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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
Hayden
howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fanfellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [00:43]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [00:47]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [00:56]
Stephen
That's right. Hey hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [01:01]
Hayden
And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [01:08]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Chicago 2011 a cop is murdered.
- [01:20]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Police and prosecutors swear they have the trigger man. He swears he didn't do it. How far will each side go to prove they're right? Like it's just one bombshell after another. You know, you're like what? What? The story of a PlayStation, a brain eating amoeba, and the relentless pursuit of justice.
- [01:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Off duty.
- [01:41]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:46]
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- [02:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. There's a famous saying which sums up the slippery nature of diplomacy. An Ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. You'll note the deliberate double meaning there. Lie can mean simply reside overseas, or it could be flagging up the necessary economy of truth in statecraft. The line comes from one of the most outrageous characters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, whose life reads like the wildest fiction yet is all surprisingly true. Let me introduce Sir Henry or Harry Wootton. Student, traveler, secretary, soldier, scoundrel, spy. A maverick who quite literally invented modern diplomacy. Wootton first entered the shady world of international intelligence when he became assistant to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth I's dashing temperamental favorite, who would ultimately lose his head for treason. But at Essex's downfall, Wootton managed to save his own neck by fleeing to Italy, where he embarked on one of the most bizarre diplomatic missions of the age, thwarting a plot to assassinate King James VI of Scotland. Witten's reward was to be appointed Britain's Ambassador to Venice. And it was while there that he took a risk that changed the course of history and averted European war. To explore Woodland's extraordinary life, I'm joined by Professor Carol Chillington, rotter emerita professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Her new book, Lying Henry Wootton and the Invention of Diplomacy, brings to light the little known story of this colourful character who sent himself abroad to lie for his country. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Professor Carol Chillington Rutter, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:55]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Thank you so very much. I'm delighted to be here.
- [04:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, we are talking about a forgotten Elizabethan, someone who coined a phrase that many of us will know, but who himself has been obscured. Why do you think that is?
- [05:10]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
I describe him as one of the best known unknowns of Shakespeare's contemporaries and I think it had to do with the way he was depreciated by scholars and biographers who were writing his biography more than 100 years ago.
- [05:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's start at the beginning then. Who was he by birth and how did he spend his formative years?
- [05:33]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
So he came from a very well known gentry family in Kent, but his father, who was named the Sheriff of Kent on the first day that Elizabeth came to the throne, issued all kinds of court appointments. He just didn't want to be part of that. He had seen the effects of regime change over the Tudor period and, and quite frankly, he wanted a quiet life. But Wootton was also the last son of his. He was A son born of a second marriage. His older brothers were all 20 years older than he is, and this was the boy that his elderly father sent off to be educated in grammar school. So the lad went off to Winchester School when he was 11 years old, spent five years doing the by that time, statutory syllabus, and it stated that what a young man needed was to know Latin and Greek, because everything that was important to be known was written in those two languages. So he went off to the grammar school, which was also important, I think, for training young men, also in poetry, in music and significantly, in the school play.
- [06:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And from Winchester, he then goes off to Queen's College, Oxford. What were the kind of things he was learning from the statutory syllabus?
- [06:50]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
On the statutory syllabus, a young man is required to continue education in logic, grammar and most importantly, to take on the idea of disputation, which has a young man standing up, arguing in Latin some point, and then coming to some kind of conclusion, winning the argument, which, of course is part of the most important training that a future diplomat could have, how to speak persuasively or order your arguments and then defeat your opponent. But importantly, also in Oxford, he had additional off the syllabus experiences. For one thing, he was tutored by a Protestant Italian refugee who is now the Regius professor of Civil Law in the university, Alberico Gentilli, who, at the time that Wootton was there in college, published the first significant three volumes on the law of nations, where he was understanding the history of diplomacy and specifically the moral qualities of an ambassador. And as part of that, lays out the notion that an ambassador has immunity.
- [08:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, so far we've got this picture of someone who is skilled in performance, he's acquired an education, even if some of the time it's by rote memorization. It develops qualities in him that allow him to remember huge amounts of stuff in future. He's practically bilingual in Latin and English and he knows what an ambassador should be. And following university, he needs to travel. Why is that? And what is the experience of travelling like for Elizabethans?
