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​SIR HENRY WOTTON
A BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH
22217
By ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD
LITT.D. HON. LL.D. PRINCIPAL OF THE OWENS
COLLEGE MANCHESTER HON. FELLOW
OF PETERHOUSE CAMBRIDGE
WESTMINSTER
· ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
1898
BUTLER & TANNER,
THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS,
FROME, AND LONDON.
TO RICHARD COPLEY CHRISTIE,
M.A., LL.D.
NI
0
DEAR CHRISTIE -
Will you allow me to dedicate to you the
following trifle? This sketch was originally
written to serve as a Monday Popular Lecture
at the College which honours you as one of
its most generous benefactors, and in which
the Christie Library and the Whitworth Hall
will soon stand side by side as enduring
monuments of your goodwill towards our
highest and our widest interests. The sub-
stance of my brief narrative was put together
during a summer holiday at Braemar, and
had it not been for your never-failing aid, I
should have had to leave Scioppius to take
care of himself. It may seem presumptuous
on my part to wish to connect an attempt
which here and there touches the confines of
the Later Renascence period, with the name
of one who is master of every part of that
interesting and complicated chapter of European
literature and life. But scholars like yourself
DEDICATION
and your late Rector and friend are wont
to show a very magnanimous indulgence to
efforts of which the imperfections are no secret
to them. So that, if in this instance I presume
on anything, it is on your kindness, of which
I have experience enough to fall back upon.
. Believe me to be, .
Yours very truly,
A. W. WARD.
Y
THE OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER,
November, 1897.
ALTHOUGH the name of Sir Henry
Wotton is a fairly familiar one to the
ears of Englishmen, there are not, I think,
many to whom he is very much more than
a name. Those who know something of
him beyond the fact that “once he wrote
a pretty poem,” derive this knowledge
mainly from Izaak Walton's life of his
friend. Yet while this biographical nar-
rative, steeped as it is in warm personal
sentiment, possesses an interest and a
1 One of the five Lives, now usually printed to-
gether. Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton was
originally prefixed to Reliquiæ Wottoniana, of which
the first edition appeared in 1651. The edition of the
Lives which I have used is that of Dr. Thomas Zouch,
Izaak Walton's biographer, 2nd edition, 1807. A
MS. sketch of Wotton's life by the antiquary William
Fulman (who also collected materials for the life of
John Hales, of Eton), is preserved in the library of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, together with some
letters of Wotton's. Other letters of his in MS. are
SIR HENRY WOTTON
X
charm of its own, it exhibits Sir Henry
Wotton, to all intents and purposes, under
a single aspect only, and that hardly of
a kind which usually commands either a
wide-spread or a long-lived popularity. Yet
it very naturally suggested itself to the
associate of the diplomatist and scholar's
declining years; and I daresay many or
most of us, should we live to his age, would
prefer to be like him remembered as we
were in the calm and peaceful eventide of
our lives, and to leave behind us, could
we do so with truthfulness, the record of
victory over the passions of life, and of
freedom from care-
“Of public fame or private breath.”
11
at All Souls', and notes from his letters by Brydall
(see below) at Queen's College. I owe this informa-
tion, together with some other notes as to the MS.
remains of Wotton in the Oxford Libraries, to the
courtesy of the Provost of Queen's, the present Vice-
Chancellor of the University. Fulman's life was pro-
bably used by Bliss in his edition of Wood's Athena
(cf. the notice of Fulman in vol. xx. of The Dictionary
of National Biography, 1889).
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
But we know full well that to few men it
is given to compass the conditions of such
contentment, and that there are still fewer
in whose lives these conditions are more
than at first a dream as of a distant haven,
and then, when at last they draw within
reach, intermixtures of a little satisfaction
with many disappointments and disillusion-
ings. And perhaps the resistance against
the gentle temptation to suppose that the
curfew-bell implies a vote of thanks is, by
a happy counter-dispensation, strongest in
natures which, like Sir Henry Wotton's
(if I rightly estimate it), are intellectually,
by constitution or by force of circum-
stances, dual. Wotton's experiences were,
for the most part, those of a traveller and
a diplomatist, who knew the ins and the
outs of many cities and of many men, and
who, for better or worse, was obliged to
put his trust in princes. But his man-
hood had begun, and his green old age
ended, as the life of a student whose pen
was ever in his hand, and in ninety-nine
SIR HENRY WOTTON
out of a hundred instances, therein proving
him a true man of letters, was employed
in the noting of conceptions rather than in
the correction of final proofs. These two
methods, and the two views involved in
them, of the conduct of life, are not so
easily reconciled, as is sometimes supposed,
in the management of an individual career;
-in the mutual relations of men the game
would be democratically dull, but that the
more distinguished figures on the board
move respectively in different ways. To
be sure, the amiable Izaak Walton, after .
dwelling on the relative advantages of the
active and the contemplative mode, insin-
uates that they both meet together, “and
do most properly belong to the most
honest, ingenious, harmless art of ang-
ling.” Which, however, of the two paths
that led to the same bank was the truly
congenial one to Sir Henry Wotton ?
Was he well warranted in applying to
himself the words which he inscribed over
his study door : Invidiæ remedium-a cure
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
against longings and troubles ? Did he
judge with accuracy when he described
himself as “of his nature academical”?
How much of self-delusion, if any, lurked
beneath the following rather involved con-
trast between the supposed bent of his
nature, and the employments to which he
gave up the last years of his manhood :-
"A poor scholar, for that is the highest of my own
titles, and in truth, the furthest end of my ambition.
This other honour (wherewith it hath pleased his
Majesty to cloath my unworthiness) belonging un-
properly unto me; who, I hope, am both born, and
formed in my education, fitter to be an Instrument
of Truth than of Art” (as we should say, craft]. “In
the meanwhile, till his Majesty shall resolve me again
into my own plain and simple elements, I have
abroad” [as ambassador] “done my poor endea-
vour, according to those occasions which God hath
opened.” 1
Such is the nature of the problem,
not perhaps signally intricate or profound,
but neither, I think, devoid of general
as well as special interest, which I pro-
pose to illustrate rather than solve in
1 To Sir Arthur Throckmorton, Reliquiæ Wot-
toniana, p. 275.
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Y
the following sketch. In this attempt
I shall principally rely on Wotton's own
literary remains, which include what was
recoverable of his writings in prose and
verse, and of personal letters from his
hand. And whatever conclusions it may
suggest as to the dualism of his intellectual
nature, and as to his shortcomings in com-
parison with his own or any other ideals,
it will, unless I mistake, show him to have
been a man of noble purposes and high
thoughts, such as, when united to a candid
spirit, a courteous bearing and a pious
spirit compose the amalgam of a true
English gentleman. Nor shall we miss in
him that ingredient of humour without a
grain or two of which the commixture
1
V
1 The collection called Reliquiæ Wottonianæ was
first published by Izaak Walton in 1651, with the
aid of Sir Henry's niece by marriage, the relict of the
second and last Lord Wotton. Subsequent editions
were dedicated to his grand-nephew, Philip, the second
Earl of Chesterfield. (See Zouch's Life of Izaak
Walton.) The edition cited in this Essay is that of
1685, described in the title-page as the fourth, which
was the first to include the letters to Lord Zouch.
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
would somehow seem to be not quite
complete.
Of the fine qualities which distinguished
Sir Henry Wotton we shall probably be
disposed to allow the credit of not a few
to his ancestry. For more than two cen-
turies before his birth, which occurred in
the year 1568, his forefathers had dwelt
at Bocton Hall, in the parish of Bocton-
Malherbe, in the fair county of Kent-a
willing nurse of enterprise, as we know,
in many a period of our national history.
Above all, the men of Kent were wont to
claim for themselves by right of birth that
freedom of speech which is appropriate to
shires flattering themselves that they think
to-day what all England will think to-
morrow. Combined with the reasonable
self-confidence which has always marked
the sons of English country gentlemen,
such a feeling is apt to serve as a useful
mainstay in life. In the Philosophical
17
1 Sir Henry Wotton, although he never owned an
acre of land, had in him something of that country
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Survey of Education, which remains one
of Wotton's most interesting literary frag-
ments, he undertakes to speak “without
publick offence, though still with the
freedom of a plain Kentish-man."1 Yet
among the public services for which, under
the Tudors at all events, the Wotton
family had been chiefly distinguished, the
most conspicuous had been diplomatic ;
the eminent Dr. Nicholas Wotton himself,
who under Elizabeth noluit archiepisco-
pari, and who had been Secretary of State
gentleman's pride which is a quite different thing from
personal vanity or self-consciousness. In his Life
and Death of the Duke of Buckingham (Reliquia,
p. 208) he refers with scorn to one of the censors of
the Duke, who would scant allow him to be a
gentleman"--whereas his ancestors had "chiefly con-
tinued” about four hundred years in the same seat
in Leicestershire, etc. He was of opinion, that even
in literary composition good breeding should make
itself perceptible, though it ought not there to assert
itself with too much emphasis. One of the Aphorisms
appended to the fragmentary Survey cited in the text
(16., p. 91) would have approved itself to the author
of Pendennis : "Somewhat of the Gentleman gives a
tincture to a Scholar; too much stains him."
· 1 Ib., p. 71.
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
11
under Edward VI., is stated by Walton to
have been nine times “ Ambassador unto
foreign princes.” According to the same
authority, however, Thomas Wotton, the
father of Sir Henry, preferred to dwell in
his ancestral home, exercising hospitality
and cherishing learning ; and from him
his youngest son may have derived what
he himself believed to be the most deep-
seated of his tastes and tendencies. Of his
mother, his father's second wife, we hear
nothing, except that though his friends
had advised Thomas Wotton, in making
his second choice, to take care to avoid
" those that had children, those that had
law-suits, and those that were of his kin-
dred,” all these impediments coexisted
in her, but that love prevailed over all.
Henry's three elder brothers, the sons of
their father's first consort, were all of them
active servants of the Queen ; the eldest,
Edward, who was in his turn employed on
several embassies, was afterwards raised
to the peerage by King James I., over
SIR HENRY WOTTON
whom he had gained a strong personal in-
fluence already as English ambassador at..
the Scottish Court. Like his more cele-
brated brother, he seems to have taken a
warm interest in literature.
Henry Wotton, who never lost his love
for Bocton Hall, and who in the decline of
his age, when he was becoming just a little
of a valetudinarian, declared, in conformity
with a pleasing superstition, that its air
best agreed with him, in due · course
entire in other of these post);
1 To him was addressed one of the Sonnets ap-
pended by Chapman to his Translation of Books
I.-XII. of the Iliad (1609 or post); but it was with-
drawn with two other of these Sonnets in the edition
of the entire Iliad, published in 1611. See Dictionary
of National Biography, vol. X. (1887), p. 49 (art.
George Chapman). As to the descent from this
Lord Wotton of the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield
(in some respects a kindred spirit), who alienated the
manor of St. Mary Lyng Ockmere, which the Wottons
had acquired by intermarriage with the ancient family
of Bellknap in the reign of Henry VIII., see Hasted's
History of the County of Kent (2nd edition, 1787),
vol. ii. pp. 116-7. The second Earl of Chesterfield,
to whom Izaak Walton dedicated the 1672 edition of
the Reliquiæ, was his grandfather.
% To Nich. Pey, 1626 (Reliquiæ, p. 321).
.
IO
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
passed on to Winchester and New Col-
lege, Oxford. His old school we find him
revisiting the year before his death, in-
dulging in a fancy of deeper significance
than the other, that in the familiar place
he might meet again with the thoughts
and hopes, long since dulled or dis-
appointed, of his boyhood. At Oxford he
must have carried on his studies in the
spirit of freedom which is the essence of
the true intellectual life of a University,
whose real purpose, as he tells us himself,
is not to prepare for “the performance of
some solemn exercise, "mor, let us say,
some stiff examination-but to enable men
to "live some space among the assiduous
advantages and helps of knowledge."
That he was not estranged by labours
taking a different bent from the love of
11
1
1 In another of his Aphorisms of Education (Re-
liquiæ, p. 87), where he favourably contrasts the usage
in this respect of the English Universities with those
of the foreign of his own day. He could not foresee
the days of the University of London as at present,
and apparently in perpetuum, constituted.
II
SIR HENRY WOTTON
polite letters is proved by his having at
Queen's, whither he had migrated from
New, and where his name occurs in one of
the earliest lists of members of the college,
composed a play called Tancredo, a subject
characteristically derived from the master-
piece of contemporary Italian literature
which the Gerusalemme Liberata so sig-
nally typifies both in its charms and in its
symptoms of beginning decay. He never
wholly lost the instinct of dramatic com-
position; and apart from his fondness for
drawing characters, of which instances will
be found in his letters as well as in his set
compositions, and which were quite in har-
mony with the literary fashion of his age, he
actually dramatised-doubtless in his later
1 Tasso's poem was first published in 1581.
Wotton's play, which is not extant, must have been
written about 1586. It is not at all likely that
Wotton's play was a version of the story of Tancred
and Gismunda, dramatised for the English stage in
1563 (and again in 1591), and in a seventeenth cen-
tury version which Mr. I. Gollanez is now editing,
Thomson's Tancred and Sigismunda (1745) appears
to be taken, not from Boccaccio, but from Gil Blas.
12
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
YTYI
days-the theme of a religious meditation.'
In literary occupations, such as the com-
position of Tancredo, Wotton may be con-
jectured to have enjoyed the sympathy, if
not the co-operation, of a friend who first
became dear to him at Oxford, and of
whose life, so singularly rich in its inner
experiences of both joy and sorrow, he
undertook, too late for carrying out his
purpose, to write an account. This was
the famous John Donne, many years after-
wards Dean of St. Paul's, and probably, of
all contemporary English writers, the one
who exercised the most commanding in-
fluence in those spheres of life and thought
in which Wotton moved. In later times
his verse has been by turns extolled and
censured with almost the same vehemence,
while his prose has come to be all but
forgotten. Notwithstanding, however,
1 A Meditation upon the 22nd Chapter of Genesis
(Reliquiæ, pp. 265-9) is a dramatic speech supposed
to be delivered by “the Father of the Believers ” on
receiving the Divine injunction to sacrifice his son.
2 According to Wood, Athene, vol. iii. p. 502 (Bliss's
13
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Wotton's literary tastes and intimacies
during his Oxford residence, his most ab-
sorbing interests there seem rather to have
been what we should call scientific. As
part of the exercises for his Master's de-
gree, which he seems to have taken about
1589 or 1590, he read in Latin three lec-
tures De Oculo, and the excellence of these
procured for him the friendship of Alberi-
cus Gentilis, then Professor of Civil Law
in the University. Gentilis, while en-
couraging Wotton's predilection for mathe-
matical studies, cannot have failed to instil
into him some interest in the subjects of
his own teaching, and in that of his treatise
De Legationibus, published in 1583, in
particular. But at the same time he
edition), Donne was a commoner of Hart Hall (after-
wards, and now again, Hertford College) at a time
when Sir Henry Wotton “had a chamber there."
1 It was followed in 1589 by the De Jure Belli, to
which Grotius afterwards acknowledged his obliga-
tions. Albericus Gentilis was probably the first
Italian Protestant, but very far from being the last,
with whom Wotton contracted friendship. See as to
him Hallam's Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. iv.
14
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
familiarised him with the Italian language,
which Wotton afterwards grew to use like
a second native tongue. His love of
scientific pursuits proved. enduring, and
can hardly but have been strengthened by
his kinsmanship with Bacon, to whom as
late as 1620 he is found sending, together
with compliments on the completion (or
supposed completion) of the Novum Or-
ganon, on account of certain early experi-
ments witnessed by him in Kepler's house
at Linz, Wotton was of the Baconian
school as a student, or if the term be
thought more fitting, as an amateur of
science; in 1622 he writes from Venice to
Charles, Prince of Wales, promising to
communicate to him such philosophical
experiments as might come in his way;
"for mere speculations have ever seemed
to my conceit, as if reason were given us
like an half moon in a Coat of Arms, only
for a logical Difference from inferior Crea-
tures, and not for any active power in
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 298 seqq.
15 :
SIR HENRY WOTTON
itself.” I “As a chimical man ” even in
his old age, he was consulted by his friend
Izaak Walton on the ingredients of certain
strong-smelling oils celebrated as seductive
to fish ;2 but into this investigation, or into
that of certain distillings from vegetables
for medical purposes which he discussed
with his nephew, Sir Edmund Bacon,
about the same period of his life, we may
be excused from following him. In his
retirement at Eton College he also in-
terested himself in experiments of measur-
ing small divisions of time by the descent
of drops through a filter. Hæc quidem
hactenus.
But neither optics nor the drama are, or,
at least, were in the latter part of the six-
teenth century, usually regarded as aids to
fortune; and probably Francis Bacon him-
self, although at the time when his "very
1 Reliquiæ, p. 319.
2 The Compleat Angler (reprint of the 1653
edition), p. 98.
3 Reliquiæ, pp. 454-5 (1633).
4 Ib., p. 475 (1628 or post).
16
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
good cosin ” was carrying on his studies
at Oxford, he was still chiefly intent upon
"drawing in ” patrons for the pursuit of
science, would a little later have refrained
from advising him to "draw them in "
with a view to what is coarsely called the
main chance. What has been already
noted as to the traditional ways of life of
the Wottons, suggests the most obvious
explanation of the choice actually made by
Henry among the paths likely to lead to
success in life. That on which he actually
entered was neither a very direct nor a very
easy one; but it nowhere appears that a
short-cut to the goal was open to him. He
was, of course, without the personal posi-
tion or influence at Court such as might
have enabled him to “beg” an heiress,
and it was not his luck to be married by
one outright. I cannot say whether we
ought to interpret the Poem written by Sir
Henry Wotton in his Youth, otherwise
1 Cf. Abbott, Introduction to Bacon's Essays (1876),
vol. i. p. xxvïii.
17
SIR HENRY WOTTON
entitled Of a Woman's Heart, as com-
memorating a personal experience ; it is
full of the bitter despondency of ado-
lescence, and it is at the same time virtually
the solitary love-poem of his composition.
For the commonplace dialogue, “by the
way," with the subsequent Serjeant Hos-
kyns (of whom a word more anon), is not
to be taken into account, and Sir Henry
Wotton's devotion to Queen Elizabeth of
Bohemia was, as we shall see, rooted in
quite a different kind of sentiment. If in
his youth he really cherished a passion and
then renounced it-
“Untrue she was; yet I believed her eyes,
Instructed spies,
Till I was taught, that love was but a school
To breed a fool,"—
this born depositary of other people's
secrets kept his own through life ; for we
shall look in vain through the whole of his
literary writings and correspondence for
either any second trace of his own amour,
or for so much as another reference to the
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
generally interesting subject of love and
marriage.
As it would seem, in the earlier part of
the year 1590, Henry Wotton, who had
finished his course of studies at Oxford,
and whom the death of his father about
this time had probably further impelled to
bethink himself of the prospects for his
future, began a course of foreign travel
which, in the first instance, occupied about
seven years. We shall see that he left
England again about the close of the cen-
tury, and that it was not till after his
return at the commencement of the reign
of James I. that he regularly entered into
the foreign service of the Crown. But
there can be no doubt that this had from
the first been the object of his ambition.
It was with the same definite end in view
that he not only resided successively in
a considerable number of places in Ger-
many, Italy, Switzerland and France, but
diligently and systematically collected in-
formation on the laws, politics, and social
19
SIR HENRY WOTTON
S
life of these several countries, and kept up
an active correspondence of what I may
call an intelligentịary kind on the subject
of his experiences with friends and patrons
at home. Nowadays, as I venture to sur-
mise, the English diplomatic service would
be apt to resent the admission of a jour-
nalist to its ranks ; at least, so I judge
from the dislike which I have heard ex-
pressed to such appointments even in a less
elevated official sphere. And yet it is pre-
cisely as a journalist of the þest kind—in
other words as an educated observer who
has cultivated both the habit of enquiry
and the art of expression, þut neither of
them to the exclusion of the other--thař
Wotton and others after him have qualified
themselves for these important branches
of public work. In any case, Wotton, who
in his later years modestly averred of
himself that " in the College of Travellers,
wherein if the fruit of the time he had
spent were answerable to the length, he
IT
20
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
might run for a Deacon at last,"1 travelled
neither for honest gain, like his contem-
porary, James Howell, nor for travel's sake,
like his other contemporary, Tom Coryate.?
He was not one of those who, in his own
phrase, which holds true of a condition of
things still within the memory of man,
"are as desirous men should observe they
have travelled far as careful in their travels
to observe nothing." 3 At the same time
he makes no secret of the circumstance
on which another species of modern
travellers is wont to dwell with misplaced
emphasis, since there is nothing to prevent
them from staying at home—that it be-
hoved him in his journeyings to practise
economy. Of one of his sojourns he
writes that, "with the best frugality he
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 356–7.
% Tom Coryate was, as Wood relates, vol. ii. p. 299,
introduced to Wotton at Venice bý a letter beginning
“Good wine needs no bush, neither a worthy man
letters commendatory," which much pleased the bearer,
who had on a similar occasion been, to his natural
annoyance, introduced as a 'very honest poor wretch.'
3 İb., p. 91 (Aphorisins of Education).
SO
21
SIR HENRY L
WOTTON
could use, yet did it pinch the shoulder of
a younger Brother.”And some of his
earlier letters contain rather curious details
on the cost of living in different towns, a
subject which at the time could not but be
interesting to him.?
His first residence abroad-in 1590—
he seems to have begun, as was fitting,
by a stay in a foreign University, at
Altdorf, the academical appendage (even
if not as luminous through the ages as
Padua was to Venice) of the Free Im-
perial City of Nürnberg, where English
Protestants like himself and Lord Zouch
were sure of a friendly welcome. To
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 684-5 (concerning his stay at Rome
in 1592).
