Agents beyond the State: The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe 0198857950, 9780198857952

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Agents Beyond the State

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Agents Beyond the State The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe MARK NETZLOFF

1

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark Netzloff 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937531 ISBN 978–0–19–885795–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

For Ananya

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Acknowledgments In gratitude to friends and colleagues, for their advice and support while I was writing this book. I began my career under the guidance of Lois Potter, and I have been incredibly fortunate in having her mentorship over the years, a model I try to emulate with my own students. My time as a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison enabled me to expand this work in new and exciting directions; my thanks to Susan Friedman and my strong cohort of fellows that year. The development of this project was also guided through many insightful conversations with my colleagues in the Textual Ambassadors group. I am deeply indebted to Tracey Sowerby and Jo Craigwood for organizing this wonderful collaboration, as well as to the AHRC for their generous support. The “States of Early Modernity” symposium I organized at the Newberry Library was a great inspiration for this book: thanks to all those who participated, including Crystal Bartolovich, Victoria Kahn, and Ania Loomba. My thanks to a number of individuals for their kind invitations to present sections of this book, including Hugh Adlington, Laurie Ellinghausen, Chris Highley, Ed Holberton, Tom Lockwood, and John Watkins. The book benefitted immensely from the productive feedback of audiences at Ohio State, Michigan State, Minnesota, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Newberry Library, the Shakespeare Institute and Birmingham, Kent, Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge, Stirling, Liverpool Hope, Durham, as well as meetings of the Shakespeare Association, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Renaissance Society of America. In these settings and elsewhere, I am grateful for the friendship of Richmond Barbour, Steve Deng, Brian Lockey, Philip Lorenz, Dan Vitkus, Henry Turner, and Chris Warley. Thanks as well to my collaborators on the Festschrift, Darlene Farabee and Brad Ryner. I have been fortunate to have a strong cohort of colleagues in the Literature and Cultural Theory program at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, particularly Barrett Kalter, Gwynne Kennedy, Kristie Hamilton, José Lanters, and Mary Louise Buley-Meissner. I am immensely grateful to Jeff Merrick for his advice and mentorship. My work took on added resonance during my time as department Chair, which was the most rewarding experience of my career, especially due to my colleagues: Jason Puskar, Gilberto Blasini, Shevaun Watson, and Kathy Doering-Kilkenny.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

viii



At Oxford University Press, Ellie Collins was an exemplary editor, and I am indebted to her for her care in bringing this book to press. The project was also substantially improved as a result of the thoughtful (and thorough) review of an interdisciplinary group of three anonymous readers. Portions of this book have appeared in earlier publications. In the Introduction, some of the discussion of William Cardinal Allen was included in “The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 236–60; comments on periodization and state formation appeared in “The State and Early Modernity,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14 (2014): 149–54, and on Habermas and the public sphere in “Public Diplomacy and the Comedy of State: Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive,” in Authority and Diplomacy From Dante to Shakespeare, ed. Jason Powell and Will Rossiter (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 185–97. In Chapter 1, a portion of the discussion of travel advice texts is featured in “Jonson’s Volpone and the Information Economy of Anglo-Venetian Travel and Intelligence,” in Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Islands, Entrepôts, Empires, ed. John Watkins and Kathryn Reyerson (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 73–89. Earlier and abbreviated versions of the sections of Chapter 3 appeared in the following formats: “The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing,” in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, ed. Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 155–71; “Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot,” Reformation 15 (2010): 151–67; “Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas,” in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Joanna Craigwood and Tracey Sowerby (Oxford University Press, 2019), 54–68. For Sukanya Banerjee. For my mother, Linda Netzloff, and in memory of my father, Richard Netzloff (1935–2015). This book is dedicated to my daughter, Ananya.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Contents List of Images

Introduction: Theorizing State Agents 0.1 Sovereignty, State Agents, and Practices of Governance 0.2 The State and Public Sphere 0.3 Stateless Persons and Nonstate Agents in the Law of Nations 0.4 Outline of Individual Chapters

xi

1 1 18 23 36

1. The Information Economy of Early Modern Travel Writing 1.1 Irregular Travelers: Intelligence Networks and Travel Advice Literature 1.2 The Narrative Accounting of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary 1.3 Thomas Coryat: Sociability, Labor, and the Market Speed of Print

40

2. The Mercenary State: English Soldiers in the Dutch Revolt 2.1 Early Modern England’s Forgotten Wars 2.2 George Gascoigne, Literary Mercenary 2.3 Delegation, Expertise, and the Extraterritorial Economies of War 2.4 Foreign Service and Domestic Households: Rycote and Penshurst 2.5 1596: Bringing the War Back Home

94 94 99

3. Friends and Enemies in the Global History of Diplomacy 3.1 The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing 3.2 Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot 3.3 Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas Afterword: The Cosmopolitical Bureau Bibliography Index

40 58 75

123 141 154

164 166 188 200

223 231 261

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

List of Images 1. Categories of information gathering, from Profitable Instructions: Describing what special Obseruations are to be taken by Trauellers in all Nations, States and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable (London, 1633).

48

2. The classification of travelers, including “Irregular” travelers: from Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (London, 1606).

54

3. Monuments and inscriptions, from Thomas Coryat, Crudities (London, 1611).

84

4. Portrait of George Gascoigne, from The Steele Glass, with The Complainte of Phylomene (London, 1576).

100

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Introduction Theorizing State Agents

0.1 Sovereignty, State Agents, and Practices of Governance One of the most influential definitions of the state is Max Weber’s formulation from a century ago: “a state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory.”¹ Weber’s statement has retained such an abiding legacy that its component features are often taken for granted, something that occurs more generally when approaching a concept as abstract, capacious, and ubiquitous as the state. But Weber does not presume the existence of the state in its modern form, and instead emphasizes that it is always an effect of a process of construction, a “human community” that gains recognition as possessing statehood only through progressively assuming a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of power. The unsettledness of Weber’s model is reflected in revisions he made to this formula elsewhere in his writings. Later in the same essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” he offers a variation that clarifies the coercive preconditions for the state’s internal consolidation of power: only after having “expropriated” the functions of other estates and institutional bodies can the state “put itself, in the person of its highest embodiment in their place.”² Weber charts the transition from practices of governance to the theoretical framework of sovereignty, from the institutional mechanisms and personnel through which the state operates to the overriding power of the sovereign who authorizes these functions. However, offsetting the seemingly fixed nature of the state, the Weberian premise of the state’s monopoly over power recognizes that this authority must be continuously challenged in order for it to assert its legitimacy.³ As Anthony Giddens notes, the state’s monopoly is, after all, only “more or less successful” in Weber’s phrasing.⁴ ¹ Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 310–11. ² As Weber clarifies, “the modern state is an institutional association of rule which has successfully established the monopoly of physical violence as a means of rule within a territory” after having “expropriated” the functions of estates who previously held these powers (“Profession,” 316). ³ For a similar point, see John Hoffman, Beyond the State: An Introductory Critique (London: Polity, 1995), 65. ⁴ Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 120–1. Agents Beyond the State:The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Mark Netzloff, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Netzloff. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857952.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

2

   

In his monumental work Economy and Society, Weber offers an altogether different version of his definition of the state: “A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”⁵ This formulation presents a more coercive model of the state, which is “compulsory,” to the exclusion of any competing affiliations, and maintains its monopoly through the “enforcement” of its sovereignty. The most important distinction, however, is that the state’s power is achieved through its “administrative staff.” The agents of the state, not the sovereign, provide the means for maintaining state authority, and the state’s monopoly over the legitimate uses of violence is ensured through delegating to its agents the exercise of forms of coercion. Weber recognized that a central tension in the formation of the state entailed a struggle for control of the “means of administration” between rulers and other institutions and associations, not only professional groups such as lawyers, clerics, and merchants,⁶ but also, more pertinently, the state’s own agents, many of whom were drawn from these classes. Nonetheless, as Jens Bartelson points out, Weber and his followers were unable to see that the state “was knowable only in terms of the actions that constitute it,” and that there was consequently a “divide between the idea of the state and its institutions.”⁷ Moreover, the state’s monopoly over power could be maintained against its own agents. When delegating authority, conflicts inevitably emerged regarding the degree of agency allocated to state representatives, a problem that was compounded in an extraterritorial setting, where the state’s control over its agents was further attenuated. The early modern period represented a crucial stage in the history of state formation, and was instrumental in the development of many foundational features of the modern state, including administrative bureaucracies within state territories as well as a diplomatic system regulating interstate relations.⁸ Yet even as increasingly formalized practices of governance created the groundwork for the modern state in its administrative operations, the conceptual equivalents to the state were not the same as subsequent modern definitions. Early modern political thinkers, such as Francisco de Vitoria, Alberico Gentili, and Hugo Grotius, did not refer to states but instead surveyed a broader range of political communities, a ⁵ Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1: 54. ⁶ Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8. For the relevant section in Weber, see Economy and Society, 2:1010–64 and 2:1085–90. ⁷ Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31. ⁸ The classic text on the organization of the sixteenth-century English state is Geoffrey Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). On the concurrent development of the English diplomatic system, see especially Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

