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148 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
there painted’; political inconsistency of a kind that implies moral
flexibility is a prerequisite for deciphering the full significance of Jones’s
masque designs (H&S VIII.402–7, ll.45, 46–8).
The word ‘character’ had one more important sense that Jonson
touches upon here, as a synonym for cipher (a meaning he evokes in ‘The
New Cry’, as we have seen.
38
) In 1588 Timothy Bright had published an
extremely popular treatise entitled Characterie, An Arte of Shorte, Swifte,
and Secrete Writing by Character, setting out a much-imitated version of
shorthand that its author believed might, in addition to speed, offer
the further advantage of functioning as a very basic form of code.
39
As
Lois Potter observes, such a simple form of cipher does not offer any
real form of secrecy, but rather produces ‘a mixture of revelation and
concealment’.
40
The Royalists’ chief code-breaker, John Wallis (whom Potter
considers the first ‘acknowledged professional decipherer’), would claim
that cracking Bright’s ‘Character’ took him only an hour.
41
The appear-
ance of impenetrability in fact belies the ease with which those practiced
in the arts of code breaking are able to interpret the hidden meaning of
such characters. The figures of ‘mixed character’ that Jonson deploys in
his Entertainment have exactly this function, constituting his audience
by sifting those who understand such moments fully from those who do
not, in precisely the same way Richard Verstegan uses cipher as a protocol
designed not, as I have argued, to ensure complete secrecy but rather in
order to signal participation in a shared enterprise that is governed by
these letter-writing conventions.
The community-building potential of this careful balance between
concealment and revelation can also be seen elsewhere in Jonson’s court
masques, which include complex verbal allusions that must be slowly
unravelled along with other forms necessitating decipherment such as
the anagram or the acrostic.
42
In the printed version of The Masque of
Blackness (1605) Jonson describes the dance with which the entertainment
culminates, noting that each couple presented carries two fans ‘in one of
which were inscribed their mixt Names, in the other a mute Hieroglyphick,
expressing their mixed qualities. Which manner of Symbole I rather chose,
then Imprese, as well for strangenesse, as relishing of antiquitie’ (H&S VII.177,
ll.268–71). The ‘mixed qualities’ of these figures render them both strange,
or obscure, and also allow them to signify in particular ways. The appeal
of the hieroglyphic lies not only in its ‘resistance to single interpreta-
tions’, but also in its ability ‘to produce divergent impressions on the
various members of the masque’s heterogeneous audience’, Molly Murray
writes.
43
Arguing that the hieroglyphic produces the appearance of trans-
parency whilst in fact concealing multiple different possible meanings
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Hannah J. Crawforth 149
(in a reflection of the position of those recusants at court who perform
religious conformity), Murray argues that it offers a coded mode of com-
munication that can only be interpreted by those spectators attuned to
its secret meanings, thus shielding a Catholic-sympathizing Jonson from
the dangers that would otherwise attend upon the expression of non-
conformism she detects in this masque.
44
Hymenaei (1606), written for the marriage of the Earl of Essex and
the Lady Frances Howard (which later ended in an infamous divorce),
similarly contains linguistic devices requiring sophisticated levels of
interpretive engagement. Reason entreats, for instance, that the audi-
ence should ‘see, where IVNO, whose great name | Is VNIO, in the
anagram’ (H&S VII.217, 220–1, ll.232–3, 310–17). Such moments invite
spectators to enter into the masque’s innermost world of meaning,
accessible only to those willing to make the effort to decipher its full
connotations. The ability or inability to fully comprehend such mean-
ing is what determines an elite audience for the masque, awarding the
form its particular power to perform inclusivity by the act of excluding
those who lack privileged access to its secret significances. Jonson’s
deployment of the anagram in order to instigate this particular kind of
readership reflects his tutor William Camden’s attention to such verbal
devices in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605), where he discusses
anagrams as well as studying the coded meanings of Christian and
surnames, allusions (by which he means a particular kind of word-play
upon proper names) and rebuses (also known as ‘Name-deuises’, these
combine words and images in order to pun upon a name). Camden
takes the anagram particularly seriously owing to its association with the
cabbala, and its relative difficulty.
45
He points out that good anagrams
are particularly hard to make in English, because its ‘names running
rough with Consonants are not so smooth and easie for transposition as
the French and Italian’.
46
However, Camden is able to reproduce some
fine examples of the English anagram, amongst them one that Jonson
will later deploy in his Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610): ‘Charles
James Steuart’ = ‘CLAIMES ARTHURS SEATE’.