2 Thus he writes from Vienna in 1590 (ib., p. 587):
“Students are forc'd here to live with better fare than
they would. The Reason is manifest, because, as the
Times are, a man may with more gain keep an Ordinary
of seven Messes at a Duckat a Person weekly, than
of four at a Floryn : for the Dutch will drink the like
at both, and Meat is cheap with us, but the Wine
dear."
3 Nine years later an illustrious and obstreperous
student was immatriculated at Altdorf in the person
22
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
this associate and patron was addressed
the first series of Henry Wotton's epistles
from foreign parts, which, like so many
correspondences of the times, combined
the character of private communications
of Albrecht von Waldstein, the son of Protestant
(Bohemian) parents. Cf. Förster, Wallenstein's
Briefe (1828), vol. i. pp. 4, seqq.; and see Schiller's
Wallenstein's Lager.
1 Edward Lord Zouch was afterwards a confi-
dential servant of King James I. It was to him that
Lord Pembroke addressed the solemn letter about
the speckled sow, printed in Dalrymple's Memorials
of James I. (1766), p. 71. He rose to be a politician
of some mark. When, on the death of Salisbury in
1612, the Treasury was put into commission, Lord
Zouch and Sir Henry Wotton's eldest brother, Lord
Wotton, were included in it. (Gardiner, History of
England, etc., new edition, vol. ii. p. 154.) In 1615
Lord Zouch was, without any solicitation on his part,
appointed to the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports,
which, however, in 1624, he gave up to Buckingham
in return for £1,000 and a pension of half that
amount. (Ib., p. 327, and vol. v. p. 310.) That his
political sentiments harmonized with Wotton's, may
be gathered from the circumstance that in 1623
Zouch was one of the absentees from the Privy
Council on the occasion of the oath being taken to
the Spanish marriage treaty; nor can it be shown
that he ever took the oath. (Ib., p. 69.)
23
SIR HENRY WOTTON
with that of newsletters. The earliest of
them is, curiously enough, dated from
Ingolstadt. For this University, which,
as he informs us, was in orthodox quarters
regarded as "the only fit place of Ger-
many for” the higher education of “a
Catholic gentleman," l was in point of
fact the flower of Jesuit educational in-
stitutions, and equipped its pupils for the
conflicts of the world as well as of the
schools. Now, it was with the Jesuits
and their ascendancy in the religious life
of the world-an ascendancy very in-
adequately, and yet on the whole not
inappropriately, described as ultramontane
in its purposes—that Sir Henry Wotton
may be said to have waged a lifelong
conflict. In the last decade of the six-
teenth century the heyday of Jesuit
1 See Reliquice, pp. 615–16. The reference, in a
letter from Vienna dated February 1oth, 1591, is to
the contested will of the Archduke Charles of Styria,
which directed that his son and heir, Ferdinand,
should be educated at Ingolstadt, where he actually
was educated and to some purpose.
24
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
VOU
DL
influence over the policy of the House
of Austria had not yet arrived. Indeed,
the long succession of Wotton's ensuing
letters to Lord Zouch shows public
opinion at Vienna to have still remained
in doubt whether the vacillating rule of
the Emperor Rudolf II. would ultimately
succumb to the Protestant sympathies of
a large proportion of his territorial sub-
jects and the effects of the tolerant system
favoured by his predecessor, Maximilian
II., or whether he would after all con-
clude it to be his interest, his duty, or
his destiny-for what trust there was in
his nature he put in the stars—to fall
back upon the ancient ways of his House.
But after Wotton had spent a few months
in Vienna, this shrewd young observer
began to have some notion of the hidden
side of the cards; he informed Lord
Zouch that for all the Emperor's pretence
of poverty, he was secretly aiding the
League, the militant organisation of
Catholicism, and that in his opinion-
- 25
SIR HENRY WOTTON
which not long afterwards certainly
seemed to be on the eve of justification-
Rudolf was, by his refusal of liberty of
conscience, precipitating the downfall of
his dynasty. Nurtured as Wotton was
in principles directly antagonistic to that
great Reaction whose operations were
more or less perceptibly overspreading
the greater part of Europe, it argued
some boldness, even on the part of a
personage politically so insignificant as he
still was, that he should have pursued
his travels, as he did late in 1591 or early
in 1592, into Italy, and still more that
he should have pushed on to Rome. He
may have run no such formal risk at
home as English travellers did a quarter
of a century later, when as ambassador
at Venice he was himself instructed by
King James to stop any of his subjects
on their way towards Rome and the
perils of perversion, or if they insisted
1 In the notable letter dated Vienna, April 17th,
1591 (Reliquiæ, pp. 639, seqq.).
26
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
on the journey, to transmit their names
to be made a note of for the royal in-
spection. And at Rome itself, in this year
1592, Clement VIII. had just come forth
Pope from the Conclave, a politic Pontiff
under the control of no Power in par-
ticular, and rigorous only towards his own
nobili and banditti, between whom there
was in many instances uncommonly little
to choose. Still there were elements of
unsafety at Rome for Protestant travellers
even then ; and Wotton may have judged
well in arriving there in good Catholic
company, and perhaps even in adopting
an Alcibiades-like device for his entry.
He donned for this occasion a black hat
with “a mighty blue feather," so as to
be sure in the first instance of being
thought an Englishman ; in the second,
of being reputed as light in mind as in
apparel ; and thirdly, that no man would
think him desirous of remaining "unknown
m
1 See the curious instruction (1616), reprinted in
Reliquiæ, pp. 483-4.
27
SİR HENRY WOTTON
7
TI
who, by wearing of that feather, took a
course to make himself known through
Rome in a few days."í Notwithstanding
this odd first appearance, he found means
and opportunities both on this and on a
second visit to Rome made shortly after:
wards for acquiring a very considerable
familiarity with the city of the Popes
and with the court and government of
the reigning Pontiff. Hë repudiates as
unfounded a rumour that he had some
trouble with the Inquisition, and he
carried himself so skilfully as to be
admitted in his character of a scholar to
a friendly interview with not less im-
portant a personage than Bellarmin (not
yet a Cardinal), and to make the acquaint-
ance, as an Englishman, of Cardinal Allen,
then near the close of his life of unrest: 3
1 Reliquie, p. 652.
2 Ib., p. 702.
3 He mentions his visit to Bellarmin himself (see
Reliquiæ, p. 705); his acquaintance with Cardinal
Allen he implies at the opening of his State of
Christendom (see below). Bellarmiñ was made a
Cardinal in 1599 ; Cardinal Allen died in 1596.
.
28
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Wotton's stern judgment of the social
condition of Rome need not be attributed
to confessional antipathy ; for the society
which enacted the tragedy of the Cenci
in real life, and which Clement VIII.
with a high moral courage strove to
purge, was in truth an abomination in
the sight of Heaven and of man. Yet
bad as Rome was, Wotton seems to have
thought no better of Florence—where,
after visiting Genoa, Naples, and, it would
seem, Venice, he made a stay of several
months ; he calls the beautiful city “a
paradise inhabited with devils." 1 The
language he considered the only good
thing to be learnt in the fairest of all
Italian towns; and this he mastered so
thoroughly as to be made anxious to be-
come equally perfect in French.
With this end in view, he in 1593 spent
some time in Geneva, where he was for-
tunate enough to be lodged in the house
of the illustrious scholar Isaac Casaubon,
1 Reliquiæ, p. 673.
29
SIR HENRY WOTTON
established since 1582 as Professor of
Greek in the “Academy” of the Republic.
Wotton's personal intercourse with this
famous scholar might have formed a bright
spot in the midst of the troubles whereby
Casaubon was perennially beset, had it not
been for a temporary difficulty which
while it lasted only added to these anxieties.
Wotton's income was limited to the
annuity of a hundred marks bequeathed
to him by his father; and when he left
Casaubon's house, there remained owing
to the latter the bill which the young
Englishman had run up, and the price of
the horse on which he rode away. More-
over, the host had become surety for a
loan which the guest had contracted.
Within a few months everything was paid;
but when we think of Casaubon as a man
of irritable temper, we may further re-
member that this temper had its trials.?
The three or four years which follow are
1 See M. Pattison's Isaac Casaubon (1875), pp.
44-6.
30
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
the obscurest—if not the only obscure-
portion of the life of Wotton as recorded
for us; possibly, more light might be thrown
upon them by a closer investigation than
can be attempted here. By 1597 he must
have returned to England from his travels ;
for a letter by him is preserved, dated
Plymouth, October 30th in that year, and
addressed to the Earl of Essex, then fresh
home from his expedition to the Azores,
informing him of the Spanish intrigues
in Switzerland, and asking his patronage
and his recommendation for employment
in the event of “any Actions between
Her Majesty and the Emperour."! That
Wotton stood at this time towards Essex
in the relation of a personal “servant," as
he is called in the superscription of the
letter in the Reliquiæ, seems indisputable;
and how well he learnt to know his patron
is shown by the interesting "parallel,”
preserved among his literary remains,
which he afterwards composed between the
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 712-13.
VI
31
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Earl and his later patron Buckingham.
Very possibly he may have been, in the
first instance, introduced to Essex through
the brothers Francis and Anthony Bacon,
and have supplied the Earl with some of the
“intelligence" from abroad in the quality
and quantity of whịch, as Mr. Sidney Lee
says, Essex House rivalled the Foreign
Office; and he seems, afterwards to have
acted as one of his patron's secretaries.
He was certainly in the confidence of
Essex by October, 1595. But when Wal-
ton goes on to say that Wotton attended
Essex in two voyages at sea against the
Spaniards, as well as in his last unhappy
expedition in Ireland, I prefer, before
1 Art. Essex, in Dictionary of National Biography,
vol. xiv. (1888).
? See the letter from Ambrose Rogers to William
Waad, Clerk of the Council, dated October 3rd, 1595,
calendared in Part V. of Hatfield MSS. (Historical
MSS. Commission), C. 7574, p. 400. The Margrave
of Baden is conjectured to be making ‘ḥis address
to Her Majesty by the Earl of Essex, for he useth
Mr. Wotton very friendly,' and has twice admitted
him to an audience.
32
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
accepting the statement, to await the
result of the researches into the subject
instituted by Mr. Lee or by one of his
contributors. There is no reference in
the letter of October, 1597, either to the
Azores expedition just terminated, or to
the capture of Cadiz in the previous year,
in which Wotton's fellow-secretary, Henry
Cuffe, and his college friend Donne are
known to have taken part. Can it be
that there is here some confusion with
Henry Wotton's brother. James, who was
also at Cadiz, and was one of the three-
score adventurous gentlemen knighted
there by the prodigal commander ?But
the strange thing is that the entire extant
correspondence and the whole of the
literary remains of Sir Henry Wotton
should not contain-so far, at least, as the
1 Walton cites the well-known rhyme, which may
have come closely home to Sir James Wotton.
“A knight of Cales, a gentleman of Wales, and a
laird of the north countrie,
A yeoman of Kent with his yearly rent, will buy
them out all three.”
33
SIR HENRY WOTTON
present writer has observed so much as
a single reference or allusion to his having
accompanied Essex, either to sea against
the Spaniards, or into Ireland ;-a reticence
for which there might indeed have been
good reasons under Queen Elizabeth, but
which in the reign of James I. would have
been almost inexplicable. Moreover,
Wotton nowhere lays claim to anything
in the nature of martial experience,--and
when, in 1615, he finds himself in the Low
Countries amidst camps and campaigners,
he exclaims with unfeigned sincerity: "For
what sin, in the name of Christ, was I sent
here among soldiers, being by my profession
Academical, and by my charge Pacifical ?”1
But whatever may have been the nature
and extent of Henry Wotton's services to
Essex, the day arrived only too soon when
the follower had no choice but to draw
back from the brink of the precipice over
which his patron was about to cast himself
headlong. Wotton's delineation of Essex's
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 438-9.
1
34
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
TIT
character just cited is, so far as it goes,
neither unfair nor ungenerous; and a fur-
ther indication of the goodwill which he
bore to the unfortunate favourite's memory
is the grudge which he seems to have
nursed against Robert Cecil (afterwards
Earl of Salisbury), the successful head of
the opposite faction in Elizabeth's latter
years. But as Wotton had not, like his
fellow-secretary, connived at the hatching
of the futile conspiracy, so he was justified
in making his escape before the outbreak,
and thus avoiding the catastrophe in which
Henry Cuffe was involved together with
their patron. “At the Earl's end," he
writes, a “ I was abroad," on the banks of
the Arno once more, or among the lagunes
1 An obiter dictum (for such it seems to have been)
of Sir Henry. Wotton, as to Salisbury's supposed habit
of " creating plots that he might have the honour of
the discovery” appears to be cited by Father Gerard
in support of his paradox, that the so-called Gun-
powder Plot was a figment of this description by
Salisbury. See Gardiner, What Gunpowder Plot was
(1897).
% A Parallel, etc. (Reliquiæ, p. 180).
35
SIR HENRY WOTTON
T
YO
of Venice, where, according to one state-
ment, he had sought safety as early as 1599.
It is in Venice that he is said to have
written what was to prove his longest
and most important prose work, although
it was not published till several years after
his death, a little later than the rest of his
prose writings. This was the treatise on
the State of Christendom, a sort of his-
torico-political survey, displaying both in-
formation and insight, but at the same time
free-spoken in a degree which sufficiently
accounts for its having remained unpub-
lished till eighteen years after its author's
death. The introduction bears a certain
formal resemblance to that of the Utopia,
the model of so many later political or
semi-political disquisitions ; but it is even
slighter in construction, and would not call
for notice at all, except from a biographi-
cal point of view. At the outset, but in
1 Essex arrived in London from Ireland on Sep-
tember 28th of that year.
2 Viz., in 1637. I have used the edition of 1667,
kindly lent me by my friend Mr. J. P. Whitney.
36
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
what is certainly not the least interesting
passage of the work, the author relates how,
in the weary days of his exile, there had
occurred to him, among other possible
ways of bringing about his return home,
the notion of “murdering some notable
traitor to his prince and country.” But it
is only fair to him to add, that he further
mentions how both his head and his heart
were induced to abhor such an action in
view, respectively, of “the great difficulty
to escape unpunished," and of “the con-
tinual terror that such an offence might
breed into his conscience."The essay, as
TT
1 The notion which at the outset of his essay Wotton
describes himself as having entertained and repressed,
is not out of accordance with the pronouncement at
its close (see the Supplementary Section on the
poisoning of Escovedo), as to its being a juster con-
clusion in the case of Philip II. than in that of Henry
III. (because of his having ordered the assassination
of Guise), that he may be "lawfully excommunicated
and deposed, and that no war against him, of what
nature soever, can be held unjust and unlawful," so
long as he continues in his present course. Such ex-
pressions prove (what for the rest is sufficiently proved
already), that at the close as well as in the middle of
37
SIR HENRY WOTTON
a whole, although overburdened with much
useless classical learning, especially in the
way of parallels, a rhetorical exercise much
affected by Wotton, is readable, even where
it cannot be called convincing. The poli-
tical acumen of the writer is exemplified by
the demonstration that the Spaniard is by
no means so strong as is generally supposed,
in his finances, to begin with ; but it is
rather startling at the close of the essay to
find not only vigilance inculcated against
France as well as against Spain, but a
shrewd, though ungenerous, warning added
against allowing the Low Countries to de-
velope into a strong and united Power. But,
although the spirit of The Prince seems to
animate such political teachings as these,
the general tone of sturdy patriotism which
the sixteenth century, when Melanchthon avowed his
desire that God would put it into the heart of some
true man to slay the English Nero (King Henry VIII.
to wit), the methods in question were not monopolised
by one side of the great contention. As for Wotton
himself, nobody but Scioppius (see below) has ever
pretended to regard him as a would be assassin, even
in the glorified form of a martyr to Protestant loyalty.
38
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
WOI
characterises this essay renders a latter-day
English reader unwilling to enquire too
closely into either the consistency of its
logic or the purity of its ethics. It would
be difficult to instance a worse argument
of its kind than the endeavour to excuse
the religious intolerance of the sovereigns
of England and France in contrast to that
practised in Flanders by Philip of Spain;
and (leaving unnoticed the defence of the
execution of Mary Queen of Scots) we
are almost revolted by the audacity
of the ensuing apology (it is practically
nothing else) for Henry III. of France and
his murder of the Duke of Guise. While
the treatise furnishes much unmistakable
evidence of political thought as well as
observation, its main interest for us lies in
the flood of light which it pours on the
1 Sir Henry Wotton stands by no means alone
among English writers of his age in this tenderness
towards the person of Queen Elizabeth's former
suitor. Cf. in the Elizabethan drama Marlowe's
Massacre of Paris and Chapman's Revenge of Bussy
d'Ambois.
2 See below.
39
SIR HENRY WOTTON
sympathies and antipathies of a man of
action belonging to that later generation of
Elizabethans who cherished traditions no
longer suited to the statesmanship of which
it was their lot to become the agents. The
State of Christendom would hardly have
stood Henry Wotton in good stead by way
of a recommendation to the service of the
Pacific King.
After liberating his soul in literary so-
liloquy, Wotton, when a short time after-
wards he paid a second visit to Rome, may
be supposed to have schooled himself to
the practice of the celebrated formula
which in his old age he impressed upon
Milton, then starting on his Italian jour-
ney. “I pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto-
your thoughts close and your countenance
loose.” Thus we may fancy him returning
from his experience of the English College,
armed with both courage and discretion,
to Florence, where, quite unexpectedly,
his opportunity came to him at last. It
usually comes, as we are wont to advise
YTI
40
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
our younger friends, to those who wait;
but not, we should be careful to add, to
those who wait unprepared.
The reigning prince at Florence in those
days was the Grand-Duke Ferdinand, of
whom Wotton, more suo, has in one of the
papers printed among his remains drawn a
very life-like character. The shrewd dis-
cernment of this banker-prince, whose best
qualities (as is at times the case with great
financial personages) would seem not to
have shown themselves on the surface, but
who was true to the ancestral insignia of
1 In one of his Aphorisms of Education (“Felicity
shows the ground where Industry builds a Fortune")
Sir Henry Wotton dwells on what may be termed
the complement of the maxim that “Every man has
his opportunity," citing Archimedes' requirement of a
TTOÙ OTW, and asserting that it is necessary in regard to
the building of a fortune. This opinion was not
strange in one who had had to "wander” so long
before he was allowed to begin what in the narrower
sense of the word can be called his career. A
fortune, again in the narrower sense, this “under-,
valuer of money," as Walton calls him in The
Compleat Angler, was not predestined to make.
2 A Character of Ferdinando di Medici, Grand
Duke of Tuscany. (Dedicated to the King.)
41
SIR HENRY WOTTON
the Medici, stood Wotton in good stead.
For the absolutely confidential commission
with which he was entrusted by the Grand
Duke, and which proved his stepping-
stone to the confidence of his own future
sovereign, then King James VI. of Scot-
land, would have been neither to the taste
nor to the advantage of an agent less dis-
tinguished by courage and prudence.
Something was said above as to schemes
of assassination that were never carried
beyond the stage of imagination ; but
Queen Elizabeth and those to whom her
life was dear knew only too well of prac-
tical attempts in the same direction, and
the Scottish monarch who hoped to be her
successor on the English throne was not
without one notable experience, according
to his own statement, of the same kind, or
without fears as to the recurrence of the
1 Among the verse attributed to Wotton are some
stanzas, fierce in spirit, written in "answer" to those
attributed to Chidiock Tychbourne, said to have
composed them on the night before his execution,
with Ballard and Babington, in 1586.
42
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
same peril. The most insidious form of
murder--poisoning-was unhappily known
on both sides of the Alps; but Italy, and
in Italy Florence, were traditionally as-
sociated in particular with the planning
and perpetration of this sort of crimes.
Whether or not some Scottish or English
plotters had actually, with the help of
Italian technical instruction, contrived a
design upon the life of the Scottish king,
at all events rumours of such a scheme
appear to have reached the ears of the
Grand - Duke Ferdinand. He resolved
upon transmitting the information to the
fellow-sovereign whose life was menaced,
while furnishing him at the same time
with a casket of antidotes, wherein, says
Wotton, “ he did excel all the princes of
the world.” And Wotton himself was
chosen by the Grand-Duke as the agent
who should convey both warning and pre-
1 The mysterious incidents in which the “Gowrie
Conspiracy” ended occurred in 1600, on August 5th,
a day afterwards appointed by King James to be kept
as one of annual thanksgiving for his escape.
1
43
SIR HENRY WOTTON
servatives. In the guise of an Italian, and
under the assumed name of Ottavio Baldi,
he, after what he describes as a painful
journey, contrived to make his way to the
presence of James VI. at Stirling Castle,
and, revealing his incognito to the king
alone, to acquaint him with the purpose
of his hazardous adventure. After three
months' stay at Court he was graciously
dismissed, and returned-still in the cha-
racter of Ottavio Baldi-to Florence.
Only a few months later—we are now in
the early part of the year 1603—the news
arrived there of the death of Queen Eliza-
beth. By the Grand-Duke Ferdinand's
advice, Wotton once more crossed the
Alps, advancing as far as Paris (if we may
be permitted to ignore geographical bear-
ings) in the direction of the rising sun.
At Paris tidings reached him from his
eldest brother, who had himself shown no
slackness in putting in an appearance be-
fore his new sovereign, that King James
I, desired his presence. When he had
44
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
hastened to respond to the summons, the
king took Ottavio Baldi, as he playfully
addressed him, into his royal arms, and
very soon afterwards offered him an em-
bassy in his service. It would seem that
he might have gone ambassador either to
France or to Spain ; but, well acquainted
as he was with the conditions of expendi-
ture at such Courts as these-an expen-
diture which would have signified to him
nothing short of ruin-he asked in prefer-
ence for the post of ambassador at Venice.
