Some recent writers have, however, questioned whether courtly love was ever ‘an actual social phenomenon’.
23
Others would ‘deconstruct’ it and see courtly love in terms of a literary device. Such scepticism flies in the face of the evidence. The court of Philip the Good of Burgundy, Margaret of Austria’s great-grandfather, developed an elaborate code of chivalry in which versions of earlier romances were not only commissioned and read widely, but ‘their contents inspired actual events at court.’
24
Nor was this a ducal fad. It set the standard for Europe. Even Pierre Sala, a modest French court official whom Anne could have met, procured an illuminated
Emblesmes de devises d’amour
for his ‘mistress’ Marguerite, the wife of the royal treasurer.
25
The English court followed suit. Henry VIII himself appeared in numerous guises, most famously in the great Westminster entertainment of 1511, when as
Cuer Loyall
(Loyal Heart) he led a tilting team comprising
Bon Voloire
(Good Will),
Bon Espoir
(Good Hope) and
Valiaunt Desire
assisted by
Bone Foy
(Good Faith) and
Amoure Loyall
(Loyal Love). At the Shrovetide tilt in 1526 (which Anne would have attended) the recently remarried marquis of Exeter announced that his amours were now over by displaying the device of a burning heart being sprayed from a watering can held in the hand of a woman.
26
And, of course, unless the European fashion for courtly posturing had really existed,
Don Quixote
makes no sense.
We also need to be less solemn. To most participants the convention of courtly love was a game, ‘pass the day’, an etiquette of flirting. After all, unless courtly love was artificial, poets such as Wyatt lived in perpetual misery.
Though I cannot your cruelty constrain
For my good will to favour me again,
Though my true and faithful love
Have no power your heart to move,
Yet rue upon my pain.
Though I your thrall must evermore remain
And for your sake my liberty restrain,
The greatest grace that I do crave
Is that ye would vouchsafe
To rue upon my pain.
Though I have not deserved to obtain
So high reward but this to serve in vain,
Though I shall have no redress,
Yet of right ye can no less
But rue upon my pain.
But I see well that your high disdain
Will nowise grant that I shall that attain;
Yet ye must grant at the least
This my poor and small request
Rejoice not at my pain.
27
The familiar tropes of courtly dalliance are all there — the disdainful mistress, the suitor whose love nevertheless remains true, the binding exclusivity of commitment, service as the highest of ideals, even when unrewarded.
We must, on the other hand, recognize that convention can be ambiguous. Most players of the game of courtly love may not have taken it too seriously, but the game was inherently sexual. At the fall of the
Château Vert
Anne Boleyn did yield at least her hand in the dance to ‘Amoressness’, ‘Nobleness’ or whoever had captured ‘Perseverance’. A lady was expected not to give sexual favours, but they were there to gain, and the lover who offered service also threatened possession. Hence Margaret of Austria warning her ladies to keep men at a distance and treat their advances with a light touch.
28
Cavendish’s comment on Henry Percy is too apposite not to merit repetition: ‘the Lord Percy would resort for his pastime into the queen’s chamber and there would fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other, so that there grew a secret love between them.’
29
Courtly love thus had an inner tension. In most cases stylized flirtation, in others it could also be a conduit for real passion; the love lyric may be artful or autobiographical, the ‘mistress’ may become the mistress. And this ambivalence is the problem with Anne and Wyatt’s poetry. After 500 years, how is the historian to be certain? The difficulty is well illustrated by the so-called ‘Devonshire Manuscript’, once at Chatsworth and now in the British Library. For almost a hundred years this has been claimed as direct evidence linking Wyatt with Anne Boleyn.
30
The manuscript is a volume of poems associated with Anne’s cousin, the Mary Howard who in 1534 married the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond; her initials are on the original binding. Another person involved was Anne’s waiting-woman, Madge Shelton, and a third, the king’s niece Margaret Douglas (on one page there is a joint inscription to her and Mary Fitzroy). The manuscript was apparently lent quite widely at court, and borrowers repaid the loan by inscribing a poem they had access to; it now includes almost 200 items in a variety of hands. Some of these are undoubtedly biographical, for example, those related to the secret marriage between Margaret Douglas and Lord Thomas Howard, for which he was imprisoned in the Tower from 1536. About a dozen of the items are, indeed, by Thomas or Margaret themselves. Wyatt is certainly present — some 125 items attributed or assigned by scholars. If he had a relationship with Anne, she should be here too.
Evidence of Anne has been seen on a number of folios: a signature (‘an’), an expression of good wishes (‘amer ann i’), and a riddle:
am el men
an em e
as I haue dese
I ama yowrs an,
which is supposedly solved by the transposition of the second and fourth letters of the first three lines:
a lemmen
amene
ah I saue dese
I ama vowrs an.
31
One of Wyatt’s stanzas seems to complete the circle:
That time that mirth did steer my ship
Which now is fraught with heaviness,
And fortune bit not then the lip
But was defence of my distress,
Then in my book wrote my mistress:
I am yours, you may well be sure,
And shall be while my life doth dure.’
32
The poem goes on to lament that now his erstwhile mistress is ‘mine extreme enemy’ - Wyatt rejected by Anne.
Unfortunately for romance, very little of this stands up to close scrutiny. There is no evidence that Wyatt ever handled the Devonshire Manuscript; its Wyatt poems represent the taste of Mary Fitzroy and her circle. Nor is the evidence for Anne at all convincing.
