Smith, Logan Pearsall. Preface to The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, Vol. 1, pp. iii-xvi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

[The following excerpt is taken from a two-volume work that was first published in 1907. The first volume offers an extensive biography of Wotton, and the second volume reprints many of his letters. Here, Smith surveys the scope of Wotton's correspondence, both personal and diplomatic, and declares him “the best letter-writer of his time.”]

Among the contemporaries of Shakespeare an interesting but little-known figure is that of the poet and ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton. It is still remembered that he was the author of two or three beautiful lyrics which are to be found in every anthology; that he went as ambassador to Venice, and fell into temporary disfavour owing to a witty but indiscreet definition of his office; and that afterwards he became Provost of Eton, where he was visited by the young Milton, and where he fished with Izaak Walton, who quoted his sayings in the Compleat Angler, and wrote an exquisite portrait of his old friend. But behind the tranquil old age described by Walton lay many years of travel and participation in public affairs, much acquaintance with men, and with courts and foreign lands. The period indeed of Wotton's life covers the whole of what is known as the great age of Elizabethan literature, from the defeat of the Armada to the death of Shakespeare, and extends almost to the outbreak of the Civil Wars. It is hardly necessary, therefore, to apologize for the publication of his letters (which for the most part have remained hitherto unpublished), and a study, longer and more complete than any which has yet been attempted, of his career and character and public services.

Sir Henry Wotton was the most widely cultivated Englishman of his time. A ripe classical scholar, an elegant Latinist, trained in Greek by his studies with Casaubon, he was an admirable linguist in modern languages as well. He corresponded with Bacon about natural philosophy, and was the friend of most of the learned men of that epoch, both at home and on the Continent; the first English collector of Italian pictures, he brought from Italy, where he lived many years, the refined taste in art and architecture, the varied culture of antiquity and the Renaissance, which was then only to be derived from Italian sources. His experiences of life were exceptionally varied, even in that spacious and enterprising age. Leaving England in 1589, he spent some time abroad in study and adventurous travel; he was much about the Court of Queen Elizabeth; he accompanied Essex to Ireland and on his famous voyages; he went in the service of an Italian Duke to the Court of James VI; and when that king succeeded to the English throne, was sent as his ambassador to many princes. Famous in his own day as a ‘wit and fine gentleman’, he deserves to be remembered as a noble example of that much maligned class, the ‘Italianate’ Englishmen—one who, with all his foreign culture, never lost the sincerity and old-fashioned piety of a ‘plain Kentish man’. Although his services as an ambassador were not always of the first importance, and his longer literary works are of a somewhat disappointing character, he yet may be counted as one of the great Elizabethans, with whom high actions were so remarkably combined with high literary expression. For Sir Henry Wotton was endowed with one gift, that of a letter-writer, which none of his more famous contemporaries possessed. Indeed, the very qualities or faults that stood in the way of his complete success, either as a statesman or author; the witty frankness that caused him to be a somewhat indiscreet diplomatist; a certain desultoriness of mind, combined with a great love of leisure and conversation, which hindered the completion of most of his literary tasks, all these made him an admirable correspondent. And letter-writing was not only one of the great pleasures of his life, but, as ambassador, almost his main duty. Among the somewhat formal and colourless epistles of that age his letters are remarkable for their wit, their beauty of phrase, and the impress of his kindly and meditative nature. His shortest note could not have been written by any one else; his long diplomatic dispatches are enlivened by reflections, epigrams, and bits of personal comment and observation. Sometimes eloquent, sometimes intimate, now informed by cynical but not unkindly knowledge of the world, and now by honest religious zeal, he put all his stores of thought and experience into his letters, in a way that was unique at the time and is unusual in any age. Any one who has read those written in the leisure of Venice or Eton will, I think, agree that it is no exaggeration to call Sir Henry Wotton the best letter-writer of his time—the first Englishman whose correspondence deserves to be read for its literary quality, apart from its historical interest. His style, although it may seem at first, to those not familiar with the style of the time, somewhat courtly and elaborate, yet possesses great qualities of beauty and distinction, and much of that quaint richness of thought and phrase which we associate with authors of a later date—George Herbert, Sir Thomas Browne, or Izaak Walton.