Hither in 1604 he repaired, sped by an
unbearably clever, but very cordial, con-
gratulatory poem from his friend Donne,
and accompanied by his nephew, Albertus
Morton, as his secretary, and by Dr.
William Bedell, of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, and Bury St. Edmunds, as
his chaplain. At last, work for which he
was pre-eminently fitted, and in a sphere
wholly congenial to him, lay ready to his
hand.
1 It is printed by Izaak Walton.
1
45
II
W E may suppose Sir Henry Wotton,
V as he was now called, after
being knighted by the king, to have set
forth on his journey towards Venice in
excellent spirits. Perhaps he might have
done better to put a restraint upon them;
but at Augsburg an English friend, in
accordance with a simple fashion still occa-
sionally honoured in the observance by
childlike minds, asked him to write some-
thing in his album, when he complied by
inscribing therein a Latin sentence of
more flippancy than wit, even in Walton's
punning English version : “An ambas-
sador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad
for the good of his country.” Now and
then, as we know, bad jokes (and for that
matter, good jokes too) come home to
roost; and Sir Henry Wotton, as we shall
see in due course, was to hear more of a
46
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
71
sally which was very far from being his
happiest effort of the sort. Indeed, he
said a very much more pointed and a far
more sensible thing when, long after-
wards," he told the Lord Keeper Williams
that “Ambassadors (in our old Kentish
language) are but spies of the time”; for
it is the closer view of things as they are,
and consequently the more accurate fore-
knowledge of things as they will be, that
constitutes the chief distinctive value of
legatine intelligence. And he made a
wittier jest, and one almost in the ap-
proved Bismarckian style, when, also in
the days of his retirement, he exhorted a
beginner in the profession which he had
then long quitted, always and upon all
occasions to speak the truth; for "you
shall never be believed," ? and thus, while
keeping yourself safe, you will put others
on the wrong scent. We shall see in the
course of this sketch that his resident or
1 In 1621-22 apparently; see Reliquiæ, p. 306.
2 Walton's Life.
SIR HENRY WOTTON
leiger ambassadorship at Venice was very
far from exhausting his efforts as a political
agent, although here as well as elsewhere
he was often charged with the conduct of
political business of great difficulty and
high importance.
But Venice-where in the course of three
ambassadorial periods, Sir Henry must,
according to the nearest calculation that
can be made, have spent the better part of
fifteen years—was the principal scene of
his official activity. Thus it is here, among
surroundings not very different from those
with which so many travellers of our own
day are familiar, that we may picture him
to ourselves taking and giving counsel,
drawing wisdom from both men and books,
and gradually disciplining his ardent spirit
1 See, for a summary of his diplomatic activity, the
eulogy prefixed to the Latin translation of his work
on Architecture (cf. the Advertisement to the Reader,
prefixed to the Reliquiæ); and his own enumeration
in a letter to the king (1615) of the treaties negotiated
by him (Reliquiæ, p. 280).
2 1604-12; 1615-19 ; 1621-24. But the absolute
accuracy of all these dates can hardly be guaranteed.
48
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
C
into that calm but not melancholy philo-
sophy of life which became to him second
nature and of which, to the friends of his
later years, he seemed a typical represen-
tative. I say, among familiar surroundings,
not only because the still mystery of the
Venetian canals, and the pride of the sun-
sets mantling the face of the Doge's bride
with a hundred hues, were the same then
as now, and must have been the same
even in the greatest days of Venice-days
that, in the earlier part of the seventeenth
century, had long passed away. But the
architectural and decorative splendour of
which in our own day so much has faded
into the semblance of the fabric of a vision,
was then still in its meridian glory. St.
Mark's, with what has been so well de-
scribed as its “ Eastern aroma," continued
to remind the beholder of the mighty past,
when Venice had been the greatest of
1 By Mr. Horatio F. Brown in his admirable
Venice : an Historical Sketch of the Republic (1893), to
which I desire here to make a general acknowledg-
11
ment.
49
SIR HENRY WOTTON
.
n
sea-powers; and the Ducal Palace--that
choicest of caskets in which Italian art had
deposited some of its most brilliant gems
seemed to assert a territorial authority of
which in truth the mere remnants were left
to a community, politically nearly decrepit,
and commercially all but bloodless. Yet,
while at no period can the outward aspect
of Venice have been fairer, or the collection
of all that adorned and enriched her
queenly beauty more complete, as a State,
so far at least as appearances went, she
still bore herself with dignity, and even,
as we shall see, when the nature of the
occasion allowed, with notable firmness.
Although her methods of government had
become more complex and more secret,
her political system had undergone no
radical changes; neither was public virtue
yet extinct among her born leaders. If the
traditions of her statecraft no longer suf-
ficed to enable her to hold her own among
those Great Powers which, in a fatal hour,
had banded together for her annihilation,
50
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
the sleepless vigilance of her oligarchy and
its agents still seemed capable of ensuring
her safety; and the moderation in counsel
which Wotton recognises as a hereditary
characteristic of her rulers,' prevented them
as a rule from that fatal rashness which
is so frequently the resort of States at a
hopeless stage of decay. Moreover, her
historic efforts against the Turk, although
they seemed to have come to an end with
the disastrous peace of 1573, were still
regarded with gratitude, and her tradi-
tional apprehension of Spain commended
her to the goodwill of other States who
had reasons of their own for fearing the
masterful policy of that Power. And at
least, if the day of her downfall was draw-
ing nearer, she seemed prepared to meet
it with something of the self-contained
dignity of her period of grandeur ; for not-
withstanding the love of display and bustle
which coloured her everyday life in the
1 See A Letter Concerning the Original of Venice
TYY
(Reliquice, p. 252).
SIR HENRY WOTTON
earlier part of the seventeenth century,
I can see no evidence that she had already
sunk into what she was to be in the
eighteenth-a city of sensual enjoyment,
an earlier Paris of the Second Empire."
Sir Henry Wotton was, as a matter of
course, alive to the beauty of Venice, and
to the value of the treasures of art accumu-
lated in her churches and palaces. He had
made a special study of architecture, on
which theme he afterwards printed a treatise
not devoid of merit, although after making
a brief attempt at a systematic survey of
1 Even in the Second of Marston's Satires (1598),
though Venice is mentioned first among foreign cities
haunted by the English traveller in search of frivolous
excitement, he is finally apostrophised as a "polluted
Neapolitan." -A very competent account of Venice, of
her local attractions, and of the causes of her decline
as a State, is given in his well-known Familiar Letters,
by James Howell, who visited the Maiden-City, as
he says Venice was generally called in Italy, during
Wotton's third embassy. The immediate purpose of
his visit was of a business character, as he was engaged
in the glass-making interest. He mentions favours
received by him from Sir Henry, who afterwards
composed some complimentary verses on Howell's
Dodona's Grove, before its publication in 1639.
52
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
the art it falls back in the main on topics
of detail, concerned with the ornaments or
accessories of architecture rather than with
its principles and their embodiment. His
position as ambassador would in any case
have made it inevitable that he should
interest himself in pictures; for he was
inevitably expected to pick up examples
of Titian, and other masters in vogue, for
friends and patrons at home, to say nothing
of Murano glass, or of products of the
famous Aldine and other Renascence
printing-presses. But the bent of his
1 The Elements of Architecture, first published in
1624, was subsequently translated into Latin, and
published as an appendix to Vitruvius, and again to
Fréart's Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the
Modern.
2 I am informed (cf. ante, p. I note), that Brasenose
College, Oxford, has a MS. of Terence once belonging
to Wotton, which he bought at Venice of the heirs of
Cardinal Bembo. There is no ground for the supposi-
tion that the pictures sent by Wotton to Buckingham
were not commissions, but gifts sent with an eye to
future favours. Cf. Maxwell Lyte, History of Eton
College. His parcels for King James seem at times
to have contained melon-seeds, and at others contro-
versial pamphlets likely to interest his Majesty.
53
SIR HENRY WOTTON
own intellectual interests, as well as his
serious official duties, after all lay in a dif-
ferent direction, and more than one of the
problems with which he had to deal in his
capacity of ambassador to the Signiory of
Venice was of a kind well suited to engage
the whole of the energies at his command.
1 Wotton's own literary remains contain less matter
than might have been looked for concerning Venetian
history and politics; it should however be remem-
bered that the Journal of his Embassies to Venice con-
stituted a separate MS., which is stated to have
formerly been in the library of Lord Edward Conway.
Of Wotton's projected History of Venice nothing is
extant, and probably nothing was written, save the
Latin dedication to King James, which “Ottavio
Baldi” transmitted to him with a letter dated Decem-
ber 9th, 1622, and a short epistolary fragment on the
“ Original ” (origin) of Venice. Of superior interest
is his account of the election of the Doge Niccolo
Donato in 1618, and the short notice of the election
in the same year of his successor, Antonio Priuli.
The former narrative comprises some noteworthy
particulars as to the procedure followed on such occa-
sions, of which Wotton had repeatedly been an ob-
server. “The election of the Duke of Venice," he
writes, “is one of the most intricate and curious forms
in the world. ... Whereupon occurreth a pretty
question, What need there was of such a deal of solici-
tude in choosing a Prince of such limited authority ? "
54
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The absorbing question of the earlier
years of Sir Henry Wotton's first embassy
to Venice was the celebrated conflict be-
tween the Republic and the Papacy, in
which the chief combatants were Pope
Paul V. and his namesake the famous
Servite Father. The Venetians had al-
ways professed a loyal adherence to the
doctrines of the Church, and even in the
time of Sir Henry Wotton, who was
allowed in his residence liberty of Protes-
tant worship conducted by his own chap-
lain, it would seem that a native convert to
Protestantism could not with comfort (or
perhaps with safety) remain in the city. But
1 In the earliest of his letters to Sir Edmund Bacon,
written in 1611 (Reliquia, p. 400), Wotton intro-
duces to his nephew a Venetian physician, Gasparo
Despotini, the sole cause of whose removal from
Venice was his “illumination in God's saving truth.”
William Bedell had brought Despotini with him to
England, because "he could no longer bear with the
corruptions of the Roman worship, and so chose a
freer air.” The Archbishop of Spalato (vide infra)
was of the party. Bedell settled Despotini in practice
near Bury St. Edmunds. See Burnet's Life of Bedell
(1692), p. 18.
O
55
SIR HENRY WOTTON
they had simultaneously known how to
preserve in the ecclesiastical administration
of Venice something more than indepen-
dence for their Patriarch as towards the
Holy See. Their abhorrence of clerical
influence was shown by the prohibition of
the tenure of any public office, or the exer-
cise of any public function, at Venice by a
priest, and by the exclusion from public
discussions on matters concerning the Curia
of all persons related in certain degrees to
the holder of an ecclesiastical benefice.?
In return, the policy of the Papacy as
an Italian Power had in the critical epoch
of the League of Cambray been one of
deadly hostility to Venetian interests.
Venice had survived the terrible experi-
ence that had revealed her real weak-
ness, as well as the excommunication and
interdict whereby Pope Julius II. had
retorted on her seizure of Faenza, Cesena
and Rimini. But the relations between
1 M. Brosch, Geschichte des Kirchenstaates, vol. i.
(1880), P. 352.
56
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
the two Powers had continued strained,
and even Clement VIII., who managed his
foreign relations so considerately, had
found himself involved in a difficulty with
the Signiory on the occasion of a not very
discreet insistance by the latter on a not
very reasonable privilege.' Paul V., who
after a short interval in 1605 succeeded
to Clement VIII, in the chair of St. Peter,
1 This characteristic incident is well related by
Wotton himself, in one of his letters to Lord Zouch,
dated Florence, July roth, 1592 (Reliquiæ, pp. 673
seqq.):" Donato, the Ambassador of Venice, hath been
twice callid to the Vatican, where he very roundly
told the Pope that the Signiory wonder'd to under-
stand him offended at the taking away of Marco di
Sharra, considering that they had priviledge from the
Seat of Rome to take any Banditti whatever out of the
Ecclesiastical State and employ him in their Wars ;
which said, he drew forth the authentick of the
Priviledge. The Pope answer'd, that their priviledge
extended itself no further than to the Banditti, but
Marco di Sharra was moreover attainted of Heresie
on nine articles. To which Donato replied very
warily that of that the Signiory had not understood,
because as yet he was not declar'd an Heretick, and
so the Disputation receiv'd an end. The Venetians
are esteem'd generally not to have done discreetly in
that Action.”
57
SIR HENRY WOTTON
CW
brought to it the most exalted concep-
tions of the Papal authority, such as in
his eyes warranted its interference in the
affairs of several Italian States, and were
wholly incompatible with the determination
of the Venetian oligarchy to retain the
control of clergy as well as laity in their
sea-girt city. In 1604 the statute of the
Republic prohibiting the erection of new
churches or convents and the introduction
of new monastic Orders in Venice without
the authorisation of the Senate had been
re-issued; and early in 1605 the operation
of a rigorous Mortmain statute was ex-
tended to the entire territory of the Re-
public. Other causes of friction had
arisen : the Venetian Senate had resolved
to tax the clergy of Brescia for the
restoration of the ramparts of that town,
and the Pope had refused to confirm the
Senate's nomination of a new Patriarch.
And in the autumn of the same year the
gauntlet was cast at the feet of the haughty
1 Brosch, u.s., P. 354.
58
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Pontiff by the arrest, under the orders of
the Council of Ten, of two criminous clerks,
charged with acts infamous enough
to bring them indisputably under the
category of offenders such as the Venetian
authorities claimed the right of trying.
The course of the contest which fol-
lowed is too well known to every his-
torical student to require more than the
most perfunctory summary. The Venetian
Senate having declined to annul its
decrees, or to surrender the two clerics, a
bull of excommunication and interdict was
in April, 1606, launched against the Re-
public. The Senate dismissed the Pope's
Nuncio, declared his interdict null and
void, and ordered the clergy to exercise
their functions as usual. The Jesuits and
the members of other militant Orders
were expelled from the city, and the
waters of the literary controversy which
accompanied the State-conflict swelled into
a flood. On the Papal side the ponderous
learning of Baronius, and the tried acumen
59
SIR HENRY WOTTON
of Bellarmin were put under contribution ;
but Venice had a stronger champion than
either in Father Paul, with whom I think
it may be said that the literary honours
of the fray have usually been allowed to
have rested. Meanwhile, not only Italy,
but Europe at large, had come to take a
keen interest in the progress of the
quarrel ; and while there were ominous
signs that Spain, the most dangerous ad-
versary of Venetian independence, would
espouse the cause of Rome, the Protestant
Maritime Powers were offering their sup-
port to Venice. However, for reasons
which it is easy to understand, she pre-
ferred to make use of the mediation of
France; and through the good offices of
that Power a compromise was ultimately
effected, in which the formal concessions
were in favour of the Pope, but of which
the substantial result justified the action of
the Republic. The two criminous clerks
were surrendered to the Papal authorities,
but the banished Jesuits were not re-ad-
60
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
mitted into Venice, and the Senate, while
undertaking in the execution of its ob-
noxious decrees not to offend against a
traditional piety towards the Holy See,
declined to withdraw them. The interdict
was taken off, but the absolution which
ought to have accompanied the withdrawal
was refused by the impenitent Venetians,
on the ground of the invalidity of the
original imposition. The great attempt
of Paul V. had come too late, if he had
fancied himself capable of reasserting the
pretensions of a Gregory or an Innocent
too early, if he had reckoned upon Venice
being powerless to resist the visitation of
his thunderbolts.
It was necessary to recall thus much
concerning this oft-told episode, because it
is certain that Sir Henry Wotton entered
heart and soul into the ultimately success-
ful proceedings of the Venetian Govern-
ment, and that, in full accordance with the
wishes of his Sovereign-who was by this
time thoroughly awake to the significance
.
бI
SIR HENRY WOTTON
of the claims of Rome, and of the efforts
of her agents-he upheld the policy of her
adversary, and sought to rally round it a
league of sympathetic Powers. Not only
this; but, more especially through the
medium of his learned and strenuous chap-
lain, Dr. William Bedell, he formed most
intimate relations with the man who was
the real director of the resistance to
Rome. There may be a certain irony in
the fact that it was a monk prompted by a
future bishop who conducted the success-
ful struggle against Papal claims, and that
in consequence the Venetians, traditionally
jealous of clerical influence, accorded to
him a prerogative position in the adminis-
tration of their State ; but. Paolo Sarpi's
Servite habit did not protect him against
the stilo Romano, any more than his
Orders restrained the freedom of his criti-
cal pen as the historian of the Council of
Trent.1 What Wotton says of him and of
1 Sarpi never acknowledged the authorship of the
Storia del Concilio Tridentino, which was first published
.62
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
his intimacy with Bedell is certainly not of
a nature to invalidate the popular belief
that Father Paul was a Protestant at
heart; 1 but such summary ways of dis-
in England through the ex-Archbishop of Spalato,
but there can be no doubt that the work was his.
See the masterly exposition of the standpoint of this
famous history, and of the characteristic features of
its. execution in the Appendix to Ranke's History oj
the Popes. A notice is there added of Sarpi's History
of the dispute between Rome and Venice (Lyons,
1624); and it is pointed out as an instance of Sarpi's
partisan method of dealing with historical facts that,
detesting both Rome and Spain, he omits all mention
of the fact that the latter Power favoured the exclu-
sion of the Jesuits from Venice.
1 "This," wrote Sir Henry Wotton, in recommend-
ing Bedell to the notice of King Charles I. in 1627,
“is the man whom Padre Paulo took, I may say, into
his very soul, with whom he did communicate the
inwardest thoughts of his heart, from whom he pro-
fessed to have received more knowledge in all
Divinity, both Scholastical and Positive, than from
any that he had ever practised in his days; of which
all the passages were well-known unto the King your
Father of most blessed Memory” (Reliquia, p. 330).
They appear to have mutually taught one another
Italian and English ; but Bedell seems to have also in-
structed Father Paul in some of the niceties of Greek
scholarship. “They had,” relates Burnet in his Life
of Bedell, a book full of interest notwithstanding its
63
SIR HENRY WOTTON
posing of a problem such as that of the
personal beliefs of Father Paul-or of
Wotton's later associate, John Hales of
characteristically discursive preface, “ many and long
discourses concerning Religion. Bedell found P.
Paulo had read over the Greek New Testament with
so much exactness, that having used to mark every
word when he had fully weighed the importance of it
as he went through it, he had by going often over it,
and observing what he past over in a former read-
ing grown up to that at last, that every word was
marked of the whole New Testament; and when
Bedell suggested to him critical explications of some
passages that he had not understood before, he re-
ceived them with the transports of one that leapt for
joy, and that valued the discovery of divine Truth
beyond all other things” (pp. 7-9). According to
the same authority, Bedell also communicated to
Father Paul a thing less worth knowing, viz., that the
name of Paul V., coupled with the satiric title Vice-
Deus, spelt the number 666-a discovery which on
being imparted to the Doge and Senate was by them
entertained as if it had come from Heaven (Ib., p. 12).
It may be surmised that Bedell, an alumnus of the
" House of pure Emmanuel,” had been originally
selected for the Venetian chaplaincy with a special
view to the dispute with the Papacy, which had
already begun at the time of Wotton's appointment.
Burnet's Life illustrates his strength and sweetness of
character, as well as his learning and energy. He
was afterwards appointed in succession to the Master-
ship, as Burnet calls it, of Trinity College, Dublin,
64
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Eton-ill commend themselves to his-
torical biography
The part which Wotton had played
with so much spirit (and, on one occasion
at least, with a judicious admixture of dis-
cretion"), in the celebrated struggle of
and to the Bishopric of Kilmore and Ardagh. Find-
ing himself unable to discharge satisfactorily the
duties of both Sees, he exercised a self-denial rare in
his days by resigning one of them (Ardagh).
1 The story is told by Burnet with so characteristic
a vivacity, that his own words must be quoted.
After the breach with Rome had become open, seven
ecclesiastics had been commissioned by the Venetian
Senate to preach against the Pope's authority during
the endurance of the Interdict. By way of promot-
ing the expected separation of Venice "not only from
the Court but from the Church of Rome,” King
James I. "ordered his Ambassadour to offer all pos-
sible assistance to them, and to accuse the Pope and
the Papacy as the chief Authors of all the mischiefs
of Christendome. The Prince" (i.e. the Doge) “and
Senate answered this in words full of respect to King
James, and said, That they knew things were not so
bad as some endeavoured to make the World believe,
on design to sow discord between Christian Princes;
and when the Pope's Nuncio objected, That King
James was not a Catholick, and so was not to be
relyed on, the Duke answered, The King of England
believed in Jesus Christ, but he did not know in
SIR HENRY WOFTON
which we have been speaking, was not
forgotten by those whose interests had
suffered most severely from its results.
He states that certain distinguished mem-
whom some others believed. Upon which P. Paulo
and the Seven Divines pressed Mr. Bedell to move
the Ambassadour to present King James's Premoni-
tion to all Christian Princes and States " which was
afterwards, in 1609, published with the re-issued
Apology for the Oath of Allegiance—" then put in
Latine, to the Senate, and they were confident it
would produce a great effect. But the Ambassadour
could not be prevailed on to do it at that time, and
pretended that since S. James's day was not far off, it
would be more proper to do it on that day. If this
was only for the sake of a Speech that he had made
on the conceit of S. James's Day and K. James's
Book, with which he had intended to present it, that
was a weakness never to be excused. But if this was
only a pretence, and that there was a design under
it, it was a crime not to be forgiven. All that Bedell
could say or do to perswade him not to put off a
thing of such importance was in vain ; and indeed I
can hardly think that Wotton was so weak a Man, as
to have acted sincerely in this matter." Burnet con-
cludes : “Before S. James's day came, which I sup-
pose was the First of May, and not the Twenty-fifth
of July, the difference was made up, and that happy
opportunity was lost; so that when he had his audi-
ence on that Day, in which he presented the Book,
all the answer he got was, That they thanked the
66
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
bers of the Jesuit Order, which in its cor-
porate capacity has never been charged with
shortness of memory, took occasion during
his residence at Venice to reflect upon him
in their writings; but to these and similar
attacks he thought it most becoming his
dignity to turn a deaf ear. Curiously
King of England for his good will, but they were now
reconciled to the Pope, and that therein they were
resolved not to admit of any change in their Re-
ligion, according to their agreement with the Court of
Rome” (pp. 13, 14).