3

distinction stemming from a natural law tradition that, as Hedley Bull notes, “treated individual men, rather than the groupings of them as states, as the ultimate bearers of rights and duties.”⁹ Looking at the etymological development of the state in the early modern period, one finds that the term was not an abstract concept but rather grounded in personalized relations of governance, and was not tied solely to an increasingly absolutist monarchy but instead encompassed a range of legislative bodies possessing authority.¹⁰ The rise of a recognizably modern form of the state was not the inevitable result of political change in the period but was instead achieved at the expense of competing models of political association. As Quentin Skinner argues, “By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the concept of the state—its nature, its powers, its right to command obedience—had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in European political thought.”¹¹ Skinner’s comment speaks to how the early modern period continues to frame our critical approaches to the state. These legacies are reflected in the ways that later discussions often reproduce the models of sovereignty inherited from this period. In this opening section of the Introduction, I will return to some canonical texts of early modern political theory, particularly the work of Jean Bodin, and explore how their theorization of sovereignty was interconnected with a reflection on the agents and practices of governance. The following section will consider state formation in relation to the emergence of the public sphere, and analyze the ways that state agents contributed to early modern publics through their writings. The latter part of the Introduction will examine the extraterritorial histories of the state: the state and the law of nations were mutually constituted in this period, and were similarly predicated by the exclusion of nonstate agents and stateless subjects. This section will look at the conceptual impasse that resulted from efforts to theorize the place of religio-political exiles in many influential statements on the law of nations, with particular attention to the writings of the Catholic exile

⁹ Hedley Bull, An Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 29. For an extended analysis of the politics of natural law discourses, see Brian Lockey, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ¹⁰ Early modern definitions of the state include “a legislative assembly in which the various estates of the body politic are represented,” as with the Dutch States General (21.a); “a person of high rank, status, or importance” (22.a); “a ruling body of nobles” (22.b); “the governing body of a town” (23.b); “a commonwealth or polity” (III), including “the condition of prosperity, order, and settled government belonging to such a community” (24). The dominant modern sense entailing sovereignty, “supreme civil rule and government” (26.a), is found as early as the sixteenth century but is not the prevailing definition used in this period. See Oxford English Dictionary (“state”), 3rd edition (2012). For a related point, see Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 93, 112. ¹¹ Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:349. Maurizio Viroli elaborates on this transition in From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

4

   

William Cardinal Allen. The Introduction is distinct in content and method from the subsequent chapters, outlined in the final section, which offer more historically grounded and literary case studies relating to the groups of extraterritorial agents analyzed in this study: travelers, soldiers, and diplomats. In approaching early modern state formation through the framework of the writings of English state agents serving overseas, Agents Beyond the State focuses on the practices of the state rather than its theoretical underpinnings. Indeed, the emergence of a discourse of sovereignty and corollary alignment of this political ideology with the nation-state is a product of the early modern period. Theories of sovereignty, in other words, derived from practices of statecraft and gained a currency by abstracting the imputed characteristics of the state from the complex forms of political agency through which early modern states necessarily operated. As Philip Abrams has argued, although the early modern state “comes into being . . . within political practice,” through the theorization of sovereignty it “acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice.”¹² Timothy Mitchell extends this argument, noting that the state is neither a structure nor a pregiven set of institutions but rather “a powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.”¹³ The construction of sovereignty is effected through an elision of the practices of governance, particularly in terms of the central role of the state’s agents and representatives. But, as Mitchell adds, in the dynamic interplay of the state and its agents, “Political subjects and their modes of resistance are formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some wholly exterior social space.”¹⁴ One of the defining features of the early modern state’s organizational terrain was its need for information from its agents stationed abroad, and the practices of early modern governance took shape through a “paper state” and its constituent procedures of writing.¹⁵ My own approach from the vantage point of literary and cultural studies concentrates on the writing of the early modern state, analyzing the forms of writing, modes of agency, and literary and professional lives of the state’s extraterritorial representatives. Chapter 1 analyzes the compositional protocols elaborated for the circulation of intelligence reports and traces how they developed into more recognizable forms of travel writing. Chapter 2 discusses the textual circulation of news from England’s informal, mercenary participation in the Dutch Revolt, exploring how the military revolution that professionalized war also led to the professionalization of literary writing, as seen with George

¹² Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1989): 82. ¹³ Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond State Theories and their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 94. ¹⁴ Mitchell, “The Limits of the State,” 93. ¹⁵ This oft-cited phrasing derives from Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (2000; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 119.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

5

Gascoigne and other military writers. Chapter 3’s analysis of the career of Sir Henry Wotton focuses on the importance of the diplomatic letter as a model for the sociable and affective dimensions of state writing. The figures discussed in this study were among the earliest professional writers in early modern England, and possessed dual careers as state agents and literary writers. As Fynes Moryson, Gascoigne, Wotton, and others entered the realm of print and addressed a reading public, they transformed models of the state in the process, rendering its administration and theoretical preconditions as subject matter for public debate and analysis. As will be discussed later in the Introduction, the literary writings of early modern state agents are an integral component to the emergence of the public sphere and its defining characteristic of a transnational traffic in news and letters.¹⁶ A number of important critical studies have reoriented discussions of the early modern state to concentrate on practices of administration as well as the personnel responsible for governance. As Bradin Cormack has argued, the administrative practices of the state reveal how sovereignty was an effect of a “more mundane process of administrative distribution and management.”¹⁷ The most sustained analysis of state formation in early modern England has been provided by historians such as Steve Hindle and Michael Braddick. As Hindle points out, the early modern state “is not to be viewed exclusively as a set of institutions” but rather as “a network of power relations.”¹⁸ He productively reframes discussion from a static sense of “government as an institution or as an event” to a more nuanced and contextualized approach to “governance as a process.”¹⁹ Noting that early modern England was not a bureaucratic state, Braddick emphasizes in his work that any institutional history is also a “history of individuals.”²⁰ In the micropolitics of local governance, Braddick adds, “there was much more to the agency of the state than the monarchical will.”²¹ Mark Goldie therefore terms as an “unacknowledged republic” the number of individuals holding offices and participating in governance at the local level in early modern England.²² In his

¹⁶ See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 15. ¹⁷ Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9. ¹⁸ Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (2000; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 19. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer offer a broader survey of English state formation and capitalist development in The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). ¹⁹ Hindle, The State and Social Change, 23. ²⁰ Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27. On early modern definitions of office and office-holding, see Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ²¹ Braddick, State Formation, 24. ²² Mark Goldie, “The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 153–94.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

6

   

influential essay on the “monarchical republic” of the Elizabethan period, Patrick Collinson similarly highlights the “measure of self-direction” and “independent detachment” of the state’s counselors and agents.²³ As we see with Collinson’s analysis and the subsequent responses it generated, the complex practices of governance, particularly in terms of its distributed and delegated operations, defy any easy translation to readily available categories such as monarchical sovereignty or republicanism.²⁴ This study expands on this influential critical tradition, and focuses on the extraterritorial contexts that are often bracketed off from discussions of early modern state formation.²⁵ As Elizabeth Mancke has shown, the demands of administering commercial and diplomatic relations in regions throughout Europe and around the globe provided an impetus for the organization and centralization of the institutions of government; taken in these terms, foreign affairs served a key role in a process of state formation.²⁶ In contrast to Weber’s emphasis on the territorial history of the state, Agents Beyond the State examines the practices of governance and service through which the early modern state extended its jurisdictional authority abroad. The state’s administrative purview traversed interconnected national and global contexts, and political agency was not confined to sovereigns, particularly in extraterritorial settings in which the state was constituted by the agents who represented its authority beyond the nation’s territorial boundaries.²⁷ As will be discussed further in a later section of the Introduction, my analysis separates the history of the state from national culture in order to emphasize the transnational contexts that contributed to the formation of the early modern state. In its extension beyond the boundaries of the realm, state power was characterized not by its monopolization or centralized forms of authority but rather its more diffuse circulation among a variety of agents, including those bearing a more tenuous connection to legitimate state institutions. As Janice E. Thomson has shown in her analysis of the extraterritorial histories of early modern state formation, the emergence of the states system depended on “the ‘disarming’ of nonstate transnational activities” such as privateering and mercenarism.²⁸ Drawing on Thomson’s argument, this ²³ Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I” (1987), in Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), 36, 42. ²⁴ See John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). ²⁵ Although Collinson never explicitly addresses the issue, it is significant that his examples of agents operating without the monarch’s explicit directives occur in extraterritorial contexts, including Leicester in his role as deputy and quasi-sovereign English authority in the Low Countries (“Monarchical Republic,” 41). ²⁶ Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 195. ²⁷ For an extended analysis of the history of territoriality, see especially Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Shakespearean Territories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ²⁸ Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. For a recent