47
This anagram had great
political significance for the English monarch, flatteringly comparing
James I’s court to the Arthurian in an extension of the British mythology
of which the Tudors were so enamoured. Graham Parry describes James
I’s fondness for the myth of Trojan descent so ubiquitous under the
Tudors, effectively combined here with ‘the contemporary fashion for
anagrams, whereby it was believed that a man’s name concealed his des-
tiny, and that destiny could be discovered by ingenious rearrangement
of the l[e]tters of his name’.
48
In his Yale edition of Jonson’s masques,
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150 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
Stephen Orgel notes that Oberon (1611), which also contains a refer-
ence to ‘Arthur’s Chair’ (l.222), was first performed at the wedding of
the Earl of Huntly and Lady Henrietta Stuart in 1588: ‘[t]he marriage
was celebrated in Holyrood Palace, at the foot of the hill called Arthur’s
Seat’, he notes.
49
Jonson uses coded anagrammatic allusions to build a
political community around a shared mythology in this way.
In concluding this essay I want to look briefly at Jonson’s most famous
statement about coded linguistic devices, the poem he wrote upon the
agonizing loss of his personal library (including the sole copies of several
unpublished works) in 1623. ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’ is an extraor-
dinarily angry poem – in keeping with an extraordinary grief – in which
Jonson rails against the god who has brought such a fate upon him.
Throughout the verse Jonson imagines a series of alternate possibilities in
which this tragedy might not have happened as it did, listing books and
works he would voluntarily have given up to the blaze in place of those
destroyed, and bemoaning the failure of the civil and legal authorities
that might have restrained Vulcan’s wrath to prevent him taking such
vengeance, before ending in an infamously uncivil ‘civil curse’, wish-
ing upon his adversary ‘Thy wife’s pox on thee, and Bess Braughton’s
too’ (H&S VIII. 202–12, ll.59–84, 174–88, 189–216). Above all, Jonson
attempts to imagine circumstances in which he might have deserved this
awful punishment. If he had spent his time in his library engineering the
kinds of intricate textual device that Camden treats in the Remains:
Or spun out Riddles, and weav’d fiftie tomes
Of Logogriphes, and curious Palindromes,
Or pomp’d for those hard trifles, Anagrams,
Or Eteostichs, or those finer flammes
Of Egges, and Halberds, Cradles, and a Herse,
A paire of Scisars, and a Combe in verse;
Acrostichs, and Telestichs, on jumpe names,
Thou then hadst some colour for thy flames,
On such my serious follies . . .
50
As we have seen, despite the fervent denunciation of such linguistic
devices here, Jonson was not above using this kind of verbal play when
it suited his own purposes. The Oxford editors have good reason to be
sceptical towards the comments reported by Drummond of Hawthornden,
that Jonson ‘scorned Anagrams & had ever in his mouth “turpe est, difficiles
amare nugas, | et stultus labor est ineptiarum” [“It is humiliating to under-
take difficult trifles; and the effort spent on idiotic tasks is foolish”]’.
51
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Hannah J. Crawforth 151
Quixotic as ever, we have seen how Jonson picks up and puts down coded
linguistic devices such as the anagram at will, utilizing where it serves the
rhetorical purposes of any given text forms that he elsewhere derides. His
oxymoronic branding of such ‘serious follies’ here reflects this deep-rooted
ambivalence; but it also registers something of the multivalency attached
to the idea of cipher in this period. I have suggested that the use of code in
correspondence between spies and their patrons is as much a form of com-
munity-building protocol as a means of rendering texts genuinely secret;
whilst using cipher may delay interpretation if a letter is intercepted, the
kinds of code employed by the majority of informers are not sufficient
to prevent decipherment when subjected to sustained scrutiny. This does
not diminish the literary value of the cipher for Jonson. As I have argued
throughout this essay Jonson’s own recusant allegiances place him in con-
tact with the world of underground intelligencers, where he encounters an
understanding of cipher that is both polemically and politically useful to
him. His masques evidence the ways that concealed meanings can be used
to draw together a particular community of readers or audience members
who are able to discern this additional layer of significance. Jonson’s use of
coded forms of language stems from a desire to ensure a safe yet provoca-
tive mode of political engagement for his texts, and requires his audiences
to participate in an ongoing process of decipherment that continues to
maintain its secrets as well as to reveal.
