed his fortunes at the court of Henry VIII—comes out again a decade or more later in his recommendation of Seneca and Epictetus to his son.¹⁰

Much that Daalder takes as the mark of Senecan influence on Wyatt could well be evidence of his debt to Plutarch. Wyatt recalls his translation of Plutarch, for instance, and the English proverbial expressions he used in it, in the lines immediately preceding the ‘Senecan’ ones from the Second Satire quoted by Daalder. The satire's assertions that

None of ye all there is that is so mad
To seek grapes upon brambles or briers

and

Ne ye set not a drag-net for a hare

echo the Quiet of Mind's

none of us sees a vine bear figs / nor an olive bear
grapes

and its reference to those

that with vain endeavour / hunt an hart with a drag
net.(11)

The reiteration, incidentally, provides the Wyatt editor with a bonus, since it reveals that the Second Satire's hare, which doesn't make sense (a hare may be caught with a drag-net) needs to be emended to hart. It is noted by Daalder in his edition, although the emendation is not made.

Wyatt also recalls the Quiet of Mind in one of the ‘Senecan’ lines actually quoted by Daalder:

Let present pass, and gape on time to come

echoes the prose translation's

for fools let good things pass though they be present / and regard them not when they perish / so much do their thoughts gape greedily after things to come.¹²

He may also be indebted to Plutarch for the notion that it is peace of mind that affords liberty, for in its penultimate sentence the Quiet of Mind affirms that it is due to our own ‘troublous affections’ that ‘we can not get us some liberty and space to take our breath’.¹³ It is to this connection between liberty and ‘space to take our breath’ that Wyatt returns in the First Satire when he informs John Poins, ‘In lusty lease at liberty I walk’.

When Wyatt translated Quiet of Mind in 1527, it needs to be remembered, he was an ambitious young courtier. Plutarch's Stoicism would have recommended itself to him, therefore, by its insistence that a busy life of public affairs is not incompatible with peace of mind. Plutarch is quite definite about this, asserting that ‘it is false / that unactive men lead a quiet life’ and urging that ‘the surety and trouble of the mind / ought not to be measured / with multitude or scarcity of business’.¹⁴ He cites the example of Laertes, who fled the court to lead a simple life in the country and took his misery with him, as a warning to those who believe that obscurity brings tranquility.¹⁵ Within ten years or so, Wyatt was ignoring this warning. He addresses his first two satires to his old friend and fellow courtier, John Poins, to explain

The cause why that homeward I me draw,
And flee the press of courts whereso they go

and then to elaborate, by way of the fable of the town and country mouse, the advantages of the very meanest rustic existence over life ‘at the rich man's cost’.

That Wyatt was already interested in Seneca by the time he was writing the satires is apparent not only from the letter he wrote to his son from Spain in the Spring of 1537¹⁶, but also from the poem ‘Stand whoso list upon the slipper top’, which is translated from Thyestes and expresses the same preference for a life of obscurity to a life at court as the satires to Poins:

Stand whoso list upon the slipper top
Of court's estates, and let me here rejoice
And use me quiet without let or stop,
Unknown in court, that hath such brackish joys.
In hidden place so let my days forth pass
That when my years be done withouten noise,
I may die aged after the common trace …(17)

The desire to be ‘unknown’ is also expressed in ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’, the first two stanzas of which are adapted from Seneca's Phaedra, from which Wyatt takes the refrain used throughout, circa Regna tonat. The poem opens with the advice

Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain …

It may have been written while Wyatt was a prisoner in the Tower in 1536 and is the first indication of Senecan influence in his poetry. In all probability, however, Wyatt wrote it at Allington after his release. He must have spent his time at home in Kent in the manner he describes to Poins in the First Satire, riding, hunting, hawking and sitting at his book ‘in foul weather’ reading and rhyming. His reading on this occasion seems to have included Thyestes and Phaedra and his rhyming the poems he derived from them. Whether he wrote the satires at this time is a moot point. It seems likely that he did and such a dating of them (Winter 1536-7) would give a neglected meaning to the remark to Poins in the First Satire that the author was ‘not now in France … Nor yet in Spain’ (my italics), for Wyatt was appointed Ambassador to Spain in March, 1537.

As Wyatt's attention had been drawn to Plutarch by the impending fall of Katherine, so his interest in Seneca seems to have been aroused by the fate of her successor, Anne Boleyn, who was arrested for high treason on 2nd May, 1536. Together with her ‘servants’, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton, Francis Weston and William Bruton, who were accused of having been her lovers, she was placed in the Tower, to which Wyatt was also committed three days later. Wyatt, who had certainly been one of the Queen's men, was eventually released. The rest were executed and it appears that Wyatt witnessed the beheading of the Queen from his cell in the bell tower, an experience recalled in ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’:

The bell-tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night:
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory or might,
          That yet circa Regna tonat.