- [08:29]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
He leaves Oxford in 1588 and he travels home to Kent at the moment the that the Spanish Armada is sailing up the Channel. I think that he's there standing on the clifftops, watching this. He has a very strict notion of the danger of the attempt of Philip II to try to reimpose Catholicism on the country. And at the end of that summer, I think it is his big brother Edward, who sits down with his little brother and they plan his Journeys across Europe because of course, as the youngest brother, Wootton has practically no view in the future of ever inheriting anything. So he has to learn how to make himself serviceable to some future patron. And that means using all of the education that he's had to date to then launch him as a traveler across Europe. Picking up knowledge of foreign courts, of foreign cities, of people, of talking, becoming informed, being a student at Heidelberg, sitting in the Imperial Library in Vienna and reading collections, picking up acquaintance. He becomes acquainted with Baron Zouch, who's in self exile on the continent, and starts feeding him information. So becoming an informant, where we're thinking about the circulation of information as both being substantial but also moving into the area of what we would think of as espionage. So he's there on the continent for five years doing that before he's finally summoned home.
- [10:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How formative do you think those few years are in his character?
- [10:17]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Absolutely. He spends four days for the first time going into Venice and then flees Venice because he says he doesn't really trust himself with these Venetian women. But he also travels to Rome. Now that's dangerous for a Protestant. He has to go in disguise. He travels as a Dutchman. He goes further in disguise, however, by deciding to ride into Rome under a hat with a mighty blue feather. And he says this disguise will make it very clear to everybody a that he's not an Englishman because no Englishman would do that, and that he doesn't want to be unknown in Rome because everybody is talking about this mighty blue feather. He spends some time in Rome and he watches. He's curious to know how Catholicism works, to be able to go into the college and dispute with some of the great Catholic minds of the period, but also to evade detection, to get out of Rome before he can be identified as an Englishman and then put in the prison of the Inquisition. Those kinds of experiences are live and formative in the way that he can put his Protestantism, which he knows of course as the true religion and very much superior to the superstitiousness of the Catholics, he can put that cultural knowledge tested against what he's heard and seen in Rome. So very formative and fast tracks, I think, in his understanding of where he might be going in service to a patron when he goes back to England.
- [11:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And when he does return to England, we're now in 1595, he becomes secretary to the man you call England's Icarus, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Give us a sense of Essex's position and ambitions at this time.
- [12:11]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
That appointment is Another wonderful accident, because it happens that there's a whole circle of familiarity that links the Wottons to the Bacons to the Walsinghams and so on. And it is Edward, the big brother, who bumps into Anthony Bacon, who is himself working alongside Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who arranges for Essex to know young Harry when he gets back and to appoint him as his personal private secretary. At this point, it looks that Essex, who is the kingdom's premier military theorist, strategist and maker of war, is moving into politics, is positioning himself now more or less as the aging Queen's Secretary of State for Foreign affairs. And he's trying then to work out a whole network of information that can link all the way across Europe. Harry is really well positioned to become that area of information for Essex. So it's moving, as it were, from the military man to the political man that I see Essex striving towards and using Harry as one of his secretaries to do this.
- [13:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So give me a flavour of what you think Harry Wootton's life in service to Essex was like, because the role of a secretary turns out to be a little more daring do in the end, given Essex's escapade in these years, than perhaps one might have thought.
- [13:39]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Essex is leading now a very crowded and demanding life. You have to be available, you have to be ready to go when your master calls, so you are never far from his side. Around him are all of these suitors asking for him to do things. He has by this time now four secretaries who are working for him. But at the moment when a new explosion breaks out, Essex is summoned by the Queen to try to look after the problem of the fall of Calais. And it's the Secretary Wootton who goes with Essex. Then they have to travel all the way back across the country to try to put together flotilla that is going to, as the Lord Admiral says, take the war into Spain. So to stop thinking about the Spanish invading us and to take the war into Spain. So he is traveling with Essex day and night, where Essex might be sending a letter to the privy Council at 9 o' clock in the morning, then at 11 o' clock in the afternoon and then 3 o'. Clock. And covering miles and miles, Wootton is there beside him. Wooten is addressing his letters. We can actually follow the map as he travels across country to start assembling this massive navy that's going to invade Spain by attacking Calais. So he has to be ready with his pen, has to be ready on horseback, he has to be ready with his stirrups. He has to be as tireless as his master.
