In 1515, Wyatt entered Henry's service as 'Sewer Extraordinary' and the same year he began studying at St John's College, Cambridge.

[10] Following a diplomatic mission to Spain,[10] in 1526, he accompanied Sir John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, to Rome to help petition Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, in hopes of freeing him to marry Anne Boleyn.

[11] At this time, he was sent to Spain as ambassador to Charles V, who was offended by the declaration of Princess Mary's illegitimacy; he was her cousin and they had once been briefly betrothed.

[13] In 1524, Henry VIII assigned Wyatt to be an ambassador at home and abroad, and he[clarification needed] separated from his wife soon after on grounds of adultery.

Wyatt experimented in stanza forms including the rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs, and satires, as well as with monorime, triplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas, and the French forms of douzaine and treizaine.

[21] Other poems are scathing, satirical indictments of the hypocrisies and pandering required of courtiers who are ambitious to advance at the Tudor court.

Serious and reflective in tone, the sonnets show some stiffness of construction and a metrical uncertainty indicative of the difficulty Wyatt found in the new form.

Wyatt was also responsible for the important introduction of the personal note into English poetry, for although he followed his models closely, he wrote of his own experiences.

The Egerton Manuscript[22] is an album containing Wyatt's personal selection of his poems and translations which preserves 123 texts, partly in his handwriting.

Tottel's Miscellany (1557) is the Elizabethan anthology which created Wyatt's posthumous reputation; it ascribes 96 poems to him,[23] 33 not in the Egerton Manuscript.

Already in the early 1970s Joost Daalder produced an edition (Oxford 1975) which attempts and partly succeeds in renovating the Wyatt canon to accord with documentary facts, and also in that year Richard Harrier published his magisterial philological study of the manuscript evidence, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Harvard University Press 1975).

On the basis of a meticulous scientific study of the documentary evidence Harrier establishes a fact-based canon of Wyatt’s poems.

Harrier's researches establish that another 33 poems from other sources (besides The Egerton Manuscript and Tottel's) can be ascribed to Wyatt on the basis of solid documentary evidence and plausible editorial judgment.

His poems were found praiseworthy by numerous poets, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Yvor Winters, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen.

[30] In his verse, Wyatt calls his mistress Anna and might allude to events in her life:[30] And now I follow the coals that be quent, From Dover to Calais against my mind Gilfillan argues that these lines could refer to Anne's trip to France in 1532 prior to her marriage to Henry VIII[30] and could imply that Wyatt was present, although his name is not included among those who accompanied the royal party to France.

[30] Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso List To Hunt" may also allude to Anne's relationship with the King:[30] Graven in diamonds with letters plain, There is written her fair neck round about, "Noli me tangere [Do not touch me], for Caesar's I am".

In still plainer terms, Wyatt's late sonnet "If waker care" describes his first "love" for "Brunette that set our country in a roar"—presumably Boleyn.

The jewel was loose "hanging by a lace out of her pocket", a "tablet" (a kind of locket)[31] which Wyatt took to wear at his neck.