We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

in an almost Shakespearean way:

      They flee from me that sometime did me seek

      With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

      I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

      That now are wild and do not remember

      That sometime they put themself in danger

      To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

      Busily seeking with a continual change.

      Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

      Twenty times better; but once in special,

      In thin array after a pleasant guise,

      When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

      And she me caught in her arms long and small;

      Therewith all sweetly did me kiss

      And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this.’

      It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

      But all is turned thorough my gentleness

      Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

      And I have leave to go of her goodness,

      And she also, to use newfangleness.

      But since that I so kindly am served

      I would fain know what she hath deserved.

      Well-travelled on the Continent and a multilingual Cambridge scholar, Wyatt also introduced the Horatian ode into English, and his address to his friend and fellow courtier John Poynz has all the easy intimacy of Horace himself. The theme is the familiar one of the poet retiring from court and explaining that he must do so because he’s had it with double dealing, oily hypocrisy and the other necessities of life around the powerful. But in Wyatt’s hands, what could be a mere poetic exercise feels like a genuine plaint by a living courtier in the cold climate of Henry’s England: farewell to all the doublespeak of politics:

      The friendly foe with his double face

      Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;

      And say that Favel hath a goodly grace

      In eloquence; and cruelty to name

      Zeal of justice and change in time and place;

      And he that suffer’th offence without blame

      Call him pitiful; and him true and plain

      That raileth reckless to every man’s shame.

      Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;

      The lecher a lover; and tyranny

      To be the right of a prince’s reign.

      I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!

      This is the cause that I could never yet

      Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,

      A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.

      This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,

      And in foul weather at my book to sit;

      In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;

      No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:

      In lusty leas at liberty I walk.

      And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,

      Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.

      No force for that, for it is ordered so,

      That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.

      I am not now in France to judge the wine,

      … Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey

      For money, poison, and treason at Rome –

      A common practice used night and day:

      But here I am in Kent and Christendom

      Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;

      Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,

      Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.

      In its easy eloquence, its self-confidence, this is not so far removed, is it, from the great soliloquies we will soon be hearing on the Elizabethan stage? The Tudor court was a highly artificial human experience; but it produced an intensity of feeling, a closeness and a directness, which would soon be heard by the masses in makeshift theatres around the land. Grandees like Wyatt were confident enough to address their peers with a familiarity unknown in British poetry before. But it would spread.

      So far, we’ve seen a misogynistic attack on women, and women presented as nervy, nibbling as the game for the courtly male hunter, but we haven’t actually heard from any woman. Anne Askew was born in Lincolnshire in 1520, and became one of the best-known and most spectacular of Protestant martyrs. Her family was relatively wealthy, in land at least. Arranged marriages were common in Tudor England, largely for economic reasons. Girls were often married off as early as fourteen, and some of these unions would have been, by modern standards, forced marriages. Anne’s father had planned to marry her older sister Martha to another local landowner, Thomas Kyne, but Martha died and Anne was substituted, aged fifteen. She bore Thomas two children, her first duty.

      It wasn’t a happy marriage; they disagreed about religion in particular. Although Henry VIII’s long struggle with the papacy over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was driving England towards the Protestant camp, there was still huge uncertainty and division over precisely what mix of traditional Catholic teaching and the new teaching of the reformers England would end up with. Relatively small doctrinal differences could become politically toxic. On this spectrum, Anne was a hard-core reformer; her husband was Catholic. While she was still little more than a teenager, Kyne kicked Anne out of the marital home. When she arrived in London she tried to divorce him on the grounds that he was an infidel, and that therefore the marriage could not be legal. Gutsy, but she failed.

      A determined woman, Anne spoke out on the streets as a female preacher, and disseminated Protestant literature. Some of it came into the hands of courtiers, and probably also reached Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Thomas Kyne pursued Anne, and had her arrested and brought back to Lincolnshire, but she escaped back to London and continued to preach. She was arrested and then brutally tortured, both at Newgate prison and the Tower of London, being almost split apart on the rack. Refusing to confess or to identify other Protestants she was burned alive at Smithfield, her body having first been sprinkled with gunpowder. She was so badly injured from her tortures that she had to be carried to her execution on a chair. Before she died, however, she composed poetry, of which the best-known example is her ballad from Newgate. If she hadn’t been tortured by then, she was about to be. It’s full, as we’d expect, of traditional Christian imagery:

      Like as the armed knight

      Appointed to the field,

      With this world will I fight

      And Faith shall be my shield.

      Faith is that weapon strong

      Which will not fail at need.

      My foes, therefore, among

      Therewith will I proceed.

      As it is had in strength

      And force of Christes way

      It will prevail at length

      Though all the devils say nay.

      Behind the familiar Arthurian images we can feel the urgent drumbeat of a rebellious mind; and indeed it’s a brave poem on many levels, including a direct attack on the royal authority:

      More enmyes