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

7

study details more fully how such nonstate activities were in fact integral to the extension of English jurisdiction abroad. In contexts such as England’s participation in the Dutch Revolt, the forms of delegated authority and commercial leasing of military labor show a political landscape that defies any strict demarcation of state-sponsored versus nonstate activities. The writings of state agents challenge some of the generic frameworks and critical models that have traditionally been used to analyze early modern sovereignty. As intelligencers, mercenaries, diplomats, and other figures represented state authority abroad, sovereignty was far from indivisible in its character or decisionist in its intent. As Christopher Warren has argued, in the early modern period genre was not merely a literary category but also the conceptual framework for imagining political models of association for gentes (peoples, nations).²⁹ Earlier critical studies have often seen tragedy as the generic template through which the absolutist monarchy’s model of sovereignty was deconsecrated and challenged by emergent publics. For Franco Moretti, the tragic flaw of sovereignty derives from the contradictions inherent in its image as a self-originating and self-determining authority that delimits political action to the decision of the sovereign.³⁰ The idea of sovereignty as founded on a state of exception, a suspension of constitutional restraints in times of emergency, has become a dominant critical model for analyzing sovereignty in recent years. As initially formulated by the early twentieth-century jurist Carl Schmitt, the defining attribute of sovereignty is seen as this power to exempt itself from the laws that seemingly constitute it: “the authority to suspend valid law . . . is . . . the actual mark of sovereignty.”³¹ Later in this section I will return to the concept of the state of exception, and show how Bodin and Machiavelli formulate complex and surprisingly critical assessments of emergency powers and extra-legal authority. As Glenn Burgess has emphasized, the term “absolutism” is generally applied too freely in characterizing early modern defenses of monarchical authority, and situating Bodin alongside

discussion of nonstate agents in early modern culture, see Laurie Ellinghausen, Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). ²⁹ Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. ³⁰ Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 2005), 42–3. Among recent discussions of sovereignty and tragedy, see Philip Lorenz, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) and Chenxi Tang, Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 107–13. ³¹ Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (1922; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 9. Giorgio Agamben analyzes this paradigm in State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (2003; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

8

   

contemporary Huguenot resistance theorists will illustrate how there were few proponents of such strict interpretations of sovereignty.³² As an alternative to analyzing early modern sovereignty in terms of tragedy or state of emergency, one instead sees that it necessarily operated through the delegated agency of its representatives. Such processes are, in fact, integral to preserving sovereign authority. As Paul de Man observed, “The declaration of the ‘permanence’ of the State would thus greatly hasten its dissolution.”³³ Sovereignty ultimately resists its intended closure, and its promises must always remain unfulfilled. Sovereignty, as Jacques Derrida so aptly put it, is stupid: in presenting itself as the basis of all authority, it will necessarily—if not tragically—break down.³⁴ As Étienne de la Boétie commented in Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un (1576), published the same year as Jean Bodin’s defence of sovereignty, “Stupidity in a tyrant always renders him incapable of benevolent action”; the antithesis of tyrannical sovereignty, for la Boétie, is embodied in friendship, and a politics of sociability that will characterize many examples of the practices of governance in this study.³⁵ “Sovereignty,” Harold Laski adds, “has necessarily to be distributed in order that the purposes of men may be achieved.”³⁶ Sovereignty is therefore always bound to its embodiment in the form of the state. As Geoffrey Bennington notes, although sovereigns may justify their authority through theoretical models emphasizing the unitary, self-originating, and indissoluble qualities of sovereignty,³⁷ these must necessarily be given a local habitation and a name in the form of the state’s representative agents. Ambassadors are, in the words of the early modern political theorist Hugo Grotius, “by a Sort of Fiction, taken for the very Persons whom they represent.”³⁸ The jurist Alberico Gentili reaches a similar conclusion regarding the effects of diplomatic representation on sovereign authority: “For if he who represents a prince is a subject of the sovereign to whom he is accredited, the prince himself is a

³² Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 18. For an overview, see J.P. Sommerville, “Absolutism and Royalism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. James Henderson Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 347–73. ³³ Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 266. ³⁴ Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). ³⁵ Étienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un (1576), published as The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (London: Black Rose Books, 1997), 83. ³⁶ Harold Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 177. ³⁷ Geoffrey Bennington, “Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 99. ³⁸ Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625), trans. as The Rights of War and Peace, 3 vols., ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Bk II, Chap XVIII, IV, 912. For a related discussion of delegation and diplomacy, see Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 163–8.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

9

subject in the person of his representative.”³⁹ Sovereignty is made manifest through its figurative forms, and is therefore an effect of its representation: the ambassador not only serves as another person of the sovereign, repeating his or her authority, but also performs sovereignty itself, only as a result of which an absent monarchical body can be conjectured as the originating cause of sovereignty. As Bartelson deftly puts it, “sovereignty is not an attribute of something whose existence is prior to or independent of sovereignty; rather, it is the concept of sovereignty itself which supplies this indivisibility and unity.”⁴⁰ In an extraterritorial setting, such as that of diplomatic encounters, the constitution of sovereignty is accomplished through the agential power of the state’s representatives. As in Grotius’s comment, we see that ambassadors may assume their distinctive role in representing sovereignty only once they are situated beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of the realm. John Donne represented this process of delegation in his verse letter “To Sir Henry Wotton, at his going Ambassador to Venice”: After those reverend papers, whose soul is Our good and great King’s loved hand and feared name, By which to you he derives much of his, And (how he may) makes you almost the same, A taper of his torch, a copy writ From his original, and a fair beam Of the same warm and dazzling sun, though it Must in another sphere his virtue stream⁴¹

In Donne’s poem the delegation of sovereign authority inherent in diplomatic accreditation is a textual process, one mediated through the letters of credential and textual correspondence that enables sovereignty to be extended “in another sphere” beyond the territorial nation. But sovereignty is in fact constituted as an effect of this delegation, and derived through the agency of the state’s representatives, a process of reproduction that makes the sovereign and his agents “almost the same.” In this dynamic relationship of agency and representation, the sovereign is a belated, constructed figure, one who intervenes, as Giorgio Agamben argues, “in order to confer legal validity on the act of a subject who cannot

³⁹ Alberico Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres [1585], trans. Gordon J. Laing (New York: Oceana Publications, 1964), I.xx.51. As Gentili notes in this section, an additional complication to the process of diplomatic representation arises when foreign nationals serve as ambassadors. ⁴⁰ Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty, 28. ⁴¹ John Donne, “To Sir Henry Wotton, at his going ambassador to Venice,” in The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), ll. 1–8, 216.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

10

   

independently bring a valid act into being.”⁴² Thus, even though Donne’s poem shows the representative agent as the subject of state power and recognizes the underlying fictionality of sovereignty, it nonetheless reflects an inability to conceptualize political agency without reference to an authorizing sovereign. A key component to early modern formulations of the state was a developing sense of the central place of the agent in practices of governance. Significantly, the OED locates in sixteenth-century England the earliest examples defining an agent as “a person who acts as a substitute for another; one who undertakes negotiations or transactions on behalf of a superior, employer, or principal; a deputy, steward, representative; (in early use) an ambassador, emissary.”⁴³ As we see with these meanings, the role of the agent is distinct from a modern sense of agency: the agent is defined not by autonomy or freedom of action but instead by a relational identity, serving on behalf of or as a substitute for a sovereign, authorizing authority. However, like in Donne’s poem on Wotton, the early modern definition of agent carries with it the potential forms of agency that a state’s overseas representatives may assume: as Giddens notes, in similarly turning back to the genealogy of the term, an agent implies power, capability, and ability to produce effects.⁴⁴ A relevant critical model in this regard is Bruno Latour’s framework of Actor-Network-Theory, which emphasizes that mediators—including the traveling informants, military agents, and diplomats analyzed in this study—do not merely serve an instrumental or subordinate role but instead “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”⁴⁵ As a result, the figuration of state authority experiences an “agential drift,” to draw on Julian Yates’s insightful phrasing, in which political agency is “a dispersed or distributive process” rather than a property—like sovereignty—that is intrinsically possessed.⁴⁶ This study expands on important interdisciplinary criticism that has analyzed the complex workings of agency among a state’s representatives in the constitution of state power. One of the earliest works to address these issues was Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969). For Miliband, state power resides in the personnel of the state, and the interpersonal networks of a “state elite” rising to power through governmental service.⁴⁷ Miliband’s model was critiqued by Nicos Poulantzas for its focus on individual subjects rather than the underlying

⁴² Agamben, State of Exception, 76. ⁴³ “Agent,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2012). ⁴⁴ Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Oxford: Polity, 1984), 9. ⁴⁵ Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. ⁴⁶ Julian Yates, “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, A Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597,” parallax 8 (2002): 48. ⁴⁷ Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western System of Power (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 49.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