- [15:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And by saying Calais. There's a bit of a slippage here, isn't there? The words Calais are used. But actually, of course, in 1596, it is Cadiz that Essex attacks. And is Wootton there with him? What does he learn from these experiences?
- [15:26]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Essex is on a brand new ship called Du Resolute, and Wootton travels with him. He's there to see the storming of Cadiz. He probably goes ashore with Essex after the battle in the harbor that within four hours the English have destroyed the defense of the bay, that immediately Essex goes on land. Probably Wootton is with him. They travel up the side of the spit where city is located, over the top of fortifications, and again before nightfall. Essex has now taken not just the harbor, but also the town of Cadiz. And they're there for four days. So what's in the harbor is the gold convoy that has come from the New World and is resting in Cadiz before going on to Spain. They're trying to get the Spanish to ransom that fleet, and the admiral there overturns orders and burns the whole thing down. In fact, what should have been just the most audacious and indeed valuable attack on the Spanish turns out to be a bit of a damp squib when they sail back to England. Essex is already anticipating what will happen, which is that he will be criticized by the queen. And he is. And I think that he and Wootton sit together and think about the difficulty of serving a queen whose mind is constantly changing. Now, that takes them up to the next big assignment that Essex is going to have, and that's being assigned to go to Ireland to try to subdue the wild Irish and to bring down the Earl of Tyrone, who constantly works as a thorn in the side of English politics. That happens in 1599. Once again, Wootton is right there beside him, looking at his letters, corresponding, taking down notes and so on. But he's right beside him day and night.
- [17:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, despite these years in Essex's service, Wootton manages to escape Essex's fate after the earl's Rebellion in February 1601. How does he do that?
- [17:42]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Do you remember that Essex thought that he was liberating the queen? He didn't see it as a rebellion. He saw it as liberating the queen from the evil counselors that she had around her, giving her false information. Wootton's problem was that when the Earl decided that he was going to do that extraordinary thing of leaving Ireland, where he had strict instructions not to abandon The Irish campaign until Tyrone was fully subdued bracket that subduing of Tyrone, we might say came theoretically when Essex and Tyrone negotiated a truce and that truce happened to be written out in the hand of Harry Wootton. So when Essex made that decision to ride back to nonsunt and confront the Queen directly with the malignity of her counsel, Wootton went with him. And that treaty clearly catches him red handed as having made this agreement that the Queen had officially resisted and indeed denied. But they used a sort of clause in her framing of that permission not to do something as a way of actually legitimating what they were doing. So when Essex was disgraced, and it was over a year before the rebellion came, we're not quite sure where Wootton was, but certainly around Essex House were his former adherents, his former secretaries. And it may be that during this time when Essex was in disgrace and petitioning to the Queen saying, I think you want my correction, not my destruction, that it was his big brother Edward, who by now had been knighted and was the controller of the Queen's household, who said to his little brother, I can hear what's happening, I think you need to get out. And indeed there's a version of the story that is told by contemporary biographer Isaac Walton that says basically that he's scarper that overnight he was put on a boat, given money and sent from Dover across the Channel in the company of Edward's son, Pickering Wotton. So that seems to be a kind of a giveaway that it might have been Edward who said get out. Now we can see the writing on the wall at that moment. Of course, though, Essex's journey is going in one direction. Now Wootton is on the continent, but he's also on the continent literally as an outlaw, because he's traveling without a license, which is the necessary document that you have to have in hand to leave the kingdom. So he's now self exiled and going across Europe, winding up in Florence.
- [20:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What happens to Wootton in that period whilst he's in self exile?
- [20:40]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
He has pitched up at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and it's there that he learns about the death of his master, which propels him into a correspondence with the Grand Duke via his secretary that says he will never return to England, that England basically has lost not just his affection, but his loyalty, and that he would be willing to serve the Duke as an informer. Now it also transpires that the Grand Duke has heard intimations that there is a plot to kill the Scottish King, James vi. If James VI is killed, then that will unbalance all geopolitics across Europe. So Ferdinand can't let that happen. He needs to find somebody to take an antidote to the poison to Scotland. And his secretary Wittna says to him, oh, I know just the man. He happens to be here in the court, and he assigns Harry Wootton this job. Harry travels incognito as one Ottavio Baldi. He reaches Scotland by this circuitous route, more than 1,800 miles, and then across the North Sea and finally meets the King at Stirling, where the King is not inclined to have a foreigner visit him or to speak with him. And at some point in this meeting, Wootton steps forward, whispers in the King's ear, actually, I'm an Englishman and I need to talk to you. And the King is so delighted by the disguise that he allows Wootton to stay in his court for three months in disguise and to return to Florence as much an Italian as he came there.