Of subsequent writers, Walton owed more than any one else to Sir Henry Wotton, and may be regarded as his disciple and follower. In the Life of Donne and the Compleat Angler he accomplished tasks which Wotton had left unfinished; and he seems to have caught his simple yet courtly grace of style from the example and discourse of the old Provost. The two men, indeed, had much in common; both were lovers of fishing and quiet days; both possessed the same musing piety and serenity of soul; and both were devoted members of the English Church, whose spirit Walton has so beautifully expressed in his Lives, and in whose orders Sir Henry appropriately ended his life, after striving so long as an ambassador for its defence and advancement. Animas fieri sapientiores quiescendo, ‘that minds grow wiser by retirement,’ was the motto in which Wotton summed up the experience of his active years: ‘Learn to be quiet,’ the text his fellow fisherman wrote at the end of his most famous work.

Of Sir Henry Wotton's correspondence enough was printed in the seventeenth century to give him a high reputation as a letter-writer. In the first edition of the Reliquiae Wottonianae, published in 1651, Izaak Walton added to Wotton's essays and poems fifty-eight of his letters. Eight more were added to the second edition of 1654, and in 1661 forty-two new letters, almost all addressed to Sir Edmund Bacon, were printed in a little volume, which is now excessively rare. These, with the addition of thirty-one fresh letters and dispatches, were incorporated in the third edition of the Reliquiae in 1672, and finally in 1685 the Reliquiae was republished with thirty-four more letters, all but one addressed to Lord Zouche, and all written in the early period of Wotton's life. Izaak Walton seems to have put together Sir Henry Wotton's letters and papers in the Reliquiae Wottonianae pretty much as they came to hand, with small regard to date or order. Little or no improvement was made in the subsequent editions, and the result is extremely confusing. Letters written in the same year are scattered over different portions of the book, many are without date or address, and there are no notes of any kind. No one has yet attempted to re-edit this correspondence, although the Reliquiae Wottonianae has always been prized by lovers of seventeenth-century literature, and the need of a new edition has often been remarked. ‘His despatches,’ Carlyle wrote of Wotton in his Frederick the Great, ‘are they in the Paper Office still? His good old book deserves new editing, and his good old genially pious life a proper elucidation by some faithful man.’¹ When, for lack of a more competent person I had undertaken the task thus indicated by Carlyle, I soon found it to be one of greater magnitude than I had thought at first. For although in 1850 the Roxburghe Club had published a volume containing the sixty-five letters and dispatches of Wotton's preserved at Eton; and in 1867 thirteen more, preserved at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, had been printed in vol. xl of Archaeologia, much the greater part of his correspondence, and many of his most interesting letters, had never yet been printed, and were to be found widely scattered in various manuscript collections, college libraries, the muniment rooms of country houses, and Italian archives. In the Record office alone there are about five hundred letters and dispatches; others are preserved in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the archives of Venice, Florence, and Lucca. Others, of which the originals have disappeared, have been published in different volumes of memoirs and correspondence. I have found altogether nearly one thousand of Wotton's letters and dispatches, published and unpublished, and it is possible that there are others which have escaped my search. These documents can be roughly divided into three classes, familiar letters, news-letters, and diplomatic dispatches. The familiar letters are generally short, of an intimate character, and addressed to personal friends. The news-letters are of a type well known to historical students—long accounts of the occurrences of the day, which were sent before the date of newspapers to political correspondents, in exchange for similar budgets of information. The dispatches were addressed to the King or the Secretary of State, and contained the ambassador's account of his negotiations, and his views on questions of diplomatic policy. But any such classification can only be extremely loose and vague. The familiar epistles and dispatches are often news-letters as well, and the political correspondence frequently contains much of a personal and intimate character. …

