Lying abroad

Student, traveller, secretary, scoundrel, spy: introducing the maverick whose diplomacy saved Europe from war.

Henry Wotton had already exhausted several lives when he arrived in Venice as England's ambassador in 1604. Yet the most remarkable phase of his career was yet to come.

In Lying abroad, Carol Chillington Rutter tells Wotton’s extraordinary story. She reveals how this one-time exile, who fled England after his employer was convicted of treason, gained the favour of King James, securing a knighthood and a diplomatic posting. Charged with restoring relations with Venice after a fifty-year hiatus, he drew criticism for his breaches of protocol. But when a dispute brought Europe to the brink of war, Wotton took a risk – one that changed European history.

This engrossing biography recounts a life that was tumultuous, tarnished and endlessly theatrical. The man King James called his ‘honest dissembler’ was a maverick who fashioned diplomacy in ways that still inform international relations today.