- [22:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what do we know about how those three months at the Scottish court benefited Wootton, albeit disguised as an Italian?
- [22:31]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
So that three months allows Wootton to be in the company daily with King James, who uses that time, I think, to. In the same way that Essex had used the time with Wootton to find out about events around the world and across Europe. So it's completely by accident that when James takes in the English throne and encounters the man that he has kept on as controller of the household, one Edward Wootton, and says to Edward, oh, by the way, do you know somebody named Henry Wootton? And Wootton says, yeah, he's my little brother. The King says, wherever he is, get him to come home. Now, Harry, by this time he's now in Venice, knowing that he's an outlaw who has to somehow recover his reputation in England. By now, also Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, is actually managing regime change. King James doesn't really like very much the whole boring business of reigning, so he hands an awful lot of his administration over to Robert Cecil. I guess again, Edward Wootton has written to his brother and says, you'd better make your peace with Robert Cecil, because he's actually the kingmaker. So he writes a very artful, beautifully crafted letter. He's been taught to write letters, all kinds of letters at school and boy, this is a classic example of how to write a letter that apologizes for a crime that you cannot say that you have committed, because if you say that you committed it, you would have been a traitor. So he writes this extraordinary letter and says something about what's happening in Venice. And it's this letter then, that works, his reconciliation with Cecil, when he finally gets home from Venice, back to England, more or less, the King turns him right around and sends him back to Venice. Now as ambassador, the first ambassador England has sent to the Republic in 50 years.
- [24:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This is quite an extraordinary moment. Could you tell me both about the general change in kind of diplomatic outlook that comes with this change of monarch from Elizabeth to James, in deciding that he will now, after 50 years, send an English ambassador to Venice and why James chose Harry as his ambassador?
- [25:02]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
What a wonderful question. James has now the reputation of being the most timorous king in Christendom. He does not like war. He cannot bear, apparently, the sight of a soldier. And he is going to reverse the Elizabethan attitude towards Spain by, in 1604, agreeing peace with Spain. Peace with Spain has been an argument that the Elizabethans were having over the last five years of Elizabeth's reign. And now James has done it. That means that James is also in service of this new peace across Europe. He calls himself the Rex Pacificus, the peaceful King. He's going to put back in all of the embassies that Elizabeth has emptied out over the past 10 years, his men, to try to keep this peace across Europe. Now, it also just so happens, accident, that when James arrives in London, there is a Venetian waiting for him. Venice has no diplomatic relations with London, but when they finally get so fed up with English piracy in the Mediterranean that they have to do something, they send an agent to talk with Elizabeth about these depredations in the Mediterranean and what she can do to stop them. He arrives in London in February of 1603. The Queen meets him. He gives the longest and most brilliant account of seeing the Queen, what she's wearing, what she says, what her hair is like, what her jewels are like. And then, of course, in March, the Queen is dead. So poor old Melly is marooned in London. He can't move until he has some kind of permission to leave by the monarch. So he's there for an entire year, watching regime change, until James can arrive in London, can decide that he's going to appoint a new ambassador to Venice to receive the ambassadors who are coming from Venice and then to set up this new exchange.
- [27:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Why then Harry Wootton?
- [27:13]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
I guess because Harry is in front of us, the most recent and the most practiced, the most knowledgeable young courtier he would be by this time, who has knowledge of Italy and specifically has knowledge of Venice, because he has spent time there now on at least three occasions. So he's known in Venice and writes about Venice. So he has knowledge of what's happening in Venice, can tip off the King about things that are going to happen there and who's in charge. And I think it's probably from the king's point of view, just the most logical appointment. But of course, what the Venetians would like would be if the king would appoint one of his kind of known but unknown Catholic supporters, Lord Crichton, for example. The king doesn't do that. He appoints somebody that he knows is a very firm, even militant Protestant who has, under Essex, shown his colors as being a very firm and militant Protestant. So that's the Protestant, then, who gets sent back to Venice to set up an embassy that is going to be an enclave of Protestantism in the republic.