11

social forces at work in the emergence of the nation-state in an economy of capitalist modernity.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, Bob Jessop has linked Poulantzas’s structural approach with the concerns of agency central to Miliband’s project, emphasizing that the state’s powers “are activated through the agency of definite political forces in specific conjunctures,” and that even under structural constraints, state actors are able to “transform social structures.”⁴⁹ As Colin Wight adds, “If the state has agency it can only be accessed through the agency of individuals.”⁵⁰ Giddens similarly acknowledges that state power is formed through a dispersal of authority among multiple actors rather than on a hierarchical concentration and unity of power.⁵¹ Even Schmitt, one of the most influential theorists of sovereignty, stresses that abstractions such as sovereignty and absolutism “are incomprehensible if one does not know concretely . . . who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such terms.”⁵² We will see throughout this study that the workings of sovereign authority are necessarily more diffuse when refracted through the agential power and interests of the state’s representatives. In discussing the intersubjective networks through which state power operated, this study grounds its analysis of extraterritorial service in material histories of writing practices, labor, domesticity, and emerging capitalist economies. Following the recommendation of Pierre Bourdieu, this material history of state practices considers the “system of agents who produce them as well [as] . . . the space of positions they occupy.”⁵³ The central place of the early modern period in broader histories of sovereignty and state formation is a common thread running through the work of many of the most influential political theorists of the past century, from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Ernst Kantorowicz to Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar, and Giorgio Agamben, among others.⁵⁴ The recurring emphasis on the formation of the modern state in the period reflects the extent to which histories of the state often rely on narrative frameworks of origin, emergence, and transition. But too often ignored are the ⁴⁸ Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978). ⁴⁹ Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 37, 42. ⁵⁰ Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189. ⁵¹ Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, esp. 8–13. ⁵² Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, ed. George Schwab (1932; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 31. ⁵³ Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 71. Recent sources that consider practices of statecraft and the agency of extraterritorial representatives include E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Daniel Riches, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Diego Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). ⁵⁴ For an expanded discussion of twentieth-century readings of early modern political theory, see Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

12

   

multiple, divergent theoretical frames through which the modern state can be conceptualized. As Kathleen Davis points out in Periodization and Sovereignty, in an argument that builds on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and other postcolonial scholars, the resurgent critical interest in the history of sovereignty risks reinscribing narratives of colonial modernity, with colonialism and slavery serving as the implicit templates and insidious preconditions for the advent of the modern.⁵⁵ Agents Beyond the State similarly traces the indebtedness of European state formation to the legacies of colonialism, particularly in the final section of Chapter 3, which discusses the concept of the lines of amity separating the European states system from colonial spheres “beyond the line.” Especially pertinent to this study is a related critical oversight: the extent to which histories of sovereignty and state formation are generally analyzed solely in reference to the territorial state. As a result, we assume that the history of the state is confined to the nation, thereby eliding the historical impact of extraterritorial contexts, from the complex position of diplomacy, and the elusive status of international law, to the varied forms of agency, travel, and service that pervade the early modern period and intersected with emerging forms of global commerce. As Davis cogently argues, new and innovative theorizations of sovereignty became dominant in the early modern period through a marginalization of rival narratives of political history: absolutist political theories were able to consign customary legal practices or competing political affiliations to the past, as residues of a feudal age superseded by the administrative modernity of the absolutist state.⁵⁶ As later thinkers looked back to the early modern period, this process was reproduced through an exclusive focus on the absolutist state, an approach that naturalized this political model as the norm and consigned constitutionalist alternatives to a medieval past.⁵⁷ These interpretations lost sight of the historical, cultural, and political conditions that led to this particular formulation of sovereignty, and thereby situated a partial, contested object at the center of their analyses. As the pluralist and Marxist theorist Harold Laski observed a century ago, “[w]e must ceaselessly remember that the monistic theory of the state was born in an age of crisis and that each period of its revivification has synchronized with some momentous event which has signaled a change in the distribution of political power.”⁵⁸ This monistic form of sovereignty, a product of historical crisis, ⁵⁵ For the classic statement of this argument, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). ⁵⁶ Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). ⁵⁷ Martin van Gelderen, “The State and its Rivals in Early-Modern Europe,” in Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath, eds., States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92. Stephen Deng emphasizes the continued legacies of medieval constitutionalism in the early modern period in Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 33–9. ⁵⁸ Harold Laski, “The Pluralistic State,” The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1921), 233. Henry S. Turner draws on Laski and other pluralist thinkers in his

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

13

gains its power precisely through its capacities for abstraction, its ability to circulate without reference to the preconditions that enabled its construction. It is therefore productive to historicize the concept of sovereignty itself and return to the specific contexts in which it was formulated and initially gained currency. A particularly important text in this process is Jean Bodin’s monumental work Les six livres de la République [Six Books of the Commonwealth] (1576).⁵⁹ Bodin’s innovativeness stemmed from how he transformed the idea of sovereignty through his emphasis on its intrinsic marks of unity, indivisibility, and indestructibility. Prior to Bodin’s formulation, the concept of sovereignty was applied far more broadly: it was a term primarily used for describing higher ranking authorities rather than a more abstract principle denoting absolute or exclusive power.⁶⁰ Sovereignty was therefore a relational term, not a designation of essence. Moreover, it was a characteristic associated with office and function, one that applied not only to individuals but also more generally to associations or organizational bodies. Sovereignty was therefore a contested space: a contingent, provisional designation conferred as a means for negotiating overlapping, potentially competing obligations to a variety of political bodies and relations, from those of kinship, alliance, and service, to corporate, civic, and professional affiliations, as well as the transnational loyalties and enmities of confessional identities. The critical afterlife of the concept of the state of exception is a prime example of how subsequent discussions of the history of sovereignty have overlooked the contexts in which it was initially constructed. When Carl Schmitt formulated this concept in the political climate of Weimar Germany, he significantly cited Bodin as his source.⁶¹ However, as Étienne Balibar pointed out, for Bodin the state of exception was itself an exception, not an abiding mechanism of sovereign power.⁶² Despite the fact that this paradigm is often attributed to Bodin, when he refers to the emergency powers of the sovereign in Six Books he offers only a provisional and conditional endorsement of such measures: while he concedes that “It is true

fascinating discussion of the genealogy of the corporation in early modern England: see The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). ⁵⁹ Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. M.J. Tooley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955). Unless noted otherwise, references to Bodin are from this edition. Due to the complex textual history of this work, other editions have been used for particular passages. Bodin initially published his text in French in 1576, then issued a revised Latin version in 1586; Richard Knolles’s 1606 English translation collated these two texts. The two modern editions, by Tooley and Julian Franklin, offer abbreviated versions of the text. For discussion, see Elden, The Birth of Territory, 261–2. ⁶⁰ Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 431. As Giddens adds, before Bodin transformed the idea of sovereignty, the term was used not only to refer to high-ranking individuals but also to the “characteristics of organizations themselves” (Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 94). ⁶¹ Schmitt, Political Theology, 8. ⁶² Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 142.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

14

   

that for making peace at Rome, the Senate very often acted without going to the people,” at the same time Bodin stresses “that the Senate, and very often the people, authorized their actions and ratified the treaties after they were made, and if they were disadvantageous to the public paid no regard to them.”⁶³ Other early modern political theorists shared Bodin’s reservations about extra-legal emergency powers. For Machiavelli, Roman precedent stipulated that “the dictator was named for a fixed period and not in perpetuity, and only to deal with the problem that caused him to be appointed.”⁶⁴ Moreover, in an earlier text, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), Bodin had argued that the power of the French crown was mitigated by other authorities such as provincial assemblies.⁶⁵ The tentativeness, complexities, and contradictions of Bodin’s political framework reveal how the concept of sovereignty emerging from his work did not arrive in a coherent, realized form; rather, as Steven DeCaroli notes, “sovereignty is presented for the first time as a question, a concept in need of a theory.”⁶⁶ In perhaps the best-known and most widely cited section of Six Books, “The True Attributes of Sovereignty,” Bodin in fact begins by remarking on the lack of classical antecedents for absolutist models of sovereignty. Noting the relatively brief consideration devoted to the topic by Aristotle, he dismisses this precedent for focusing solely on the administrative components of governance and restricting the three parts of a commonwealth to “the taking and giving of counsel, for appointing to office[,] and assigning to each citizen his duties, for the administration of justice.”⁶⁷ Significantly, the classical tradition that must be superseded by the modernity of absolutist sovereignty is an administrative model that places greatest emphasis on the functions of the agents of governance: counsel, office-holding, and justice. In his later survey “Of the Different Kinds of Commonwealth,” Bodin argues against mixed forms of government, declaring that since sovereignty must remain indivisible such forms “could never exist or even be clearly imagined.”⁶⁸ Bodin’s argument reveals the parameters of the political imagination, and he concludes the section by conceding the underlying fictionality of his monistic construction of sovereignty. As Andrew Hadfield points out, Bodin’s reference to the state as res publica recognized “that there was no natural form of government, merely a variety of types that could be

⁶³ Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), I.10.61. ⁶⁴ Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), I.34.94. ⁶⁵ Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 23. ⁶⁶ Steven DeCaroli, “Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty,” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43. ⁶⁷ Bodin, Six Books, I.10.41. ⁶⁸ Bodin, Six Books, II.1.55.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

