Inscribed in Latin​ on a large floor slab in the chapel of Eton College is a memorial to a former provost, Sir Henry Wotton, who died, aged 71, in December 1639: ‘Here lies the first author of this sentiment: The itch of disputation is the scab of the churches. Inquire his name elsewhere.’ Izaak Walton was the first to pursue this prompt to biographical appraisal in his Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), which comprised a Life and selected letters, poems and prose by ‘the curious pencil of the ever memorable Sir Henry Wotton’. Having shared many of Wotton’s riverbank musings, Walton recalled his older friend’s affection for angling as ‘idle time not idly spent’ and his dictum that ‘he would rather live five May months than forty Decembers.’

Carol Chillington Rutter’s Lying Abroad opens with an aqueous image. Staring ‘down into the waters of a Venetian canal’, the author imagines a watery Wotton floating among forgotten ignoti: ‘faces from the past who want to return to the light of day’. Wotton served as English ambassador in Venice between 1604 and 1610; he is, for Rutter, an unorthodox diplomat whose initiatives ‘averted pan-European war’ when Venice’s long-running jurisdictional disputes with the papacy threatened to escalate into armed conflict. After his election as pope in May 1605, Paul V sought to overturn restrictions on church-building and the unlicensed transfer of properties to the Church, while also seeking to deny the republic’s right to try clergy indicted on criminal charges in secular courts. The Venetians resisted, resulting in the Interdict Crisis of 1606-7, during which the papacy excommunicated the entire city and banned all religious services and sacraments, effectively rendering newborn children illegitimate, denying absolution to the dying and preventing burials in consecrated ground.

A zealous Protestant, Wotton regarded the interdict as, in Rutter’s words, ‘the monstrous conjoined twin to the gunpowder conspiracy’ that, only six months before, had nearly annihilated James VI and I, his sons and the country’s political and clerical establishment. Wotton sought to turn the crisis into an opportunity by advocating the creation of a cross-confessional armed league to resist papal encroachments on territorial sovereignty. Having exceeded his formal diplomatic instructions by proposing such a league, Wotton’s ambitions were quickly stalled by the penurious caution of James’s ministers, notably Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, as well as by the ‘calcified habits’ of Venice’s ruling gerontocracy. Meanwhile French diplomatic intervention quietly accomplished a peaceable resolution of the dispute, with the papal interdict lifted in April 1607.

The prologue to Lying Abroad describes Wotton’s first reception by the doge and Senate in the autumn of 1604. Rutter, an expert in Shakespeare performance studies, reminds us that ‘by a marvellous coincidence’ the audience was held on the same day as the first court performance in London of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. As Wotton is ‘walking the pavements of Venice, King James will be there with him’. Wotton’s innate theatricality rendered his diplomacy unpredictable and endears him to the author. Writing predominantly in the historical present, Rutter chaperones readers along Venetian alleys and invites them to ‘look over Harry’s shoulder.’ As Wotton is rowed to the Sala del Collegio in the Doge’s Palace, we observe the way ‘the oars cutting the water leave bubble trails like pools of Burano lace.’ During his first audience, we watch as ‘Wotton checks his hat … He straightens his hat … His voice is low, a little unsteady … Caught up in the moment, he daffs aside protocol … Wotton is winging it.’

Subtitled ‘Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy’, Rutter’s book champions him as an innovator. The claim that Wotton averted pan-European war by recommending a league in which Anglo-Venetian forces would triumph in battle against a Habsburg-backed papacy is, perhaps, moot. Pondering whether Wotton’s apocalyptic alarm might not be ‘slightly absurd’, Rutter asks: ‘Are a couple of scabby priests and some vacant properties really going to bring Christendom to internecine war?’ Once the crisis had been resolved, the threat of armed English intervention in support of Venice could, however, be retrospectively credited as the catalyst prompting French intervention. Although Wotton had received a dispatch from Cecil warning him to ‘be the more wary hereafter, how to carry yourself’ in representing England’s interests, the doge, Leonardo Donà, was impressed and told Wotton he could ‘do more with them than any public minister he had ever known in this state’. The dustjacket for Lying Abroad reproduces a contemporary painting by Odoardo Fialetti depicting an audience in the Collegio: Wotton is seated to the right of Donà, who extends his hand towards the English ambassador.

Although armed conflict didn’t break out, there was, as Wotton reminded Cecil, a vicious ‘war of the quill’. Culled from Wotton’s dispatches to the Jacobean court, A Declaration of the Variance between the Pope and the Seignory of Venice was published anonymously in London in 1606. ‘Now there’s an innovation,’ Rutter writes admiringly: ‘a brilliant exercise in smuggling, putting extracts of dispatches meant for the king into the public domain’. When he returned to England in 1611, Wotton left behind ‘a fully functioning English embassy’ in Venice, part of the significant expansion of overseas diplomatic activity initiated by James after decades of Elizabethan isolationism.