1 In the Latin letter to Mark Welser of Augsburg
(appended to the Life in Reliquia), which will be
again referred to below, he writes concerning these :
“I remember, indeed, that being at Venice, my
family was struck with an Anathema in Baronius his
Parænesis” (this was the Parenesis ad Rempublicam
Venetam, published at Rome in 1606 on the occasion
of the Interdict; Cardinal Baronius, of course, was
not a Jesuit, but an Oratorian]; “I remember that
then also some things of a like sort were cast at me
by Gomitulus, a Jesuit of Perugia, and by Anthony
Possevin,” (who, after a series of services almost with-
out parallel in their vanity and extent, was made
Rector of the Jesuit College at Bologna, and being
at Venice at the time of the issue of the Interdict,
essayed his good offices at Rome. His attack upon
Wotton was possibly continued in his Apparatus
Sacer, Venice, 1603-6, a sort of supplement to his
67
SIR HENRY WOTTON
11
enough, however, very considerable in-
convenience, including the necessity of a
rather elaborate self-defence, was entailed
upon him by another attack, proceeding
from a much less respectable, but in his
way not less redoubtable, combatant, whose
missiles at that period came from the same
side as the fire of the heavy artillery of
which I have made mention. This was
Caspar Scioppius, one of the cleverest
and most self-reliant, and at the same time
one of the most unprincipled and shame-
less literary gladiators of this or any other
age. Born a German Calvinist, and
educated in Protestant Universities of the
south-west, Scioppius had already achieved
a certain distinction, and engaged in
quarrels affecting his literary character,
Bibliotheca Selecta, Rome, 1593, “which, although
they flowed from galled spirits, yet, however, I bore
in silence, for these were men of no mean repute, at
least at home, and such eminency as they had quali-
fied the injury.”
1 All the authorities designate “Neagora," in the
Upper Palatinate, as the place of his birth. Is this
the little town of Neunburg vor dem Wald ? .
68
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
LU
when, according to his own account in
consequence of his perusal of a volume of
the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius, he
was converted to the Church of Rome.
Disinterested motives (we have this on
his own authority) prevented him from
seeking to take the Orders of that Church,
and, decorated with a little more than
honorary papal title, he was for a time
content to make himself generally useful
at Rome by means of his prolific pen and
his quite abnormal power of mastering
whatever subject of discussion or con-
troversy was proposed to it. But long
before he came into conflict with Sir
Henry Wotton, he had passed into a fresh
phase of his restless activity, and in his
tremendous attack upon the venerable
Joseph Scaliger, the greatest scholar of
his age - whatever may be the merits
of the genealogical pretensions on which
it largely turned-proved himself its fore-
most libel-writer, and at the same time
one of its most irresistible masters of
YO
69
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Latin style. In both capacities he now
launched forth a series of assaults upon
Protestantism and its leading representa
tives marked by a combination of brilliant
Latin, incomparable scurrility and intimate
connaissance de cause, which gave them
a potency of their own that tickled the
ears and filled the nostrils of all Europe.
While officiously tendering his counsel to
the young Emperor Ferdinand II. in his
mission for the extermination of heresy and
heretics, and sounding the tocsin of a Holy
War, Scioppius poured upon the Protestant
crowned head of James I. vial after vial of
derision, scorn, and contumely. The first,
and relatively the most moderate of these,
was the Ecclesiasticus (1611), written in
answer to the King's cherished Apology ;
afterwards there followed the Collyrium
and the Corona Regia, both of them books
1 See M. Pattison's description of the Hypobolimæus
and its effect upon subsequent biographies of Scaliger
in his essay on Joseph Scaliger in Essays (1889),
vol. i. p. 192.
2 Classicum belli Sacri.
wa
20
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11
of infinite grossness, the latter leaving
untouched none of the bodily or moral
defects from which King James suffered
or was supposed to suffer, and being, by
way of an enhancement of the insult, put
into the mouth of his illustrious protégé,
Isaac Casaubon. Concerning Scioppius
and his achievements in general no more
must be added here, save that he after-
wards diversified his career as a contro-
versialist by taking up arms against the
Jesuits, and more suo seeking to confute
their principles and confound their practice
with his usual recklessness of invective.
His quarrel with the Order seems to have
sprung out of the objections taken by him
to its methods of grammatical teaching ;
but although he may on this score have in
some respects had the best of the argu-
ment, he was unable to overthrow the
authority of the Jesuits in the schools any
more than in other spheres of influence.
In his old age he withdrew to Padua-in
the territories of that very Venice whose
TYY
71
SIR HENRY WOTTON
greatest citizen, Father Paul, he had once
taken upon himself to insult with menaces
of Papal vengeance; now, it was the
reviler-general of his age who had to shut
his person up within his four walls, consol-
ing himself with the reflexion that he
had not laboured in vain, since he had
made all the world hate him. And thus
he wrote on, day and night, to the last,
cavilling at the creed in which he had of
old unctuously declared himself to have
found a refuge, but friendless either out-
side or within the Church of which he had
posed as the champion. His death at an
age beyond threescore and ten is said to
have been hailed by a consensus of satis-
faction on the part of those upon whom
had descended the envenomed aspersions
of his pen-Catholics, Protestants, Deists.
A later Lucian might have pictured his
arrival on the further side of Styx, and
Giordano Bruno, whose death in the flames
had of old edified him so much, motioning
him to a prominent place among the.
AV
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A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
masters of free speech, who are the near
neighbours rather than the true associates
of the martyrs of free thought.
In 1611, Caspar Scioppius and Sir
Henry Wotton may have been old
acquaintances. As it happened, they had
alike been students at Altdorf; but
Scioppius is not likely to have had
tidings of the young Englishman who had
attended that University some four years
or so before his own appearance there,
But they can hardly have failed to hear
of one another during Scioppius' visit to
Venice in 1607, when his impertinences
to Father Paul subjected him to an arrest
of two or three days. After this he went
i The best, and most readable, extant account of
Scioppius is to be found in vol. ii. of Nisard's
Gladiateurs de la République des Lettres aux Xyme,
XV]me et XVIIme Siècles (Paris, 1860). Bayle's article
on him, however, is full of information. See also the
useful notes to Sir J. S. Hawkins' edition of Ignoramus
(1787). No scholar of the present age except Mr.
R. C. Christie could do literary justice to a career
covering a wide and complicated section of the liter-
ature of the Later Renascence. Mr. Christie's library
contains copies, some of them unique, of all the works
of Scioppius.
73
SIR HENRY WOTTON
north, and either then or later he must
have picked up at Augsburg some in-
formation as to the witticism which
Wotton had written in the album of his
friend Fleckmere, when on his way to
his Venetian post, concerning the menda-
city expected from ambassadors. At all
events, when Scioppius was engaged in
the process to which reference was made
just now of scarifying King James I. and
rubbing gall into the tender places-when
he was composing the Ecclesiasticus
(1611), to be followed up with more
drastic plaisters-he threw in a playful
reference to Wotton's facetious entry in
the merchant's album at Augsburg. Play-
ful after his manner-that is to say, with
an application not only ad hominem, but
ad regem, and interlarded with quotations
from literature both sacred and profane.
: 1 See cap iv. of G. Scioppii Ecclesiasticus auctori-
tati Serenissimis D. Jacobi Magnæ Britanniæ Regis
Oppositus (Hartberg, 1611). “If,” he says, inter alia,
" we may put any trust in this royal ambassador (as
we may suppose to be in accordance with the wish
74
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Terribly clever and utterly unscrupulous,
and at the same time perfectly posted
up in his field of battle, he no doubt
calculated upon the sensitiveness of the
king for his arrow wounding two victims
in one flight. For James: I., although
addicted to the perpetration of jokes of
his own, and liking to be thought appreci-
ative of wit to his address, was not fonder
than most kings and princes are of ridicule
casting a reflexion on their own dignity.
Moreover, an ambassador, as Wotton
might have remembered from Donne's
poem, which he must have carried with him
on his journey from England, is in his rela-
tion to the sovereign whom he represents-
"A taper of his torch, a copy writ
From his original.” .
And, as a matter of fact, King James did
expressed by him in the ambassador's credentials), it
is inevitable that the king himself should rightly be
numbered among those 'scornful men that rule this
people which is in Jerusalem,' who said, 'the scourge
shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our
refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves?”
(Isa. xxviii.).
75
SIR HENRY WOTTON
-
take some umbrage at the jest which the
sagacious Scioppius had been at the pains
of bringing to light some eight years after
its perpetration, and Wotton found it
necessary to explain. This he accom-
plished by means of a public letter
addressed to Marcus Welser, one of the
burgomasters of the Free Imperial City
of Augsburg, to whom Scioppius himself
had been under literary obligations ; ?
taking the opportunity of falling foul of
his wayside assailant with a wealth of
vituperative Latinity which leaves nothing
to be desiderated. Furthermore, accord-
ing to his own account, he wrote a private
letter to the king, who hereupon magna-
nimously pronounced that Sir Henry
Wotton had “commuted sufficiently for
a greater offence.” It is, however, notice-
able that the Latin letter to Welser is
superscribed “from London, 1612"; and
TY
TA
1 He facetiously explains that his witticism, while
innocent in itself, was intended to include ambassadors
of every kind, even legati a latere.
76
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
although we do not know at what date
Wotton had left Venice, another English
ambassador seems in that 'year to have
been in residence there. Nor have we
notice of any talk until the following
year of Wotton's being again employed
as ambassador (in France); and some-
thing like a further two years ensued
before he was actually sent on a mission
to the United Provinces, whence he
again returned to his Venetian post.
'11 gather these data from the Letters to Sir
Edmund Bacon, in Reliquiæ, pp. 399 seqq., and (as
to Wotton's having been temporarily superseded at
Venice) from the Legatus Latro. Sir Henry Wotton,
we may rest assured, found no compensation in the
indignities to which Scioppius was subjected in re-
taliation of his invective against King James. Accord-
ing to his own account, printed under the pseudonym
of Oporinus Grubinius in the rare tract of Legatus
Latro (Ingolstadt, 1615, of which Mr. R. C. Christie
kindly lent me his copy), these included two distinct
attempts at assassination, which proved that Sir
Henry Wotton's aphorism as to the functions of an
ambassador ought in the case of Calvinist ambassa-
dors to be thus extended : " Legatus Calvinista est
vir bonus scilicet, peregre missus ad mentiendum et
latrocinandum Reipublicæ causâ." The first attempt
77
SIR HENRY WOTTON
To the interval spent by Wotton in
England, and, as it would seem, mainly
at or near the Court, belongs the origin
was made in 1612, when “Wotoni successor et
Anglicus apud Venetos Orator," after making some
enquiries about Scioppius at Augsburg, caused him
to be “shadowed” at Milan by four “sicarii satis
lacertosi," who sent a bullet through the window of
the college where he was lodging. Of the second
and more effective attempt, which took place at
Madrid in 1614, the perpetrators were persons em-
ployed by the English ambassador there, Lord Digby;
and of this the Legatus Latro gives a very circum-
stantial and distressing account. The assault, how-
ever, seems to have been merely one of those brutal
chastisements which, unfortunately, it would be
possible to parallel by London incidents belonging to
the later Stuart times. In the following year (1615)
King James was, on the occasion of his visit to the
University of Cambridge, gratified by a different kind
of castigation of his relentless assailant. At the
second performance of George Ruggle's Latin comedy
of Ignoramus before the king, which took place on
May 6th, a new Prologue (called in the editions
Prologus Posterior) was introduced, of which the chief
fun consists of a burlesque trial and condemnation of
Scioppius, whose impudence, mendacity, and para-
sitical ways are exposed with merciless buffoonery.
The Aristophanic sentence pronounced on him is said
to have excited the king to boisterous merriment.
Repeated references to this performance in the
. 78
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
DU
of what, if we so choose, we may call the
romance of his life. For romance, in the
proper sense of the term, is whatever
takes us, in life or in literature, out of
routine, whether that routine be a fashion-
able canter or an unpretending jog-trot.
Nor will it be denied that the romance
of a man's life, understood in this sense,
may come to him as late as that of Sir
Henry Wotton's, who, so far as we can
ascertain, was about fifty-five years of
age-perhaps was a year or two more-
when he became the “servant" of the
Princess Elizabeth, afterwards best known
by her twelfth-night title of Queen of
Bohemia. To a large proportion at
least of his fellow-countrymen and women
of later generations he is better known
in this than in any other character, for
the very sufficient reason that some time
writings of Scioppius attest the deep irritation which
it provoked in him, and which, perhaps, may have
been increased by the circumstance that there were
present at it members of the family of the Fuggers,
the great merchants and bankers of Augsburg.
79
SIR HENRY WOTTON
between November, 1619, and November,
1620 (for he could hardly have addressed
her as Queen before her coronation or
after her flight)-he commemorated the
beauty of his mistress in verses which are
unforgotten in our literature. And, indeed,
what fame could be more enviable by any
man, whether statesman or scholar, or
neither, than that gained by the authorship
of an imperishable lyric? There can be
no need for any explanation of the nature
of the relations between Sir Henry
Wotton and the Princess-Queen--whether
they began at home in England, or in
the bright days at Heidelberg, where
she was still surrounded by fair native
satellites who may or may not have
acquiesced in the apostrophe :-
"You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you, when the moon shall rise ?"
*
You violets that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known,
80
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own,
What are you when the rose is blown?”
The servant of a lady—permitted to
designate himself by this term, and her as
his mistress, in the diction of the rococo
chivalry and conventional “platonism" of
the early Stuart age-would in an earlier
age have called himself her knight ; the
tie by which he bound himself to her ser-
vice was, however, woven out of slighter
threads than that which had secured the
knight's fidelity and sent him forth in
quest of achievements to be glorified by
being dedicated to her name. When in
1613, amidst the acclamations of Protes-
tant England, the Princess Elizabeth was
wedded to the amiable Prince, who as
Elector Palatine was, as it were, predes-
tined to stand in the forefront of the great
religious conflict of which Europe was
breathlessly awaiting the outbreak, the
national enthusiasm had found expression
in numberless poetic tributes. If they are
81
SIR HENRY WOTTON
not to be counted, neither need they be
individually weighed; for it is manifest
that the heart of old and young went up to
the beautiful and high-spirited girl for and
from whose future so many fond hopes
were cherished. Sir Henry Wotton was
present at the wedding—" the conjunction
of the Thames and the Rhine, as our
ravished spirits begin to call it"_to which
he is found inviting some country cousins,
as a Londoner in possession of a Jubilee
window might have done in the present year
of grace; and he praises the bridegroom,
1 One of them may perhaps be singled out-not
because of any special poetic merit, but in recogni-
tion of the author of The Maske of the Middle
Temple and Lyncolns Inne. Chapman's historical
and political insight forms one of his distinguishing
characteristics as an Elizabethan dramatist, remained
true to his enthusiasm for the cause of the Palatinate,
and as late as 1622, when Sir Horace Vere was
shut up at Mannheim, printed a poetic appeal for
aid to the garrison under the title of Pro Vere
Autumni Lachrymæ. I think it just possible that
Chapman was acquainted with, and influenced by,
the German poet Weckherlin, who was resident in
London from 1620, and employed in foreign affairs
there. See below.
82
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TY
the Palsgrave, as "a gentleman of very
sweet hope."1 He chronicles the belated
departure of the newly-wedded pair,
whom he seems to have met again in the
days of their brief period of happiness at
Heidelberg. A meeting in “a merry
hour," he called it in a letter addressed to
Elizabeth some twelve or thirteen years
later ; and so far as I can discern, it was
the last occasion on which he beheld the
rose-the rose of his charming stanzas
the Rose of Bohemia as she was to be
called so soon afterwards, when her hus-
band, and she with him, had made the
great and fatal venture of their lives. I
cannot think that, with all her high spirits
and lightheartedness, Elizabeth had much
to say to this momentous decision ; she
was not, I take it, a heroine in the sense
of one who conceives a great action and
does her utmost to carry out her concep-
tion. But she was the Queen Louise of
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 278-9. 2 Ib., p. 410.
3 From Eton, 1628. (Reliquiæ, p. 442.)
83
SIR HENRY WOTTON
cause
the Thirty Years' War to all who had the
cause of militant Protestantism at heart,
in that with perfect fortitude, in the midst
of cruel deprivations and disappointments,
she never swerved either from the side of
the husband of her choice and the care of
their children, or, during the entire length
of the War, from the cause with which she
had become identified. Had she, among
the many princes who were thought of or
talked of for her hand, chosen the Swedish
Gustavus Adolphus, we may be sure she
would have bravely shared the dangers
and fatigues of those campaigns which
Wotton prayed God to "bless and cherish
as His Own business."1 As it was, after a
brief period of royal state among her new
self-continued and self-satisfied subjects,
she was to see the edifice of her fortunes
collapse with awful suddenness; and, at
first by her husband's side and then alone
among her children, during the better part
TYTT
an
1 To Sir Edmund Bacon, July 27th, 1630. (Reli-
quia, p. 451.)
- 84
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TY
of half a century to eat that bread of exile
which neither flattery nor charity can al-
together sweeten. But such consolation
as is to be derived from loyal and un-
changing devotion was not denied to her ;
Christian of Halberstadt rode into battle
with her glove in his helmet--which bore
little resemblance to a mitre, though he
was the Administrator of a Bishopric—and
the good Lord Craven, once as wealthy a
man as any goldsmith's son in England,
cheerfully ruined himself for her sake. As
for Sir Henry Wotton, whose verse is an
enduring monument of her charms, neither
was his fidelity to her cause one of words
alone. It is touching to trace his admir-
ing remembrance of her throughout his
correspondence, down to the days of his
cloistered retirement; she is to him "the
Triumph of Virtue”; 1 he addresses her
as “Most resplendent Queen, even in the
Darkness of Fortune"; "that," he writes,
1 To John Dinely (her Secretary), 1633. (Reliquiæ,
p. 569.)
85
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Y
1
“was wont to be my style with your
Majesty, which you see I have not for-
gotten.”1 “I cannot,” he exclaims at a
rather earlier date, “but fall into some
passionate questions with my own heart.
Shall I die without seeing again my
Royal Mistress myself?"2 He sends her
for her diversion "some of the Fancies
of his youth,”-not, we must conclude,
the famous stanzas to which repeated
reference has been made, and which
had been published four years earlier. 3
In his last will, printed by Walton, he
bequeathed, in his usual terms of devoted
admiration, her picture-a Honthorst,
perhaps, in which full justice was done
· to her raven locks and tall, lithe form-
1 To the Queen of Bohemia, 1636 (Ib., p. 336).
2 To the Same, 1629 (Ib., p. 450).
3 To Dinely, 1628 (Ib., p. 558). Wotton's stanzas
were printed with music as early as 1624 in Est's
Sixth Set of Books, etc. See Hannah's Poems, etc.,
p. 95, note, where it is observed that this lyric has
been a favourite theme for variations and additions,
and has in such an altered shape found its way into
the poems of Montrose.
1
86
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
to her nephew the Prince of Wales ; nor
is there any reason for disbelieving
Walton's story of the affront offered by
Wotton to Ferdinand II., how, when on
the point of quitting the Imperial Court
to which he had been accredited, he gave
away a jewel of great price presented to
him by the Emperor, “because he found
in himself an indisposition to be the better
for any gift that came from an Enemy of his
Royal Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia.”
But, apart from this pardonable out-
burst, he laboured hard in his vocation to
mitigate what neither he nor his timorous
master could undo, viz., the dire effects
upon the fortunes of King James's
daughter and her children of the battle
of Prague and the seizure of the Pala-
tinate. Indeed, the long-sustained en-
deavour to bring about a settlement
which should restore to them part at least
of what they had lost forms so integral a :
part of the foreign policy of James I. that,
as one of its regular agents, Wotton
87
SIR HENRY WOTTON
laboured incessantly for this object, stead-
fastly refusing to accept what he bitterly
describes to Bacon as the probable Jesuit
interpretation of the original catastrophe :
“ Victrix causa Deo placuit.” 1
The period spent at or near the Court
by Sir Henry Wotton (1612–14) was a
season full of turbid rumours and appre-
hensions, of which there are to be found in
his letters certain faint reflexions, as though
his heart had not been very much in these
home concerns. On April 22, 1613, men-
tion is made of the arrest of Overbury,
but already on May 27 he is stated to
1 To Lord Bacon (Reliquice, p. 301). Under
Charles I. Wotton was, as we shall see, no longer
active as a diplomatist. But it is interesting to find
him, in the noteworthy letter to the Queen of
Bohemia, where he discusses the career of Bucking-
ham, assure her that her brother King Charles had
always cherished her interests, and that the Parlia-
ments hitherto summoned by him had been
assembled mainly with a view to their effecting some-
thing on her behalf. (See Reliquia, pp. 555-6.)
2 See the Letters to Sir Edmund Bacon in Reliquiæ,
pp. 405-597. A separate edition of these letters was
published in 1661.
