Short answers, pulled from the story.
Henry Wotton, born on the 30th of March 1568, was an English author, diplomat, and politician who served as ambassador to Venice for most of the first two decades of the seventeenth century. He is best known for the remark that an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country, and for his poem beginning "You meaner beauties of the night," addressed to Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Wotton originally wrote the line in a friend's album as a play on the English word "lie," which can mean either to deceive or to reside abroad. The Latin original, Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa, carried no such ambiguity and plainly meant to deceive. Caspar Schoppe published the remark in 1611 in an attack on King James, briefly ruining Wotton's diplomatic career.
Wotton spent most of roughly twenty years based in Venice, departing London in 1604 and returning to England early in 1624, with two interruptions between 1612-16 and 1619-21. During that time he supported the Doge against ecclesiastical pressure and worked closely with the historian Paolo Sarpi.
In 1602, while living in Florence, Wotton was entrusted by the grand duke of Tuscany with letters warning James VI of a murder plot, along with Italian antidotes against poison. He traveled to Scotland via Norway under the alias Ottavio Baldi, spent three months at the Scottish court without revealing his true identity, and was later knighted by James after James became king of England.
Wotton published two works in his lifetime: The Elements of Architecture in 1624, a free rendering of Vitruvius's de Architectura completed during his years in Venice, and a Latin prose address to the king on his return from Scotland in 1633. The larger collection of his writings, Reliquiae Wottonianae, appeared in 1651 after his death, including fifteen of his poems and accompanied by Izaak Walton's Life.
Wotton was installed as provost of Eton College in July 1624 and spent his final years there. He died at the beginning of December 1639 and was buried in the chapel of Eton College. His closest companions during that period were Izaak Walton and John Hales, and he and Walton regularly fished together at a bend in the Thames called Black Potts, below the Eton playing fields.