The Ambassador’s Point of View, from London to Paris (1608–9)
In 1611, the French ambassador in Venice, Léon Brulart, wrote to a colleague: “Let ceremonial rules and compliments be exactly observed, and our charges devoted and obliged to maintain them, for he who sins in one single point ruins everything.”1 For want of an appropriate salutation to a foreign dignitary, a treaty negotiation could fall apart. Consequently, the ceremonies surrounding even the most routine diplomatic encounters required an intense attention to detail. Outside observers might dismiss diplomatic fights over purely ceremonial favors as so much preening. How petty, we might think, to let a mistake in etiquette or a slight to an individual’s dignity disrupt meaningful political proceedings. From the diplomat’s point of view, though, there was nothing inconsequential about a breach of protocol. If a delegate paid a visit to the other resident ambassadors at his new posting in the wrong order, or if a host seated his diplomat guest in the wrong place at the dinner table, that small faux pas destabilized the symbolic order that governed relations among European states.
The chief principle underlying European diplomatic protocol in the early modern period was known as the rule of precedence (préséance). Established by Pope Julius II in 1504, the rule of precedence ranked European kingdoms and principalities into a hierarchy that determined the degree of favor to be shown toward each country’s delegates. Ambassadors, in their roles as representatives of their sovereigns, had to keep up the appearance of formality and dignity that signified their kingdom’s place in the European order. This was particularly true in Rome, where the rules of precedence were most strictly observed. As the French ambassador in Venice wrote to his colleague d’Estrées in Rome in October 1640, “Rome is a veritable theater on which the dignity of his Majesty’s name must be highly maintained, and as such it is important to alter nothing.”2
Full-throated defenses of the monarch’s dignity and commands to “alter nothing” in ceremonial practice reflected not that precedence was a fixed and rigid ranking but conversely that the accepted hierarchy of states was under constant revision in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Julius II’s official rankings were not updated to include the new political entities that emerged over the period, so statesmen from those countries had to negotiate for their place in the diplomatic order. The question of precedence proved particularly difficult to resolve when the United Provinces broke away from the Spanish-controlled Netherlands and officially became a republic in 1581, as general rules about the relative rank of duchies and elected and hereditary monarchies did not apply to this new type of polity.3 These kinds of challenges to the established order, combined with the fact that some Protestant countries discounted the authority of the pope in underwriting the legitimacy of precedence rules, rendered Julius’s ranking increasingly irrelevant. No longer codified or inscribed in any legal framework, precedence became contingent, a matter of continual negotiation. The result of this situation “was bitter, often unedifying, sometimes comic battles over precedence.”4 Different European courts observed different rankings, depending on the state of their relations with particular countries. At the start of a treaty negotiation, representatives would deliberate to establish rules of precedence for the duration of the conference. Europe’s most powerful monarchies, especially France and Spain, competed for precedence on these multiple diplomatic stages.5 In this way, the fluidity of the hierarchy allowed individual ambassadors the possibility of distinguishing themselves professionally by achieving a higher rank for their states. To adapt the metaphor used by diplomats themselves, ambassadors functioned not only as actors in the “theater” of diplomacy, enacting the prestige and dignity of the political entities they represented. They were also, to some extent, its authors, helping to determine the “script” of precedence that regulated diplomatic relations.
Given the highly theatrical quality of diplomatic life in early modern European courts, the spectacles performed on courtly stages for audiences including visiting and resident ambassadors might appear superfluous. Yet entertainments remained important social events for the diplomatic community, where any favor or honor bestowed upon an individual ambassador was sure to be witnessed by the assembled public. Centered on a theatrical spectacle, diplomats’ behavior in the viewing stands constituted a second level of dramatic performance in meta-theatrical relation to the event onstage.
Performing in the Theater of Diplomacy
When an ambassador took his seat for a court entertainment, he was every bit as much a part of the spectacle as were the dancers on the stage. As spectator accounts suggest, the host court took care to choreograph the arrangement of the audience to signal the relative importance of its attendees. Each spot in the spectators’ gallery carried significance. Viewers could interpret the composition of the audience space as a spectacle in its own right. Spectators were also conscious of their own position as objects of fellow audience members’ gaze, a fact that transformed their experience of watching the entertainment into a kind of performance as well.
Courtly spaces of all kinds were of course highly theatrical. Works on courtiership, such as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, urged aristocrats to present themselves in society in such a way as to appeal to the eyes of fellow nobles. Courtiers experienced their mode of being in society as a form of acting, as inhabiting a role.6 For those who also worked as diplomats, self-presentation took on an additional layer of complexity. As Timothy Hampton has observed: “The courtier dissimulates in order to represent himself effectively at court. The ambassador, by contrast, represents himself while representing another.”7 The doubled representation carried out by ambassadors “elicited new types of self-presentation and a necessary rethinking of traditional modes of acting.”8
The theatrical dimension of diplomatic work remained a constant theme of literature on diplomacy throughout the early modern period. In fact, the conception of the diplomatic arts as a form of public theatrical performance marks even the earliest treatises and manuals for ambassadors, such as Bernard du Rosier’s Short Treatise About Ambassadors (Ambaxiator brevilogus, 1436).9 The demands on an ambassador’s performance skills grew increasingly exigent—and more complex—with the emergence of “permanent diplomacy,” or the practice of maintaining resident ambassadors in foreign courts.10 As Europe’s society of diplomats expanded to fill these new permanent roles, the number of ambassador’s manuals also burgeoned. Often echoing the courtier handbooks that proliferated in the same time period, these works advised the ambassador on his self-presentation at the host court. The portrait of the perfect ambassador that emerged from this corpus of texts emphasized external qualities: physical beauty, eloquence, the ability to dance, sing, and ride.11 He should have a personal fortune sufficient to furnish his embassy in accordance with the prestige of his sovereign (and to keep him free from the temptation of bribes).12 The manuals also argue for the importance of less tangible virtues such as prudence, knowledge, and noble blood, though even these interior traits are justified by their contribution to the successful outer performance of diplomacy. Juan Antonio de Vera’s treatise on the “perfect ambassador,” for example, explains how good verbal skills can make up for a lack of knowledge, allowing the ambassador to “divert [the conversation] as dexterously as possible away from subjects that he does not know well.”13 Even the requirement that an ambassador be of noble rank was explained by a pragmatic concern for his ability to perform his role as representative of his sovereign in a convincing manner, as when Alberico Gentili concludes that “it is scarcely probable that a man of ignoble station could assume the personality of one of noble rank, much less that of a prince.”14
This more elaborate external enactment of pleasing behaviors served not only to project a positive image of the ambassador’s sovereign but also to conceal or deflect attention away from the resident ambassador’s primary activities: gathering and disseminating information. The most contentious virtue ascribed to the ambassador was that of prudence, described by most authors as the talent to hide anything that might be detrimental to his country’s image and political objectives. In other words, the diplomat had