88
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
be “not only at liberty but almost out of
discussion.” As yet the gossips of the
Court were in doubt whether the Suffolk
or the Rochester interest would in the end
prevail, and in November, when Roches-
ter was created Earl of Somerset, his star
was of course still in the ascendant. It
was not till October, 1615, that the tragic
catastrophe of Overbury's confinement
was in its consequences to drag down the
favourite, whose fall Wotton moralised in
some rather commonplace verses. In
May, 1613, reporting the imprisonment of
the Lady Arabella Stuart in the Tower,
he observes that his “lodging is so near
the Star Chamber that his pen shakes
in his hand.”; but his political sentiments
were by no means of a nature likely to
bring him into trouble, and the matters
in which he took a keen interest apper-
1 " Upon the sudden Restraint of the Earle of
Somerset, then falling from Favour.” The last two
lines run:
"Vertue is the roughest way,
But proves at night a bed of downe."
89
SIR HENRY WOTTON
tained not to domestic but to foreign
policy. Perhaps, too, like some other men
of action and some other men of letters,
he cherished a prejudice against men of
talk. Thus, in 1614, he reports with
perfect composure the arrest of four
Members of the House of Commons for
license in speech, although one of the
offenders was his old schoolfellow and
College contemporary, John (afterwards
Sergeant) Hoskyns, with whom in younger
days he had composed love-poetry in
amæbean stanzas, ' And he comments
1 I assume with Dyce that the verses superscribed
Sir Henry Wotton and Sergeant Hoskyns riding on
the way should be assigned to an early date in
their respective causes. Hoskyns' offence had been
"a desperate allusion" apropos of Scotch favourites
"to the Sicilian Vespers "; but on examination he
not very magnanimously declared that he had been
put up to the use of the phrase by Dr. Sharp, without
being himself aware of its significance. After a
year's restraint, during which he produced a large
quantity of Latin verse, including an appeal to the
king, he was set at liberty, and, though he had
another passing trouble of a similar kind, lived to be
serjeant-at-law, justice-itinerant of Wales, and member
90
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
without reserve on the futility of the
Parliament of this year (which separated
without having passed a single Act),
declaring that as some Parliaments had
been called Mad, Merciless, and so forth,
so this ought to be known as “the Parlia-
of the Council of Marches. Hoskyns, who was two
years older than Wotton, and like him educated at
Winchester and New College (see the notice of him
in vol. xxvii. of the Dictionary of National Biography,
1891, where there is no mention of Wotton) was in
his day a personage of considerable literary reputa-
tion; indeed Anthony Wood states that "he was the
most ingenious and admired poet of his time," and
that he “polished Ben Jonson and made him speak
clear, whereupon he ever called our author Father
Hoskyns." (He is not, I think, mentioned in the
Conversations with Drummond.) Very little of his
English verse is preserved (much Latin remains in
MS.); but Anthony Wood possessed a volume of
his epigrams and epitaphs. His advice to his little
Child Benjamin from the Tower (see Reliquiæ, p. 398)
is good, and still better his Epitaph on a Man for
doing nothing :-
"Here lies the man was born and cried,
Told threescore years, fell sick and died.”
(See Poems by Sir Henry Wotton, edited by the
Rev. Alexander Dyce (Percy Society, 1843), and the
article by Mr. W. P. Courtney already cited.)
91
SIR HENRY WOTTON
ment of greatest diligence and of least
resolution that ever was or will be.” 1
At last, in the summer of this year,
1614, Sir Henry Wotton was once more
in active employment. King James I.
was attempting, as yet on a comparatively
small theatre, his favourite part of a me-
diator, and although with Wotton's aid he
achieved a nominal success, the perfor-
mance was in reality as ineffective as it
was when afterwards repeated on a larger
scene. The inheritance of the Duchies of
Juliers, Cleves, and Berg was disputed by
1 I pass by, as not bearing upon Wotton's
biography, the mention in one of his letters, dated
July 2, 1613 (Reliquiæ, pp. 425-6) of the burning
down of the Globe Theatre on the occasion of the
performance of All is True. I have elsewhere given
my reasons for holding the opinion that the prob-
abilities of the case are in favour of the identity of
this play with Henry VIII. rather than with Samuel
Rowley's When you see me you know me. Whether
Wotton's description of the play performed on the
fatal June 29 as "a new play" should or should not
be understood literally, seems a more difficult ques-
tion ; but I am inclined to think the application of
the epithet in substance correct.
92
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1
two rival claimants, Wolfgang William
Count Palatine of Neuburg, and the Elector
of Brandenburg, who had of late respec-
tively changed their confessions—the one
from Calvinism to the faith of Rome, and
the other from Lutheranism to Calvinism.
Thus Spain and the United Provinces,
whose troops had, during the long wars
between the two Powers, frequently found
their way into these all too convenient
border-lands, had each despatched soldiery
thither once more; and where Maurice of
Orange and Spinola stood face to face, the
conflict that seemed imminent was unlikely
to prove a mere skirmish. I have already
cited Wotton's humorous expression of
wonder at finding a diplomat and scholar
like himself immersed in the din of camps
and armies. The negotiations in which he
and the French ambassador were engaged
1 Cf. ante, p. 5. Wotton's stay in the Netherlands
seems to have extended from August, 1614, to August,
1615, very nearly the same dates, by the way, as
Hoskyns' sojourn in the Tower. See Gardiner,
History of England, etc., vol. ii., p. 308, note.
93
SIR HENRY WOTTON
1
extended over more than a twelvemonth.
As early as November, 1614, they con-
trived to bring about an arrangement on
paper between the claimants, whereby the
disputed territories were provisionally
divided between them (the Treaty of
Xanten); but the allies whom the “posses-
sing” princes had brought into the Rhenish
duchies were not to be induced to evacuate
them, and the Juliers-Cleves-Berg ques-
tion remained emphatically open, contri-
buting in a very marked degree to the ulti-
mate outbreak of the Thirty Years' War.
By 1616 Wotton, whose diplomatic
labours at the Hague had been enlarged
by the task of superintending the resump-
tion of negotiations for the amalgamation
of the Dutch and English East India Com-
panies, was once more-if the external con-
ditions of the Hague and of Venice allow
1 Hugo Grotius had in the previous year been sent
to England on the same errand. He had not been
successful, and the negotiations at the Hague were
likewise broken off in April, 1615. (See Gardiner,
.5., p. 313.)
94
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
of the differentiating metaphor-in quiet
waters, and settled at his old ambassadorial
post. This time he appears to have re-
mained at his post for three years or there-
abouts, and unless I am mistaken, there is
nothing in his private correspondence to in-
dicate any occurrences of a specially trouble-
some nature in this chapter of his Venetian
life. Yet in its third year (1618) the very
existence of the Republic was transitorily
threatened by a strange conspiracy, to which
romance and the stage have perhaps lent an
exaggerated importance, but which proves,
at all events, that the “fear of Spain”-
or at least of the inflated ambition of her
representatives-was no illusion on the
part of the Council of the Ten. But the
1 See the account of the plot, of which the chiet
agent was the Frenchman Pierre, and in which most
of the representatives of Venetian blackguardism were
personally interested, while its promoters were supe
posed to be the Viceroy of Naples, and the Spanish
ambassador at Venice, ap. H. Brown, u.s., pp. 403, seqq.
The Council of the Ten did its best to keep the inci-
dent quiet, and no literary account of it seems to have
appeared before the romantic history published by the
95
SIR HENRY WOTTON
cunning which French cupidity had placed
at the service of Spanish arrogance over-
reached itself, and Venice was preserved,”
as in most instances states and institutions
are preserved, from a design of fools and
knaves. Sir Henry Wotton can hardly
but have been a witness of these occur-
rences; for it was in 1618 that he applied
to the king for the usual leave of absence
in order to visit his native country, or, as
he less roundly puts it, for the privilege
ordinarily accorded by his Majesty to his
foreign servants of “the comfort of his
gracious sight once in three years."1 And
in March, 1619, he was still in Venice, for
in that month we find him writing to the
king, thanking him for having signified to
him the royal intention of employing him
Abbé St. Réal (1674), a virtuoso in the treatment of
such episodes, followed by Otway's tragedy, Venice
Preserved (1682). Otway ingeniously mixed up with
the story “motives” derived from that of the so-called
Popish Plot. Thus it is that, between reticences and
adulterations, "impressions” of historical transactions
are at times created.
1. Reliquiæ, p. 485.
LUI
96
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
7
upon the execution of a special task as
arduous in its conditions and as serious in
its issues as has at any time been com-
mitted to an English diplomatist. He was
charged, in a word, with finding out the
basis on which King James might success-
fully mediate in a conflict of interests and
forces which was on the point of involving
--and, as it proved, actually involved-
nearly the whole of Europe in a general
war. In the front line stood the Bohemians
-three-fourths Protestants, supported by
the sympathy of at least half of the subjects
of the House of Austria—who by an act
of the grossest violence had proclaimed
their revolt against the authority of their
king and their rejection of the successor
elected by themselves. Their grievances
and pretensions were admitted neither by
1 See his letter to the king in Gardiner, Letters, etc.,
pp. 50, 51: “I must end with mine owne most
humble and hartie thankes unto youre matie about
myselfe ; that it hath pleased you (for soe Mr. Secre-
tarie Naunton hath given me knowledge) to designe
mee to treate in youre royal name betweene the
Emperor and the Bohemians."
97
SIR HENRY WOTTON
the Emperor-king, nor by his destined
successor on the imperial as well as on
the Bohemian throne, unlike himself a man
who believed in his mission and had been
trained in a school of steel to perseverance
in accomplishing it. In uneasy expectancy
there waited on the opposite side James'
own son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, the
head of the Calvinistic interest in the
empire, the indefatigable agents of which
were at work to remove the impediments
to the Finger which should point his way to
this same Bohemian throne ; and between
them was thrust the stolid obstruction of
the traditional chief of the Lutheran interest,
the Imperialist and conservative Saxon
elector. The eager ambition of Charles
Emmanuel of Savoy, --a prince whose
policy had long been an object of special
study to Wotton, and to whom he was in
the course of his career accredited in two
special missions was urging forward the
1 See Reliquiæ, p. 416 (1613): “I, who have a
little contemplated the Duke of Savoy's complexion."
98
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
policy of the Elector Palatine, while en-
deavouring to secure for its own intrigues
a recompense equal if not superior to that
held out to its desired ally. In the imme-
diate background the Catholic League and
the Protestant Union were hesitatingly
awaiting the issue ; while no reliance was
to be placed upon the ultimate action either
of Spain, distrustful of the future of the
Austrian Habsburgsand urging King James
to play the thankless part of mediator, or
of France, whose religious sympathies had
not yet been definitively subordinated to
an all-absorbing policy of national aggran-
disement. To secure peace when war was
written in the skies, and to satisfy at once.
So far as I know, the precise purpose of Wotton's
missions to Charles Emmanuel has not yet been ex-
plained.
1 The designs of Charles Emmanuel, noted by
Gardiner in the Introduction to his Letters etc. illus-
trating the Relations between England and Germany
(Camden Society's Publications, 1865), have been quite
recently more fully discussed by Ritter in his article,
Die pfälzische Politik und die Böhmische Königswahl,
in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, vol. lxxix., Heft 2
(1897).
TO
S
YYA WA
1
99
SIR HENRY WOTTON
the mutually irreconcilable hopes and fears
of the continental states and the manifest
sympathies of the great body of English-
men,-such was the not ignoble but pre-
posterous task which King James I. had
resolved upon setting to himself and to the
agents of his statecraft.
At the last moment he altered his
choice of his principal diplomatic agent,
and in Wotton's place sent out Doncaster,
whose irresistible social attractiveness could
not prevent the inevitable breakdown.
But although not allotted the part of pro-
tagonist, Wotton was actively employed
on a lengthy series of negotiations, partly
preceding, partly following upon the elec-
tion of Frederick to the Bohemian crown
in August, · 1619, and his (at first secret)
acceptance of it a month afterwards.?
Some time in 1619-apparently about the
month of May--we find Wotton at
1 See A Report of my Negotiation in Germany and
of some Peculiarities occurring in my Journey, addressed
to the King (1619), and the ensuing letters and docu-
ments in Reliquiæ, pp. 486 seqq.
TT
TY
100
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Munich, at the court of the sagacious
Maximilian of Bavaria, who was then still
full of professed doubts as to "Ferdin-
ando's fortune,” and of high-flown com-
pliments to King James' "most virtuous
daughter," but who early in the following
October was, notwithstanding, to assume
the active headship of the Catholic League,
and to enter into a compact fatal to her
interests with the new Emperor, Ferdi-
nand II. For it included a secret promise
of the transfer to Maximilian of her hus-
band's electoral dignity, and of so much as
should have been conquered by his adver-
saries of his hereditary lands. From
Munich Wotton passed on to Augsburg,
and thence to Heilbronn, where in June
the members of the Protestant Union were
assembled to determine its attitude to-
wards the impending Imperial election,
and where Wotton opened to them a
double commission. He was empowered
1 See Häusser, Geschichte der rheinischen Pfalz (2nd
ed., 1856), vol ii. p. 298.
IOI
SIR HENRY WOTTON
by the Doge and Senate of Venice to an-
nounce their determination not to permit
the transport across their gulf into Aus-
trian territory of any succours that might
tend to the further troubles of Germany;
and he was entrusted by his own Sovereign
with a characteristic series of devices for
counteracting the vexatious proceedings of
Papal and Jesuit agents in England and
other countries, including a literary propa-
ganda against the Pope and his policy in
Italy. But the Union, which could not
even make up its mind to give a decisive
answer to the Bohemian envoys at Heil-
bronn, shrank from any such enlargement
of the sphere of its operations, and ad-
journed without doing anything at all, ex-
cept decreeing the mobilisation of an army
for purely defensive purposes.?
In the autumn of 1620, long after the
die had been cast, and when the war,
which had been carried by the Bohemians
into the disaffected Austrian provinces, was
1 Ritter, 26.s., P. 274.
102
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
I
.
on the eve of coming to a decisive issue
in Bohemia itself, while Spanish troops
were about to flood the Palatinate, King
James was still with pathetic obstinacy
striving to make peace where no peace
was. Wotton was instructed to repeat to
the Emperor Ferdinand, the “Elector
Palatine” (the style should be noted), and
to the other parties concerned, the repre-
sentations urged in vain by Doncaster,
and to insist that the election of Frederick
to the Bohemian crown had been neither
approved by King James nor brought
about by Frederick himself. In the latter
part of the summer Wotton presented
himself before the Dukes of Lorraine and
Würtemberg, before the Archduke Leo-
pold, and in the imperial cities of Strass-
burg and Ulm, without, however, obtain-
ing anything but ambiguous answers.? In
1 See his despatch to the King, dated Augsburg,
August 18, and cf. Gindely, Geschichte des 30-jährigen
Krieges, vol. iii. (1878), p. 272. The account of
Leopold, archduke, bishop and territorial prince, is
an interesting sketch of character. He had been
103
SIR HENRY WOTTON
September he made his way. to Vienna
itself, where he was at once admitted to
an audience by Ferdinand II., and after-
wards conferred with Eggenberg, the Em-
peror's most influential minister, and, says
Wotton in his frank way, “tainted with the
Jesuit, as most of the Court are.”I Fer-
dinand's difficulties still rendered it incum-
bent upon him to accord a courteous
reception to the proposals of King James,
which amounted to the conclusion of a ces-
sation of arms without the question of the
Bohemian crown having been previously
decided. Wotton, however, more eager
in the interests of the King's daughter
and her family than the King himself,
seems to have recommended the accept-
appointed to the government of the Tyrol in 1619,
but Wotton seems to have visited him in his diocese
of Strassburg; for the archduke, who was as devoted
to the Order as was his brother Ferdinand, turned
back with the ambassador half a day's journey to
" Mulzham, the notorious nest of Jesuits.” This was
the College of Molsheim (cf. Crétineau-Joly, Histoire
de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1844, vol. iii. p. 378).
i Reliquice, p. 504.
104
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
ance of part at least of the proposals made
at Ulm in the earlier part of the year, ac-
cording to which Ferdinand would have
had to content himself with the title of
King of Bohemia without having any
authority of its government, and in the
event of his death Frederick would have
become entitled to enjoy both. More
than this, he informed the French ambas-
sador (the Duke of Angoulême) that he
was prepared to press for an acceptance of
these proposals in their entirety. Without
entering into any negotiation on the bases
suggested by King James and elaborated
by his ambassador, the Emperor, still
thinking it well to preserve an attitude of
politeness, assented to their being made
known at Prague ; but even here they
1 Cf. Gindely, u.s., pp. 273-4. It may be worth
observing that the Accord of Ulm (June 22, 1620),
as printed in Reliquiæ, pp. 531 seqq., merely secures
the neutrality of League and Union in the war, ex-
cluding, however, from the operations of the treaty
Bohemia and its Incorporated Provinces, and the
hereditary dominions of the House of Austria.
105
SIR HENRY WOTTON
met with no unconditional acceptance.
Ought we to applaud Wotton for his per-
sistence, or to blame him for an excess of
zeal ? The victory in diplomacy is not
always with those who ask least ; but in
the present instance the chances of success
were small, and Wotton is, at all events
not chargeable with the folly of having
formed too lofty an estimate of them. In
October, 1620, he congratulates an “old
friend "—whom one would like to be able
to identify, and who was probably one of
the numerous volunteers for the cause they
had both at heart?-on having exchanged
civil for military employment, “for no-
body knows better than yourself how slight
is the importance attached to ambassadors
in troubled times.” Well might he make
this reflexion, for the fictitious rumour of
a great Bohemian defeat which he men-
tions in this very letter was a week or two
later to come only too true. On Novem-
1 See the Latin letter, Reliquiæ, p. 515. The old
friend had written from Worms.
106
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
ber 8, the Battle of the White Hill at
Prague had once for all settled the ques-
tion of the Bohemian crown, and on the
same day Frederick and Elizabeth were
homeless fugitives. Behind them there set
in, as Wotton picturesquely expresses it,
"fluctuation and submission, the Ordinary
consequences of victory.”] The English
negotiations at Vienna hereupon begin at
once to turn upon the question of preserv-
ing the possession of the Palatinate itself to
the Electoral couple or to their children,
and in the first instance they largely take
the shape of protests against the pronounce-
ment of the ban of the Empire upon the
dethroned king. An ambassador who is
worth his salt understands how to take
his departure before that proceeding has
become quite inevitable; and Sir Henry
Wotton had “the Honor to be much ex
pected and desired at Venice." 2 Of his
1 Reliquiæ, p. 527.
2 The chief vexations of diplomatists, I imagine, are
for the most part of home growth; and Wotton had
manifestly felt much annoyed by having no sufficient
Or
107
SIR HENRY WOTTON
parting escapade at Vienna I have already
made mention ; you may expel human
nature by the choicest of snuff-boxes,
but it will persist in re-asserting itself.
Even, however, at Venice, where by
February, 1621, Sir Henry Wotton had
for the third time settled down at his resi-
dential post, he continued, while, as a
matter of course, attending to the king's
affairs in general—the Spanish marriage
project among the rest—to uphold as best
he could a cause which together with the
large majority of Englishmen he had much
more at heart than the furtherance of their
Sovereign's matrimonial projects and the
weaving of his other ropes of sand. The
Venetian Signiory had remained anything
but indifferent to the progress of affairs in
the Empire. In March, 1618, Wotton had
V
answer ready to the Spanish ambassador at Vienna
(Ouate), when the latter quoted a despatch of Buck-
ingham's as relieving the Spanish Government of any
imputation of breach of faith in ordering the invasion
of the Palatinate (Reliquiæ, p. 526).
1 Reliquiæ, p. 535 (1621).
108
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
been able to assure King James that the
Republic was by no means disinclined to
enter into a treaty with the Protestant
Union, more especially (this is highly
characteristic of Venetian policy) if she
need not take the initiative ;1 and later
in the same year negotiations had been
carried on between the Senate and the
Duke of Savoy with a view to the loan by
the former of some of its mercenaries in
the same interest.2 Late in 1621 or early
in 1622, Wotton informed the Lord
Keeper Williams that the Venetians were
watching the progress of affairs, and look-
ing forward to playing a part in them, but,
if possible, without provoking Spain.3
And some time in 1622, as it would seem
before the battles of Wimpfen and Höchst
had proved fatal to the cause of the Pala-
tine house, he, at the request of Frederick
and with the implied or assumed sanction
of James, made a direct appeal on its
i Gardiner, Letters etc., p. 50. . Ib., p. 167; cf.
Ritter's essay, cited above, p. 275. 3 Reliquice, p. 306.
109
SIR HENRY WOTTON
.
behalf to the Venetian Secretary of State.?
“His Majesty," said the ambassador, well
acquainted as he was with the aversion
entertained by the Signiory to overt ac-
tion, “would be content with a silent
contribution without noise."-£5,000 per
mensem was the figure specified. But
when, in reply, the Venetian official in-
sinuated that his Government had already
done something towards the support of the
United Provinces, by paying subsidies for
1 See the important despatch in Reliquiæ, pp. 536
seqq. Wotton says that he was “the better enabled"
to press his demand for some contribution to the
support of Mansfeld's army on the part of Venice
" by very careful instruction from Sir Dudley Carleton
under cypher, of the whole business as it stood.” It
is possible that some particulars as to this transaction
may be continued in the MS. notes by John Brydall,
on affairs of State, collected from the letters of Sir
Henry Wotton and Sir Dudley Carleton, preserved in
the library of Queen's College, Oxford. The Provost
mentions as likewise preserved there, a MS. book of
state, also by Brydall, chiefly relating to questions of
precedency among ambassadors of foreign States,
from the relations of Sir Henry Wotton and other
English ambassadors abroad, and a transcript of the
Parallel between Essex and Buckingham adverted to
below.
IIO
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Mansfeld's army, besides promising assist-
ance to France and Savoy in the “Rhætian
business” (the projected invasion, I sup-
pose, of the Tyrol), and that it expected
to have to furnish further aid in the
Grisons, Wotton shrugged his shoulders.