Notes and references
1. As we await the publication of the new Cambridge Edition of The Works of
Ben Jonson, the authoritative text still remains that of Herford and Simpson.
All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated, which will be abbre-
viated to ‘H&S’ in the text. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds., with the
assistance of Evelyn Simpson (1925–52) Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
11 vols., VIII, p. 45.
2. Ian Donaldson notes that Jonson had previously been imprisoned in 1597
and this would not be his last jail term. See Donaldson (2004) ‘Jonson,
Benjamin (1572–1637)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
3. See Theodore A. Stroud (1947) ‘Ben Jonson and Father Thomas Wright’,
English Literary History 14.4 (December): 274–82.
4. On the politics of conversion amongst the Catholic community in Elizabethan
and Jacobean prisons see Peter Lake and Michael Questier (1998) ‘Prisons, priests
and people’ in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800
(London: UCL Press), pp. 195–235.
5. Richard Dutton (2008) Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’ and the Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 22.
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152 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
6. John Michael Archer (1993) Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture
in the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 120.
7. Mark Eccles first argued that we should take seriously Jonson’s experience of
intelligencing in (1937) ‘Jonson and the Spies’, The Review of English Studies
XIII.52 (October).
8. William W.E. Slights (1994) Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (Toronto &
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press), p. 177.
9. Annabel Patterson (1984) Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of
Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison WI: University of
Wisconsin Press), p. 57.
10. See Donna B. Hamilton (1999) ‘Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed
Intelligence (1605): A Catholic Antiquarian Replies to John Foxe, Thomas
Cooper and Jean Bodin’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 22.1 (April),
1–38; and my own (2008) ‘Prophetic Language and Etymological Discovery
in the Work of Richard Verstegan,’ New Medieval Literatures IX, 93–115.
11. The exchange occurs at II.i.80–6; see H&S V.316–17.
12. Paul Arblaster has recently published the first full-length monograph to
address Verstegan’s writing in the context of his extraordinary life: (2004)
Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of
Catholic Reformation (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press).
13. Anthony G. Petti (1959) ed., The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan
(c.1550–1640) (London: Publications of the Catholic Record Society), p. xvi.
14. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti) No. I, p. 7.
15. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XX, p. 97.
16. Southwell was tortured for three years before he was finally put to death in
1595; Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. X, p. 72.
17. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XLVII, p. 199.
18. Robert Southwell describes the role of ‘Philips the decipherer’ in his letter to
Verstegan of early December 1591. See Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. LXI,
pp. 233, 235, and No. I, p. 3, respectively. On Phelippes’s work as a cryptographer
and employment by Walsingham, see William Richardson’s entry ‘Phelippes,
Thomas (c.1556–1625), cryptographer and intelligence gatherer,’ ODNB.
19. Introduction to Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), p. xxiv.
20. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XV, p. 87.
21. Quoted in Gary Schneider (2005) The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular
Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press), p. 91.
22. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, p. 158.
23. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XV, p. 88.
24. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XLVII, p. 199.
25. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XL, p. 177.
26. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. LVIII, p. 229, No. LXI, p. 233.
27. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. VIII, p. 65n.
28. Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, p. 5.
29. The manual referred to here is Giovanni Baptista Porta’s De Furtivis Literarum
Notis (Naples, 1563).
30. R. Malcolm Smuts (1987) Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition
in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press),
p. 78; Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, p. 46.
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Hannah J. Crawforth 153
31. Stephen Orgel (1975) The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English
Renaissance (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press),
p. 88; David Lindley (ed.) (1984) The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester
University Press), pp. 8–9.
32. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (1998) eds., The Politics of the Stuart
Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4.
33. Martin Butler (2008) The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 2. Whilst the focus of this study – like that of
Bevington and Holbrook – is predominantly the masques of a later period,
this argument stands for Jonson’s Jacobean works.
34. H&S VII.91, ll.257–67.
35. The procession was notoriously a disaster, unable to hold the short attention
span of King James. See H&S’s Introduction to their Commentary upon the
piece (H&S, X.387), where they cite accounts of the monarch’s impatience
with the festivities by Arthur Wilson (1653) Life and Reign of King James
the First (London), pp. 12 and 13.
36. Robert Cawdry (1604) A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true
writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the
Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. (London), sig.Cii
v
.