It is hardly surprising that Anne's execution made a far deeper impression upon the poet than the plight of Katherine had done nine years earlier. Friedman sought to discredit the importance I placed upon this incident by saying that I believed ‘the sight haunted [Wyatt] for the rest of his life’.¹⁸ What this way of putting the matter conveniently overlooks is that Wyatt only lived another six years and that Bonner informed Cromwell in 1538 that Wyatt ‘doeth often call to his rememberance his imprisonment in the Tower, which seemeth so to stick in his stomach that he cannot forget it.’¹⁹ Unlike many of the claims brought against him by Bonner, this is one Wyatt never rejected.

There is no reason to doubt Wyatt's declaration in ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’ that the events of May, 1536, put an end to his courtly ambitions and turned his mind against life at court:

These bloody days have broken my heart:
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:
          Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

Here, as in the stanza previously quoted, Seneca's circa Regna tonat is being called upon to give moral significance to Wyatt's experiences in the Tower. It is from the same source, Senecan tragedy, as he draws this moral that Wyatt derives the notion that peace of mind is not to be found at court but is to be found in rustic obscurity at Allington.

Wyatt did not adopt the view that inner tranquility was to be found in retirement and reject Plutarch's opinion to the contrary because he found Epicureanism intellectually more satisfying than Stoicism. He was not a philosopher and when he turned to the Muses it was, as he informed Poins, ‘to read and rhyme’. What the poems of 1536 serve to illustrate is how intimately his reading and rhyming is related to his experience of court. It is an intimacy no less evident in his appreciation of liberty, which is Daalder's particular concern, than in the quietism which was his initial response to the lesson (when ‘the axe is home, your heads be in the street’²⁰) he ‘learnt out of a grate’ whilst incarcerated with Anne Boleyn and her ‘lovers’ in the Tower.

As ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’ serves to remind us, prison and with it loss of liberty were not merely states of mind for those in Wyatt's situation. John Harington, for instance, to whom we owe the preservation of so much early-Tudor court poetry, was one of Sir Thomas Seymour's men and accompanied the Lord High Admiral to the Tower in 1549. Like Wyatt he wrote a sonnet in praise of his patron and spent his time in prison reading and rhyming. He also took the opportunity to translate Cicero's De Amicitia from the French and in the dedicatory epistle, explained to Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, that

As my prisonment and adversitee, most honorable lady, was of their owne nature joigned with great and sundrie miseries, so was the sufferance of the same eased, by the chaunce of diverse and many commoditees. For thereby founde I great soule profite, a little minde knowlage, some holow hertes, and a few feithfull freendes. Whereby I tried prisonment of the body, to be the libertee of spirite: adversitee of fortune: the touchstone of freendship, exempcion from the world, to be a contempt of vanitees: and in the ende quietnes of mind, the occasion of study.²¹

Harington was in the habit of adopting lines from Wyatt in several of his poems and recalls him here in the phrase ‘quietnes of mind’. He represents quiet of mind as the last of a series of misfortunes which had attendant benefits, this particular adversity being conducive to the study needed for the translation of Cicero. His view is that of someone who sees ‘the world’ in terms of the court milieu, with its vanities and fair-weather friends, much as does Wyatt in his satires. Exempted from the busy politics of that world by his incarceration, he makes a virtue of necessity and turns his mind to study in order to ease his miseries. In this his response is similar to Wyatt's and his quietism, like Wyatt's, is a reaction to his exclusion from court.

Wyatt himself was imprisoned on four occasions (if his capture in Italy in 1525 is included), on the last two as the result of political machination. Life and liberty were precarious in Henry's court, constantly at risk in shifts of favour, for which the courtier had to be ever alert. It is the anxiety to which such a state of affairs naturally gives rise that inspires Wyatt's ‘It may be good, like it who list’:

It may be good, like it who list,
But I do doubt: who can me blame?
For oft assured yet have I missed,
And now again I fear the same:
The windy words, the eyes' quaint game,
Of sudden change maketh me aghast:
For dread to fall I stand not fast.

The trepidation expressed in these lines is acute, but it is not neurotic, as Daalder alleges.²² The political dangers alluded to were real and the poet's appreciation of them is sane, even though he indulged at times in an exasperated quietism which was, both politically and poetically, an inept response to them, as he realized himself in ‘Tagus farewell’, his adieu to Spain, where he acknowledges that it is ‘My king, my country, alone for whom I live’.

