Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was a prominent figure in the court of King Henry VIII. He played an important ambassadorial role in representing the King's petition to Pope Clement VII to have Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn annulled. Wyatt was also an innovative, accomplished poet, the power and complexity of whose work only became fully understood when revisited and studied in the early 20th century.
Even for the tall, handsome and brilliant Wyatt, however, life at the court of Henry VIII was a dangerous, knife-edged business. Wyatt had been an admirer but possibly lover of Boleyn before she caught the royal eye. In this he was not alone. When in 1536 he was imprisoned in the Tower for adultery with Boleyn, he was able to watch from his prison window the beheading of five other accused Boleyn adulterers and then the death of the queen herself. Wyatt survived and, having supporters within Henry's court, was subsequently released.
In his famous poem about his sexual passion, Wyatt disguises the pursuit of Anne Boleyn as a deer hunt:
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind
But as for me, helas! I may no more
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore
I am of them that furthest come behind.
The poem ends with a warning. This deer wears a diamond necklace on which is engraved:
Noli me tangere, [Do not touch me], for Caesar's I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
This is a classic example, as are some other Wyatt poems, such as 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek', of the courtly poet's language being deliberately ambiguous. It was a matter of self protection.
Little wonder that Wyatt often found court life not only perilous but repugnant and dreamed of escape. Seneca's Stet quicunque volet potens from his tragedy Thyestes became the vehicle for a typically oblique, escapist translation: 'Stand whoso list upon the slipper top/Of court's estate,' Wyatt muses, but as for himself he would 'rejoice' to be 'unknown in court, that hath such brackish joys'.
That arresting word 'brackish' tells us this is no mere idle dreaming but a heartfelt wish. And if there were any doubts, the ferocity of the conclusion resolves them: the meretricious court life prevents self-knowledge — until the end, when it's too late, when a suddenly implacable Death grabs the courtier by the throat:
For him death grippeth right hard by the crop
That is much known of other; and of himself alas
Doth die unknown, dazed with dreadful face.
A hundred years later, Andrew Marvell used the same lines from Seneca to dream of his own escape from the balancing act of living in Cromwell's Republic and either forgetting the regicide or pretending it didn't happen: 'Climb at court for me that will/Giddy favour's slippery hill' he begins and 'Who exposed to others' eyes/Into his own heart ne'er pries/Death to him's a strange surprise' is his equivalent of Wyatt's throat-grabbing Death.
Marvell's tone is less haunted than Wyatt's, but he still had to be very careful — avoiding punishment after the Restoration despite his ambiguously Cromwellian stance during the Republic. His care extended to complete anonymity when he launched some corrosive satires on the corruptions of the Court.
Abraham Cowley, a contemporary of Marvell but unlike him a committed royalist, spent 12 years in exile in France then retired to the country on his return. Unthreatened in the political clime of the Restoration, he wrote a calm and moralistic version of Seneca, imagining the man to whom: 'The face of Death … will terrible appear' because, though 'known to all the world beside/Does not himself, when he is dying know ... what he is, nor whither he's to go'.
Wyatt, Marvell, Cowley and others like them — John Norris (1657–1711), Richard Polwhele (1760–1838) — though separated by centuries, all latched on to the lines of Seneca because these afforded each man an opportunity to express his disenchantment with life at court and at the centres of power. At a pinch, they could claim, if pressed, that they were not giving their own views on the corruption, deviousness, shallowness and self-delusion of contemporary courtiers but simply translating the words of long-departed Seneca (4BC–65AD).
Which brings us to the court of Tony Abbott. There is much here that Wyatt, for example, would recognise — the obsessive secrecy, the suspicion of foreigners, the cruelty, the ecclesiastical connections, the dames and knights, the aggressive Anglophilia.
But there would be one source of relief for Wyatt: he would not need to employ his considerable prosodic talents in order to encode his true meanings. He could come right out and — in the words of Attorney General Brandis — 'say things that other people find offensive or insulting or bigoted'. Or even racist, if you're smart about it.
So, whoso list to rant, rave, insult and bully, I know where is an place for you. Just don't come here in an boat.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.