Would the Secretary of State be good
enough to furnish him with matter more
substantial for report to his Sovereign?
“For philosophy, whose naked Principles
I have studied more than Art of Language,
has taught me, even in one of her most
fundamental Maxims, that ex nihilo nihil
fit." He proved himself at times, we see,
in practice, whatever he might profess to
be in theory, a member of the plain-
speaking school of diplomacy; but he
concurred with the Venetian minister in
deeming it advisable to await in the first
instance the “issue of this Rhætian
noise,” which, in point of fact, by no means
remained without tangible results.
1 Viz., the Alliance of Paris between the Swiss
Cantons, Savoy and Venice (1623), the detachment
III
SIR HENRY WOTTON
But before these became manifest, Sir
Henry Wotton's third and last embassy
to Venice had come to an end, and Sir
Isaac Wake, who had for some time been
employed in negotiations with the Duke
of Savoy, and looking out-after the
manner of even the best-natured diploma-
tists--for Sir Henry's place, had arrived
to supersede him. Of Wotton's minor
diplomatic labours during his third am-
bassadorial period at Venice some inci-
dental notices have been preserved which
show him to have continued active in
endeavours harmonising with his religious
tendencies. He is found exerting himself
on behalf of an Englishman consigned to
the prison of the Inquisition at Rome for
of the Prätigau from the Tyrol, and the expulsion of
the Spaniards from the Valtelline (1624).
1 “Sir Henry Wotton," writes Wake to Bucking-
ham in June, 1619, “is departed from Venice, without
any purpose, as I understand, to returne thither any
more. If he continue in the same minde," etc., etc.
(Gardiner, Letters etc., p. III). There is no reason
for supposing that Wotton wished to quit his Venetian
post, either in 1616 or in 1622.
TS
II2
A BIOGRAPHICAL 'SKETCH
circulating King James' irrepressible Apo-
logy ;' and using his good offices at Venice,
we do not know precisely to what end, in
the matter of the return to Rome on his
self-deluded mission of the ex-Archbishop
of Spalato, with whom Wotton, like his
friend Bedell, was unmistakably in sym-
pathy. I am not aware to what part of
Tr
1 Reliquiæ, p. 314.
2 An account of the return journey of De Dominis, his
re-admittance into the Church of Rome by the Papal
Nuncio at Brussels, his final difficulties at Rome with
the Inquisition, and the posthumous proceedings against
him there, will be found in Dalrymple's Memorials,
etc., pp. 140 seqq., concluding with the not inappo-
site comment that "too much, perhaps, has been said
concerning a person whose fame greatly exceeded his
literary and controversial merit.” The problems
suggested by his strange career are briefly discussed
by Gardiner in his History of England, etc., vol. iv.,
pp. 282 seqq. Walton, in his Life of Wotton, refers
to what the latter did by direction of King James
with the Venetian State, concerning the Bishop of
Spalato's return to the Church of Rome," but omits
to particularise. King James, although he ultimately
permitted, strongly objected to the ex-Archbishop's
journey; yet Wotton must be concluded to have
sought to smooth his way. Bedell is said to have
corrected for De Dominis some of the blunders in
113
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Wotton's sojourn at Venice should be
ascribed the Hymn written by him “in
the time of a great sickness there,"—lines
in which the spirit of courage finding ex-
pression in almost every period of his
existence is sustained by a spirit of hu-
mility not less proper to so intrinsically
noble a nature. “The errors of his wan-
dering life," of which he speaks in this
poem, never impaired his simple trustful-
ness in a Strength that was not his own.
1
his work De Republicà Ecclesiasticâ, arising from his
ignorance of Greek; and in his curious discourse to
the representatives of the Union at Heilbronn (ante,
p. 101), Wotton reminds them “how greedy the
Italians were of our Treatises in matter of controversie,
and of divers ways that had been used both to excite
and to satisfie that curiosity, both by the works of the
Archbishop of Spalato, since his retirement into your
Majestie's protection,” and by a certain famous History
of the Council of Trent (Reliquiæ, p. 493).
114
III
TOR the moment, at the close of a period
T of public service which had extended
(with intervals) over more than seventeen
years, and had imposed upon him difficul-
ties and responsibilities beyond the com-
mon, Sir Henry Wotton found himself
stranded. During these years he had been
one of the busiest agents of a policy of
mediation which had proved signally un-
successful ; but so far as it had lain in him,
he had laboured to give that policy a bias
in better accordance with the national senti-
ment. And, as should not be forgotten, he
had achieved a conspicuous success at the
post where he had been regularly accredited,
by accomplishing what very able diploma-
tists (including English diplomatists) have
now and then been known to neglect, and
making himself a persona gratissima to the
Government whose goodwill he was in the
first instance commissioned to gain. Al-
1
vert
115
SIR HENRY WOTTON
1
though caution was the distinctive quality of
the Venetian authorities, they had not re-
fused to Wotton their confidence with re-
gard to their relations with Rome and with
Spain—the importance of which relations
to England hardly admitted of exaggera-
tion. But now the time had come for him
to discover—what in turn we all of us have
to discover,--that no man is indispensable.
Few diplomatists of his time had seen
more Courts and cities; few had negoti-
ated more treaties; and few had with
greater readiness spent their all in the
thankless service of the Crown. His Ger-
man mission, as he wrote to one who had
proved a friend in need, went near to
plunging him into “a most irrecoverable
ruine and shame."1 Even in Venice, as
it would appear, he had lived. “in an
expence above his appointments.”2 Now,
as I have said, he was stranded. “After
seventeen years,” he wrote to Buckingham,
1 Reliquic, pp. 353-4.
2 Burnet's Life of Bedell, p. 30.
116
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
upon whose patronage everything had by
this time come to depend in the State,
“of Foreign and continual employment,
either ordinary or extraordinary, I am
left utterly destitute of all possibility to
subsist at home; much like those Seal-
fishes, which sometimes (as they say) over-
sleeping themselves in Ebbing-water, feel
nothing about them but a dry shoar when
they awake. Which comparison I am fain
to seek among those Creatures, not know-
ing among men, that have so long served
so gracious a Master, any one to whom I
may resemble my unfortunate bareness.” 1
And, again, he more than once compares
himself to the cripple in the Gospel, who
lay so long by the Pool's side, and none
would throw him in. Scarcely any one, as
we shall see, set a greater value than he
did upon the blessings of rest and retire-
ment, but though the higher life comes not
by bread alone, bread is necessary for
sheer subsistence. And bread, alas! is not
1 Reliquiæ, p. 320. ? Ib., p. 318.
2
117
SIR HENRY WOTTON
earned easily when it has to be gained by
begging and suing, as was only too well
known to others besides Wotton, and not
less abounding in merit than he, both in the
days of King James, and in those of his
great predecessor on the English throne.
“Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide :
To lose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow ;
To have thy Princess' grace, yet want her Peeres”;
To have thy seeking, yet wait manie yeeres.”
Wotton, had it been of much immediate
moment to him, might certainly have held
himself assured of the “grace”--the per-
sonal goodwill—of King James I., with
whom nominally rested the decision of his
suit. It has been seen how he had gained
that goodwill by an act of daring devotion;
and he had retained it not only by indefatig-
able service, but also by the intelligence
the wit if you like—which understands how
to gratify where it serves. King James—I
do not know whether there was as much
118
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
glass near Theobalds then as there is
nowadays—seems to have been interested
in the cultivation of melons, and his am-
bassador took care to send him from
Venice selections of seeds, the fruit of
which we have all seen so many boat-loads
passing under the Rialto Bridge. And even
more seasonable was Wotton's skill in
humouring the King's belief in his own
wit and wisdom by sallies or turns of
phrase that seemed more or less overtly to
appeal to them, and such as could be
pointed out without difficulty in his letters
and despatches designed for the royal eye,
or again by so direct a tribute of recog-
nition as the dedication of his projected
Venetian history. But the King's favours
were only to be obtained through the
King's favourite; and it was on such kindly
feelings as Buckingham might entertain
towards him that Wotton's chances of a
comfortable settlement for his declining
years in point of fact depended. In the
unfinished Parallel afterwards composed
1
119
SIR HENRY WOTTON
by him between the patrons of his youthful
and of his later fortunes, Essex and Buck-
ingham, he declares himself “obnoxious to
the memory" of the Duke “neque injuriâ
neque beneficio "—that is to say, he owed
him neither a grudge for unkindness nor
gratitude for benefits—"saving that he
showed me an ordinary good countenance.”
Although as a matter of course, Wotton's
letters in the period of Buckingham's
ascendancy show a constant mindfulness of
the importance of conciliating the goodwill
of the first man in the country, it would be
utterly absurd to regard the execution of a
commission for pictures, or even the pre-
sentation of “two Boxes of poor things” in
the light of prospective bribes, or to
enquire too narrowly into the literary sin-
cerity of the high-flown compliments which
Wotton addressed to him on his sick-bed.2
1
YY
1 See the letters to Buckingham in Reliquiæ, pp.
315 and 304.
? There can, I presume, be no doubt that the
lines To a Noble Friend in his Sickness are correctly
superscribed in MS. Razul. Poet. : “On the Duke of
120
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
1
At a later date it fell to his lot to render a
substantial service to Buckingham's good
fame; but this was performed as a plain
piece of official work entrusted to him
by royal command. In his letters to
Buckingham-allowing for some courtly
flourishes—I can perceive no undue obse-
quiousness or unworthy flattery ; while in
the interesting biographical sketch which
he afterwards put forth under the title of
Buckingham sick of a fever. The following stanza,
which is quite in the vein of the Fantastic School, more
than one of whose poets shows a liking for images of
the surgery or the sick-room, points unmistakably
to him and his both roaming and politic ambition :
“Had not that blood, which thrice his veins did yield,
Been better treasured for some glorious day
At farthest West to paint the liquid field,
And with new worlds his Master's love to pay?"
1 To Wotton was committed in 1626, by order of the
Privy Council, an enquiry into the evidence of an im-
portant witness concerning the charges preferred against
Buckingham in a book by Dr. George Eglesham, one
of the King's physicians, of a design to poison the
King and other personages of importance. See his
letter to Buckingham (May, 1626), enclosing a copy
of his report, in Reliquiæ, pp. 545 seqq. Eglesham's
libel seems to have helped to fire the disordered brain
of Felton to his bloody deed (cf. Gardiner, History,
etc., vol. vi. P. 352).
I21.
SIR HENRY WOTTON
KA
The Life and Death of the Duke of Buck-
ingham his judgment of the most brilli-
antly successful and most bitterly detested
Englishman of his times is on the whole
fair in spirit as well as dignified in tone.?
The change of Buckingham's popularity
into its direct reverse seems to have
affected Wotton as a philosopher rather
than as a partisan ; nor can the pheno-
menon have seemed other than para-
doxical, that where two Kings in succession
had never wavered in their trust, popular
feeling should have chosen to prove fickle.
When Sir Henry Wotton returned to
England, he was promised, in addition to
the reversion of a minor place of profit,
the office of Master of the Rolls, so soon
as, Sir Julius Cæsar's tenure of it should
determine. Lawyers (and others) who
chance to be sexagenarians sometimes dis-
1 See also the Parallel between Buckingham and
Essex, and the letter to the Queen of Bohemia cited
ante, p. 88, note 1. Wotton appears to have been
signally impressed by the extraordinary revulsion in
the popular sentiment towards Buckingham.
122
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TIT
like speculations as to the date of their
dissolution ; and Sir Julius Cæsar preferred
to live on for an additional thirteen years.
But Sir Henry Wotton had not in vain
taken time by the forelock. Early in
April, 1623, the Provost of Eton (who,
like some other Scottish gentlemen of his
day, had found preferment) was known to
be sinking; and the news of his approach-
ing dissolution, in which Izaak Walton's
rather unctuous phraseology seems almost
to indicate a certain opportuneness, at once
brought into the field many earnest and
some important suitors for the succession.
Pre-eminent among them was the late
Lord Chancellor, the Viscount St. Albans,
the half-fierce style of whose letter of appli-
cation to the Secretary of State is under
the circumstances half-pathetic. But the
place had been promised beforehand to Sir
William Becher; and although even after
the Provost's death there was still “some
nibbling” at the appointment, Buckingham,
after his return from Spain in October,
123
SIR HENRY WOTTON
declared himself “engaged” to the appli-
cant in question, unless indeed some
means could be found of giving him "satis-
faction.” We may surmise that this was
the beginning of the really serious stage
of the contest, in which from first to last
quite a catalogue of competitors took part,
Bacon was now left out of account, having,
in the words of his biographer, “nothing
serious to give up." At one time or
another it seems to have included, among
others, Sir Robert Naunton, who had just
resigned, or was resigning, the Secretary-
ship of State ; Sir Dudley Carleton, a rival
diplomatist and son-in-law to the deceased
Provost's eminent predecessor, Sir Henry
Savile ;? and, oddly enough, Sir Henry
Wotton's own favourite nephew and former
Secretary at Venice, Sir Albertus Morton.
Finding himself among a pleiad thus con-
stituted, Wotton would, even apart from the
1 Sir Dudley Carleton, like Sir Henry Wotton,
appears to have applied for the reversion of the
Provostship of Eton already on the occasion of Sir
Henry Savile's illness in 1617.
I24
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TA
1
special instance of Viscount St. Albans,
have been chargeable with affectation, had
he, like the editor of his chief posthumous
work, set down the vacant Provostship as
"a place not considerable enough for a
person of his merit.”! The nodus lay in the
means of "satisfying" Sir William Becher;
and these were furnished by Wotton, who
placed at Buckingham's disposal the rever-
sion promised to him of the Mastership of
the Rolls, and thus enabled him to accom-
modate Sir William by means of a further
exchange of promises and preferments.
In the end, Sir Henry Wotton had "his
seeking," although he had to wait for it till
June 24th, 1624, when he was duly elected
Provost of Eton College, four days after
a royal mandate had issued in his favour.2
Thus it befel that he entered into the
haven destined to shelter him during the
1 1 See the editorial Preface to The State of
Christendom (1667).
2 Cf., with Walton's Life, Spedding's Letters and
Life of Francis Bacon, vol. vii. (1874), and Mr. Max-
well Lyte's History of Eton College (1875).
125
SIR HENRY WOTTON
<
whole of the concluding period of his
life, which most modern obituaries would
promptly dismiss as fifteen years of un-
eventful tranquillity.
It is of these years that Izaak Walton,
who wrote his obituaries in a rather dif-
ferent spirit, has left us one of those pic-
tures whose delicate tints only a very rash
hand would attempt to retouch. What
little therefore I have to add concerning
this part of the life of Sir Henry Wotton,
which was neither all idyll nor all elegy,
but rather a more than commonplace
conclusion of a more than commonplace
career, must here be told with a concise-
ness which even to natures less expansive
than that of the friend of Wotton's old age
will not I hope seem intentionally bald.
Perhaps, therefore, I may be held ex-
cused from dwelling on those little miseries
which now and then-but not, I think, all
things being considered, relatively very
often or very seriously, interrupted the
“soft running" of these years, bound
7
126
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Ocean-ward like the great English river
on whose banks they were spent. When
Wotton went down to Eton after being
elected Provost, he was so ill-provided with
money that the Fellows of the College
were “fain to furnish his bare walls”;
and some little time elapsed before he
managed to obtain £ 500 out of the arrears
due to him of his official pay as an am-
bassador. The income of the Provostship
itself was meagre, consisting of but a fifth
of the sum just named, in addition to
board, lodging, and allowances; and the
Provost, like the Ambassador before him,
seems never to have quite managed to
make ends meet. On one occasion, in-
deed, he was actually arrested for debtma
strange vicissitude, we may think, to be-
fall a Provost of Eton, but hardly to be
reckoned as discreditable to him, since it
happened to him when coming from the
Lord Treasurer's, from whom he had been
soliciting payment of a sum due to him
on account of his services abroad, twenty
127
SIR HENRY WOTTON
times greater than the claim which he was
unable to answer. In that epoch incomes
were most speedily augmented by profi-
ciency in the art of begging-a term more
highly technical then than perhaps at any
subsequent time; and Wotton, as he writes
late in his life, owned himself "con-
demned, he knew not how, by Nature to
a kind of unfortunate bashfulness in his
own Business." Still, he was not abso-
lutely silent in his own behalf; and in 1628
we find him laying before King Charles
the whole tale of his pecuniary embarrass-
ments, and asking for a small allowance
reserved from the income of the Master-
ship of the Rolls, and (he had by this time
taken Holy Orders) "for the next good
Deanery that shall be vacant by Death or
Remove."? In the previous year the king
had granted Wotton a pension of £200,
and this was in 1630 very generously
raised to £500, in order to enable him to
i To the Lord Treasurer Westor (Reliquiæ, p. 336).
* Reliquia, pp. 562 seqq.
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A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
write a History of England, and to obtain
the requisite clerical assistance for the pur-
pose. Yet to the last he was occasionally
again obliged to resort to those pitiful
appeals which must have been so irksome
to his spirit of independence; as late as
1637 he is found making application to
the King for the Mastership of the Savoy,
should its present holder be promoted to
the Deanery of Durham, and sending his
letter through the hand of the Archbishop
of Canterbury (Laud), "which in our
lower Sphere is via lactea."1 Fortun-
ately for Wotton, in whose otherwise well-
ordered career the course of his money
affairs never seems to have run smooth, he
possessed through the greater part of his
life one " friend of trust,” ? upon whom
he could depend for assistance in business
transactions of all kinds, and who with
that indefatigable unselfishness by which
such good men are apt to ease the troubles
of their so-called “betters,” never failed to
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 340-2. ? Ib., p. 304.
1
129
K
SIR HENRY WOTTON
come forward in the hour of need with
counsel or cash. The name of Nicholas
Pey, one of the Clerks of the King's
Kitchen, should find a place in every bio-
graphical account of Sir Henry Wotton.
I saw the other day in a newspaper a
paragraph wherein the utmost astonish-
ment was expressed that one of the most
distinguished, as he is one of the most
accomplished, of living English diplo-
matists should, at the close of his period of
active service, have retired to live the life
of a country gentleman, looking after his
own estates. The writer would doubtless
have thought it more in accordance with
the fitness of things, had this gifted man of
action, as well as of letters, withdrawn into
indolence and sunshine on the Riviera or
the Bay of Naples. Not one of Sir Henry
Wotton's fifteen years of retirement can
have seemed long to him; for his mind
was one of those to which nothing is so
intolerable as stagnation. The beginning
of his philosophy of life was to abstain
130
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
11
from looking back with unavailing regrets
upon an era to which, when once aban-
doned, there is, as every wise man who
has “retired from business ” knows, no
returning. We find him, indeed, con-
fessing to a friend : "Although I am now
a retired and cloystered man, yet there
still do hang upon me, I know not how,
some reliques of a harking humor"Z_he
means, a lingering fondness for political
gossip which in his days there were no
evening gazettes brought down to College
to satisfy. As a matter of course, he
shows an interest in diplomatic negotia-
tions such as those in which Sir Thomas
Roe-a kindred spirit, and a devoted
adherent like himself of the Queen of
Hearts-was sent to take part at Hamburg
in 1637 or 1638, and which Wotton likens.
to “an Antiphone to the other malign
Conjunction at Colen."? He attentively
1 Reliquiæ, p. 373.
2 Preliminary peace-conferences were held at
Hamburg and at Cologne between the Protestant and
the Catholic powers respectively.
131
SIR HENRY WOTTON
follows the progress of the great war, both
in its fortunate turns, when Bernhard of
Weimar was reported to have done miracles
“upon the Danuby, the river sometimes of
our merry passage," and when the reviving
prospects of the Palatine house once more
became obscured. But “as for Novelties
of State,” he confessed himself to be little
better than a rusticus expectans ; and as
for hopes and fears concerning such
things, he had come to rest in the con-
viction : “the best philosophy is Voluntas
tua fiat, Domine." ?
His days at Eton were, however, very
far from being spent, as he humorously
pretends, in standing agape for "cold
icesickles” of news from London. The
College itself, to begin with, claimed no
small share of his leisure, and he gave it
most ungrudgingly. As a place both of
learning and of education Eton had taken
1 To John Dinely, December roth, 1633. (Reli-
quia, p. 569.) Wotton was at Linz in 1620, which
may be the occasion referred to.
2 Reliquiæ, pp. 569 (1633), 577–8 (1638).
132
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
a distinct step forward under Sir Henry
Savile's provostship; and everything
tends to show that this advance was fully
maintained under his next successor but
one. The elections of foundation scholars
to Eton, and from Eton to King's,
necessarily occupied the Provost and
Fellows very largely ; and on such
occasions they received letters and mes-
sages enough to make them, as Wotton
writes, “think themselves Electors of the
Empire."2 His own letters are full of
references to this branch of his official
responsibilities, although his was not the
sort of spirit that derives inexhaustible
gratification from the exercise of functions
such as these. They were not made any
the easier by the necessity of now and
then resisting commendations from the
1 Wotton himself in one of his letters (Reliquiæ,
P. 451) seems to compare Westminster School with
Eton rather to the advantage of the former; but his
point seems to be that the Westminster boys had a
more certain chance of preferment to either of the
two Universities. 2 Reliquiæ, p. 567.
133
SIR HENRY WOTTON
Crown or from its principal ministers, or
by the hardship of having to reject a
protégé of the Queen of Bohemia because
he had made the mistake of being born at
Delft. In addition to the King's Scholars,
however, Eton was already in those days
much frequented by boys not on the
foundation, then called "commensals,
many of whom appear to have been the
sons of noble families. The Provost
adopted the practice of taking from time to
time boys out of the School to reside in
his own Lodge, where they enjoyed the
advantage of daily intercourse with him.
