Wyatt
...Kent, in 1503, the son of Henry Wyatt and Anne Skinner. He was educated at St. John's College Cambridge, become a diplomat in the service of Henry VIII about 1526 and travelled to Italy first in 1527. After a brief imprisonment for his affair with Anne Boleyn in 1536, the king's second wife who was executed for treason, Wyatt went to Spain as English ambassador to Charles V from 1537 to 1539. In 1541, after the fall of Thomas Cromwell, Wyatt was arrested again and charged with treason but his release followed shortly. He died October 11, 1542, and was buried at Sherborne. Having separated from his wife Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, Wyatt was survived by his mistress Elizabeth Darrell and their son Francis.
The best modern editions of Wyatt's poems are Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Penguin, 1978), Richard C. Harrier's The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (a diplomatic transcription of the Egerton MS poems, for which see below), and the Collected Poems, edited by Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (London: Routledge, 1969), who give especially full notes.
For biographical information, see Patricia Thomson's Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (London: Routledge, 1964) and Kenneth Muir's Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963).
Thirteen original sources exist for Wyatt's poems.
1. Harington MS, Arundel Castle: see The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960).
2. Blage MS, Trinity College, Dublin
3. Parker MS 168, Corpus Christi College Cambridge
4. Devonshire Ms 17492, British Library
5. Egerton MS 2711, British Library: see Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), Part II, the best edition of the best version.
6. Harleian MS 78, British...
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