This is a tragic oneshot about Thomas Wyatt after Anne Boleyn's death. Anne Boleyn is dead and Thomas Wyatt will mourn for her forever. The poet's heart is bleeding, and the light of his life is gone forever. He is heartbroken and lost without Anne.
I always liked Thomas Wyatt on the show. Maybe it would have been better if Anne had married him instead of falling in love with Henry Tudor.
Undoubtedly and unfortunately, I don't own any characters and the show.
Hope you will enjoy the story.
Any reviews are welcome. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
Bleeding Heart
Thomas Wyatt was mourning for the loss of Anne Boleyn, and his chasmal mourning will last forever. He knew that he would never be happy again. Anne Boleyn, his beloved and his muse, the only woman of his dreams, was dead and the light of his life died together with her.
Thomas was released from the Tower of London right after George Boleyn, Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Henry Norris, and Francis Weston had been executed, but before the day of Anne's execution. He didn't leave London and watched her execution on Tower Green: he pressed himself to the stone wall, which shielded him from general view, and observed how the French executioner swung his sword and beheaded her with one powerful blow.
Thomas felt his heart breaking into many small pieces when her head tumbled to the wooden scaffold. At that instant, he hated the whole world and everyone who had contributed to the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Most of all, he hated King Henry for murdering Anne – he hated the man with his entire being, and his hatred was festering and overpowering. He was so maddened with grief that he was capable of rushing to the Palace of Whitehall and murdering the King with bare hands. Surely, God wouldn't have punished him for that murder, for Henry truly deserved to be dead as the rivers of innocent blood had been spilled to get rid of Anne and then marry Jane Seymour.
Anne Boleyn was innocent of all the charges brought against her by Cromwell. Thomas knew that Anne had deceived King Henry because she hadn't been a virgin when Henry had slept with her for the first time. Thomas Wyatt had become Anne's first man who had taken her virginity and who had worshiped her as a Goddess. Yet, their secret relationship had been doomed to remain a mystery forever, like he had promised Anne. Their relationship had started after Anne's engagement to the Earl of Northumberland had been broken by Cardinal Wolsey. But even if she had once been Thomas' lover, Anne had never slept with any other man since she had fallen in love with King Henry and when Henry had begun to seriously court her. Anne hadn't deserved to die a cruel death on the scaffold.
After Anne's death, Thomas went to Allington Castle in Kent, near Maidstone, which was only twenty miles away from Hever Castle. He was born and raised at Allington. He also spent the happiest time of his life – his time with Anne Boleyn; the most memorable moment was when he read his poem about her to Anne and received from her an expression of affectionate love and gratitude. He knew Anne from early childhood as they often played together in the parks of Hever Castle or Arlington Castle. The Wyatt family was not only the neighbors of the Boleyns, but also shared many friends at the court.
Thomas knew and was devoted to Anne since early adulthood. In his adulthood, he fell in love with Anne nearly at the first glance when he saw her after her return from France. Her deep blue eyes entranced and hypnotized him, her dark enigma magnetized him. Her charm was so overpowering that he had found himself in deep and passionate love with Anne. Thomas particularly loved Anne's exotic dark attractiveness, her dark enigma which broke hearts of many men at the French court and at the English court as well. Anne Boleyn was a muse for the poet; he gave her a poetic name "brunet".
After Thomas' return to the family manor, he locked himself in his bedchamber, wishing only to be alone and abandon himself to grief. Looking at Anne's miniature in the locket, he wrote numerous poems in the honor of his beloved. If he found it impossible to write, he started drinking himself to stupor, then sleeping during the whole day, waking up, and again writing poems about Anne.
Thomas spent many long hours of darkness and anguish in his room, and finally his parents threatened him that they would break the door and drag him out of the bed; but their threat didn't work and Thomas continued burying himself alive, digging the grave for himself. He was drinking so much that his parents feared their son would die only due to excessive intoxication by alcohol.
Thomas often spent hours looking at his most precious possession – the locket Anne had once given him when they had been lovers. It was the only thing that he had left from Anne. In wake hours, he wore the locket on a golden chain about his neck; in the nighttime, he put it under his shirt, close to his heart that was once beating for his beloved. The locket helped him feel Anne and he imagined that he touched Anne when his long, slender fingers caressed the perfect image in the locket.
Heartbroken with grief, Thomas often wandered around the places where he and Anne had spent much time together. In the summer, he often lay under the old oak on the green lawn, where Anne had once told him that he must have forgotten about her because he had been a married man and because their relationship had ended. At that moment, he had told her that he would divorce his wife, but she had been cruel to him and replied that he had been obliged to forget her if he had treasured his own life. He had always known that she hadn't been serious, but her words had been a hard blow to his heart.
The dream of his life had been to be together with Anne, but Thomas had obediently done what Anne had wanted – he had left her and had never spoken about their relationship to anyone else. He had become her good friend and had reconciled himself to the thought that they had never been destined to be together because she had a higher path than he could ever have. Anyway, it hadn't saved her and she had been arrested at the order of the man whom she had loved and who had betrayed her.