37. The transition of the word’s meaning can be reconstructed in the following
way: from its original sense of an impression or mark, the term becomes
associated with handwriting; handwriting is distinctive to a person, hence
people are associated with their ‘character’, or, ‘The sum of the moral and
mental qualities which distinguish an individual or a race, viewed as a
homogeneous whole; the individuality impressed by nature and habit on
man or nation’, Oxford English Dictionary (ed.) John Simpson, Second Edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ‘character, n, 11’.
38. H&S VIII.59, ll.27. Compare Sejanus (1604), when Posthumus refers to those
at court who ‘talke in character’ (H&S IV.386, II.334).
39. Timothy Bright (1588) Characterie: An Arte of shorte, swifte, and secrete writing
by Character (London), sig.A3
v
.
40. See Lois Potter (1989) Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 43 and 41.
41. Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 41 and 43.
42. Jonson employs acrostics in the arguments prefixed to Volpone (H&S V.23)
and The Alchemist (H&S V.293), and in the epitaph on Margaret Ratcliffe
(H&S VIII.46).
43. Molly Murray (2007) ‘Performing Devotion in The Masque of Blacknesse,’
Studies in English Literature 47.2 (Spring), 427–49, 440.
44. Murray emphasizes that this is not a straightforward ‘secret defense of
Catholic belief’. ‘Such a reading’, she points out, ‘in addition to rehears-
ing contemporary Protestant allegations of the genre’s crypto-Catholicism,
ignore the essential polysemy of the masque, its uncanny capacity to signal
both a celebration and a repudiation of its titular color’. Murray, ‘Performing
Devotion’, 428–9. On such allegations Murray cites David Norbrook, ‘The
Reformation of the Masque’, in Lindley, ed., The Court Masque, 94–110.
45. See commentary to William Camden (1984) Remains Concerning Britain, R.D.
Dunn ed., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 401n.
46. Camden, Remains, p. 145.
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154 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
47. Camden, Remains, pp. 145 and 403n. Dunn credits Jonson with the invention
of this anagram, although I suspect that he borrowed it from Camden.
48. Graham Parry (1981) The Golden Age Restor’d: The culture of the Stuart Court,
1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 64.
49. Stephen Orgel (1970) ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press), p. 481n.
50. H&S VIII. 202–12, ll.33–40.
51. The epigram is from Martial II.lxxxvi, 9–10; see Ben Jonson: The Complete
Poems, George Parfitt (1975, repr. 1996) ed. (London: Penguin), p. 611n and
H&S XI.74–5.
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155
9
The Ambassador’s Household:
Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity,
and Diplomatic Writing
Mark Netzloff
After a decades-long period of neglect, the study of early modern
diplomacy has experienced a revival in the past several years, with
important contributions from historians such as Daniela Frigo and
Douglas Biow and literary scholars including Timothy Hampton and John
Watkins.
1
As Watkins has recently argued, ‘the time has come for a multi-
disciplinary reevaluation of one of the oldest, and traditionally one
of the most conservative, subfields in the modern discipline of history:
the study of premodern diplomacy’.
2
An examination of the historical
foundations of the diplomatic system is especially pertinent due to
the catastrophic failure of diplomacy in our own time. At a historical
moment when our states have actively circumvented not merely diplo-
matic protocol but also, and more significantly, foundational premises
of international law, we find ourselves turning to what Watkins accu-
rately describes as a problematically conservative field. This position
in which we find ourselves is oddly, reminiscently early modern. As
James Der Derian points out, the most significant early modern efforts
to theorize sovereignty similarly emerged out of contexts of political
upheaval, from Jean Bodin and the French civil wars, and Hugo Grotius
and the Thirty Years’ War, to Hobbes and the English Revolution.
3
But
these figures also inaugurated a tradition in which theories of sover-
eignty were analysed at a remove from diplomatic practice, something
that continues to characterize much contemporary work on diplomatic
history and international relations: ‘Diplomacy’, Der Derian notes, ‘has
been particularly resistant to theory.’
4
As a way of reflecting on the theoretical preconditions that informed
diplomatic practice, this essay examines the social and material life
of the early modern embassy. Through a discussion of the career and
correspondence of Sir Henry Wotton, England’s resident ambassador
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156 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
in Venice through much of the Jacobean period, my focus is not the
diplomatic content of these embassies but rather the unique position
of the embassy as a space of residence, domestic business, and social
and pedagogical conduct. Offsetting the naturalized assumption that
diplomacy follows prescribed rules and universal protocols, I instead
emphasize the extent to which its practices are shaped by the actions,
agendas, and personal styles of its contributing agents. As Der Derian
has commented, ‘some of the most “trivial” matters have been crucial –
and neglected – factors in the formation of diplomatic practices’.
