Henry Wotton

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Henry Wotton, born on the 30th of March 1568, is remembered today less for the decades he spent negotiating on behalf of the English crown than for a single sentence he wrote in a friend's album. That sentence would follow him for the rest of his life, nearly destroying his career, and it poses a question about the nature of diplomacy that still unsettles people today: when does an official representative stop being honest, and start being a liar in service of a state?

  Wotton was a poet, an architectural theorist, a parliamentarian, a spy, and for most of his working life an ambassador to Venice. He moved through the courts of Europe during one of the most turbulent periods in English and continental history. He sheltered under false identities, carried secret warnings of assassination plots, and gave away an emperor's jewel as a matter of principle. He ended his days fishing by a bend in the Thames called Black Potts, in the company of his friend Izaak Walton. How a man travels from the crisis of the Essex Rebellion to the quiet banks below the Eton playing fields is a journey worth tracing.

• 2. Family and Formation

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  Thomas Wotton, Henry's father, died in 1587 leaving his youngest son only a hundred marks a year. That modest inheritance pushed Henry toward a life that depended on powerful patrons and foreign postings rather than landed wealth. He was already well educated by then, having attended Winchester College and moved on to New College, Oxford, where he matriculated on the 5th of June 1584 alongside John Hoskins. He later transferred to Queen's College, graduating in 1588.

  At Oxford, the friendships Wotton made shaped his intellectual world. Alberico Gentili, then professor of Civil Law, was one close associate. John Donne was another. During his time at Queen's, Wotton wrote a play called Tancredo, which has not survived. His deeper interests, though, leaned toward science. For his master's degree he delivered three lectures titled De oculo, and a curiosity about physical experiments stayed with him through old age.

  His family roots already ran into diplomacy. His granduncle Nicholas Wotton had been a diplomat, and his elder brother was Edward Wotton. When Henry left England around 1589, probably to prepare for a diplomatic career, those family connections gave shape to a journey that would last roughly six years. At Altdorf he encountered Edward, Lord Zouch, and the letters he addressed to Zouch between 1590 and 1593 survive as a record of his travels through Vienna, Venice, and Rome. In 1593 he spent time in Geneva at the house of the scholar Isaac Casaubon, to whom he ended up owing a considerable debt.

• 3. The Essex Years

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  Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was the magnet that drew Wotton back into English political life. While still abroad, Wotton had occasionally passed information to Devereux, and after returning to England in 1594 he formally entered Essex's service as one of his agents or secretaries. His assignment was intelligence: affairs in Transylvania, Poland, Italy, and Germany. From the 15th of April 1599 to the 4th of September 1599, he served as Essex's secretary in Ireland.

  When the Essex Rebellion collapsed in 1601, Wotton's position was dangerous but survivable. His fellow secretary, Henry Cuffe, was hanged at Tyburn. Wotton had no direct part in the rebellion, but he did not wait to see how suspicion might fall. Within sixteen hours of Essex's arrest, he was safe in France. From there he moved on to Venice and Rome.

  The escape proved a turning point rather than an ending. In 1602, living in Florence, Wotton received a strange and consequential commission. A plot to murder James VI of Scotland had come to the attention of the grand duke of Tuscany, and Wotton was chosen to carry warning letters to the Scottish king, together with Italian antidotes against poison. He made the journey under the Italian alias Ottavio Baldi, traveling to Scotland by way of Norway. James received him well, and Wotton spent three months at the Scottish court without dropping his Italian disguise. When James became king of England shortly after, Wotton hurried back to London, and James knighted him.

• 4. Venice and the Ambassador's Life

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  James offered Wotton the embassy at Madrid or Paris, but Wotton knew those posts carried costs that would ruin him. He asked instead for Venice. He left London in 1604 with Sir Albertus Morton, his half-nephew, serving as secretary, and William Bedell, later the author of an Irish translation of the Bible, as chaplain. Wotton would spend most of the next twenty years in Venice, with two gaps between 1612 and 1616 and between 1619 and 1621.