To understand Wotton’s mental world, Rutter devotes more than half of Lying Abroad to reconstructing his life before his ambassadorial appointment. Born in Kent in 1568, he was the only son of his father’s second marriage. As well as giving a detailed account of the humanist curriculum Wotton followed at Winchester College, Rutter offers readers numbered advice on ‘how to read an early modern letter’. At Oxford, Wotton encountered the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili, whose tract De Legationibus Libri Tres (1585) described the necessary qualities of a successful ambassador: not only the traditional manly virtues of fortitude, prudence and temperance, but also ‘conspicuous bravery’, shrewdness and experience of foreign travel. For Rutter, Gentili’s text ‘bristles with thousands of cracking quotations gleaned from authorities ancient and modern’. Once ‘we know what’s in it, we know what’s driving Henry Wotton in Venice.’ She is less complimentary about James VI and I’s Apology for the Oath of Allegiance (1608), ‘over the course of which the royal author hits his stride and the modern reader sinks into a slough of pedantry’.

After Oxford, Wotton embarked on five years of travel that he later called ‘the wandering part of my life’. He visited Naples, Heidelberg, Rome, Vienna, Venice (briefly), Florence, Milan and Geneva. In Rome, he observed the stringent measures pursued by Pope Clement VIII to rehabilitate papal authority: ‘Clement’s Rome in May 1592 is a shark tank,’ Rutter writes. ‘But Harry doesn’t propose to dive in naked.’ As Wotton explained, he assumed the persona of an unassuming Dutchman. Despite this, he attracted attention by sporting ‘a large blue feather in a black hat’ before prudently departing for Naples as Holy Week approached. On his return to England in 1594, Wotton obtained employment in the talented secretariat attached to Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. Two years later, he was encamped with Essex in Plymouth, ahead of the English raid on Cadiz. As Essex’s troops plundered Cadiz, Rutter writes, ‘Wotton is living Dante’s Inferno: stinking sulphur, blinding smoke, noise more deafening than all the howling demons in pandemonium.’ Similar horrors confronted Wotton when accompanying Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ideas of astonishing crassness.’ By the spring of 1601, however, Wotton had abandoned his employment and fled to Florence, avoiding the disastrous Essex Rebellion and its vindictive aftermath.

In self-imposed Continental exile, he offered his services as an intelligencer on matters concerning the British Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to Scotland to warn James VI of a credible poisoning plot. Since Wotton’s connection with Essex made him an outlaw, he couldn’t travel through England, instead taking the ‘horse-killing route’ through Germany and Denmark, then across the North Sea to Leith. Presenting himself as an Italian gentleman called Ottavio Baldi, he contrived to whisper his real identity and purpose to the king and endeared himself sufficiently to James that he remained at the Scottish court under his Italian alias for three months, laying the foundations for his formal ambassadorial appointment after James’s accession.

Two years apart in age, James and Wotton shared certain personality traits. In 1581, an English envoy to Scotland had warned Elizabeth I that the 14-year-old Scottish king was ‘the greatest dissembler that ever was heard of for his years’, while a French ambassador to London later termed James ‘a king of artifices who dissimulates above all the rest of the world’. For his part, James regarded Wotton as ‘the most honest and therefore the best dissembler ever he met with’: there were no ambassadorial dispatches he read ‘with better contentation’ than Wotton’s. Two decades after their first meeting, Wotton wrote to James from Venice in late 1622, playfully signing his letter ‘Ottavio Baldi’ and enclosing the draft preface to a planned history of the city-state, together with some melon seeds.

Polyglot playfulness is, however, a risky trait in a diplomat. En route to Venice in 1604, Wotton inscribed in an album amicorum in Augsburg: Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causa. If translated into English, the epigram was a punning witticism claiming that ‘the ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the sake of his country.’ But there was no alternative sense of ‘to lie’ in the original Latin; rather, ad mentiendum unambiguously asserted the mendacity attaching to foreign embassies and, seven years later, proved damaging when a German Catholic polemicist, Caspar Schoppe, published Wotton’s words in an attempt to undermine James’s diplomacy.

Intelligence – whether rumour, gossip, hearsay or clandestine leaks – was central to ambassadorial activity. Wotton’s unusual status as a resident Protestant ambassador in a Catholic state allowed him to plant spies in cities including Milan, Turin and Frankfurt while maintaining regular correspondence with English ambassadors in The Hague, Brussels, Paris and Madrid. Members of Wotton’s entourage loitered in Venice’s piazzas, where, as Rutter puts it, gossip was ‘an elixir … Every mouth gapes for it.’ Speculative chatter invariably accompanied the municipal decision-making that, every Sunday, required hundreds of black-robed citizens to gather and select different coloured balls, meaning either ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘neutral’. Recalling that it had taken seventy rounds of balloting to elect Marino Grimani as Doge in 1593, Venice was a polity where, as Rutter muses, ‘ballot balls drop like Tuscan chestnuts in an autumn wind.’