15

classified.”⁶⁹ His model of sovereignty is ultimately an artifice used to give form to the complex workings of governance. In practice, he acknowledges, a principality “is nothing but an aristocracy or a democracy which has a single person as president or premier of the republic.”⁷⁰ A prince, in this stunning admission, is not qualitatively distinct but merely a first among equals. As Quentin Skinner has noted, Bodin presented his monistic model of sovereignty in response to Huguenot resistance theory, which had marshalled its arguments to defend their community’s political representation in legislative bodies.⁷¹ Therefore, rather than analyzing Bodin in isolation, as an inaugural text in a discourse on sovereignty, it is necessary to situate his argument as a conservative response to more radical alternatives. One particularly relevant aspect of this strand of resistance theory is that it conferred the right to resist unlawful authority to officers of government. In Theodore Beza’s De jure magistratum [The Right of Magistrates] (1574), office holders (lesser magistrates) are obligated by oath to fulfill their duties, and therefore freed from obedience and “entitled to resist” any sovereign authority who impinges on their obligations to uphold their office.⁷² Constitutional and legislative bodies similarly have the power to depose sovereigns who have violated the limits and conditions of their authority.⁷³ Beza’s argument was expanded in Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), which concluded that “it is lawful either for all or at least for many of the officers of the kingdom to restrain a tyrant. Indeed, not only lawful, but their office makes it incumbent on them.”⁷⁴ Writing a generation later, the German theorist Johannes Althusius drew on the Dutch Revolt as a model for an association of regional and lower-ranking officials who opposed unlawful authority, in this case the Spanish vice-regal court.⁷⁵ Such collective resistance embodied Althusius’s alternative model of politics as “the

⁶⁹ Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 160. ⁷⁰ Bodin, Six Books, II.1.56. ⁷¹ Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:284–301; also see Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 309 and Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 98–120. ⁷² Theodore Beza, The Right of Magistrates, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay, ed. Julian H. Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 111–12. ⁷³ Beza, The Right of Magistrates, 114. For analysis, see Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. Burns and Goldie, 208–14. ⁷⁴ Philippe du Plessis Mornay, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 158. On the response to Huguenot resistance theory in early modern England, see Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Good News from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 75–95. ⁷⁵ Johannes Althusius, Politica (1603), ed. Frederick S. Carney (1964; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 194.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

16

   

art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them.”⁷⁶ Juxtaposing Bodin with his contemporaries reveals the distinctive histories that emerge when one draws attention to contexts of governance, administration, and state formation rather than focusing solely on theoretical models of sovereignty. Perhaps the most significant example of an overly selective reading of early modern political thought is provided by the contemporary Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In Homo Sacer, which remains his most influential work, Agamben significantly cites only two figures from the early modern period: Bodin, whom he describes as “the most perceptive modern theorist of sovereignty,” and Hobbes, whose view of an originary, ahistorical state of nature in many ways resembles Agamben’s own analysis.⁷⁷ Although I am singling out Agamben, his exclusive attention to Bodin and Hobbes is something one finds in other recent critical discussions of sovereignty as well. Even Derrida—in a dialogue with Habermas on the effects of 9/11 on contemporary philosophy— qualifies his endorsement of a tradition of shared or limited sovereignty by still subscribing to the notion that, “[a]s Bodin, Hobbes, and others have pointed out, sovereignty has to be and must remain indivisible.”⁷⁸ Instead of placing Leviathan at the center of a discussion of early modern sovereignty, Hobbes is more aptly seen, as Foucault once put it, as chief of the “false paternities” of modern political thought.⁷⁹ One effect of Hobbes’s influence is that the state is often analyzed in reference to models of sovereignty rather than in the context of the material histories of the state. As Srinivas Aravamudan argued, Foucault’s own sustained discussion of early modern sovereignty provides a materialist counterhistory to offset the legacies of Hobbes.⁸⁰ In his analysis of what he terms governmentality, Foucault focuses on the multiple registers in which an art of government circulated in the early modern period: “The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things, and a way too of relating to government.”⁸¹ The state was not merely a vehicle for subjecting a populace; it was also a “principle of intelligibility” that “entered into the reflected practice of people” and in fact served ⁷⁶ Althusius, Politica 17. Van Gelderen discusses Althusius as a response to Bodin in “The State and its Rivals,” 86–9. ⁷⁷ For Agamben’s comments on Hobbes, see Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 106–9 and 125. ⁷⁸ Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanni Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 131. ⁷⁹ Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 270. ⁸⁰ See Srinivas Aravamudan, “ ‘The Unity of the Representer’: Reading Leviathan Against the Grain,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (2005): 631–53. ⁸¹ Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 277.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

17

as the “only real space for political struggle.”⁸² Foucault’s analysis of the literature of reason of state in the early modern period provides a dynamic alternative to Hobbes, whose emphasis on the irreversible nature of the transfer of sovereignty to representative political bodies forges a tradition that presents the state as a monolithic and abstract entity which cannot be contested or reimagined.⁸³ Given the abiding influence of Machiavelli on subsequent eras of Italian thinkers, his absence in the work of Agamben is a perplexing omission. It is therefore useful to return to the ways that Machiavelli himself addressed the origins of sovereignty in his analysis of the beginnings of political systems. As Louis Althusser suggests in Machiavelli and Us, the Prince is offered as a way to sidestep the impossibility of absolute origins, providing a figure for imagining the creation of political order out of nothing.⁸⁴ But Machiavelli is concerned less with origins than he is with the future, and the potential duration and durability of any form of the state. Regardless of how a state begins, the more pressing matter is how it is maintained. For Machiavelli, it is preserved not through an essential, immovable, and absolute model of sovereignty, one that necessarily coheres to the solitary, unifying figure of the Prince. On the contrary, the state endures because of its foundation, with sovereign authority transferred from the Prince to the people in the form of laws. The exhortation for national unity that concludes The Prince, for instance, is premised not only on a liberating sovereign leader but also sustained through “new laws and new practices.”⁸⁵ Machiavelli’s praise of the contemporary French parlement, which restrains the nobles while protecting the people, is expanded in his analysis of the tension between senate and plebeians to which he attributes the “perfection” of the Roman republic, characterized by “its laws and institutions for the benefit of civic liberty.”⁸⁶ What defines this statist form is its mutability and protean character, subject not only to fortune and historical finitude but also to a constant, innovative reconstitution through the concrete influence of competing classes.⁸⁷

⁸² Foucault, Security, 286, 276; latter quote from Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 221. ⁸³ The key section in Leviathan is “Of the Rights of Sovereigns by Institution,” which disallows subjects from the right to “cast off monarchy,” “be freed from . . . subjection,” or reclaim the ability to transfer their rights to another sovereign authority (I.XVIII.115–16). Hobbes allows for subjects to be “absolved of their obedience to their sovereign” when that authority is no longer “able to protect them,” but does not elaborate on the actions that subjects would be warranted to take in these instances (Leviathan, I.XXI.147; ed. J.C.A. Gaskin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]). ⁸⁴ See Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999), 57. ⁸⁵ Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), XXVI.89. ⁸⁶ Machiavelli, The Prince, XIX.66; Discourses on Livy, I.2.27 and I.4.29–31. ⁸⁷ Machiavelli describes the inevitable mutation of political forms in Discourses on Livy: “all human affairs are in constant motion and cannot be fixed” (I.6.37); for similar comments on the cyclical decay of political forms, see I.2.26. In The Prince, he emphasizes the mitigating force of popular will, as a result of which “a ruler is always obliged to co-exist with the same people” (IX.35). For analysis, see

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

18

   

Machiavelli’s model gestures toward the heuristic advantages of locating critical frameworks outside of a monistic model of sovereignty to describe the dynamism of early modern politics—in practice as well as theory. In distinction from Agamben, the realm of the political is not constituted on the basis of primeval forces of exclusion, violence, and abandonment but is rather shaped, to draw on the insights of Bradin Cormack, through the ongoing administrative and jurisdictional operations we associate with the modern state.⁸⁸ In many respects, my reading bears witness to the continued relevance of J.G.A. Pocock’s analysis of the transnational republican tradition that he sees Machiavelli inaugurating through his emphasis on the precariousness of civil institutions.⁸⁹ In drawing on this framework, however, this study will focus on the practices of governance, particularly its forms of writing and agency, rather than a singular and linear intellectual history. This model of the state, in other words, is not a pregiven entity, a mode of modernity always already in place. It is neither isolated to the bureaucratic functions of normative judgment and administrative operations nor monopolized by sovereign bodies. As Graham Hammill has argued, early modern sovereignty was a fluid, multivalent discourse, one that served as a mode of constitutive power enabling the creation of new models of political community.⁹⁰ As we see with Machiavelli, the formation of the state in the early modern period was an agonistic process in which innovative theoretical reflections were inextricably bound up with practices of political agency, and with historical preconditions— but also possibilities of transformation—that still shape our historical present. The state, the commonwealth, the res publica—literally, the public thing—then, as now, is worth fighting over.⁹¹

0.2 The State and Public Sphere Early modern state formation is seldom analyzed in reference to the concurrent emergence of a variety of publics in the early modern period.⁹² The seemingly Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 28, 37. ⁸⁸ See Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, passim. ⁸⁹ J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). ⁹⁰ Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). ⁹¹ Relevant to this point are Chantal Mouffe’s model of “agonistic pluralism” and Bruno Latour’s call for an “object-oriented democracy”: see Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005) and Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). ⁹² An important recent exception is András Kiséry’s Hamlet’s Moment, which analyzes early modern English drama as a “channel for the dissemination of knowledge about professional work, and about the business of politics in particular, to a broad and socially inclusive public” (Hamlet’s