That time that mirth did steer my ship
is assigned to Wyatt by only some modern editors. The ‘signature’ is a couple of letters written to test a pen. The expression of goodwill is a mere doodle and is certainly not in Anne’s hand. As for the riddle, not only is it hardly intelligible in solution, on the page the lines are randomly scattered, probably not written at one time and possibly by different writers. They are better understood as casual exercises, the last two, clearly part-versions of phrases such as ‘as I have deserved’ and ‘I am yours and ever will be’ — expressions of courtly love as stock as the greetings on any Valentine card.
33
If a text as closely associated with Anne Boleyn’s entourage as the Devonshire Manuscript tells us nothing of Anne and Wyatt, it is small wonder that many attempts to interpret isolated poems by (or perhaps by) Sir Thomas carry little conviction.
34
Apart from the conventionality of courtly love and deciding whether a poem is autobiographical, Wyatt’s active sexuality presents a problem; as he said himself, ‘I grant I do not profess chastity.’
35
Thus only with the clearest corroboration can we assume that if any of his poems of desire, rivalry, possession, rejection or retreat are autobiographical, the woman they refer to is Anne Boleyn. And corroboration does not include supposed allusions to Wyatt losing Anne to a higher bidder. Even in a private poem (and poems were rarely entirely private) it was ill advised to write
I quit the enterprise of that that I have lost
To whomsoever lust [likes] for to proffer most
if that higher ‘bidder’ were Henry VIII.
36
George Wyatt’s suggestion that Anne is the subject of
I could gladly yield to be tied for ever with the knot of her love,
is ruled out by the reference to hair of ‘crisped gold’. One of the pseudo-Wyatts could be a defence of the defiant motto which Anne adopted for a brief period in 1530 —
Ainsi sera groigne qui groigne
(‘Let them grumble; that is how it is going to be’) - but even if by Wyatt, that would only suggest that in 1530 he was one of the future queen’s circle, which we might guess anyway.
37
Proper historical scepticism, indeed, leaves only four Wyatt poems where there can be reasonable confidence that he is referring to Anne Boleyn. The revealing 1532 poem about the journey to Calais we have already noted. Much less informative is an earlier poem (again genuine) in the form of a riddle to which the solution is ‘Anna’:
What word is that, that changeth not?
Though it be turned and made in twain?
It is mine answer, God it wot,
And eke the causer of my pain.
A love rewardeth with disdain,
Yet it is loved. What would ye more?
It is my health eke and my sore.
38
Even here, of course, it is a question of probability — the poem would fit any ‘Anna’ — but Anne Boleyn is an obvious possibility. At a surface level this is a courtly conceit, a teasing trifle ornamented with conventional emotions, but is there more behind the poem than that?
We are on better ground with the sonnet which mentions ‘Brunet’. Again definitely by Wyatt,
If waker care, if sudden pale colour
tells of the poet falling in love again. The closing lines do not, in the final version, necessarily suggest Anne:
If thou ask whom, sure since I did refrain
Brunet that set my wealth in such a roar
The unfeigned cheer of Phyllis hath the place
That Brunet had: she hath and ever shall.
She from myself now hath me in her grace:
She hath in hand my wit, my will, and all.
My heart alone well worthy she doth stay
Without whose help scant do I live a day.
39
That Brunet is Anne, however, is made clear by what Wyatt wrote Initially:
... since I did refrain
Her that did set our country in a roar
The unfeigned cheer of Phyllis hath the place
That Brunet had ...
40
Wyatt had the sense to suppress the indiscretion, but it indicates that at least he had enjoyed the permitted courtly relationship with Anne of servant and mistress. It could also mean more if we interpret literally ‘Phyllis hath the place that Brunet had’. But poetic form is against that reading. The final quatrain has to present a contrast, in this case setting the depth and stability of his relationship with Phyllis (his mistress, Elizabeth Darell) against the turbulence of Brunet.
41
Caution is equally called for by the final poem linking Wyatt and Anne, and the only one which makes a clear allusion to the king. It is, admittedly, inspired by a poem of Petrarch (and perhaps by other Italian sources), but as usual Wyatt twists ‘Petrarch’s meaning to suit his own more urgent and worldly interest’.
42
Whoso list to hunt: I know where is a hind.
But as for me, alas I may no more:
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest 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.
Who list to hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain,
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
‘Noli me tangere,
for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’
43
What Wyatt appears to be admitting is being powerfully attracted to Anne, ‘the hind’, and having to break this by drawing back from her crowd of admirers, a sentiment close to the Calais poem. This time, however, he says that he had been only one of the hunt followers and by no means near the prey — ‘I am of them that farthest cometh behind’ — and that his ‘travail’ had been ‘vain’. The final sestet is a warning: ‘Anne belongs to Henry.’ Though ‘tame’ (that is, approachable), she will shy away from any attempt at possession by another; the collar, which in Petrarch tells of Laura’s devotion to God, has become a slave collar.
No doubt the search for autobiographical allusions in Wyatt’s poetry will continue, but the few demonstrable references to Anne Boleyn add up to much less than some have claimed. If we discount the ‘Anna’ riddle as a mere triviality, the remaining three pieces each point to personal commitment on Wyatt’s part. However, in the Calais poem Anne did not respond.
Noli me tangere
portrays her as remote, and only the poem written to his mistress after Anne’s death can be read to suggest that she fully reciprocated his affection — and then only by defying the requirements of poetic form. Wyatt’s poems alone are not enough to support the hypothesis that Anne and Thomas were lovers. They merely suggest that Wyatt became one of a number of Anne’s acknowledged courtly suitors, found himself emotionally involved but drew only a limited response.