Due to the specific concept of representation in early modern diplomacy, the death of an ambassador often caused major problems. Ambassadors were no state servants, they were personally authorised by their monarchs, bore some of their royal power, and functioned as their images in all courtly ceremonials. When the ambassador therefore died, the office could not just be passed on to someone else. However, at the same time diplomatic life had to go on somehow. This article compares two cases of ambassadors’ deaths in Istanbul at the end of the seventeenth century and asks how in each of them the problem was dealt with. While, as it turns out, a huge conflict for power occurred in the French case between the ambassadress and the embassy’s chancelier, in the English case the embassy secretary just took over the affairs as a matter of course. But, as this article argues, this was not due to different stages of development, with a pre-modern patrimonial system of proxy representation facing a modern bureaucratic one. Instead, in both cases the same cultural logics were working, and it was only organisational differences that led to a different outcome.