- [28:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It might be helpful, touching on that point of Venice being a republic, to explain a little bit about how Venice was governed. Because of course, it isn't like so many countries at this time, a monarchy, certainly not an absolute monarchy. And to introduce the Doge in 1604.
- [28:44]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
So the Republic is run by an oligarchy, a nobili. It has three tiers of people. So the nobili who are absolutely in charge, the cittadini, whom we would think of as the second rank elite, but who are the civil service and the popolani, the people who have no part at all in government. So a republic is not a democracy, but the Republic is, has 2,000 young and old men who serve on the major consiglio, the Maggior Consilio. But then from that Maggiore consiglio, they derive 300 men who sit in the Senato. And they are the people who actually manage the government that then has all of its various magistrates that are constantly shifting and changing and turning over so that nobody in the republic ever gets to have an absolute power. The families have power and they jockey for power, but there is never any one single person who is ever in a position of absolute power. The doge is an elected responsibility, an elected position. He serves for life. He looks like a monarch, but he has no executive power. And when things come to a vote in the republic, he doesn't even have a vote, but he sits at the top of another magistrate, the colleggio. And the collegio is the group of about 25, 30 men who are the place that receives ambassadors. And here's what ambassadors say. So Wootton, appointed to his embassy, speaks in the Colleggio, he speaks to the doge. And these other 25 savi, wise men, as they're called. He has his audiences that are in Italian. He speaks. His audiences are recorded. Those records then are on another day taken next door to the sonato and read out. And then decisions are made and carried back to the ambassador. So Wootton never, ever speaks to the sonato. He only speaks in the collegio. So it's a very kind of circumscribed, limited way of thinking about how government business is conducted. And so there won't be kind of contamination among magistracies. But also so in the myth of Venice, everything is very secret, secretesima. So it's sepulto. It is buried. Nobody will ever know. And of course, everybody does know, and that's the way Republic runs. So it's the responsibility of the noble families eventually to elect a doge who presides over the this, the power sharing and the decision making.
- [31:45]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [31:53]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [31:57]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [32:06]
Stephen
That's right.
- [32:06]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Hey.
- [32:07]
Stephen
Hey. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [32:11]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [32:18]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan Fellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [32:26]
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- [33:22]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Liberty, liberty, liberty, Liberty.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [33:29]
Hayden
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- [33:32]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
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Hayden
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Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
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- [33:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And so it's into this complex system that Wootton arrives to try and operate on behalf of England. What does much of his quotidian business of diplomacy entail in his first year,
- [34:20]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
say, in office, going back to Gentilly and his treatise on ambassadors, he said that ambassadors were there to take messages between states. And he locates angels as the first ambassadors because their business is from God, to tell human beings what they're on about. But he says the second responsibility is trade, to set up trade negotiations and to facilitate trade. So in the first year Wootton is there in Venice mostly, he spends a lot of time arguing about shipping and piracy and depredations and cargoes that have been pirated and taken to Zante, and who has a responsibility for the shipwreck and so on. And it's mind numbing because it goes on and on without really very many conclusions being reached. So shipping cargoes, who has the right to take responsibility for shipwreck? And then trying to understand how you can work out the big problem for English trade in the Mediterranean, which is recognition at sea. If you're sailing across the Mediterranean and a ship is sailing towards you, how do you know whether it's one of your own, whether it's a pirate, whether it's a man of goodwill? How do you recognize that other ship? And it goes on to a long, labored conversation about how one might reveal oneself not just legitimately, but dependably at sea. So that's one big thing that he's arguing about that has to do with piracy and people who are preying upon not just, just Venetian ships, but English ships as well. And the other big thing that he argues ad infinitum is about the anchorage tax of who's going to pay the tax, how much the tax is, whether the tax is the same in England as It is in Venice, blah, blah, blah. It goes on for page after page
- [36:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
a little bit like what we might call tariffs today, perhaps?
- [36:21]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Absolutely. But one other thing that kind of enlivens his first year is that he is informed that an English merchant has been murdered. And he identifies the culprit for this as a nobleman of the Venetians. And he goes after this man and it goes finally to court. It's again, a long, laborious process where you're actually reading through all this stuff. You're trying to figure out exactly what happened and when it happened and how it happened and did it happen. And all of these things get very much tangled up in Wootton's rhetoric. But eventually he believes that he can declare that Niccolo Balbius murdered Nicholas Put and accuses him in the collegio of having done this and demands satisfaction by their own curious means. It goes to the Senate, to jurisdiction, and it comes back that, in fact, Balaby is innocent. And Wootton has to say, thank you very much. I'm really very glad to be able to report to my king that Nicholas Pert died by natural means, that he wasn't indeed murdered. That's brilliant. So that's the role of the ambassador. He takes it on the chin and says that the one thing that he hadn't counted on was the fact of Niccolo Balbi's birth. Because he was a nobleman in Venice, he was not going to be incriminated for this murder.