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

19

antithetical nature of these political forms derives from the oppositional framework set out in Jürgen Habermas’s classic study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas initially describes “state servants” as the prototypical “public persons” of the early modern period.⁹³ But as he charts the increasing separation of civil society from state power, and thereby restates modern liberalism’s characteristic separation of private and public spheres, the state drops out of his analysis: state agents lose a separate identity as they are subsumed alongside other professional, bourgeois subjects within civil society, while the state itself takes on an abstracted, bureaucratic identity as it is reduced to the component spheres of “public authority” such as the “police” and “court.”⁹⁴ As Habermas traces the development of a public sphere from late seventeenthcentury England onwards, he insists that this space of civil society could take shape and flourish only after it had situated itself beyond the jurisdiction of the state: the social equality of the public sphere is described as possible only “outside the state,” in a space in which the “laws of the state” were suspended.⁹⁵ As he charts the social position of the public sphere, situating it between the private realm of the family on the one hand and the “sphere of public authority” of state and court on the other, he nonetheless draws a sharp, untraversed boundary separating the public sphere from the state. “The state” remains an abstraction located outside the public sphere, serving as an oppositional force that is invoked solely in order for the public to define itself against its power. But the strict demarcation of the public sphere from the state in Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere at its eighteenth-century zenith is complicated by the genealogy he offers in earlier historical sections of his study. Working backwards chronologically through Habermas’s analysis, one finds that he in fact emphasizes the mutually constitutive relation of the public sphere and the state: “Civil society came into existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority,” he argues.⁹⁶ The affective bonds linking private individuals together in terms of shared economic interests and through a rational debate on political matters were predicated by their “exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus”;

Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 2). ⁹³ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 11. Among the many valuable critical reappraisals of Habermas’s study, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Mike Hill and Walter Montag, eds., Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (London and New York: Verso, 2000); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Brownen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, eds., Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2009); Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment. ⁹⁴ Habermas situates the “Public sphere in the political realm” in an interstitial space between civil society (comprised of market relations and the domestic family) and the state (constituted by the court and “the police”) (Structural Transformation, 30). ⁹⁵ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35, 36. ⁹⁶ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 19.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

20

   

even as early as the mid-sixteenth century, the term private “meant as much as ‘not holding public office or official position.’ ”⁹⁷ Habermas additionally traces the conceptual separation of an administrative class within the state from the court of the monarch: the term public, he points out, “referred to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler.”⁹⁸ One therefore finds two competing models of the public: in a later part of the early modern period, the more recognizable version of private individuals gathered together in spaces such as taverns and coffee houses, engaged in literary production as well as political debate. But the emergence of this more familiar manifestation of the public sphere obscures recognition of another public within the administration of governance, a context that Habermas in fact describes as the prototypical public of the early modern period: “the servants of the state were . . . public persons.”⁹⁹ One of the concerns of Agents Beyond the State is to examine the elusive place occupied by the state and its agents in critical models of an early modern public sphere. I will be focusing on three modes of extraterritorial service—travel and intelligence gathering, military service, and diplomacy—in order to explore the porous boundaries of what is encompassed within a history of the state. State agents navigated between overlapping spaces and mutually constitutive relations of governance and civil society: the state’s networks of intelligence gathering, for instance, outlined the compositional procedures that laid the groundwork for emergent genres of travel writing, while these travel narratives themselves addressed distinct publics and settings of textual production, from the marketplace of print to the manuscript circulation of literary coteries. Additionally, the extraterritorial setting of these forms of service shows that the early modern public sphere did not limit its concerns to national politics and was therefore not demarcated as a space separate from international contexts. We will see this in Chapter 2’s discussion of the military writer Sir John Smythe, who entered a public sphere of print to offer a critique of the effects of the commercial economy of extraterritorial warfare on the traditional hierarchies of agrarian England. These contexts serve to complicate two conventional assumptions about the place of the state in the Habermasian model of the public sphere: that the state is territoriallybound and primarily concerned with domestic (national) politics, and that the extra-political space of civil society necessarily transcends the strictly demarcated boundaries of the bureaucratic state. This study will draw on the classic model of the public sphere in order to address not only early modern state formation but ⁹⁷ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 11. ⁹⁸ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 11. As Habermas adds, this emerging public came to be seen as “ ‘state-related’ ” because the state itself “no longer referred to the representative ‘court’ of a person endowed with authority but instead to the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction” (18). ⁹⁹ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 11.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

21

more especially the intersection of extraterritorial service with the social, textual, and political domains of a variety of early modern publics. Another central concern of this book is examining the history of domesticity, and the effects of state formation and overseas service on models of the household, family, and private sphere. Many of this study’s central texts—from paternalistic travel advice literature and the domestic entertainment of a military family to the workings of the ambassadorial household—offer a domestic setting, in the sense of familial or household spaces, for imagining the entrance of state servants into public life and the ambit of sovereign authority. The Habermasian public sphere is predicated by a constitutive division of public and private spheres, and assumes that the progressive emergence of the public took place by leaving behind the limits of the domestic. Nonetheless, for Habermas, the public sphere could take shape only through modeling itself on the private sphere it superseded, drawing on the “audience-oriented subjectivity” of the household while ultimately transcending the private, local concerns of the domestic sphere.¹⁰⁰ As a result, the public sphere reproduced the affective relations of the intimate spheres of family and household in order to replace them, thereby creating a fantasy of a political space occupied solely by men. Feminist critiques of Habermas have rightly emphasized how the classic definition of the public sphere fails to address the gendered divisions intrinsic to this critical framework.¹⁰¹ The writings and careers of the early modern state agents surveyed in this study complicate this traditional imagination of separate spheres. As will be discussed in the first chapter, the state’s control over the flow of information from travelers and other intelligence agents was established through a paternalistic mode of governmentality that extended familial relations to the context of state service. Chapter 2 explores the impact of foreign service on models of domesticity and the household, analyzing the cultural production relating to two military families, the Sidneys and the Norrises. The final chapter examines the ambassadorial household of Sir Henry Wotton, looking at the affective relations of diplomats with their colleagues and members of their staff. The extraterritorial context of the embassy enabled the creation of alternative networks of affiliation between Wotton and his ambassadorial “family,” which, while resembling the audience-oriented subjectivity of the Habermasian public sphere, also drew on languages of service and mentorship for imagining public forms of community that did fully cohere to either the territorial state or its domestic analogue, the family. As demonstrated by Wotton, the identity of the ambassador and other state officials was not a primarily bureaucratic role. The term bureaucracy was itself the

¹⁰⁰ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 28. ¹⁰¹ Among other examples, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–32.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

22

   

product of a later age: initially coined in 1765, it entered general usage only in the early nineteenth century.¹⁰² In other words, when Weber formulated his bureaucratic framework of the state, one that presumed the existence of a stable, hierarchical, and professionalized institution managed by trained, credentialed civil servants, he grounded his analysis on a model that was a very recent innovation. However, even Weber acknowledged the social and affective dimensions of political service: among his types of social action he listed not only the instrumentally rational, value-rational, and traditional, in keeping with a bureaucratic model, but also the “affectual,” which is “determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states.”¹⁰³ In analyzing the pre-bureaucratic social environments of early modern state agents, this study focuses on the importance of what Julia Adams has described as “the historically specific role of affect for early modern elite political actors.”¹⁰⁴ In early modern England, the position of the state in relation to civil society was not that of a bureaucratic domain of public authority separate from and at odds with the public sphere. On the contrary, the agents of the early modern state themselves constituted a form of civil society, one that not only flourished in extraterritorial settings but also served as a social force that transformed state authority by rendering it as an object of public analysis and political reflection. Recognizing this space for political agency challenges the assumed separation of public and private spheres implicit in many definitions of the state. As Marxist critics have long argued, the separation of economic and political practices into the respective domains of civil society and state functions to legitimate not only liberalism’s fantasies of an individualistic and somehow autonomous economic sphere but also a view of the state that abstracts it from economic production and relegates it to a “purely political” status.¹⁰⁵ In addition, drawing on Peter Lake and Steve Pincus’s formulation of a “post-Reformation public sphere,” we see that the workings of early modern publics are not tied to a particular chronological framework, whether in connection to the emergence of a recognizable form of the newspaper (ca. 1620s and following), the English Revolution, or the ¹⁰² Martin Van Creveld, Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 137. As enumerated in the OED, the term “bureaucracy,” deriving from the French “bureaucratie” (ca. 1759), first entered the English language in its various senses as “Government by officials; a system of government or (in later use) administration by a hierarchy of professional administrators following clearly defined procedures in a routine and organized manner” (1815); “A state, institution, organization, etc., which is governed or run by bureaucrats” (1843); and the pejorative reference to “The people employed in such a system, considered collectively” (1818) (“bureaucracy,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition [2013]). ¹⁰³ Weber, Economy and Society, 1:25. ¹⁰⁴ Julia Adams, “Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State-Formation,” in Steinmetz, ed., State/ Culture, 114. ¹⁰⁵ My discussion is indebted to Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 127–8. A related point is made by Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London and New York: Verso, 1991).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

23

coffee-house culture of the Restoration.¹⁰⁶ Analyzing practices of governance alongside models of the public sphere enables us to recognize the dynamic and contested political landscape of early modern England in which competing spheres of public authority vied for legitimacy. As Foucault appealed, “We have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State.”¹⁰⁷

