Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604–1610

Abstract

Sir Henry Wotton served as first English ambassador to Venice in three successive missions - from 1604 to 1610, 1616 to 1619, and again from 1621 to 1623 - where he effected a two-way fashioning of Venice to England and England to Venice.1 Whilst in Venice he also sought to further English interests by strategically engaging various other autonomous, distinct, yet interrelated, Italian urban locations, such as Rome, Florence, and Padua. This article looks primarily at how Wotton handled affairs in Venice by monitoring activities at Rome and deploying strategic representations of Rome. The two sections of this article examine different but related aspects of Wotton's activities in Venice in this respect. The first section looks in part at Wotton as supervisor of English travellers to Italy, and particularly Rome, and sets him alongside two other contemporary travellers to Italy: Anthony Munday, who infiltrated the English College at Rome in 1579 and exposed the subversive activities there of Jesuits and English scholars;2 and Thomas Coryat, who tried to cultivate Wotton's acquaintance in Venice in 1608, and whose presence there testifies to an increase in English travel to the signory in the wake of Wotton's appointment. 3 The second section considers Wotton's attempts to stir up anti-Papal feeling during a specific historical incident that dominated his first embassy: the Venetian-Papal split of 1606-07 in which Rome placed Venice under an interdict for its perceived infringement of ecclesiastical liberties - a jurisdictional conflict involving a protracted consideration of the proper limits of secular and religious authority.4Sources of tension between Venice and the Papacy were exacerbated on 17 April 1606, when Pope Paul V issued Venice with a bull of Interdict and Excommunication for its refusal to surrender the two clerics arrested on criminal charges and to annul its decrees prohibiting both the holding of public office by priests and the erecting of new churches without governmental consent. Venice issued an edit declaring the bull to be invalid, dismissed the Papal Nuncio, and expelled the Jesuits from its territories, partly because their obedience to the Pope was seen to challenge their allegiance to the state. Paolo (Pietro) Sarpi stood as advisor to, and apologist for, the republic, his Consolatione della Mente, translated as Rights of Sovereigns and Subjects (1722),5 challenging Rome's encroachments of power, identifying limits to Papal jurisdiction, and reassuring the republic of the invalidity of the excommunication, which he saw as not only undeserved (Venice not having departed from the Catholic faith), but also as a misuse of a spiritual weapon to serve the Pope's temporal ambitions.6 As the second section of this article shows, Wotton sought to exploit this split with the Papacy, and to use it further to cement links between Venice and England, by utilising what scholars call 'the Myth of Venice', which had taken shape by accumulation around discrete historical events that it also served to help navigate.7 Involved in this 'Myth of Venice' were the combined features of its unique constitution, its political independence, and its longevity. There existed a perceived link between the harmonious operation and unimpeachable justice of Venice's governmental system and its continued freedom from external oppression. James Howell's S.PQ.V. A Survay of the Signorie of Venice (1651) begins with a verse 'Upon the Citty and Signorie of VENICE' that includes the lines:Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayd;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure ....8Howell is typical in attributing Venice's duration to the soundness of her constitution, and in using the metaphor of her virginity to signal her resistance to foreign domination. …