Sir Henry Wotton's correspondence divides itself into three periods. In the first we have a record of the life of a young Oxford man abroad in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the second period the ‘poor younger brother’ has become a diplomatist charged with weighty and important negotiations. Wotton was sent as special ambassador, once to Holland, and once to Vienna, in the troubled times before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, to try to avert the impending conflict. On the first occasion he saw much of the great Dutch leaders, Barneveldt and Count Maurice of Nassau; on the second he negotiated with the Catholic Princes, Maximilian of Bavaria and the Emperor Ferdinand II. He was also twice accredited to the Duke of Savoy; but it was at Venice that he lived as resident ambassador, and the main part of his diplomatic activity is connected with Venice and Italy, in which country he was for many years the only English envoy. Although most of the negotiations between Venice and England were not of great importance, there are incidents in his career as ambassador in Italy which still possess considerable historic interest. Chief among these is the support he was empowered to offer the Venetians in their famous quarrel with the Pope—one of the most courageous and successful actions in James I's not very courageous or successful foreign policy—and the subsequent attempt, in secret combination with certain Venetians, the chief of whom was the great historian and statesman, Paolo Sarpi, to introduce religious reform into Venice.

A study of Wotton's papers throws considerable light on the hitherto obscure history of this movement, and especially on the delicate and much-debated question of Paolo Sarpi's connexion with it. As an attack made on the Pope almost in his own country, in the midst of the Catholic Reaction, by members of the English Church, under the guidance and advice of a Servite friar, who was the greatest of living Italians, this movement deserves to be better known.

Of more general interest, perhaps, is the contribution which I hope these volumes will make to our knowledge of English diplomacy—a subject which has not yet found its historian. Wotton's letters and dispatches give an intimate picture of an English ambassador's life in the time of Shakespeare; how he travelled, how he lived in the place of his charge, of whom his household was composed, and how such diverse duties as kidnapping and religious propaganda, the robbing of the posts and the suppression of pirates, were all part of his official occupation.

The materials in printed books and manuscripts for the study of Wotton's life seem extremely abundant, when we consider the scanty information which has come down to us about many of the great Elizabethans. That his diplomatic papers should have been preserved is not surprising; but that nearly fifty letters should remain, written between 1589 and 1593, from Wotton's twenty-second to his twenty-sixth year, when he was an obscure youth wandering about Europe, is somewhat remarkable, if we remember that James Spedding, with all his research, was only able to find seven letters written in the same early period of Francis Bacon's life. For Wotton's career as an ambassador, the mass of material becomes almost unmanageable; and, indeed, the difficulty of his biographer is not lack of information, but the means of condensing it into a book of reasonable proportions. This is particularly the case with regard to his life in Italy. In traveling to Venice he went into the province, and came under the observation of a government, whose officials were, for many centuries, the memoir-writers of Europe. In the famous archives of Venice are preserved full accounts of all his negotiations with that State. Sir Henry Wotton was not only a charming letter-writer, but a witty and accomplished orator as well, and not the least interesting of the documents in these archives are the verbatim reports, taken down by shorthand, of many hundreds of the speeches of this ambassador, who was a distinguished man of letters in the greatest age of English literature. These speeches are, of course, in Italian, a language almost as familiar to Wotton as his own; those for the period of Wotton's first embassy, from 1604 to 1610, have been transcribed and translated by Mr. Horatio Brown in the tenth and eleventh volumes of the Calendar of Venetian State Papers. I have made extensive use of these admirably edited Calendars in my notes, and only regret that for the period of Wotton's two later embassies I am compelled to rely on my own transcripts from the Venice archives. The correspondence of De Fresnes-Canaye, who was French ambassador at Venice for some years after Wotton's arrival, has been published; that of the Tuscan residents there, Montauto and Sachetti, I have examined in the Florence archives. From these sources, from Wotton's dispatches, and other documents in the Record Office, from letters written by his chaplain Bedell, and other members of his household, I have endeavoured to create a living and vivid picture of Sir Henry Wotton's life and activities in Venice. If I have not succeeded in my attempt, the fault must be my own.

To the third and last period, the period of Wotton's life at Eton, belong the letters which possess perhaps the most personal and literary charm. The courtier and man of the world had returned to the books and religious thoughts he had never really deserted; and the correspondence of this time, with Izaak Walton's account of the Provost's days and conversation, gives a picture of a gentle, pious, old age, spent among congenial friends and beautiful surroundings, which one would find it hard to equal in any literature.

Note

1. Book iii. chap. xiv. note.