0.3 Stateless Persons and Nonstate Agents in the Law of Nations The demarcation of international relations from the territorial history of the state is one of the most significant legacies of early modern state formation. As Anthony Giddens has argued, the principle of state sovereignty imposes an imputed boundary separating the internal and external histories of the state. As the state assumes full sovereignty within its territories, it necessarily brackets off extraterritorial contexts as the foreign domains of imperial and colonial relations.¹⁰⁸ As will be discussed further in the final chapter’s section on the concept of the lines of amity, the anarchic definition of colonial spaces was an innovation of the early modern period and, as Justin Rosenberg comments, a feature “characteristic . . . of capitalist modernity.”¹⁰⁹ In the premodern era, by contrast, there was an “absence of distinction between domestic and international politics,” as Saskia Sassen has noted.¹¹⁰ Hendrik Spruyt elaborates on this point, noting that in the medieval period “it is impossible to distinguish the acts conducting ‘international’ relations, operating under anarchy, from those conducting ‘domestic’ politics, operating under some hierarchy.”¹¹¹ Ken MacMillan therefore distinguishes between sovereignty (imperium) and possession (dominium) in order to emphasize the ways that state authority intrinsically extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation: monarchs “with imperium were recognized as having both internal and external sovereignty.”¹¹² The complexities inherent in the extraterritorial operations of English governance are reflected in many of the examples found throughout this study, from the ¹⁰⁶ See Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 270–92. Also see Lake and Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). ¹⁰⁷ Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 34. ¹⁰⁸ Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 170, 281. ¹⁰⁹ Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, 123. ¹¹⁰ Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 40. ¹¹¹ Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12. ¹¹² Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

24

   

Dutch cautionary towns ceded to the English in exchange for their military involvement in the Dutch Revolt to the commercial terms in which England leased military labor to the Dutch States General following the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585). The porousness of the boundaries of English jurisdiction in these contexts is markedly distinct from a modern framework that conventionally emphasizes the territorial character of state authority. In other instances, the extraterritorial extension of state power was a matter of controversy, as will be shown with the English government’s attempted forced repatriation of Catholic exiles following the Gunpowder Plot along with corollary efforts to limit the mobility of English subjects seeking employment abroad in a transnational economy of military and maritime labor. The significance of a territorial basis to state authority is most evident in those cases involving the actual crossing of the realm’s jurisdictional boundaries. The English state retained direct control over travel through licenses issued by the Privy Council that limited the duration and itineraries of journeys, and regulations over travel particularly focused on surveilling the movement of Catholic subjects and exiles. Rather than functioning as an abstract principle undergirding state authority, territoriality manifested itself through the enforcement of border checks and control over the mobility of subjects, as will be seen with the apprehension of Fynes Moryson at Dover on his return from his travels as well as the extradition of Father William Baldwin, captured while crossing a checkpoint in Germany that was held by English expeditionary forces. In these examples, the interrelated workings of territoriality and extraterritoriality are most apparent in the administrative practices through which the English state’s authority was exercised over individual subjects. The boundaries distinguishing the territorial versus extraterritorial domains of governance are appropriately ambiguous throughout this period due to the fact that these concepts were themselves undergoing a process of definition and had not yet arrived at their modern, more recognizable forms. As Stuart Elden has recently shown, territoriality possessed a range of evolving meanings: it could entail, for instance, a sense of jurisdiction or dominion over “territories,” a term encompassing adjoining regions as well as non-contiguous and often overseas possessions, spaces that would be deemed “extraterritorial” in the modern framework of the territorial state.¹¹³ In surveying early modern precursors to the territorial nation, Benedict Anderson similarly emphasized the distinctly nonterritorial boundaries of early modern dynastic realms and composite monarchies, “where borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptively into one another.”¹¹⁴ Especially central to this study is the category of the extraterritorial, a term that emphasizes the significance of forms of travel, service,

¹¹³ Elden, Shakespearean Territories, 76. ¹¹⁴ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 2006), 19.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

25

and governance beyond the territorial state,¹¹⁵ and is used instead of more general variations, such as “foreign” or “overseas,” because it more precisely represents the jurisdictional specificities and anomalies of the means by which English state power was extended abroad in distinct settings such as the embassy, military garrison, or privateering voyage, as well as through networks of individual travelers and informants. The extraterritorial does not imply a formalized sense of “extraterritoriality,” however, and it is important to remember that the legal codification of this principle became fully established only in the nineteenth century. Significantly, the earliest use of the term extraterritoriality was made by Hugo Grotius. In the passage cited earlier, in which he referred to the ambassador representing sovereignty “by a Sort of Fiction,” Grotius emphasized a related process of representation, with diplomats retaining legal rights as if still situated in their native state and outside the territories of their host culture, “so may they by the same kind of Fiction be imagined to be out of the Territories [extra territorium] of the Potentate, to whom they are sent.”¹¹⁶ Contrary to the marginal role often allotted to extraterritorial histories of the state, in the early modern period the emergence of the nation-state as the normative model of a political community was interconnected with a corollary process in which an international states system was elaborated through theorizations of the law of nations. Giddens has emphasized that the subsequent development of international institutions in the modern era served to enshrine the nation-state as the sole political actor in a global system.¹¹⁷ In the early modern period, in lieu of such formal mechanisms, this process was conducted at a theoretical level through codifications of the law of nations. What links these distinct historical contexts is that in each period state sovereignty was defined as a result of efforts to create a states system regulating relations among political bodies. Jens Bartelson, Hedley Bull, and others have explored a reverse dynamic, examining how an international states system emerged in the early modern period as an effect of internal state formation. As Bartelson adds, it is “the categorical distinction between the domestic and the international that conditions the possibility of statehood” and that “makes modern politics modern.”¹¹⁸ Following this approach, one can see that a states system was itself a product of the emergence of the early modern nation-state and the theories of sovereignty that underwrote its consolidation. Part of this process also entailed a bracketing off of extraterritorial

¹¹⁵ For discussion, see E.R. Adair, The Extraterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Longmans, 1929) and Maïa Pal, “Early Modern Extraterritoriality, Diplomacy, and the Transition to Capitalism,” in The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics, ed. Daniel S. Margolies et al. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 69–86. ¹¹⁶ Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, Bk II, Chap XVIII, IV, 912. ¹¹⁷ Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 263–4. ¹¹⁸ Bartelson, The Critique of the State, 161. For similar comments, see Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty, 23 and Bull, An Anarchical Society, 8.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

26

   

contexts from national culture, which thereby provided an impetus for the formation of the early modern state. Questions of periodization have been central to discussions of the law of nations in the early modern period. It is generally recognized that the term “international law” is itself anachronistic to the period, and the first reference to this phrasing derives from the end of the eighteenth century.¹¹⁹ A number of important critical studies have challenged a related chronology that had ascribed the formalization of a modern states system to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The terms of these treaties, Benno Teschke has shown, intended to preserve a dynastic status quo rather than enshrine a new framework of territorial nationstates.¹²⁰ More recently, Stuart Elden has argued that while the treaties did emphasize the primacy of German states’ internal territorial jurisdiction, these powers did not entail “some absolute notion of sovereignty.”¹²¹ This historical reappraisal has revealed the extent to which early modern frameworks of the law of nations and a states system are distinct from their later, more recognizably modern forms.¹²² Especially pertinent to this study is attention to how the law of nations was challenged to accommodate varieties of delegated power and licensed agency that are anomalous if not unimaginable in the subsequent history of the modern state. The extraterritorial extension of state sovereignty often occurred informally, illicitly, and out of necessity. It was accomplished through the agency of not only the state’s own credentialed representatives but also figures bearing a more complex relation to the state, such as those supplying military labor or political intelligence, who might be more accurately seen as nonstate agents or stateless persons. As Janice E. Thomson notes, the danger of such agents stemmed from the fact that “nonstate violence was often turned against the state itself.”¹²³ The histories of state formation that hinge on the emergence of the postWestphalian territorial state do not fully take into account extraterritorial

¹¹⁹ Bull, An Anarchical Society, 36. The OED’s first citation of “international law” is from Jeremy Bentham, ca. 1789 (Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition [2015]). The formulation found in early modern texts, by contrast, is that of the law of nations (jus gentium), deriving from Roman law. For further discussion, see Chapter 3, “Lines of Amity,” below. ¹²⁰ Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), 244. Among critiques of the emphasis placed on the Peace of Westphalia in the history of International Relations, also see Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55 (2001): 251–87. Stéphane Beulac analyzes the texts of the 1648 Münster and Osnabrück treaties in The Power of Language in the Making of International Law (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2004), 67–97. ¹²¹ Elden, The Birth of Territory, 313. ¹²² Annabel Brett, for instance, describes the era immediately prior to Westphalia as an “interim” period between medieval and modern models of the state (“Scholastic political thought and the modern concept of the state,” in Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 147). ¹²³ Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, 6.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

