CHAPTER VIII.

Platonic Love.

1523.

I. WYAT the poet married a good and loyal girl, Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Thomas Brooke, Lord Cobham, one of his Kentish neighbours. Cobham was great-grandson of Sir John Oldcastle, the "Good Lord Cobham." Wyat and his wife were both at court when Anne came home from Paris. Margaret, the poet's sister, married Sir Antony Lee, of Quordon, in Bucks. A friendly group was formed; the children, now grown up and partly fixed in life, returning to the habits of their earlier days. The poet's wife and sister were the nearest friends of Anne; and Wyat, in his yearning for the laurels of an English Petrarch, chose his old companion Anna, as the subject of his muse.

2. Old English and Italian poets had already set that fashion of adopting an ideal Love, which gave to literature the tribe of Lauras, Leonoras, Annas, Geraldines, and Stellas. Rising in crusading times, when high and distant things were objects of desire, this fashion was renewed with a crusading prince. Geoffrey Rudel, a minstrel in the court of Lion Heart, had fallen in love with the Countess of Tripoli, whom he sang in radiant lines, yet never saw until the moment of his death. Bertrand de Born

had hymned the virtues and accomplishments of Elinor Plantagenet. Dante had given a higher reach to these poetic flatteries, and crowned his Beatrice with an immortal wreath of verse. Petrarch had followed Dante, with a closer clinging to the minstrel's part. In hope of raising a new crop of poetry in English soil, Wyat resolved to have a Laura of his own, whose grace and virtue he could celebrate in English rhyme. In choosing his poetic Love, a poet had to look at many points. The object of his passion must be high in birth and pure in life -as good in heart as she was soft in speech—and more than all, she must be unattainable as a star in heaven. All these conditions met for the young English poet in his playmate Anne.

3. Besides being good and bright, gentle and loving, Anne stood for him beyond the reach of any passion not of the platonic kind. She was his wife's near friend, his sister's nearer friend. Her brother George was his disciple in the minstrel's art. Her father was his namesake, if not his godfather; and the two families were knit together in the closest bonds of love. The name of Anna tickled his conceit.

"What word is that, that changeth not,
Though it be turn'd and made in twain?
It is mine Anna, God it wot;

The only causer of my pain;

My love that meeteth with disdain.
Yet is it loved; what will ye more?

It is my salve, and eke my sore."

The course of this platonic wooing was in public; Wyat being a poet of repute from early years; so

that Anna Boleyn soon became a heroine to men and maids. The strain and style, the fashion and the fame, were new in English ears; yet every line addressed by Wyat to his Love was such as minstrel might have written to a female saint. His theme was love; his idol an embodiment of love; yet the platonic fury was so nicely tamed that nothing came from him unfit for maiden eyes to read.

4. The fuel of romantic passion is a rival; for a court of Love requires to have one suitor of more earthly mould. Not long had Wyat's muse to wait. Such inspiration as may lie in jealousy was soon supplied. While Anna's Irish cousin, James, Lord Butler, was pestering her with an unwelcome suit, a palmer in the shape of Henry, Lord Percy, brought to her the offering of his love.

5. An air of romance clung about this Border chief, in whom his ancestor Hotspur seemed to live again. A man of thirty-five, handsome and tall, he looked the soldier from his bonnet to his spur. Percy had seen but little of the court; his father having wished him to marry ere he entered that great world in which, from his position, he must play a leading part. Putting their heads together, Shrewsbury and Northumberland had made a match between their children; settling between them in a secret compact that Lord Percy and Lady Mary Talbot should be man and wife. Northumberland was rich, and Shrewsbury, always mean in what concerned his pocket, wished to get his daughter off his hands, without having to pay the portion usual with a lady of her birth. Shrewsbury had been acting

as Lieutenant-General in the North, and Northumberland was ready to secure a friend at court, where he was one of the suspected peers. But Percy rose against this bargaining for his heart. Northumberland was hot, but Percy was as stiff as he. Time, as Percy knew, would bring the liberty for which he made his stand. And so the time had sped till he became a hostage in the Cardinal's house.

6. Lord Percy's name had so much influence in the Border, that the Government was obliged to name him warden of the Eastern March and Middle March. No one but he could quell the lawless spirits of the Tay and Tweed. While prudence kept him at York Place, Surrey, who had taken Shrewsbury's place, was anxious to see him in the north, where his appearance would have done the King's affairs much good. Surrey had to tell the Border men that Percy was their warden, and that Dacre was no more than Percy's deputy, while he was moving heaven and earth, to have Lord Dacre, as his partizan, appointed to succeed him in his own command. Percy, he had to say, would soon come back, and every man who had to deal with Scotch and Border politics would have gladly seen him in the English camp.

7. In Wolsey's house, Anne Boleyn's name was a familiar word; the Cardinal's plan of forcing her to marry James, Lord Butler, being no secret. The position of a young lady, who dared to stand against the great minister, was one to kindle curiosity in Percy's heart. Percy had a friend in John Melton,

of Aston, county York, a gentleman living in the Wyat circle, and acquainted with Mistress Anne. Befriended by Melton, Percy had easy access to the maid of honour, whom he found not only gay and winsome, but an object of attention to the greatest wits. Love feeds on rivalry, and Percy fell in love. Anne heard his compliments with a yielding ear; for in his name and person there was much to charm a woman's heart. To blood as high and fame as wide as any in the land, his family added that delight in culture which was common to the Boleyns and the Wyats. Percy yearned for her in spirit, while Anne repaid his worship with a kindness that seemed ripening into love.

8. But in the midst of these poetic and romantic doings, Wolsey rushed into the scene, and finding what the minstrel and the palmer were about, upset their pastorals, and drove them in his wrath to the four winds of heaven.

History of two Queens. V.

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