Spaniards by the menaces of the Inquisition. In 1537 he married Jane, daughter of Sir William Hawte of Bishopsbourne in Kent, by whom he had ten children. Wyat was noted in his youth as dissipated, and even as disorderly. He is known to have had a natural son, whose mother Elizabeth was a daughter of Sir Edward Darrell of Littlecote. In 1542 he inherited the family property of Allington Castle and Boxley Abbey on the death of his father. From 1543 to 1550 he saw service abroad as a soldier. In 1554 he joined with the conspirators who combined to prevent the marriage of Queen Mary with Philip the prince of Spain, afterwards King Philip II. A general movement was planned; but his fellow-conspirators were timid and inept, the rising was serious only in Kent, and Wyat became a formidable rebel mostly by accident. On the 22nd of January 1554 he summoned a meeting of his friends at his castle of Allington, and the 25th was fixed for the rising. On the 26th Wyat occupied Rochester, and issued a proclamation to the county. The country people and local gentry collected, but at first the queen's supporters, led by Lord Abergavenny and Sir Robert Southwell, the sheriff, appeared to be able to suppress the rising with ease, gaining some successes against isolated bands of the insurgents. But the Spanish marriage was unpopular, and Kent was more affected by the preaching of the reformers than most of the country districts of England. Abergavenny, and Southwell were deserted by their men, who either disbanded or went over to Wyat. A detachment of the London train-bands sent against him by Queen Mary, under the command of the duke of Norfolk, followed their example. The rising now seemed so formidable that a deputation was sent to Wyat by the queen and council to ask for his terms. He insisted that the Tower should be surrendered to him, and the queen put under his charge. The insolence of these demands caused a reaction in London, where the reformers were strong and were at first in sympathy with him. When he reached Southwark on the 3rd of February he found London Bridge occupied in force, and was unable to penetrate into the city. He was driven from Southwark by the threats of Sir John Brydges (or Bruges), afterwards Lord Chandos, who was prepared to fire on the suburb with the guns of the Tower. Wyat now marched up the river to Kingston, where he crossed the Thames, and made his way to Ludgate with a part of his following. Some of his men were cut off. Others lost heart and deserted. His only hope was that a rising would take place, but the loyal forces kept order, and after a futile attempt to force the gate Wyat surrendered. He was brought to trial on the 15th of March, and could make no defence. Execution was for a time delayed, no doubt in the hope that in order to save his life he would say enough to compromise the queen's sister Elizabeth, afterwards Queen Elizabeth, in whose interests the rising was supposed to have been made. But he would not confess enough to render her liable to a trial for treason. He was executed on the 11th of April, and on the scaffold expressly cleared the princess of all complicity in the rising. His estates were afterwards partly restored to his son George, the father of the Sir Francis Wyat (d. 1644) who was governor of Virginia in 1621–26 and 1639–1642. A fragment of the castle of Allington is still inhabited as a farm-house, near Maidstone, on the bank of the Medway.
See G. F. Nott, Works of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyat (1815); and Froude, History of England.
WYATT, JAMES (1746–1813), English architect, was born at Burton Constable in Staffordshire on the 3rd of August 1746. He was the sixth son of Benjamin Wyatt, a farmer, timber merchant and builder. At the age of fourteen his taste for drawing attracted the attention of Lord Bagot, newly appointed ambassador to the pope, who took him with him to Rome, where he spent five or six years in studying architecture. He returned to England in 1766, and gained his first great success by the adaptation for dramatic purposes of the Pantheon in Oxford Street, London (1772), a work which was destroyed by fire twenty years later. In 1776 he was made surveyor of Westminster Abbey, and in 1778 and the following years executed many important commissions at Oxford.
During this earlier period Wyatt shared the prevailing contempt for Gothic architecture; thus the New Buildings at Magdalen College, Oxford, designed by him, formed part of a scheme, the plans for which are extant, which involved the demolition of the famous medieval quadrangle and cloisters. He built many country houses in the classic style, of which he proved himself a master. Gradually, however, he turned his attention to Gothic, the spirit of which, in spite of his diligent study of medieval models, he never understood. The result is still visible in such “Gothic” freaks as that at Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, built for Lord Bridgewater to replace the ancient priory, and in the lamentable “restorations,” e.g. in Salisbury and Lichfield cathedrals, which earned for him even among contemporary archaeologists the title of “the Destroyer.” Of these Gothic experiments the most celebrated was Fonthill Abbey, built for Beckford (the eccentric author of Vathek), the great tower of which speedily collapsed, while much of the rest has been pulled down. None the less, Wyatt must be regarded as the pioneer of the “Gothic revival,” while his general influence may be gauged by the fact that nearly every county and large town in England possesses or possessed buildings by him.
On the death of Sir William Chambers in 1796, he was appointed surveyor-general to the Board of Works. In 1785 he became a member of the Royal Academy, and during a misunderstanding between Benjamin West and the Academy, in 1805, he filled the presidential office at the wish of King George III. He was killed by a fall from his carriage on the 4th of September 1813, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His son, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775–1850?), who succeeded him as surveyor of Westminster Abbey, was also an architect of some distinction.
WYCHERLEY, WILLIAM (c. 1640–1716), English dramatist, was born about 1640 at Clive, near Shrewsbury, where for several generations his family had been settled on a moderate estate of about £600 a year. Like Vanbrugh, Wycherley spent his early years in France, whither, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to be educated in the very heart of the “precious” circle on the banks of the Charente. Wycherley's friend. Major Pack, tells us that his hero “improved, with the greatest refinements,” the “extraordinary talents” for which he was “obliged to nature.” Although the harmless affectations of the circle of Madame de Montausier, formerly Madame de Rambouillet, are certainly not chargeable with the “refinements” of Wycherley's comedies—comedies which caused even his great admirer Voltaire to say afterwards of them, “Il semble que les Anglais prennent trop de liberté et que les Françaises n'en prennent pas assez”—these same affectations seem to have been much more potent in regard to the “refinements" of Wycherley's religion.
Wycherley, though a man of far more intellectual power than is generally supposed, was a fine gentleman first, a responsible being afterwards. Hence under the manipulations of the heroine of the “Garland” he turned from the Protestantism of his fathers to Romanism—turned at once, and with the same easy alacrity as afterwards, at Oxford, he turned back to Protestantism under the manipulations of such an accomplished master in the art of turning as Bishop Barlow. And if, as Macaulay hints, Wycherley's turning back to Romanism once more had something to do with the patronage and unwonted liberality of James II., this merely proves that the deity he worshipped was the deity of the “polite world” of his time—gentility. Moreover, as a professional fine gentleman, at a period when, as the genial Major Pack says, “the amours of Britain would furnish as diverting memoirs, if well related, as those of France published by Rabutin, or those of Nero's court writ by Petronius,” Wycherley was obliged to be a loose liver. But, for all that, Wycherley's sobriquet of “Manly Wycherley” seems to have been fairly earned by him, earned by that frank and straightforward way of confronting life which, according to Pope and Swift, characterized also his brilliant successor Vanbrugh.
That effort of Wycherley's to bring to Buckingham's notice