  In Venice, Wotton's work was more than ceremonial. He helped the Doge resist what the source describes as ecclesiastical aggression, and he was closely associated with Paolo Sarpi, whose history of the Council of Trent was forwarded to King James as each section was written.

  In 1620 a special embassy took Wotton to Vienna to plead on behalf of James's daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose cause he supported with genuine feeling. His poem beginning "You meaner beauties of the night" expressed that devotion. When the emperor presented him with a valuable jewel at his departure, Wotton accepted it respectfully, then gave it to his hostess before leaving the city, explaining that he would accept no gift from the enemy of the Bohemian queen. That gesture cost him real money. He was arrested for debt at least once during the years that followed, a reminder that decades of expensive diplomacy had left him chronically short of funds.

• 5. The Epigram That Wouldn't Die

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  Years before the trouble began, Wotton had written a line in the album of a friend named Christoff Fleckhammer. He was being playful. The line defined an ambassador as "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." In English, the word "lie" carries two meanings: to tell falsehoods, and simply to reside somewhere. The original Latin formulation, Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa, carried no such ambiguity. Mentiendum means to deceive. The Latin said plainly what the English could pass off as a pun.

  In 1611 the scholar Caspar Schoppe published a scurrilous attack on James called Ecclesiasticus. Schoppe had been a fellow student of Wotton's at Altdorf and knew exactly what to dig up. He reproduced the album entry as evidence of the morals of James and his servants. Wotton was on leave in England at the time and found himself in temporary disgrace. He made two formal defenses: one a personal attack on Schoppe addressed to Mark Welser of Augsburg, and one submitted privately to the king.

  The episode cost him diplomatic employment for a period. He eventually recovered royal favor, partly through his parliamentary support for James's claim to impose taxes on merchandise. In 1614 he was elected Member of Parliament for Appleby in the parliament that would become known as the Addled Parliament. In 1625 he was elected MP for Sandwich, a constituency he represented in the year of James's death.

• 6. Eton and the Late Years

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  After his third term of service in Venice, Wotton returned to London early in 1624 and in July of that year was installed as provost of Eton College. The provostship gave him a home and a role, but it did not solve his financial difficulties. The arrest for debt came during these years.

  In 1627 he received a pension of 200 pounds, and by 1630 this had been raised to 500 pounds, on the condition that he write a history of England. That history was never finished. He did not, however, neglect the duties of his provostship, and his later years brought a kind of contentment: he entertained friends generously at Eton, and his most constant companions were Izaak Walton and John Hales.

  Wotton died at the beginning of December 1639 and was buried in the chapel of Eton College. In 1651, more than a decade after his death, the Reliquiae Wottonianae appeared in print, accompanied by Izaak Walton's Life. Of the 25 poems included in that collection, 15 are Wotton's. Two became the best known: "O his Mistris, the Queen of Bohemia" and "The Character of a Happy Life."

• 7. The Written Legacy

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  During his lifetime, Wotton published just two works. The Elements of Architecture appeared in 1624, drawn from his years in Venice and based on the de Architectura of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. The phrase most associated with it, "Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight," is shared between Wotton and Vitruvius; some scholars have called the Elements a paraphrase rather than a strict translation, and the line is often attributed to Vitruvius alone. His other published work was a Latin prose address to the king on his return from Scotland, issued in 1633.

  A third piece of writing, short and informal, has perhaps outlasted everything else. The epitaph Wotton composed for Elizabeth Apsley, widow of his nephew Sir Albertus Morton, reads: "He first deceased, she for a little tried to live without him, liked it not, and died." Twelve words that compress an entire marriage into a single sentence. It is the kind of writing that suggests what Wotton might have done had he spent less of his life in embassies and more of it at his desk. The promised history of England never came, but the provostship at Eton, the pension that funded it, and the companionable walks with Walton along the Thames toward Black Potts carried their own kind of completeness.