Sir Henry Wotton

English diplomat, traveller, scholar, and poet, born in Boughton Malherbe, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Oxford, then travelled extensively. He became the confidant of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. On his friend's downfall (1601) he went to France, then to Italy, and was sent by Ferdinand, Duke of Florence, on a secret mission to James VI of Scotland. When James succeeded to the throne of England, Wotton was knighted, then sent as ambassador to Venice (1604). His tracts and letters were collected as Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651). One of his few surviving poems is ‘The Character of a Happy Life’.

Sir Henry Wotton (1568 - December, 1639) was an English author and diplomat.

The son of Thomas Wotton (1521-1587) and grandnephew of the diplomat Nicholas Wotton, he was born at Bocton Hall in the parish of Bocton or Boughton Malherbe, Kent.

His father, Thomas Wotton, died in 1587, leaving Henry only a hundred marks a year. About 1589 Wotton went abroad, with a view probably to preparation for a diplomatic career, and his travels appear to have lasted for about six years.

He returned to England in 1594, and in the next year was admitted to the Middle Temple. Wotton was not, like his unfortunate fellow-secretary, Henry Cuffe, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1601, directly involved in Essex's downfall, but he thought it prudent to leave England, and within sixteen hours of his patron's apprehension he was safe in France, whence he travelled to Venice and Rome.

In 1602 he was living at Florence, and a plot to murder James VI of Scotland having come to the ears of the grand-duke of Tuscany, Wotton was entrusted with letters to warn the king of the danger, and with Italian antidotes against poison. He then returned to Florence, but on receiving the news of James's accession hurried to England. but Wotton, knowing that both these offices involved ruinous expense, desired rather to represent James at Venice.

He left London in 1604 accompanied by Sir Albertus Morton, his half-nephew, as secretary, and William Bedell, the author of an Irish translation of the Bible, as chaplain. Wotton spent most of the next twenty years, with two breaks (1612-1616 and 1619-1621), at Venice. He helped the Doge in his resistance to ecclesiastical aggression, and was closely associated with Paolo Sarpi, whose history of the Council of Trent was sent to King James as fast as it was written. Wotton had offended the scholar Caspar Schoppe, who had been a fellow student at Altdorf. In 1611 Schoppe wrote a scurrilous book against James entitled Ecclesiasticus, in which he fastened on Wotton a saying which he had incautiously written in a friend's album years before. This was adduced as an example of the morals of James and his servants, and brought Wotton into temporary disgrace. Wotton was at the time on leave in England, and made two formal defences of himself, one a personal attack on his accuser addressed to Marcus Welser of Strassburg, and the other privately to the king.

He obtained no diplomatic employment for some time, but seems to have finally won back the royal favour by his parliamentary support in for James's claim to impose arbitrary taxes on merchandise. Wotton's devotion to this princess, expressed in his exquisite verses beginning "You meaner beauties of the night," was sincere and unchanging. At his departure the emperor presented him with a valuable jewel, which Wotton received with due respect, but before leaving the city he gave it to his hostess, because, he said, he would accept no gifts from the enemy of the Bohemian queen.

After a third term of service in Venice he returned to London early in 1624 and in July he was installed as provost of Eton College. A bend in the Thames below the Playing Fields, known as "Black Potts," is still pointed out as the spot where Wotton and Izaak Walton fished in company.

Sir Henry Wotton was not an industrious author, and his writings are very small in bulk. Of the twenty-five poems printed in Reliquiae Wottonianae only fifteen are Wotton's.

During his lifetime he published only two works: The Elements of Architecture (1624), which is a free translation of de Architectura by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, executed during his time in Venice, and a Latin prose address to the king on his return from Scotland (1633).

Wotton shares authorship of the oft-quoted line "Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight," with Vitruvius, from whose de Architectura Wotton translated the phrase. In modern times, misunderstanding of English usage in Wotton's time has led some authorities to term his Elements a 'paraphrase' rather than a true translation, and the quote is most often attributed to Vitruvius.

In 1651 appeared the Reliquiae Wottonianiae, with Izaak Walton's Life. Much more recent is "Wotton And His Worlds - Spying, science and Venetian Intrigues" by Gerald Curzon (2004), see See also AW Ward, Sir Henry Wotton, a Biographical Sketch (1898).