EXTRACTS FROM THE LIFE

OF

THE VIRTUOUS CHRISTIAN AND RENOWNED

QUEEN ANNE BOLEIGNE.

BY GEORGE WYATT, ESQ.

WRITTEN AT THE CLOSE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS OF THE REV. JOHN LEWIS.

Among the other calumnies with which the memory of the unfortunate Queen Anne Boleyn has been aspersed by the enemies of the Reformation, it has been said—“that she had long carried on a criminal intercourse with Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet; who, we are told, had gone so far as to confess to the king that he had debauched her; and had urged this, in the first instance, as an argument to dissuade the king from marrying her.” The story requires no refutation; but Wyatt’s name having been called in question when Anne Boleyn’s conduct was scrutinized, gave the forgers of fabulous history an opportunity of engrafting their libellous inventions on slight circumstances, in order to give them something of the colour of probability. How far there was any foundation for these calumnies will now appear. The following interesting pages were written, it is presumed, by the grandson of the poet, George Wyatt, Esquire, sixth son and heir of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger, who was beheaded for rebellion in the first year of the reign of Queen Mary. The writer died at the advanced age of eighty, at Boxley in Kent, in the year 1624, and seems to have meditated a complete exposure of such parts of Saunders’ Book on the Reformation as came within his own immediate knowledge. He was maternal uncle to Sir Roger Twysden, and in 1623 communicated to him part of his collections. A fragment of the Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, was in the late Mr. Bindley’s library, to which we have already referred, at p. 120 of the present edition; prefixed to which was the following note by Sir Roger Twysden.— “I receaved this from my uncle Wyatt, Anno 1623, who beeing yonge had gathered many notes towching this lady, not without an intent to have opposed Saunders.” It is remarkable that this fragment from Wolsey’s Life has been twice printed as a piece of original and authentic cotemporary history, without suspicion of its being an extract from Cavendish;—the first time for private distribution, in 1808, and secondly by Dr. Nott, in his appendix to Wyatt’s Poems, in 1816.

The manuscript from which the present very interesting memoir is printed was purchased at the late Sir Peter Thompson’s sale. It is in the hand writing of the Rev. John Lewis, of the Isle of Thanet, the celebrated antiquary. It was printed in 1817 for a few noblemen and gentlemen, but twenty-seven copies only having been taken off, may be considered still to have almost the rarity of a manuscript.