- [37:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You're working in this period from his professional letters that survive. But am I right in thinking that only one personal letter survives from this period, and this is from someone whose name we well know?
- [37:58]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
I think there's a distinction to be made between the masses of writing that he is doing as dispatches sent to the King via Robert Cecil as Secretary of State, because all of early modern diplomacy is conducted through communications that look like letters. But clearly a dispatch is a very different animal to a private letter. Letters were going to and fro with his family, but none of these survives. The one letter that does survive is a verse letter that is sent to him by a friend that he made when this friend was only 12 years old and pitched up at Oxford, the poet John Donne. And he remained a lifelong friend of John Donne. John Donne went on the raid to Cadiz, sent him a verse letter, worrying about the campaign in Ireland, and here sends him a verse letter to Venice that basically says, when you finish with all of your other business, all of these other writings, do you think you could spare some time to read a Letter, a verse letter from a friend, and celebrates Wootton's business, that he has turned from one kind of life into this new life of diplomacy, even as he, John Donnelly, has now is suffering through his terrible disgrace of having married secretly, Anne Morton and now being more or less thrown into outer darkness of prestige and patronage. So, yes, that is the only letter that we have.
- [39:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now we get to late 1605, to what you call the monstrous conjoined twin to the gunpowder conspiracy. I'd love it if you could explain what's going on here. The catalyst seems disproportionate to its impact, so take us through it and describe what's at stake here, please.
- [39:56]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
What happens in England in November of 1605 is what we now know as the gunpowder conspiracy, the attempt to blow up the entire royal family by disaffected Catholics who have been promised so much by James before he came to the throne, because he was angling for the throne, but it hadn't actually been identified as his and he needed adherents everywhere to try to support his claim to the English throne. He promised Catholics all kinds of things and then didn't deliver. So by 1605, Catholics are very much disillusioned with the King and would like to place on the throne a Catholic puppet. So that's going on in London. Meanwhile, in Venice, the new Pope, Paulo Quinto, who has come to the papal chair quite extraordinarily because the last Pope only lasted 26 days. So Pope Paul sees it as a kind of divine sign that he is to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, the previous Pope, Clement, to clean up the Catholic Church. And he does this all over the place, but specifically with a target in Venice of challenging the Venetian right to create new laws that prevent the Catholic Church from inheriting land in Venice, land obviously in Venice and the Veneto is very precious. If you've got a city that's built on water, giving your land away is problematic. So they'd extended these laws across not just Venice, but across the Veneto. So that's one thing the Pope is upset about. The second thing is that in Venice, the Republic has arrested two delinquent priests on charges of rape, slander and murder. And the Pope says, you've got to hand these men over to me in Rome to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts. Venice says, no, the crimes that they committed were secular crimes. They will be tried in our secular court. The Pope gets angry about this and decides that if they don't fall into line, he is going to formulate that is to. To thunder an interdict. An interdict means that he tells all of the clergy in Venice that they are to stop any kind of pastoral care. No baptisms, no confessions, no marriages, no extreme unction, no funerals. They're to stop everything. And that, of course means that all of these souls in Venice are going to be damned. Any child that's born is going to be bastard and nobody can get married, et cetera, et cetera. The obvious reason for doing this is to propel the Popolani of Venice into rebelling against the Senate. What Venice does is basically to say to its clergy, no, you just keep on going. We're simply blanking this idea of interdict. We are going to challenge the Pope and his claim to be able to interfere in our secular sovereignty. The only higher order for us is God, not the Pope in terms of our secular sovereignty. So now this comes into massive controversy between the Pope in Rome and the Venetian authority. And our boy Henry Wootton is loving it.
- [43:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Why so?