In the School at large he showed a warm
and continuous interest, paying frequent
visits to it and encouraging the scholars
with pregnant words of wisdom ; and it
was he who was at the pains of adorning
the wooden pillars of the Lower Chamber
with pictures of the great classic authors,
so as to make it a kind of House of Fame
1 See the case at length, Reliquiæ p. 570, seqq.
? See Mr. Maxwell Lyte, u.s.
134
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
AZ
in miniature. Among the Fellows of the
College we may gather that the new
Provost was popular from the first. As
time went on, he became intimately
associated with the most learned scholar
and original thinker in the Society,--
"our Bibliotheca ambulans, as I use to
call him "2_the" ever memorable" John
Hales. Sir Henry Wotton, we cannot
doubt, was attracted to this most interest-
ing personage by something more than
the profound resources of his learning ;
—to such as these he could not himself
pretend, but he shared with John Hales
an irrepressible desire for intellectual free-
dom and an impatient abhorrence of vain
dogmatic disputations.
Not long after his election to the
Provostship, Sir Henry Wotton had taken
Deacon's Orders. Should there perchance
1 See Walton's Life.
2 Reliquiæ, p. 475 (1638). In the interesting
notice of John Hales by Dr. W. Wallace in Sir Henry
Craik's English Prose, vol. ii. p. 184, the authorship
of this designation seems to be attributed to Wood.
rell
135
SIR HENRY WOTTON
U
seem anything strange in this proceeding
it must be remembered, in the first place,
that ordination was required from the
Provost by the Statutes of the College,
and that Wotton is therefore to be com-
mended for not having, like some other
Heads, left the Statutes to take care of
themselves. He exhibited, indeed, moral
courage in braving the comments which
then, as now, are bestowed on any act
that is unusual, whether or not it is in
itself warranted; and, in words which
well became both his new and his old
profession, he expressed a hope, that
“Gentlemen and Knights' Sons, who are
trained up with us in a Seminary of
Church-men (which was the will of the
Holy Founder) will, by my example
(without vanity be it spoken), not be
ashamed, after the sight of Courtly
Weeds, to put on a Surplice.” In the
same very striking letter to the King,
while modestly deprecating, under the
1 Reliquiæ, p. 328.
TIT
VVU
136
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
special circumstances of his ordination,
any intention of assuming a cure of souls,
he avows himself unwilling to “sit and
do nothing in the Porch of God's House,
whereinto he is entred.” But his private
study would have to be “his Theater
rather than a Pulpit, and his Books his
Auditors, as they were all his Treasure."
If it should be in his power to do so, he
would utilise both his reading and his long
experience abroad in an exposure of the
“arts and practices” of Rome; and
should he prove unable to "produce any-
thing else for the use of Church and
State, yet it would be comfort enough to
the little remnant of his life to compose
some Hymns unto His endless glory,
Who had called him, though late, to His
Service, yet early to the knowledge of His
truth, and sense of His mercy.” These
passages appear to me to throw a very
searching light upon the deeper workings
of Sir Henry Wotton's mind; and so much
of a piece are all its labours and their
IS
137
SIR HENRY WOTTON
products, that no words could more fit-
tingly than those which I have cited
introduce what little remains to be added
about his literary writings.
It is impossible to assert that, as a
whole, these admit of being described as
worthy of his powers. We may attach no
very special tributes paid to the abilities
in question by Sir Richard Baker, the
Chronicler, and Thomas Bastard, the Epi-
grammatist; we may refuse to allow our-
selves to be overpowered either by the
turgid panegyric of Cowley,' or by the
statement-almost an epitaph in itself-
that Bacon made a collection of his kins-
man's apophthegms. But there is not much
that Wotton has left behind him, either
in prose or in verse, which does not bear
the stamp of his individuality, or, in other
words, which is without a style of its own.
N
1 Cowley was always going beyond himself in one
way or another. This elegy contains two tours de
force of this sort :-
“He's gone to heav'n on his fourth embassy";
and
“ He dy'd lest he should idle grow at last.”
138
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Nor am I aware what else it is that makes
a writer interesting (though many other
things may make him instructive or
amusing), and how else this result is to
be achieved, than by letting your heart
and soul flow into your pen. Wotton
cannot in reason have at any time ex-
pected a solid literary reputation from
what he had actually produced ; indeed,
on one occasion, when something that
he had contrived to bring up to the stage
of publication had attracted a certain
amount of attention at Oxford and Cam-
bridge, as well as at Brussels, he declared,
with unfeigned astonishment, how he had
hitherto "thought in good faith, that as
he had lived (he thanked God) with little
Ambition, so he could have died with as
much Silence as any man in England. 1
And perhaps it is not matter for much
marvelling, that when at a time of life
rarely coinciding with the height of a
man's productive energy the requisite
1 Reliquiæ, pp. 358-9.
N1
W
139
SIR HENRY WOTTON
1
Y
leisure came to him at last, he should have
proved far more ready to plan and design
in the way of authorship than to carry into
execution. His chief politico-historical
work, The State of Christendom, which
has been already briefly described, was
written in the years of his prime; and in
this branch of composition, for which he
was from more than one point of view
specially qualified, he never completed
anything worth placing by the side of his
firstfruits. The biographical sketches of
Buckingham and Essex, and one or two
other attempts of the same description,
although always readable and freely
adorned by wise and witty passages, fall
short even of the force of outline such as
we might imagine to have been developed
into portraits like Clarendon's. The
politics of Sir Henry Wotton's later days,
though still exciting his interest, never
seriously occupied his pen; and the one
exception that might perhaps be cited, the
1 Ante, pp. 36-40.
TS
140
·
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Panegyrick to King Charles, addressed
to that sovereign on his return from his
coronation in Scotland (1633), was
written in Latin, and put into English by
another hand after the King's death.l. The
piece is curious, although perhaps less
creditable to the author's insight into the
signs of the times at home than to a
certain candour of soul that rises above
flattery. He holds the King fortunate in
not having been born to the crown; in
having succeeded to the hopes surround-
ing an elder brother who was the nation's
darling ; in having been at first himself
weak of body. The moral discipline of
such circumstances as these would hardly
have been suggested by a mere courtier as
a theme of congratulations. On the other
hand, the panegyrist is well within the
limits of both subjective and objective
veracity when he sympathetically praises
in Charles his religious mind, and the
sincerity of his good intentions towards
1 See the title-page in Reliquiæ, p. 135.
141
SIR HENRY WOTTON
COl
11
both Church and people. When, in the
course of the same essay or address, he
extols the king more particularly for having
suppressed debate on "high points of the
creed, which pulpits and pens might have
overrun," we are constrained to hold our
breath ; for what was the meaning of this
allusion to the Declaration issued by
Charles I. in 1628 but a plea for the view
of Laud-and of some honest men who
have lived after Laud-that the duty of
the clergy lies in the enforcement of rules
of conduct rather than in the discussion of
points of dogma ? “In my opinion,”
1 There are some other points in this Panegyrick
which seem to me discriminating and true, but
which are hardly noticeable in the same degree as
that adverted to above. The writer shows his loyalty
to both the king and the principles of monarchical
government in praising the constancy of Charles to-
wards Buckingham. He little dreamt how dearly the
king would have to pay for being driven out of his
constancy towards Strafford.
2 Cf. the observations on the King's Declaration
(1628) in Gardiner's History of England, etc., vol.
vii. pp. 20, seqq. Among Sir Henry Wotton's poems
is an Ode to the King, written on the same occasion
of his return from Scotland.
142
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
exclaims Wotton, “ the itch of disputation
is the scab of the Churches.” The saying,
to which we shall find him recurring with
complacency when thinking of his end,
may have a harsh and unpleasant sound
in our ears; but St. Paul had said much
the same thing in nobler words : “Where-
as there is among you envying, and strife,
and divisions, are ye not carnal ?”.
To Wotton's fragmentary contributions
to the history of Venice, of which he had
at one time proposed to lay a connected
narrative at the feet of King James, I need
not in this place return; their quality is
here and there of the finest, but their
quantity is altogether disappointing. Pro-
bably most historical students will agree
with me in the wish that Wotton had kept
his promise to King James, rather than
entered into a fresh undertaking, destined
to remain even more utterly barren, to
write à History of England at the request
of King Charles. Of this nothing re-
mains—but assuredly something further
143
SIR HENRY WOTTON
hu
must at least have been sketched--beyond
a brief character of William the Con-
queror, and a few sentences apparently
designed for the opening of a life of
Henry VI. This latter fragment possesses
a mournful interest ; for it seems to have
been indited as a kind of protest against
the numbness of hand, which in old age is
not always dissociated from the velleities
of activity. “There is but little difference.
between those who are silent and those
who are dead”;-surely it argues at least
the consciousness of a literary mind to be
so sensitive to the irony of this last dis-
tinction without a difference. In favour
of this History of England, which was
never written, Wotton had relinquished the
project of a Life of Luther, of the ardour
of whose very style he seemed in his
earlier days to have caught the contagion."
1 I cannot refrain from quoting a passage from one
of Wotton's letters from Italy to Lord Zouch (1592)
in illustration of the above remark: "I have seen her"
-her of the Apocalypse "mounted on her chair,
gazing on the ground, reading, speaking, attir'd and dis-
I 44
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TY
But one may be pardoned for hinting that
one would have sacrificed even the Life of
Luther for the Life of Donne, for which
Wotton in his last years requested Izaak
Walton to supply him with materials.
They served eventually for the earliest of
Walton's own inimitable five biographies ;
but something has been lost in the record
of the personal life of a man. of genius,
which was to have been written by one
· who had known and loved him before he
underwent the refinement of affliction and
ascesis.
Together with the entertaining although
intrinsically unimportant Elements of
Architecture, and the opening section-all
that was printed-of the Survey of Educa-
tion (much to be commended to the votaries
1
rob'd by the Cardinals ... in both her Mitres,
in her Triple-Chair, in her Lectica, on her Moyl, at
Mass and lately in public consistory. ... Of
Rome, in short, this is my Opinion, That her Delights
on Earth are sweet, and her Judgments in Heaven
heavy." Compare Luther's memoranda of his visit to
Rome in 1511 (Köstlin, Martin Luther (1883) II.
Buch, 2. Kapitel).
145
SIR HENRY WOTTON
of the new branch of research known as
Child-Study, and also to the adherents of
the ancient theory that what a child does
not like it must lump), as well as with a
religious Meditation or two, dating from
his later years, the above list comprises
nearly all the known prose compositions,
forming each a separate whole, executed,
begun or planned by Sir Henry Wotton.
It would, however, be to pass by one of
the most characteristic products of his pen,
were I to omit a special reference to the
so-called Aphorisms of Education, which in
the Reliquice Wottonianæ are subjoined to
the unfinished survey of the same endless
theme, and which I have more than once
put under incidental contribution in the
course of the present sketch. Bacon, we
remember, himself a master of gnomic
wisdom, collected Wotton's aphorisms;
and there was probably no literary form
better suited to his genius than this,
wherein his age took so great a delight,
unless it were the cognate form of
146
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TY
characters, in which so many of his con-
temporaries, from observers like Earle and
Overbury to the great historical writer
whose name has already been mentioned,
succeeded in excelling. Both forms were
in harmony with the sententious tendencies
of the silver age of our English Renascence,
and not less significant of the decay among
us of that far mightier literary form, the
Elizabethan drama, of which they may be
regarded as partial reminiscences. But this
by the way. In Wotton's case everything
combined to perfect in him the art of pithy
and pregnant diction :-the literary tastes
of his age to which I have just referred ;
his personal experience of the profession
of an ambassador, or (as the office was
still designated from one of its chief func-
tions) an orator; and the leisurely habits
of his later years at Eton, when he would
never finish a visit to the School without,
in Walton's words, " dropping some choice
Greek or Latin apophthegm or sentence
that might be worthy of a room in the
As
147
SIR HENRY WOTTON
memory of a growing scholar.” The
Aphorisms of Education are in my judg-
ment of rare excellence, wise without un-
called-for solemnity, shrewd without an
unpleasant flavour of cynicism ;—but the
liking for strings of polished stones is an
acquired one, and some of us have never
been able to acquire it. The strong witti-
ness of style for which this production is
pre-eminently noticeable will, however, be
found exemplified in a less provocative
fashion in almost every page of Wotton's
prose. It brings his set compositions
home to us with the ease of familiar letters,
while his letters in their turn impress their
purpose with the force of oratorical design.
His pen is never at a loss for simile or
metaphor, now bold, now homely, but
always telling, and introduced without
effort as pearls are cast up by the sea.
Does he press his counsels upon the im-
movable Signiory,—he calls it “digging
in a rock of diamonds”; is he hopelessly
entangled in an Eton scholarship election,
1
148
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
he professes himself “as intricate as a
Flea in a bottom of Flax”; is he sending
from Italy to his beloved nephew, Sir
Edmund Bacon, a bunch of everlastings,
they are “in Winter and Summer the
same, and therein an excellent type of a
Friend”; is he watching the restless
competition at Court for place and pay,-
"methinks we are all overclouded with
that sleep of Jacob, when he saw some
ascending and some descending ; but that
those were Angels, and these are Men.
For in both, what is it but a Dream ?”
Of the above examples, taken almost at
random from his correspondence, the last
two may also serve to remind us of the
poetic instincts which were to the last alive
in Wotton, but for which he had found so
few opportunities of direct expression that
it seems difficult to claim for him any
distinct place of his own among our
English poets.
Yet that he should be included in their
band there can be no manner of doubt.
149
SIR HENRY WOTTON
1
The true touch is to be found, not only
in the lovely stanzas dedicated to the Royal
Mistress of his fancies, or in the pungent
lines on the inconstancy of a lady of less
high degree, to which I do not propose
to return. Wherever his verse has a
religious cast, it seems, notwithstanding
the elaboration of phrase that was com-
mon to all the courtly poets of the earlier
Stuart period, to come from the heart to
the heart. Such, for instance, is the effect
made upon me by a poem of Wotton's
later years, the Tears at the Grave of Sir
Albertas Morton, his nephew and the
1 The death of Sir Albertas Morton 'appears to
have taken place in 1625. As to the distinguished
career of this diplomatist, who was secretary to the
Princess Elizabeth when at Heidelberg, and, after
filling other diplomatic posts, ultimately rose to be
one of the Secretaries of State, see Wood, vol. ii.
p. 253. In 1628 Wotton sent the King, through
his friend, her secretary, John Dinely, the epitaph on
Lady Morton, who had been married to Sir. Albertas
in 1624, and survived him for two years only :-
“He first deceased. She for a little tryed
To live without him : liked it not, and dyed.”
Since Wotton commends the epitaph as “worth the
Queen's hearing, for the passionate plainness,” it
150
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
companion of his earliest official labours
at Venice, whom he seems to have loved
with a peculiar tenderness, and who was
himself an accomplished man and a writer
of verse :-
“Dwell thou in endless light, discharged soul,
Freed now from Nature's and from Fortune's
trust,
While in this fluent globe my glasse shall role,
And run the rest of my remaining dust.”.
And in the celebrated lines entitled The
Character of a Happy Life, which may
with certainty be assigned to Wotton, and
which Ben Jonson told Drummond of
Hawthornden he had by heart,1 Wotton's
muse may fairly be held to have soared to
the greatest height within the reach of her
wings. No doubt it may be said with
cannot have been by him, and indeed it is in the
Reliquiæ (p. 560) marked as “Authoris Incerti.”
1 By a slip of the tongue or pen he is made to
attribute it to Sir Edward Wotton. See Conversa-
tions, edited for the Shakespeare Society by D. Laing
(1842). In a note reference is made to the copy
of these verses, taken from the original in Ben Jon-
son's handwriting in Collier's Memoirs of Edward
Alleyn, as varying materially from the copies as printed
in the several editions of the Reliquice.
151
SIR HENRY WOTTON
TO
VI1
truth that such a poem as this is in
some sense, like the Characters and the
Aphorisms touched upon above, a pro-
duct of the age whose mark it bears, and
again that neither in depth nor in fire
can it compare with Wordsworth's Happy
Warrior, which it can hardly fail at once
to call to the mind of any English reader.
Yet it is not the less a beautiful poem,
and the genuine aspiration of a noble and
manly soul, which among all the changes
and chances of the world had not alien-
ated the God-given power of possessing
itself in quiet:
“How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will ;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill ;
Whose passions not his masters are ;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath.
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall :
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And, having nothing, yet hath all.” 1
1 In a letter to Notes and Queries, vol. ix. p. 421
152
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
While every ear recognises the true
ring in a poetic philosophy such as this,
(May 6th, 1854), Mr. J. Macray pointed out "the
almost perfect identity of these verses with some in-
cluded in the Geistliche und Weltliche Gedichte of
George Rudolf Weckherlin, a German poet contem-
porary with Wotton. The two men must have come
into personal contact with one another ; for after leav-
ing Germany, possibly in the suite of the Elector Pala-
tine, Weckherlin was in 1620 appointed Secretary of
the so-called German Chancery-a department, as we
should say, of the Foreign Office which was in that
year established in London ; and here, after being in
1644 appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues, and
in 1649 superseded in this office by Milton, he died
in 1653. Inasmuch as his first volume of verse was
not published before 1616, and his Geistliche und
Weltliche Gedichte not till 1641 (with a preface dated
.1639), the probability that Wotton's lines were the
original, and Weckherlin's a translation, of the Char-
acter of a Happy Man, amounts almost to a certainty.
Wotton's poem is said by Dr. Hannah to have been
printed in 1614, together with Overbury's Wife, and
to have been traced at Dulwich (I presume by Collier)
with the date 1616.
Weckherlin occupies a notable position in the his-
tory of German poetic literature ; but there is much
difficulty in determining the relative claims of Opitz
and himself to the introduction of certain reforms in
versification. See Koberstein's Grundriss, vol. i.
(1847), p. 565; and cf. Hermann Fischer's interesting
notice of Weckherlin in Allgemeine Deutsche Bio-
153
SIR HENRY WOTTON
PT
the almost theatrical cynicism of the well-
known lines beginning
..."The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span,"
has to my ear no solid sound; and the
rather pompous rhetoric of the companion
heroics superscribed A Farewell to the
Vanities of the World almost conveys the
impression of an additional vanity. But
neither of these two pieces, nor a small
group of others which have been carelessly
ascribed to Wotton, possess any claim to
be considered his; and the question as to
their authorship need not be pursued
here. He cannot, I fear, be relieved of
I
graphie, vol. xli. (1896). I have not yet succeeded
in seeing Conz, Nachrichten von dem Leben und den
Schriften R. Weckherlin's (1803).
1 They were not printed by Dyce in his edition
of Sir Henry Wotton's Poenis (Percy Society's Pub-
lications, vol. vi., 1842); but they find a place, not,
however, without the necessary notes and queries,
in the Poems of Sir Henry Wotton included by
Dr. Hannah in a delightful volume (1891) with
those of Sir Walter Raleigh, and of other Courtly
Poets. Most of them were printed in the Re-
liquiæ as “found among Sir Henry Wotton's
154
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
the responsibility for one or two common-
place ditties in honour of King Charles,
and of the birth of his hopeful heir; but
we shall prefer to bid good-bye to him as a
poet “on a Banck as he sate a-fishing.”
This pretty picture-drawn to the life-
of an English country scene-let us say,
near a turn of Thames below the Eton
Playing-fields—" is said by Izaak Walton
to have been composed by the Provost
of Eton when beyond seventy years of
age, and cannot in any case have been
written more than a very few years before
papers," some of them with the signature "Ignoto,"
which need not be taken to imply more than its
literal meaning. The Description of the Country's
Recreations, referred to in my text, bears this signa-
ture; but it is cited as "doubtless made either by Sir
Henry Wotton, or by a lover of angling” in The
Compleat Angler, where Piscator recites to Victor,
at the close of their communings, in an arbour
at Tottenham, over "a bottle of sack, and milk and
oranges and sugar, which, put together, made a
drink too good for anybody but anglers."
1 Wotton and Walton were, according to Mr. Max-
well Lyte, in the habit of fishing together at Black
Potts, on the Thames, just below the Playing-fields,
still a fréquent resort of the fish.
panich necaning
á to 11 ubtless
155
SIR HENRY 1
WOTTON
his death. These sunny lines, which have
something about them of Marvell's most
charming manner, are to me far more
attractive than the more celebrated De-
scription of the Country's Recreations,
which may or may not have been written
by Wotton, but which, though not devoid
of a touch or two of genuine poetry,
strikes me as not altogether in a vein
characteristic of him. In the simpler
piece we seem almost to stand face to face
with him as on the fair spring morning he
glances along the river bank for the com-
panion of “his idle time, not idly spent”:
“And now all nature seemed in love ;
The lusty sap began to move;
New juice did stir the embracing vines,
And birds had drawn their valentines;
The jealous trout that low did lie,
Rose at a well-dissembled fy:
There stood my friend with patient skill,
Attending of his trembling quill.”
The friend was, of course, no other than
Izaak Walton in propria personā, to whom
Wotton's verse and Wotton himself owe
not a little of their celebrity; who
TL
TL
156
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
S
collected his literary remains; who nar-
rated his life in the monograph, full of
both dignity and piety, which I have so
freely used in this sketch ; and who found
another fit place for his praise in that
English classic, The Compleat Angler.
Perhaps it may be reckoned as a service
rendered by Sir Henry Wotton to our
national literature, that he never carried
out the intention attributed to him by
Walton of writing a discourse of the art of
which he was a dear lover, and in praise of
angling ; "and doubtless,” adds this guile-
less friend and admirer, “he had done so,
if death had not prevented him.” For
had Wotton's book not proved stillborn,
Izaak Walton might have left his own
unwritten; and we should have lost a
picture-book of English life unique in the
charm of its sweet simplicity.
