Thomas Wyatt the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Wyatt the Younger was born on the 10th of September 1521 into a family already famous for shaping English culture. His father, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, had introduced the sonnet into English literature and served as a diplomat to foreign courts. The son would carve out a different legacy entirely. In the winter of 1554, he led an armed rebellion against Queen Mary I, marching thousands of men toward London in one of the most audacious challenges to Tudor authority of the sixteenth century. What drove a young English nobleman, raised Catholic and raised loyal, to take up arms against his own queen? And why, at the very end, did the man who had gambled everything choose to protect those he could still protect?

• 2. A Wyatt Among Wyatts

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  His mother was Elizabeth Brooke, a daughter of Thomas Brooke, 8th Baron Cobham, of Cobham Hall and Cooling Castle, both in Kent. Through his grandmother Dorothy Heydon, Thomas could trace a line to Sir Henry Heydon and to Elizabeth Boleyn, a daughter of Sir Geoffrey Boleyn. His paternal grandfather was Sir Henry Wyatt; his grandmother, Anne Skinner, a daughter of John Skinner of Reigate, Surrey. The family's roots ran deep through Kent, and through the corridors of royal power. Growing up the eldest of four boys, Thomas was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. His godfather was Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, a man who wielded enormous influence over the early Tudor court, and who left a lasting impression on the boy's formation. When his father took a delegation to Spain, young Thomas went along, and there he witnessed something that would never quite leave him: the workings of the Spanish Inquisition. That encounter would prove consequential decades later.

• 3. Wild Youth and Debt

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  At sixteen, Thomas was married to Jane Haute, daughter of Sir William Haute of Bishopsbourne, Kent. The marriage came young and was troubled. When his father died in 1542, Thomas inherited Allington Castle and Boxley Abbey in Kent, but the properties came burdened with debt. The elder Wyatt had separated from his wife under rumours that both had been unfaithful, and he had a son named Francis Darrell by Elizabeth Darrell, an unmarried daughter of Sir Edward Darrell of Littlecote House in Wiltshire. The elder Wyatt left Elizabeth property in Dorset, which reduced what the younger Thomas stood to inherit. Despite this, Thomas maintained friendly relations with his half-brother Francis, eventually giving him the manor of Tarrant as a gift. Those who knew Thomas in his early adulthood described him as impulsive and somewhat wild. In 1543, he was caught up in a serious public disturbance in London, alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and other young noblemen. The same autumn, he and Surrey joined volunteers at the Siege of Landrecies, where the professional soldier Thomas Churchyard praised Thomas as a rising military figure. He followed this with a responsible command at the Siege of Boulogne. By 1547 he had been elected Member of Parliament for Kent, and in 1550 he was appointed commissioner to delimit the English frontier in France, though illness prevented him from carrying out the work.

• 4. The Road to Rebellion

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  When Queen Mary I announced her intention to marry Philip of Spain, Thomas Wyatt read it as an injustice to England. His feelings were personal as much as political. The years he had spent in Spain as a boy, watching the Inquisition operate, had given him a lasting aversion to Spanish power. By his own account, he had no plan to protest the marriage until Edward Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon, approached him. Courtenay wanted to stop the match. That conversation set events in motion. When the official marriage announcement was published on the 15th of January 1554, Wyatt and his associates gathered at Allington Castle to plan resistance. Arrests of fellow conspirators soon forced Wyatt to step forward as leader. He published a proclamation at Maidstone, claiming his rising had been approved by "dyvers of the best shire", and called on the people to defend "liberty and commonwealth" against "the Queen's determinate pleasure to marry with a stranger". He set up his command headquarters in Rochester on the 26th of January. By then, French ambassador Antoine de Noailles was taking him seriously, and Wyatt was commanding fifteen hundred men.

• 5. March on London

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  Queen Mary moved quickly once she learned of the rising. She offered a pardon to any follower who returned home peacefully within twenty-four hours. Wyatt countered by telling his men that French support was imminent and that uprisings elsewhere were succeeding. Neither claim was true. When the Queen sent the Duke of Norfolk to confront Wyatt's force, the plan backfired: the Duke's own men were outnumbered, and many of them defected to the rebels on the spot. The Duke fled to Gravesend. Wyatt and the four thousand men now with him marched through Gravesend and Dartford to Blackheath. The chronicler Stow, writing in 1598, recorded the scene: "in the year 1553, the 3rd of February, Sir Thomas Wyat and the Kentish men marched from Depeford towards London... the draw-bridge was cut down, and the bridge gates shut." The government played for time, offering to hear Wyatt's demands while simultaneously mobilising over twenty thousand men to defend the Queen. The Tower of London and the royal court were placed under heavy guard, and a reward of land was offered to anyone who captured Wyatt alive.

• 6. The Collapse

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  Entering Southwark, Wyatt found London Bridge fortified and his support in the city cooling fast. His demand that the Tower be surrendered and the Queen placed in his charge had alienated even reformers who had sympathised with him. Forced out of Southwark, he turned toward Kingston-on-Thames, planning to enter the city by another route and capture the Queen at St James's Palace. The government let him advance, then closed around him from every direction. Skirmishes whittled his numbers down as he pushed forward. By the time he reached the city, the rebellion was effectively over. Wyatt surrendered and was taken to the Tower of London. On the 15th of March 1554, after a trial that was largely a formality, he was sentenced to death for high treason. The sentence was held back while the government pressed him to implicate Mary's half-sister Elizabeth, but Wyatt would not provide enough to put her in danger.

• 7. Scaffold and Legacy

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  On the 11th of April 1554, his scheduled execution day, Wyatt asked John Brydges, 1st Baron Chandos, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, for permission to speak with Edward Courtenay before dying. The two men met for half an hour. Wyatt knelt before Courtenay and urged him "to confess the truth of himself", believing Courtenay had been the true instigator. On the scaffold, though, Wyatt turned the blame back onto himself and cleared both Princess Elizabeth and Courtenay of wrongdoing. After he was beheaded, his body was punished according to treason custom. His head was hung from a gallows until it was stolen on the 17th of April. His limbs were displayed around the surrounding towns. The rebellion had failed, but his line continued. He and Jane Haute had six sons and four daughters. His son George preserved a manuscript on Anne Boleyn's life, which eventually passed to Anne's husband Roger Twysden, whose grandson was Sir Roger Twysden. George's son Sir Francis Wyatt served as governor of Virginia in 1621-26 and again in 1639-42. A great-grandson, Captain Henry Fleete, became an explorer and interpreter in Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Wyatt the Younger also survived in another form: John Webster and Thomas Dekker made him the central character of their history play Sir Thomas Wyatt, published in 1607.