Thomas Wyatt was born c. 1503, to a good family. His father was the Constable of Norwich Castle. Wyatt was educated at Cambridge University. As an adult, Wyatt proved an adept courtier, and was sent by the king on several missions to Italy, the Vatican, and France. Because of tangential involvement in a conspiracy that he may or may not have even had knowledge of, in 1536 Wyatt was imprisoned for a time in the Tower. While there, he witnessed the speacilaly imported French executioner  wield his sword against the neck of Ann Boleyn, and wrote about the event in a Latin poem. On release, Wyatt retired to his country estate in Kent and is known to have produced some of his better poetry there. He was subsequently sent to the Tower again in 1541. Wyatt was pardoned by the King, probably at the request of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's wife by then, and even became an Ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Wyatt spent several years abroad, principally in Spain.

Wyatt, because of family connections, probably knew Henry the VIII's future wife Anne Boleyn when they were both children. In later years, he is said to have courted her, and may have been imprisoned in the Tower in part because of Henry VIII's concerns about a relationship between Boleyn and Wyatt. Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso List to Hunt" is generally thought to contain an allusion to Anne Boleyn.

None of Wyatt's poetry was published during his lifetime. Most of what was published was included in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. He is credited, with Henry Howard the Early of Surrey, also featured in Tottle's Miscellany, with bringing the Italian sonnet to England. He experimented with a variety of verse types, and clearly was influenced in phrase and vocabulary by the works of Chaucer as well as Petrach, several of whose sonnets Wyatt translated into English.

In his lifetime, Wyatt was considered an athlete, a scholar, and a rare courtier. There are a handful of extant portraits, and letters describe him as over six feet in height, and a superb horseman. A number of his poems are preserved in the Devonshire Manuscript, a manuscript which was passed around to various courtiers who contributed poems and other bits of their writing. Several of Wyatt's poems are preserved in strikingly different versions in the Devonshire manuscript than in the edited versions printed in Tottel's Miscellany.