The friendship between this oddly, but
most happily assorted pair, and the sur-
roundings amidst which they enjoyed the
peaceful pleasures of their intercourse,
157
SIR HENRÝ WOTTON
1
form one of the most attractive of the
episodes in the life of Sir Henry Wotton.
Izaak Walton was so richly endowed with
the gift of reverence and of that sympa-
thetic appreciativeness which is often only
another word for the same thing, that it
seems quite out of place to wonder how
he, a simple London tradesman, could
become the very embodiment of some of
the most romantic elements in the spirit of
the Caroline age. As to the author of a
justly celebrated romance of our own days,
in which one side of the life of those of
Charles I. is revived with true imaginative
power, so to. Walton everything came
directly home that was morally ennobling
and refining in contemporary English
churchmanship; nor could he look other-
wise than with repugnance upon the revolt
which anathematised his ideals. The ·
1 The passage in Walton's Life of Bishop Sander-
son, cited in Zouch's Life of Izaak. Walton, seems
worth citing again : “When I look back upon the
ruin of families, the bloodshed, the decay of common
honesty, and how the former piety and plain dealing
158
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
force of such a repugnance as this should
be taken into account in estimating the
sentiments which were entertained by
many gentle-hearted and sober-minded
men towards the revolution imminent in
the closing period of Wotton's life, and
which were very outspokenly shared by
himself. It is needless to multiply
illustrations of a feeling intelligible
enough, at all events in its foundations ;
but I may quote a passage from one of the
very last of the letters remaining from
his hand, and written when the Scotch
Covenanters and Charles I. were actually
levying war upon one another, and when
they had been openly charged by their
Sovereign with a desire to overthrow his
authority on the pretence of religion :-
“The Covenanters in Scotland, they say, will have
none but Jesus Christ to reign over them. A Sacred
of this now sinful nation is turned into cruelty and
cunning; when I consider that, I praise God that He
prevented me from being of that party which helped
to bring in the covenant, and those sad confusions
that followed it.”
159
SIR HENRY WOTTON
M
Cover of the deepest Impiety. God open their eyes,
and soften their hearts.... Never was there
such a stamping and blending of Rebellion and
Religion together.”1
Perfectly at one in their political opinions
and religious convictions, this pair of
worthies equally agreed in that calm
enjoyment of nature which descends upon
most of us in the evening of our lives,
whereas youth, without thinking much
harm, skips over this and similar blessings.
Izaak Walton, it should be remembered,
was by some quarter of a century the
junior of Sir Henry Wotton ; but his
inborn gravity of disposition, through
which his humour twinkles at moments
like the stars through a half-veiled sky,
must have rendered him a fit companion
for an expansive old age like that of his
much-experienced friend. In The C012-
pleat Angler, occasional testimony is
borne to Wotton's observation of bio-
logical facts; but even apart from this, it
would be difficult to doubt the truthfulness
1 Reliquiæ, p. 580 (April 21, 1639).
160
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
of the cabinet-picture of him presented in the
same delightful book,' to be subsequently
enlarged into a full length :-
“That undervaluer of money, the late Provost of
Eaton Colledg, Sir Henry Wotton (a man with whom
I have often fish'd and convers’d), a man whose
forraign employments in the service of this nation,
and whole experience, learning, wit and cheerfulness,
made his company to be esteemed one of the delights
of mankind; this man, whose very approbation of
angling were sufficient to convince any modest
censurer of it, this man was also a most dear lover,
and a frequent practicer of the art of angling."
1 I quote from the reprint of the 1653 edition.
2 It may be noted in passing that against whatever
kind of censure Izaak Walton may have been anxious
to defend his favourite pastime, no conception of its
partaking in any degree of the immorality imputed
to field-sports ever so much as entered his mind.
Could he have supposed any "censurer" capable of
questioning the humanity, as towards the fish, of
one who joyed to gaze upon their very shape and
enameli'd hues, agreeing with Solomon that every-
thing is beautiful,—just because the fish might
chance to have a hook in his mouth, and to have
been baited with a live frog? Or would he have
pleaded, as to the latter, that he had taken care to
enjoin upon the novice to tie the frog's leg above the
upper joint to the armed wire, with the precaution:
“Use him as though you loved him, that is, harme
him as little as you may possibly, that he may live
the longer”?
I6I
A
SIR HENRY WOTTON
And he goes on to say that the descrip-
tion of the spring morning quoted above,
composed in the last year of the writer's
life, warrants the earnest belief that
"peace, and patience, and a calm content
did cohabit in the cheerful heart of Sir
Henry Wotton."
According to the same unimpeachable
authority, the aged Provost was often
heard to say that he "would rather live
five May months than forty Decembers.”
But after he had written the lightsome
lines, in which an English May, seems to
blossom up before our eyes, he was but
once again to "welcome the new-liveried
year.” When the strength of his man-
hood had given way, he had begun to
confess to his faithful “ Nic." and others,
how he occasionally suffered from the
spleen and other complaints; and, retaining
an active mind even in such matters, he
had tried divers remedies, both English
and Italian. But until nearly the last he
seems to have changed few of the ordinary
habits of his life, continuing to pay an
1
162
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
as
annual visit to the place of his birth in
Kent, and another to Oxford. Two
years before his death he was still, as an
incorrigible man of letters, reviving old
plans of publications and projecting new;
he has, so he writes, “divers things in
wild sheets” (a phrase of which few
authors will fail to appreciate the force),
" that think and struggle to get out, of
several kinds, some long promised, and
some of a newer conception.” 2 At the
same time he was carrying on his corre-
spondence with old friends and new,
among the former mindful as ever of the
Queen of Bohemia and her dependants,
and among the latter writing only in 1638
to Mr. John Milton. This distinguished
young scholar, who had of late resided
at his father's house in the village of
Horton, about five miles from Eton, was
about to start on a continental tour, and
1 "An Academy," he writes to the Queen of
Bohemia before going up to the Encania in 1636,
" will be the best Court for my Humor." Reliquiæ,
P. 338.
2 Ib., p. 468 (1637).
163
SIR HENRY WOTTON
had waited upon the Provost with a view
to advice such as might still prove by no
means supererogatory, and such as no man
in England was better qualified to give.
Milton had been so much gratified by
the urbanity of his reception, that he had
transmitted to the Provost a copy of his
masque of Conus, published without the
author's name in the preceding year.
Mention has already been made above of
the excellent advice given to the young
traveller by the veteran diplomatist as
to the profitableness at Rome of discre-
tion in speech, Curiously enough, al-
though Milton seems to have borne the
hint in mind at Rome, he forgot it at
1 No date is attached to Wotton's letter to Dr.
Castle, Reliquiæ, pp. 361 seqq.; but although it was
probably written a year or two before the celebrated
letter to Milton, it contains a passage illustrating the
phenomenon (noticeable even in greater writers) of
unintentional self-repetition. “When a Friend of
mine, that was lately going towards your City, fell
usually into some discourse with me, how he should
cloath himself there, I made some sport to tell him
(for a little beguiling of my Melancholy Fumes) that
in my opinion the cheepest stuff in London was
Silence. But this concerneth neither of us both,
164
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Naples. But of far deeper interest than
the man of the world's sagacious warning
is the cordial recognition offered by one
who had gained a transitory access to
the secret of true lyric effect, to the
youthful master-hand which held the key
to that secret in paramount ownership.
He would, writes Wotton, much commend
the dialogue of Comus, but that he was
ravished by the lyrical passages of the
poem, "whereunto I must plainly confess
to have seen yet nothing parallel in our
language.” Divination of this sort is the
supreme sort of criticism; the mere
manner of phrasing or “putting " such a
TT
for we know how to speak and write safely, that
is honestly. Always, if we touch any tender matter,
let us remember his Motto, that wrote upon the
Mantle of his Chimney, where he used to keep a good
fire, Optimus Secretariorum."
1 Manso, the friend of Tasso, who received Milton
with signal courtesy in his villa, proffered his excuses
to the young traveller for having failed to show him
greater attention, on the ground that he had not
been able to do so in Naples, " because I” (Milton)
“would not be more close in the matter of religion."
See Masson's Life of Milton, vol. i. (new edition),
p. 815.
165
SIR HENRY WOTTON
prompt and complete recognition is (with
all respect to those whose professional
duty obliges them to catch the eye before
finding their way to the mind) a matter
of very secondary importance. And the
praise was not the less honourable to him
who accorded it, because the Puritan spirit
-I might say, the Puritan moral—of
Comus could remain no secret to Sir
Henry Wotton, who, as he says in so
many words in a letter of this very year,
1638, had no desire to be thought a
Puritan. In literature, as in divinity, the
ipsam apply w
whom as
1 It is touching to find one of the finest, as he was
one of the most fearless, of English poetical critics of
our own age, in his last book, the Second Series of his
Golden Treasury, apply Wotton's praise of Milton's
lyric verse-Ipsa mollilies—to a poet (O'Shaughnessy)
whom as yet there have been but “few to praise."
2 The passage, in a letter to Sir Edmund Bacon,
dated December 5, 1638, concerning a contem-
porary Women's Question in the University of Cam-
bridge, of which the incidents had been communicated
to him by the Provost of King's, may be worth
extracting : (I know nothing about the Christopher
Goad here referred to; possibly he was a kinsman of
Dr. Thomas Goad, of King's, who appears to have
died in the previous August.) It concerns "a weekly
166
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
soul of Wotton turned instinctively to-
wards-
"those happy climes that lie
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in in the broad fields of the sky."1
In the summer of the last year of his life
- 1639--Sir Henry Wotton, instead of
paying his annual visit to Oxford, betook
lecture” at Cambridge, "performed heretofore by the
Person of Mr. Christopher Goad, and lately deposed
with severe commandment (as it would seem) from
above; whereupon the women especially, by way of
revenge for that restraint, do flock to St. Marie's in
such troops, and so early, that the Masters of Arts
have no room to sit ; so as the Vice-Chancellor and
Heads of Houses were in deliberation to repress their
shoaling thither. Methinks it is a good thing when
Zeal in a Land” (vide Bartholomew Fair) grows so
thick and so warm. But soft; if I launch any farther,
I may perchance run (which yet were a great mistake)
into the name of a Puritan. For that very Lecturer
which is now deposed, did live heretofore with me at my
Table upon especial choice” (he must have been an
Eton boy; cf. ante, p. 134): “being in truth a man of
sweet conversation, and of sober solidity.” (Reliquia,
pp. 472, 473).
1 Wotton's letter, with its eulogy on Comus, was
much cherished by Milton, and was prefixed by him
to the masque in the First or Miscellaneous Edition
of his Minor Poems (16). See Masson's Life of
Milton, vol. iii. p. 454.
.
167
SIR HENRY WOTTON
himself once more to his old school at
Winchester. On his return to Eton, he
seems to have felt much enfeebled, and to
have had a presentiment that the end was
not far distant. He was prostrated by an
asthmatic fever, and in consequence for-
swore the use of tobacco, which, says
Walton, he had, “ as many thoughtful men
do, taken somewhat immoderately." He
was much in the company of John Hales,
to whom he expressed his contentment
with the life he had been permitted to
enjoy, and his humble hopes of a better
hereafter. About a month before the last,
he was seized by a fever of which he could
not mistake the significance. During an
interval of partial recovery he was able
once more to busy himself with his papers
and letters, and in a last letter to the faith-
ful Izaak Walton he enclosed a copy of a
Hymn, which he had composed in one of
his nights of sickness, and which bears an
unfaltering testimony to the simple faith
that had sustained him through all the
troubles great and petty of a long life of
168
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
endeavour. Early in December the fever
returned, and he died.?
Wotton, who had not much to leave
behind him in the shape of earthly goods
or gear, left a rather elaborate will, which
Walton transcribes at length. For my part,
resting but little faith on last words, I am
still less disposed to dwell with reverential
awe on last words that may be, or that
might have been, revoked ; and Wotton's
were set down two years or more before
the date of his death. Still, the references
to the Queen of Bohemia, to whom he had
proved so true, and who was to survive
him for nearly a quarter of a century, and
to the good Nicholas Pey who had
1 The distinctness of Wotton's personal tenets is
quite unmistakably asserted in this utterance:
“No hallowed oyle, no grains I need,
No rags of saints, no purging fire;
One rosie drop from David's seed
Was worlds of seas to quench Thine ire.
Thou then, That hast dispurg'd my score,
And dying wast the death of Death," etc.
? The precise date of Wotton's death is not men-
tioned by Walton, or in the dictionaries. It might
perhaps be ascertainable at Eton.
169
N
SIR HENRY WOTTON
.
watched so faithfully over his own “rugged
estate," must interest us as gathering up
two long strands in the texture of his bio-
graphy. The one testamentary direction,
however, which Sir Henry Wotton left
behind him, and of which any thought has
been taken by posterity, concerned the
epitaph directed by him to be inscribed
upon his grave, and intended, no doubt, in
some sort as a summary of the principles
that had actuated him in the general con-
duct of his life. “Here lies," so ran the
English version of the Latin words, “the
first author of the sentence: The Itch of
Disputation will prove the Scab,"--or, in
a later translation, more grandiloquently,
“the Leprosy" -- " of the Churches.
Inquire his name elsewhere.” Now, it
would be the reverse of fair to quote a
man of letters—and in Wotton's age, as
may be said without captiousness, a man
of letters was a man of phrases,-against
himself; or one might recall his description,
in a memorable connexion, of an epitaph
1 Cf. ante, p.
170
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
as “the last of miserable remedies.”1 But
in his own case at least, there was no
prejudice to set right, no misinterpretation
of a life of honest intentions to remove.
If it might seem as though in the suc-
cessive stages of his career a desire to
avoid religious controversy had not always
been the leading motion of his activity,
we should remember that in such matters
no man's heart can be quite accurately
read by the most considerate of human
judges. There were differences concern-
ing religion which to him, and there are
differences which to most high-spirited
men, it is intolerable to ignore or cover
with silence. What I take it he meant
to imply by his farewell aphorism was the
principle that in the controversies about
non-essentials is to be found the bane of
the religious life which it is the one Divine
1 See Reliquiæ, p. 310, as to the attempt of the Fos-
carini family at Venice to redeem by means of a post-
humous appeal the fearful miscarriage of justice
towards one of its members of which the State had
been guilty. Cf. for an account of the case, Horatio
E. Brown, 1.5., pp. 406–8.
171
SIR HENRY WOTTON
purpose of the Churches to advance. And
with this interpretation of his epitaph we
must leave it, and may say Amen to it,
in our own generation as in that of Sir
Henry Wotton.
Throughout the course of this imperfect
sketch no attempt has been made to re-
present the story of Sir Henry Wotton's
life and labours in the light of a record
of achievement. When we meet with such
a record, or with one approaching to the
character of such, we feel that we are in
contact with greatness, with genius, with
what Wotton calls the “felicity” which is
the basis of success. His own life and
work consisted not so much of achieve-
ment as of endeavour. But if the con-
clusion be warranted that this endeavour
was honest, high-minded, and “persever-
ing to the last,” then not many of us will
merit a larger meed of praise.
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Face of the Waters,' point to a specialism which is becoming one of the
salient features of modern fiction ; but 'In the Tideway,' although
dealing entirely with England and Scotland, presents the same keen and
unerring grasp of character, the same faculty of conveying local atmo-
sphere and colour, the same talent for creating strong and dramatic
situations, and the same originality of thought and expression. ...
It is too late in the day to speak of Mrs. Steel's position. This is
assured, but this book adds greatly to an established position. It is
profoundly impressive." --St. James's Budget.
“Wonderfully bright and lively both in dialogue and incidents.”-
Scotsman.
“Admirably written."-Glasgow Herald.
6. The story is beyond question powerful. The characters are life-like
and the dialogue is bright and natural."- Manchester Guardian.
“As it is, the book is a sheer triumph of skill, one degree perhaps
less valuable than a fully conceived presentation of the actual, but none
the less admirable within its limits. There is care shown in every
character. ... But the real art, perhaps, lies less in the sequence
of events or the portrayal of character, than in just this subtle sugges.
tion everywhere of the abiding causeless mystery of land and sea." --
Academy.
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Dracula
By BRAM STOKER
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“A preternatural story of singular power. The book is bound to be a suc-
cess."--Dublin Freeman's Journal.
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--Sheffield Telegraph.
“We strongly recommend all readers of a sensitive nature or weak nerves to
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Green Fire : A Story of the
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The Shoulder of Shasta
BY BRAM STOKER
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air passages, and the portrait it contains of Grizzly Dick."-Daily Nerus.
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ventional."-Publishers' Circular.
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corner of the world better known to him than to the majority of those who will
read his book."-Standard.

The Fortune of a Spendthrift
AND OTHER ITEMS
By R. ANDOM
Author of "We Three and Troddles," “ The Strange Adventures of Roger
Wilkins," etc., etc.
AND
FRED HAREWOOD
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"The adventures of a spendthrift, which form the principal feature of the
book, are related with so much dramatic force that any improbabilities of the
plot are forgotten in the reader's eagerness to learn the dérouement. . . .
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cleverly sustained. ... They are all told with spirit and vivacity, and show
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afternoon."--Globe.
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Dracula
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An Indian S
His Majesty's Greatest Subject
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The Love of an Obsolete Woman
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IO
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1422-1509
EDITED BY JAMES GAIRDNER
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| the scholar."-Review of Reviews.
In 48 Volumes
CONSTABLE'S REPRINT
OF
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THE FAVOURITE EDITION OF
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YI
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The Nation's Awakening
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Volunteers and the National Defence
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The Brain of the Navy
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At all Booksellers and Bookstalls.
NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION,
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WAR IN THE EAST.
Problems of the Far East
Japan–Corea-China
BY THE
Rt. Hon. GEORGE N. CURZON, M.P.
With numerous Illustrations and Maps. Extra Crown Evo, 75.6d.
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English Illustration. “The Sixties”: 1855-
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With Numerous Illustrations by Sir E. BURNE-JONES ; FORD MADOX
BROWN; BIRKET FOSTER ; A. Boyd HOUGHTON ; ARTHUR HUGHES ; CHAS.
KEENE; LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A. ; G. DU MAURIER; Sir J. E. MILLAIS,
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... This sumptuous volume, which Messrs. Constable have printed with their
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Certainly in the first instance the voluine is a monuinent of painstaking research. . .
But a careful reading conveys the sense that the historians and critics' parts belong not
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English art. Even those to whom the names on its title-page are nothing ibut names,
will find it a surprising picture book, an album, if you will, to lay upon the table, but an
album rich in suggestion and of singular and subtle charm."--Pall Mall Gazette.
“We recognise the magnitude of the task undertaken by Mr. Gleeson White, as well
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"Mr. Gleeson White has written a work wortlıy of a foremost place among the
standard reference books on matters artistic. Messrs. Constable have produced the book
in a truly suinptuous manner."-Publisher's Circular.
The Household of the Lafayettes. By
EDITH SICHEL. Illustrated. Demy 8vo. 155. net.
Songs for Little People. By NORMAN GALE.
Profusely Illustrated by HELEN STRATTON. Large Crownz Svo, 6s.
"A delightful book."-Scotsman.
“We cannot imagine anything more appropriate as a gift-book for children."-Glasgow
Daily Mail.
"This book, in truth, is one of the most tasteful things of its kind."- IVhitehall Revicw.
"Mr. Norman Gale is to be congratulated."-Black and White.
" A delightful book in every way."- Academy.
The Selected Poems of GEORGE MEREDITH.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
New Poeins. By FRANCIS THOMPSON. Fcap.
Svo. 6s. niet.
“The first thing to be done, and by far the most important, is to recognise and declare
that we are here face to face with a poet of the first order, a man of imagination all com-
pact, a seer and singer of rare genius.”—Daily Chronicle.
" It confers a literary distinction upon the both year of the Victorian Era, and it gives
the annus mirabilis yet a new title to memory."--Newcastle Daily Chronicle.
“A true poet. .
here unquestionably is a new poet, a wielder of
beautiful words, a lover of beautiful things.-I. ZANGWILL, in the Cosmopolitan, Sept.,
"At least one book of poetry has been published this year that we can hand on con-
fidently to other generations. It is not incautious to prophesy that Mr. Francis Thomp-
son's poems will last."-Sketch.
"Mr. Thompson's is the essential poetry of essential Christianity."— Academy.
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO
1895..
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS WESTMINSTER
CONSTABLE'S
Hand Atlas of India
A NEW SERIES of Sixty Maps and Plans
prepared from Ordnance and other Surveys
under the direction of
J. G. BARTHOLOMEW, F.R.G.S.,
F.R.S.E., &c.
In half morocco, or full bound cloth, gilt top, 145.
This Atlas is the first publication of its kind, and for tour-
ists and travellers generally it will be found particularly useful.
There are Twenty-two Plans of the principal towns of our
Indian Empire, based on the most recent surveys, and offici-
ally revised to date in India.
The Topographical Section Maps are an accurate reduction
of the Survey of India, and contain all the places described
in Sir W. W. Hunter's “Gazetteer of India,” according to his
spelling.
The Military, Railway, Telegraph, and Mission Station
Maps are designed to meet the requirements of the Military
and Civil Service, also missionaries and business men who at
present have no means of obtaining the information they re-
quire in a handy form.
The index contains upwards of ten thousand names, and
will be found more complete than any yet attempted on a
similar scale.
Further to increase the utility of the work as a reference
volume, an abstract of the 1891 Census has been added.
“It is tolerably safe to predict that no sensible traveller will go to India
in future without providing himself with Constable's Hand Atlas of India.'
Nothing half so useful has been done for many years to help both the
traveller in India and the student at home. 'Constable's Hand Atlas' is
a pleasure to hold and to turn over.”-Athen.cum.
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS WESTMINSTER
Butler Ev Tanner.]
16

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