Elizabeth Brooke - a poet's wife yet an almost wife of Henry VIII
- Sira Barbeito
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
(Cover image – © Pinterest)
Sir Thomas Wyatt, widely remembered for his borderline obsessive admiration and love towards Queen Anne Boleyn and harboring a life-long affair with Elizabeth Durrell, while being already married, wrote in one of his poems that “I love another, and thus I hate myself” and somehow his wife was the one gone down in history as the adulterous cheating woman that might’ve taken big ol’ King Henry VIII to bed. She is thought to have been a potential candidate to the English throne after the bloody end of the late young Queen Kathryn Howard but having escaped that fate due to her disastrous and scandalous separation from Thomas Wyatt.
Now, as many Tudor lovers do, you may or may not have seen the infamous show starring Natalie Dormer as Queen Anne Boleyn and you may or may not remember that dreamy scene on a summery meadow where Jamie Thomas King portrayed the English poet Thomas Wyatt reciting some verses to her, half in love, half resentful, knowing she’s about to leave him. He accuses her of being cruel and not upfront towards him and she tires of it and reminds him he’s married to which he clarifies that he’s actually separated from his wife. That wife they are referring to is Elizabeth Brooke, with whom he shared four boys, one of which would later on be known for his rebellion against Queen Mary I and received the name of Thomas Wyatt the Younger.
It’s difficult to center her in this narrative when all we have left of her persona is relating to the men in her life and not much is known about herself. We do know that she was born to her parents, Thomas Brooke, 8th Baron Cobham, and Dorothy Heydon, the daughter of Henry Heydon, an English lawyer, knight and royal official, at some point during 1503. She was the sister of George Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham (which would be relevant later on), who was one of the 27 peers at the trial of his second cousin Queen Anne Boleyn. This brings us back to Thomas and Anne and their alleged affair during Elizabeth and Thomas’s separation.
You see, this was not common, precisely, during the Tudor period. The fact that the Wyatts separated was quite unusual and rendered her a scandal to her family. Back then you had three options (if you were lucky enough to not lack the necessary means to obtain them): annulment, which required proving the marriage was invalid from the start, something that Henry VIII tried to do with her first wife, Catalina de Aragón; legal separation from bed and board, which allowed spouses to live apart but still considered themselves married and they were forbidden to remarry; and, lastly, a private Act of Parliament to grant a full divorce, a dissolution of the marriage that did allow to marry again but was only available in the late 17th century, albeit it was a rare and arduous process usually reserved for the aristocracy that possessed the means to do it. The Wyatts chose to live informally separated in 1526 with Thomas still taking economic care of her for some years until 1537, when he refused to keep doing so and reverted her to her brother, who didn’t take it kindly and tried to force his ex brother in law to maintain her sister’s livelihood.
The reasons for this breakup seemed to be present from the very beginning of their marriage, though he never claimed any responsibility for the fall down, stating that it all was her fault but offering virtually no explanations. All that was said is that she was an adulteress even though no man was ever linked to her during those times. What about him though?
He spent those years pursuing Anne Boleyn, writing poems about her before finally surrendering her to the all-consuming Henry VIII and meeting who was to become his mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, with whom he shared three children. Elizabeth Wyatt née Brooke remains obscure besides her adulterous life up until a Spanish ambassador refers to her in 1542 as a potential new interest of the King, going as far as to say she might become one of his ill-fated wives. He said about her that she “was a sister of Lord Cobham, whom Wyatt, some time ago, divorced for adultery” and that “she is a pretty young creature, with wit enough to do as badly as the others if she were to try”, which sounds weird keeping in mind that by this point she was pushing 40 years old and we are currently talking about marrying a king who had just married a teenager.
Some believe he got his 'Elizabeth's confused and mixed up the older Elizabeth Brooke with the younger and exceptionally nice looking Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, nearing sweet sixteen back then. She was also so young that she didn’t have any tumultuous past relationships or gossip following her unlike Lady Wyatt, which I’m certain was one of Henry’s worries after the whole debacle with poor Kathryn Howard.
Thomas Wyatt passed briefly by the Tower of London, accused of adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn and saved by Thomas Cromwell, only to be accused of it again five years later and being saved again but this time by Queen Kathryn Howard under the condition of reuniting with his wife. After her execution the rumors about her becoming Henry’s sixth queen started to pour, even if everybody knew she was still married to Thomas Wyatt. Luckily or not, Thomas Wyatt came down with an illness that ended up claiming his life on 11 October 1542.
This was only the beginning of a long list of tragedies that came upon Elizabeth Wyatt. She married once more. The chosen one was Edward Warner, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, who was arrested on suspicion of treason on January 1554 just when Elizabeth and Thomas’ son Thomas started and uprise against Queen Mary I. Thomas the Younger would be executed and Edward’s capture would go on for over a year, sadly coincidentally, Edward, the son she had with Warner, died young around the same time as well. Everything seemed to be going against her best wishes for poor Elizabeth.
Mary’s reign wasn’t long and soon later Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, assumed the throne and restored Edward Warner to his old position of Lord Lieutenant of the Tower where he would bid his farewell to his wife and bury her after her death in 1560. One can only feel warmth at the thought that Elizabeth could hopefully get a bit of peace and well deserved happy life after all that trauma before leaving this world behind, though the lack of information about her makes it practically impossible to know what it really was like for her and what conditions she was under.
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