- [43:18]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Because there in the embassy, in his little Protestant enclave, he has hopes that Venice by this will actually be pushed more towards aligning itself with Protestant Europe and that indeed this will be the beginning of the Protestant revolution in Venice. So all of his representations in the Collegio are aimed at supporting Venice against the Pope, but also coming up with an idea that will mobilize Britain, as King James is now calling it. Mobilize King James and all of its powers to support Venice in its controversy with the Pope. And it becomes a massive pan European problem because Spain lines up against the Pope, France flip flops going between one and the other, and it looks as though there could be a world war across Christendom. Henry Wootton is in the thick of it.
- [44:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And Henry Wootton in the thick of it, is proposing a maverick policy that seems to be really very much of his own invention. Is that fair?
- [44:32]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
We need to remember that ambassadors are only proxies. They're stand ins for their King and they are never to work or exceed instructions. They have to wait for instructions and then they speak the presence of the King through those instructions. But it takes 21 days for a message to get to London and 21 days for that message to get back. So if you're waiting for instructions on something, you've got about a six week wait before communications can happen. What Wootton is doing is he is in the middle of this very volatile, very fluid political situation where things are happening day by day in the Republic, but he's also reading and he reads a bit of Venetian history that goes back 50 years and says, I've read that that in the past, when Venice came to terrible difficulties with the Pope, there were opportunities to create leagues, defensive leagues, and to get on board those who were sympathized with your side. And so he goes into the collegio and he proposes, without any authority from the king or instruction from Robert Cecil, he proposes that they could figure out a new defensive league that would align King James with his brother in law, the King of Denmark, would bring in the Protestant states of Germany, maybe would involve the king of France, because Henry iv, before he capitulated, had been a Protestant. So maybe he could align himself with this Protestant cause and maybe altogether then they could outgun the power of the papacy, backed by Spain. Now that is a maverick decision on his part because it isn't supported with any kind of instruction from London.
- [46:39]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [46:47]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen. Your book, Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [46:51]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [47:00]
Stephen
That's right.
- [47:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hey.
- [47:00]
Stephen
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chap.
- [47:05]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [47:12]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
- [47:19]
Advertisement Voice
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one, one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [47:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So how close does this actually get to the brink of war, do you think?
- [48:04]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Days again, the messages going backwards and forwards. Talk about mobilizations in Milan, which is of course a Spanish protectorate, that troops are being landed on the south coast, that the Pope has made new cardinals that are going to put money into his War dress. Some days it looks like they might reach some kind of accommodation. Other days they say, no, that's all a lie. And the Pope is arming. He's on our doorstep, we've got to do something, and so on. The situation, of course, for Wootton is that when Wootton proposes his league, of course London doesn't know anything about it. So when the Senate asks Wootton, through the Collegio, to dig out of the King a firm commitment to this league, it has to go through the ambassador, the Venetian ambassador who's in London, who goes and has a long conversation with the King. Now, what everybody knows about the King is that he doesn't like war. So although he has lots of words and he's constantly talking, is he actually going to do anything? But Wooden also knows that the one thing that the King hates more than war is an attack on sovereignty. King James has written the manual on the Divine Right of Kings, so he sees what the Pope is doing to Venice as very much like the kinds of challenges to his sovereignty are being made in the Gunpowder Plot. So it's trying to figure out which way the King is going to jump and whether he's actually willing to back his words with a mobilization. The Venetian ambassador gets from the King what he takes as a very solid declaration for Venice, which is then reported back in Venice, but is also then transferred to Robert Cecil. And it's Robert Cecil then, who explodes, because Robert Cecil knows darn good and well that the parlous circumstances of the King's exchequer will simply not afford any kind of adventure, any kind of military mobilization towards Italy. So it is Cecil, then, who absolutely tears the hide off. Henry Wootton, in a letter saying, you have really overstepped your role as ambassador. Retract, get back what it is that you have promised. And it becomes another great ambassadorial diplomatic problem for Wootten to row back and then to row forward and to try to make his peace with the Doge again. And it all comes out well for Wootton, but it's a little bit dodgy for a few days while all of this is going on. Behind it all is whether or not the King will mobilize. But I think the bigger point, and where I can argue that Wootton is actually responsible for peace in Europe, is that it's only because Wootton has articulated this league and it's now public across Europe, that the Spanish say, ooh, wait a second, maybe we should rethink this. And the French go on this side and then go on that side, and people start now beginning to rethink whether they are really committed to this world war. And I think it's because of this maverick diplomacy. As I'm saying, the mistake that he makes, that turns into a diplomatic uproar that allows us to imagine that Wootton really is responsible for saving the peace of Europe in 1607.