5
This
essay therefore analyses the everyday matter of the embassy: not only
gossip, informal espionage, and even interior decorating, but espe-
cially the material practices and social dynamics of letter writing.
‘The early modern state’, Lynne Magnusson notes, ‘transacted its adminis-
trative business, for the most part, in personal letters’.
6
The circulation of
news and intelligence, one of the embassy’s primary functions, conferred
a central role to a multinational staff of secretaries and correspondents.
In its anomalous, extraterritorial position – as a national space beyond
the nation and a household outside the familial structure – Wotton’s
embassy re-imagined ‘domestic’ identities by elaborating alternative
affective ties based on adoption, affiliation, and mentorship.
The Jacobean period offers a particularly useful historical case study
due to James I’s efforts to place diplomacy at the center of his foreign
policy. In order to achieve these objectives, he needed a new diplomatic
corps of state agents to serve abroad. Because the English state had
severed diplomatic relations with every European nation over the final
twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign,
7
James had to revive a defunct insti-
tutional structure to manage inter-state negotiations, and his efforts to
inaugurate a mode of public diplomacy led to a broader cultural exami-
nation of the role of ambassadors and other diplomatic agents, with the
initial publication of diplomatic handbooks such as Jean Hotman’s The
Ambassador (1603) occurring in the first years of his reign. As a new class
of subjects was recruited to staff England’s permanent embassies, one of
the key figures entering this political vacuum was Wotton, who would
serve as James’s resident ambassador to Venice in three separate terms
over the following twenty years.
Logan Pearsall Smith, the early twentieth-century editor of Wotton’s
letters, encapsulates the critical assessment that this figure has tradition-
ally received: ‘Wotton is of more interest to us as a writer of letters, full
of wit and gossip, than as a statesman.’
8
This comment is indicative of
what has traditionally counted as the subject of the study of diplomacy,
and is premised on the assumption that the ambassador solely maintains
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Mark Netzloff 157
a public, bureaucratic role, an identity that necessarily excludes the
subjective traces of his own personality. It also reflects the extent to
which the analysis of diplomacy is shaped by a modern bureaucratic
paradigm that confines diplomacy to the domain of an ‘administra-
tive process’, relegating it to an instrumental position in the formal
negotiations between state bodies.
9
But as Daniela Frigo has recently
argued, early modern diplomacy is more effectively analysed in terms
of the role or office of the ambassador rather than in an abstracted
sense of a ‘sphere of formalized actions’.
10
The historical ascendancy of
a bureaucratic model of the diplomat has obscured recognition of the
distinctive modes of agency and practices of writing exercised by ambas-
sadors in the early modern period. These prior and competing forms
of diplomacy, if not generally ignored, are consequently relegated to a
private, literary sphere lying outside the public, institutional domain of
diplomacy.
Early modern ambassadors vied to establish a bureaucratic identity
for themselves as a way of arrogating a degree of political agency.
Particularly since many resident ambassadors hailed from civic,
professional classes, or were younger sons of gentry or aristocratic
families, the nascent civil service offered them a rare venue for meri-
tocratic social advancement.
11
But the lack of precedents for this kind
of social model forced diplomatic culture to adhere to the rules of
court culture, a dynamic that additionally stemmed from economic
necessity, since ambassadors had to keep tabs on the English court
as a way of ensuring their own pay and promotion. Offsetting the
social and economic straits that often accompanied their position,
Jacobean ambassadors were instrumental in professionalizing the
diplomatic service, and they did so by forging what was primarily
a corporate, bureaucratic identity. But the depersonalized, institu-
tional forms of writing of Wotton’s colleagues, such as Sir Thomas
Edmondes in Brussels or Sir Charles Cornwallis in Madrid, were coun-
tered by the ways that Wotton himself maintained a distinctive style
throughout his correspondence. This personalized signature – what
Smith described as the literary qualities of Wotton’s ‘wit’ – did not
merely inflect his diplomatic life; rather, it was through this affective
register that his diplomatic identity itself was constructed. A subjec-
tive emphasis on intimacy and sociability was intrinsic to Wotton’s
fashioning of himself as a professional and political subject. As he
wrote to his new colleague Sir Walter Aston, recently dispatched to
Madrid, ‘Besides our own private friendship, we are now consociates
in the public service.’
12
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10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
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