That Wyatt's poetry has a nice regard for social reality is further evidenced in the second stanza of ‘It may be good’, which begins:

Alas, I tread an endless maze
That seeketh to accord two contraries
And hope still, and nothing has
Imprisoned in liberties …

Daalder takes ‘liberties’, used so paradoxically here, as ‘a mental state’.²³ The word offers, on the contrary, a succinct illustration of the manner in which subjective and objective worlds are related in Wyatt's poetry. What, on Daalder's reading, remains a paradox, prompted no doubt by what Friedman would call ‘a passion-led fluctuation of mind’, ceases to be so when the liberties referred to are understood to be those areas around a prison in which prisoners were sometimes allowed to live. Wyatt had personal experience of confinement within the liberties of a prison, having been committed to the Fleet in 1534, and alludes to such an experience in other poems. In ‘I find no peace, and all my war is done’, for instance, the lover complains of a situation

That looseth nor locketh, holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape nowise

and in ‘Such vain thought as wonted to mislead me’ he laments that he cannot send his heart after his cruel lady, because

          armed sighs my way do stop anon
'Twixt hope and dread locking my liberty.

It is not necessary, of course, in taking the penal sense of ‘liberties’ when reading ‘It may be good’, to disregard the other physical image in the opening lines of the second stanza. An endless maze is similar to the liberties of a prison in that it allows those it confines to wander but not to escape.

The experience and prospects of prison inform Wyatt's concern for liberty almost as much as does his preoccupation with service. This is reason enough to heed Daalder's warning against assuming that the word ‘liberty’ in Wyatt's poems invariably represents ‘a state in which the lover is not a “thrall” who is “bond” to a woman he “serves”’.²⁴ Nevertheless, Wyatt does use the word in precisely that way, as in ‘Though I cannot your cruelty constrain’:

Though I your thrall must ever more remain
And for your sake my liberty restrain …

His poetry constantly complains of the dangers and poor rewards of service and often expresses a desire to be free of it. As Wyatt knew only too well, it was a vain desire. It was impossible to be your own man in a court where loss of protection left you prey to enemies, as Wyatt discovered at the expense of his own liberty in 1536 and again in 1541, following the execution of Cromwell.

Wyatt had been Cromwell's man from 1536 and his lament for the death of his patron reveals that he did not always find service irksome and unrewarding. He clearly had a deep affection for his protector and in the poem adapted from Petrarch to express his bereavement the loss of Cromwell's support is felt in a personal rather than a political way:

The pillar perished is whereto I leant,
The strongest stay of mine unquiet mind.
The like of it no man again can find
From east to west still seeking though he went.

Although Cromwell's fate had dangerous repercussions for Wyatt, he is as honest and indiscreet in declaring his personal attachment as he had been some years earlier in his references to Anne Boleyn. When the poem gives vent to ‘woeful cry’ a few lines later it does no more than the poet himself had done at the scene of Cromwell's execution. Nevertheless, however felt, the loss was no more purely personal than the support of the King's right-hand man had been. Given the nature of public life at the time, Wyatt could only be truly Stoical in service to the court, running the risks of imprisonment and death, and what ‘The pillar perished’ reveals is his conviction that in Thomas Cromwell he had found a patron who was worthy of service and who had enabled him to follow Plutarch's advice and find a ‘stay’ for his ‘unquiet mind’ in political life.

Notes

1. Raymond Southall, ‘The Personality of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, E in C, XIV, 1 (January, 1964), 43-64.

2. op. cit., p. 43.

3. Donald M. Friedman, ‘The “Thing” in Wyatt's Mind’, E in C, XVI, 4 (October, 1966), 376.

4. Joost Daalder, ‘Wyatt and “Liberty”: A Postscript’, E in C, XXXV, 4 (October, 1985), 330.

5. ‘Love and fortune and my mind remember’. The text of Wyatt's poems throughout is that of Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems, ed. Joost Daalder (1975).

6. ‘Stand whoso list upon the slipper top’.

7. Joost Daalder, ‘Wyatt and “Liberty”’, E in C, XXIII, 1 (January, 1973), 64.

8. Daalder, ‘Wyatt and “Liberty”: A Postscript’, p. 335.

9. Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), p. 440. I have modernised the spelling throughout. All quotations from Wyatt's translation are from this edition.

10. Plutarch's Quyete of Mynde, translated by Thomas Wyat (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), xiv.

11. ed. cit., pp. 454, 452.

12. ed. cit., p. 45. This recollection is also noted by Daalder in his edition.

13. ed. cit., p. 463.

14. ed. cit., pp. 442, 443.

15. ed. cit., p. 443.

16. Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), p. 43.

17. It seems to me that court's estates would read better here than courts' estates.

18. Friedman, p. 375.

19. Muir, Life and Letters, p. 66.

20. ‘In mourning wise since daily I increase’.

21. R. Hughey, John Harington of Stepney: Tudor Gentleman. His Life and Works (Columbus, Ohio, 1971), p. 137.

22. ‘Wyatt and “Liberty”’, p. 64.

23. Ibid.

24. ‘Wyatt and “Liberty”’, p. 63.