- [51:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Does he make it seem that he has been pivotal or was he really so?
- [51:59]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Absolutely not. When the peace comes, he ascribes all of the responsibility for that piece to the King. He says, I was just an ant. And he says, it was the king who, while everybody else was twiddling their thumbs, it was our king, my king, who came on board and said he would defend Christendom. And the doge, Leonardo Dona, who really likes Wootton, really finds him a charmer and charismatic. He says, you are the most loving ambassador we have and it was your responsibility of getting the King on board that allowed us to be able to do this. So. Yes, but he gives all the credit to the King, none to himself.
- [52:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The perfect ambassador. So the subtitle of your book is Henry Wushner and the Invention of Diplomacy. Let us conclude, then, by thinking about the way in which Wootton does invent diplomacy. What's his legacy, do you think?
- [52:55]
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
There are several places where he is clearly making up policy on the trot, where he has no instruction and sometimes he pulls it off and sometimes he doesn't. We haven't mentioned yet the huge debacle at the end of his career where he presents the King's book to the collegio and it is completely mistimed. It is a miscalculation, massive miscalculation on the part of the King in writing this book that is basically a slander of Catholicism and sending it around to all of the kings of Europe, saying, you need to be careful about giving away your sovereignty. But in Italy, the Catholics interpret this also as an attack on Catholicism. Wootten goes and presents this book innocently, thinking that the Venetians are going to love it. The Venetians already know what's in the book because they've had a pre read from their ambassador back in London. So they know what's going to happen and they've already decided that they will accept the book, say thank you very much, and then as soon as Wootton is outside the cabinet, they will put it into the library of restricted reading. When Wootton hears about this later, that it has been so handled, he throws a monstrous tantrum. His great adherent, the Doge, is not in the collegio When Wootton storms back, demands that they reverse this decision and continuing on, says, if I can't represent my king appropriately, I'll resign, and basically takes off his robes, resigns as ambassador, you're just not allowed to do that. This creates another massive diplomatic kerfuffle, the end of which is that Wootton, who knows he's overstepped his possibilities, his authority, this invention of diplomacy now has gone absolutely pear shaped, has to try to retrieve his reputation, but says about it that he now knows the definition of a republic that you can lose in a day all of the reputation that you have achieved over five years. And it's at that point that he starts to want to go home. He's been serving now for nearly six years and he's homesick. He wants to go home. So what is his legacy? His legacy is, I think that when he leaves Venice after the six years, he leaves something that he has invented, which is a fully functioning English embassy as a Protestant enclave on Canadegio that is serviced by informants who are working across Italy, who has a secretary, who is there working assiduously, who has friendships in Venice. He also leaves behind a legacy of that bearding the Pope, of not backing down to the Pope. So where across the rest of Italy, papal authority is grabbing one state after the other. Venice remains a republic. It is the defeat of the Popolani, that is the papal adherence inside the Senate, that would clamp down probably on trade with heretic nations. He achieves, in his defiance of the Pope, the freedom of the press, which is really important in Venice. So all of that he leaves behind, and he leaves for the person who is coming after him, a house that Wootton built to see what it is that Dudley Carleton is going to make as his own embassy in this place. So it's a massive legacy and also, I think, for all of us, a legacy that leaves us with that idea that the ambassador is the honest man sent to lie abroad for the sake of his country, which sets up the idea of plausible deniability of the way the ambassador has to look you in the eye and know behind it that there is something of a dissimulation going on. The King called Henry Wootton his honest dissembler, an oxymoron that I think really gets to the heart at the person who is responsible for being the ambassador and lying abroad for his country, an honest assembler.
- [57:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
There's a couple of words that we could use about a politician or two of our own age. Professor Tillington Rutter. Thank you so much for coming on to bring this character of Henry Wootton to us, who ties up so many other threads that we might well know from this period and gives us this vision of what it was like to operate in a foreign country, defending and sometimes inventing the policy that would determine the nature of kingdoms and the outcome of their fate. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. And to my producer, Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and Not Just the tutors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [58:22]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [58:30]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [58:34]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy episode epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [58:43]
Stephen
That's right.
- [58:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hey.
- [58:43]
Stephen
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [58:48]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [58:55]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [59:02]
Advertisement Voice
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.