In a chapter titled ‘Household Stuff’, Rutter describes the fifteen-roomed residence where Wotton lived with his seven-member famiglia, or entourage. Three pairs of floor-to-ceiling glazed doors on the piano nobile let in dazzling light that ‘reflects off the lagoon, off the canals … it even bounces off the palazzo’s speckled, marble-chip terrazzo floors.’ Located in the Cannaregio (‘as far away as possible from the signoria’s centre of government in San Marco’), the English embassy was just a few steps from the Servite monastery where the renowned anti-papal theorist Paolo Sarpi and his collaborator Fulgenzio Micanzio lived. As historians including Eloise Davies and Filippo de Vivo have shown, the embassy, protected by diplomatic immunity, became a vital hub for disseminating Protestant works in the Veneto and for supplying James’s court in London with extensive information on the background to the Interdict Crisis.

Under the pretext of learning English, Sarpi and Micanzio met weekly with Wotton’s chaplain, William Bedell, later provost of Trinity College Dublin and bishop of Kilmore. All three men believed that papal claims to temporal jurisdiction were an illegitimate usurpation of sovereign power – a recent, post-Tridentine arrogation. Bedell recounted his discussions with Sarpi and Micanzio in letters to Adam Newton (tutor to James’s eldest son, Prince Henry) and also translated the Book of Common Prayer into Italian. Wotton, meanwhile, commissioned a portrait of Sarpi as a gift for James, promising the king that he would ‘behold a sound protestant’, albeit dressed ‘in the habit of a friar’. James had no doubt startled MPs when he announced, to his first Westminster Parliament in 1604, that he recognised ‘the Roman Church to be our Mother Church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions’. But in a later publication, Bedell recalled a conversation in a Venetian stationer’s shop in which a customer had asked what were the differences between the Church of England and the Catholic Church, only to be informed (perhaps by Bedell himself) that there were ‘none: for we account ourselves good Catholics.’

Lying Abroad​ ends abruptly with Wotton’s return to England in the spring of 1611, as he turned 43. An epilogue of fewer than three pages covers the major episodes of the next three decades, during which Wotton ‘fruitlessly’ tried to negotiate a double Stuart-Savoyard marriage for James’s children Henry and Elizabeth, ‘haplessly’ represented English interests as ambassador to The Hague and passed two ‘largely uneventful’ further terms as ambassador in Venice (1616-19 and 1621-23). By contrast, Walton devotes a third of his Life to the years between 1624 and 1639, when Wotton was provost of Eton. It’s true that, as Logan Pearsall Smith wrote in 1907, ‘the mass of material’ generated by Wotton’s diplomatic career is ‘almost unmanageable’, and therefore ‘the difficulty of his biographer is not lack of information, but the means of condensing it into a book of reasonable proportions.’ But Rutter’s decision to halt her account in 1611 is curious given her opening claim that ‘nobody until now has paid attention to Wotton’s full dossier, his complete diplomatic bag compiled from archive sources’ in Venice and London that together ‘show the evolution of his diplomacy and the sheer industry of the man’. Also frustrating is the absence of endnote references in Lying Abroad; readers are instead offered a discursive list of ‘sources’.

Wotton’s ‘sheer industry’ did not stop in 1611. His missions to Turin combined marriage diplomacy with efforts to retain Savoyard amity in a broader anti-papal axis. He undertook embassies not only to Venice and The Hague, but also to the imperial court in Vienna, and visited James’s daughter Elizabeth in Heidelberg following her marriage to the Elector Palatine Frederick V. Joining the ranks of English envoys besotted by her charms, Wotton wrote a verse tribute to Elizabeth, later queen of Bohemia, that survives in more than ninety 17th-century versions. During his second posting to Venice, Wotton oversaw the covert dispatch to England of Sarpi’s manuscript history of the Council of Trent, in fourteen folders disguised as madrigal collections. From those smuggled folders, the king’s printer produced Latin, English and Italian editions of Historia del Concilio Tridentino: a major publishing event warmly received by supporters of pre-Tridentine conceptions of the Catholic Church.

In the hundreds of letters edited by Pearsall Smith, Wotton emerges as an entertaining correspondent. In an account of the conclave of 1623, he mentions the ‘belief in Rome that Popes must have an R in their names’, which prompts the jesting thought that senior clerics ‘choose Popes as we do oysters at home, when the month hath an R in it’. Lacking funds rather than wit, Wotton was impecunious throughout his life and, during his later ambassadorial terms in Venice, was suspected of taking bribes from city financiers and from Florentine and Spanish agents. When James appointed Sir Isaac Wake ambassador to Venice in early 1624, Wotton lamented that he was ‘utterly destitute of all possibility to subsist at home; much like those seal-fishes’ that ‘oversleeping themselves in an ebbing-water, feel nothing about them but a dry shore when they awake’. The provostship of Eton failed to yield sufficient income to discharge his debts and, in 1635, he was arrested as he was leaving the Exchequer and threatened with imprisonment. Charles I intervened to grant him royal protection. Although Wotton was more the unpredictable maverick and less the innovator claimed by Rutter, the liveliness of the tale told in Lying Abroad might inspire readers to pursue Wotton’s Venetian trail. His Cannaregio residence, the Doge’s Palace, the Sala del Collegio and ‘the bench outside the door where he sat’ can all still be visited.