One night, Thomas caught cold; then he was sick for several weeks. In his fever dreams, many times he called for Anne and confessed his love for her to Anne's ghost he saw in the moments of feverish despair. Fearing for the outcome of his sickness, Thomas' parents summoned a local priest many times, but Thomas was still clinging to life. Soon he began to recover, but he was very weak and lost much weight; he became extremely thin, mere skin and bones, with dark circles under his eyes. While he was recovering, he continued writing love poems and sonnets in the honor of Anne Boleyn.
Eventually, his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, told his son that the young poet had to reconcile with Anne's death and try to move on. The assurance that Anne wouldn't have approved of his current lifestyle worked effectively and Thomas stopped destroying himself. Instead, he found consolation in God: he spent much time in the local church, standing on his knees and praying for Anne's soul, as well as for Elizabeth, imploring God to make Henry treat Elizabeth not as cruel as he had treated Mary Tudor.
When Thomas was somewhat recovered from his abysmal despair and his physical sickness, his parents desired that their son would consider what was the most prudent step to be taken in his unhappy situation while he was still unable to move on and lamented over his grief. His parents wished him to leave Allington Castle and even England to forget Anne Boleyn. But Thomas categorically refused to leave Allington as he wished to stay as close to Anne was it was possible.
After Anne's death, Thomas especially liked the darkness of the evening, the melancholy feeling of the twilight, when he could remember his muse in the blessed solitude, holding the locket with her image in his hand and smiling at her perfect features. A flood of sorrow invaded his heart and crushed him to the core, the pain tearing apart his body and essence; that torrent of despair seemed to overwhelm him and drive him mad. He had suicidal thoughts, for it seemed so easy to kill himself and reunite with Anne in Heaven; only the knowledge that he would have his soul damned forever prevented him from taking his life. Above all things, he feared that he would be unable to meet with Anne after his death, and so he tolerated his existence, enduring the pain of separation from the love of his life.
Thomas Wyatt often read and re-read the poem he wrote on the day of Anne's death. It was the vibrant and colorful epitaph to everything what happened to Anne and the four innocent men executed on the trumped-up charges by the cruel and merciless King of England. The epitaph showed his true feelings and opinion of the matter: his great grief was hidden in every word of the poem, which also contained reference to the malicious things which Henry did to Anne and her alleged lovers.
These bloody days have broken my heart:
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
When Anne had been alive and Thomas had often been at the court, he had been in Henry's good graces and had spent much time at the royal household. Yet, he had never liked and respected Henry – he had always despised Henry, thinking that the other man was able to love only himself and his power, as well as lavishness and opulence. Thomas didn't believe that Henry was callable of feeling deep and unconditional love for any woman, even for Anne Boleyn; Henry loved what he couldn't have, but when he got it, his passions cooled off and he craved for a new love conquest.
Now Thomas hated Henry with his entire being. Henry was the man who had taken Anne from Thomas twice – when Anne fell in love with the King and when the same King murdered her. When Anne had discarded Thomas, he had left her because she had fallen in love with Henry and because he had wished her happiness. Even if Thomas had wished to take his revenge on Henry, he knew that nothing good would come out of that, so he had to leave justice to God and providence. Now neither Henry nor Thomas had Anne, but her memory was engraved in Thomas' heart forever.
When Henry had intended to marry Anne, Thomas had some moments of open rivalry with the King, and once the man had warned Wyatt to stay away from Anne. Since then, the poet had done everything to dissociate himself from the persistent rumor about his love affair with Anne. To achieve that, Thomas had regularly told his friends how much he had loved to devote his poems to the most intelligent and most beautiful women at the court, stressing that only some special women were muses for him and giving examples of poems written in the honor of those ladies. His tactic had been directed to keep the courtiers well aware of his appreciation of Anne and several other ladies at the court in order to help Anne protect her reputation. His strategy had worked and nasty rumors had died out.
Now Anne Boleyn was gone. She was dead and Thomas Wyatt didn't know how to forget her and move on. He was lost in the world where he couldn't look at Anne even from a distance, even knowing that she no longer loved him and that he had to continue keeping the secret about their affair forever. He would have done everything to make Anne come back from the dead, and he would have gladly died himself if it had meant that Anne would stay alive. But Anne was dead and there was no way back.
Thomas still couldn't believe that Anne was dead and that he would never see her again. But the voice the back of his head whispered to him that she was gone and that nothing would ever change because the dead cannot come back from the world of shadows. He couldn't reverse the hands of the clock and save Anne. He had to resign to the fact that she was dead, but it appeared to be beyond his ability.
Thomas Wyatt loved Anne more than anyone and anything in the world – he loved her more than himself, all other people, his friends, his parents, and the world itself. He missed her too much and his longing for her was unbearable. The light of his life – the light of the whole world – was gone forever and only the destructive, swirling darkness surrounded him. He was heartbroken. His heart was bleeding. He was in mourning forever. He was lost. He was alone in the world.
