BIOGRAPHY: BRIAN LYNCHreviews Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, SpyBy Nicola Shulman Short Books, 378pp. £20

ON A 1987 television game show called It's a Royal Knockoutmembers of Queen Elizabeth's family dressed up as vegetables and threw fake hams at each other. In 1522, on the occasion of the visit of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V to England, members of Henry VIII's court hurled sweetmeats at the visitors from the battlements of a huge castle made of green tin.

Around both events hangs the grim air of mandatory hilarity, but in the latter case, which was organised in part by “the father of English poetry”, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), the mock violence was soon to become as bloody as a butcher’s axe. It was about these happy companions that Wyatt wrote his most famous line: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.”

The chief victim of the axe, the provocatively intelligent Anne Boleyn, probably had some sort of dalliance with Wyatt before Henry laid hands on her. The queen consort was certainly the subject of the prophetic verse that gives this wonderfully entertaining book its title:

And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about:

Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

As a prisoner in the Tower of London Wyatt may have seen from a window the last living thing Boleyn did: she fixed her skirts around her ankles to prevent them flying up when her head was chopped off.

The queen’s tragedy and Wyatt’s glory had their origins in wordplay. This was a complex world of allegory, mythology and romance, a time of perfume and threat, when medieval and Renaissance values mingled, as Nicola Shulman puts it, “in varying degrees of emulsification”. But queen and poet were deluded in their salad days. Nor were they alone in the delusion: almost everyone in Henry’s entourage, a hive with perhaps only 100 bees at its core, seems to have buzzed around in a perpetual state of unsatisfied sexual excitement, exchanging “rancid courtly banter”.

The cold-headed exception, the chief courtier, Thomas Cromwell, a horrible man despite Hilary Mantel's labours on his behalf in her Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall, was as deluded as the rest of them. If he had had real intelligence he would have foreseen that the monster king would cut his head off too.

Before that happened Cromwell had murdered all around him, and where he did not murder he spiritually maimed. Maiming is what he did to Wyatt. By any stretch of the evidence the poet was guiltless in the Boleyn business, so why Cromwell brought Wyatt’s neck to the edge of the chopping block is a puzzle. Whatever the reasons, it would seem that he obliged Wyatt to say something about Anne (perhaps that she had sniggered at the king’s verses) and, in return for the incrimination, set the poet free. But thereafter he owned Wyatt body and soul.

It’s debatable whether shame is a natural or a social construct, but, either way, we can, I think, rely on it, and on pure terror, to illuminate the poet’s future career as Cromwell’s ambassador to Charles V in Spain.

In that service murder was a tool Wyatt wielded shamelessly: his main target, Cardinal Reginald Pole, survived a variety of assassination plots. Ironically, the popishness that marked Pole out for Henry’s hatred was also, unjustly, imputed to Wyatt and got him locked up in the tower for a second time.

This was a sinister magician’s show, a contrivance, to use Bertie Ahern’s immortal phrase, of “smoke and daggers”. Working out what went on behind so many malicious mirrors is hard to know and even harder to interpret. That work, as Shulman admits, is best left to historians of diplomacy. In consequence, the latter part of her morning-fresh and amusingly astringent book cannot help but be a little perfunctory. What she is mainly interested in, and good at interpreting, is the poetry.

Here, too, there are mysteries. The stanza quoted above, for instance, limps awkwardly. Time and again one wonders why Wyatt didn’t mend his lame feet – the iambic metre he usually used is, after all, relatively easy to keep straight. This is the more puzzling because the rest of Wyatt’s genius, everything as it were above the ankles, is so athletic. At a time when most verse writing was, as Shulman puts it, “an exercise in dilation”, he was compressing and squeezing “the small, abstract vocabulary of the courtly lyric till it bulged with implications”. Any ear attuned to verse since Gerard Manley Hopkins will appreciate how Wyatt wrings out the language, as in, for example: “Such hap as I am happed in / Hath never man of truth I ween.”

But the attentive reader needs only sympathy to appreciate the very best of him, which is human. Wyatt is a pioneer in imagining what it means to “die unknown, dazed, with dreadful face”, and he is the first poet in English to record erotic regret as if on a personal film:

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

Brian Lynch is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and publisher of the Duras Press. He was one of the three judges who last month awarded Seamus Heaney's Human Chainthe Irish TimesPoetry Now prize