27

contexts, where practices such as privateering and mercenary service remained widespread until the nineteenth century.¹²⁴ A good example of the porous boundaries distinguishing state from nonstate activities in the early modern period is provided in the work of Hugo Grotius. One of Grotius’s innovations is that he attempted to present the law of nations as deriving from the customary practices of states.¹²⁵ However, this project was also influenced by his own position in relation to nonstate political entities: one of his early works, Mare Liberum (1609), a central defense of free maritime commerce, was commissioned by his employer, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), to defend the seizure of a Portuguese vessel, the Santa Catarina, in 1603.¹²⁶ In Grotius’s model of free trade, the efforts of the Portuguese to bar the VOC from trading in the East Indies violated the laws of nature mandating free maritime access and trade, and in defense of this right even a private, nonstate agent such as a corporation could have recourse to the laws of war to justify extraterritorial violence and the seizure of prize.¹²⁷ Grotius’s defense of free trade points to the flexibility of the law of nations, which in this case is used to legitimate private war by non-state actors, and attests to the complex forms of political agency that were exercised in the spheres beyond the jurisdiction of the territorial state. Even as early modern works of political theory constructed the states system through its theoretical elaboration and practical codification, they presumed that they were merely systematizing what already existed in a stable and recognizable form. In Leviathan, for example, Hobbes dismissed any consideration of the law of nations, about which “I need not say any thing in this place,” since the topic was “comprehended” in the rules governing individual sovereign bodies.¹²⁸ The extraterritorial histories of the state were similarly elided in other influential formulations of state power. In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli’s analysis does not fully address the extent to which the mutability of the Roman republic was an effect of its foreign entanglements, with cultural expansion necessarily precipitating a cycle ¹²⁴ Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, 11. ¹²⁵ F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (1966; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 188. ¹²⁶ Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004). For analysis, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–94; Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–7; Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ¹²⁷ Bull, An Anarchical Society, 30. Among discussions of the early modern corporation, see Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); William Pettigrew and David Veevers, eds., The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). ¹²⁸ Hobbes, Leviathan, II.30.235. On the transnational contexts of Hobbes, see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59–74; on Hobbes and international law, see Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 127–59.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

28

   

of cultural decay.¹²⁹ Bodin asserted that sovereigns were no more subject to the law of nations than their own edicts, and could ignore international law if they deemed it unjust.¹³⁰ But if the law of nations was merely national law writ large, how does one account for subjects—such as political exiles—who were denied the protections of either home or host nation? As Gentili conceded, “As regards exiles, . . . the question whether they cease to be citizens is a subject of debate among our authorities,” one that, in fact, remained unsettled throughout the period.¹³¹ The religio-political exile was the prototypical stateless person of the early modern period. In an era of state formation that increasingly limited political agency to the sovereign nation-state and its official representatives, such figures remained a conceptual impasse in early modern political theory and international law. In his De Jure Belli (1588, rev. 1598), for instance, Gentili exempted exiles and political dissidents from his analysis: “Such rebels cannot be discussed in a few words; but I am not treating that subject, which belongs to civil law.”¹³² Although Gentili placed exiles under the jurisdiction of their home nations, there was nonetheless a recognition of the ways that exile complicated the legal status of such subjects. Jean Hotman, French Huguenot diplomat and exile, therefore described exiles and other rebels as “devided subjects.”¹³³ However, even a resistance theorist like Theodore Beza, a Huguenot exile in the Calvinist community of Geneva, barred private persons from taking action against a tyrant, and proposed instead either obedience or voluntary exile.¹³⁴ As these examples show, the most influential works outlining an emerging states system were unable to theorize the place of exiles, which is especially ironic since many of these texts were written by exiles: Gentili spent his career as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford while also serving as a consultant for the English as well as Spanish governments; Jean Hotman, briefly Gentili’s colleague at Oxford, served under Leicester in the Low Countries as well as in the English embassy in France; Grotius wrote De Jure Belli ac Pacis while in exile and in the service of the Swedish diplomatic corps in Paris; Hobbes in fact composed Leviathan in Paris, where he resided from 1630–37 and again in exile from 1640 until shortly after the text’s publication in 1651.¹³⁵

¹²⁹ Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.6.37–8. ¹³⁰ Bodin, Six Books, I.8.36. ¹³¹ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.x.85. ¹³² Alberico Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, trans. John C. Rolfe (New York: Oceana Publications, 1964), III.viii.321. Among recent overviews of Gentili’s works, see Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Ursula Vollerthun, The Idea of International Society: Erasmus, Vitoria, Gentili and Grotius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 106–44. ¹³³ Jean Hotman, The Ambassador (1603), I7. ¹³⁴ Beza, The Right of Magistrates, 108. ¹³⁵ Diego Pirillo expands on the role of exiles in the history of diplomacy in The Refugee-Diplomat, focusing on the links between England and diasporic Italian Protestant intellectuals. James Loxley examines the effects of exile on Hobbes’s political thought in “ ‘Not sure of safety’: Hobbes and Exile,” in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 133–51.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

29

The most extensive analysis of the implications of exile is offered by William Cardinal Allen, the nominal head of the expatriate English Catholic community and founder of the seminaries at Douai and Rome. Although Christopher Highley has drawn valuable attention to the contributions of Catholic writers to emerging models of English national identity, there has not been a comparable appraisal of the relation of English Catholic writers to theorizations of the law of nations.¹³⁶ Allen’s own argument reflects the difficulties in representing exile and, like Gentili, he defines the position of the Catholic exile community primarily in terms of its contested status under English law.¹³⁷ His text An apologie and trve declaration of the institution and endeuours of the two English Colleges (1581) was written in response to the series of anti-Catholic proclamations, issued beginning in 1580, which will be discussed later in this section. Allen dissevers loyalty to “publike authoritie” and “affection” to nation from geographic location.¹³⁸ In his terms, exile enables dissent, not treason: “we are not fugitiues,” he declares, emphasizing that seminarians did not flee arrest in England or depart out of political protest but left only to preserve matters of conscience relating to religion.¹³⁹ In addition, given the recurring changes of state religion in recent English history, he anticipates an imminent Catholic restoration, after which time the clergy trained in the English Colleges would provide a necessary service to the state.¹⁴⁰ Allen dislodges theological debate from its association with political subversion, challenging Anglican officials to “a disputation” and calling for the free circulation of prohibited Catholic texts.¹⁴¹

¹³⁶ Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Highley offers a comprehensive survey of the writings of Catholic exiles on the Continent: see especially 80–117 and 154–9. ¹³⁷ In contrast to his colleague Robert Persons, whose works often describe the cultural effects of travel on the Catholic exile community, Allen consistently defines English identity in reference to law and political allegiance. For discussion, see my essay “The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 236–60. For an overview of Persons’s writings, see Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). ¹³⁸ William Allen, An apologie and trve declaration of the institution and endeuours of the two English Colleges (Mounts [Rheims], 1581), A5v. ¹³⁹ Allen, An apologie and trve declaration, B4v. On the question of Catholic loyalism in the early modern period, see especially Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). ¹⁴⁰ Allen, An apologie, C4v. ¹⁴¹ Allen, An apologie, I1v, H2v. The call for public debate was a recurring feature of the English mission: on this issue, see Thomas S. McCoog, SJ, “ ‘Playing the Champion’: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission,” in McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 119–39, as well as Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Puritans, Papists, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 587–627.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

30

   

Allen even forges a strategic alliance with nonconformists and other opponents of the Oath of Supremacy, offering these groups refuge in the English Colleges.¹⁴² Defending a right of conscience, Allen limits the power of the state to political matters: as he concludes, “there can be no iurisdiction ouer English mens soules.”¹⁴³ In his Defense of English Catholics, written three years later, Allen would turn to Protestant writers for support, although with the sly intent of showing that resistance theory was not unique to Catholic authors following the Papal Bull against Elizabeth.¹⁴⁴ Despite these ecumenical gestures, his Defense nonetheless contradicts his support for religious toleration in his earlier text. He defends the persecution of heresy in general, including the execution of Protestants in the reign of Mary Tudor, but attempts to exclude English missionary priests on legalistic grounds by arguing that the Elizabethan state itself had since rescinded the laws “to put any man to death for his faith.”¹⁴⁵ Discussions of Allen have noted that his published texts, which often emphasize loyalty to the Elizabethan regime and an engagement with publics across a confessional divide, are contradicted by private statements in his correspondence, which show an active support for foreign invasion and the restoration of Catholicism in England by force.¹⁴⁶ One sees a hardening of Allen’s position over the course of the 1580s, which reflects the changing political climate that followed the English state’s violent suppression of the English Mission. Allen was the figure directly responsible for recruiting Catholic priests to the Mission, and witnessed the effects of the government’s response, with 116 of the 471 priests sent to England executed by the end of Elizabeth’s reign.¹⁴⁷ The outbreak of hostilities between England and Spain, including the English interventions in the Low Countries that will be analyzed in Chapter 2, had a direct impact on Allen as well, forcing him to relocate ¹⁴² Allen, An apologie, C7. For discussion of the Oath of Supremacy, see Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 37–68. ¹⁴³ Allen, An apologie, F4. ¹⁴⁴ William Allen, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 134–46. Susannah Brietz Monta discusses Allen’s debate with Burghley in this text in “Rendering Unto Caesar: The Rhetorics of Divided Loyalties in Tudor England,” in Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59–86. ¹⁴⁵ Allen, Defense, 94. As Duffy reminds us, Allen’s support of the Spanish Armada similarly did not envisage religious toleration but instead the suppression of Protestant heresy following a Catholic victory (Eamon Duffy, “William, Cardinal Allen (1532–1594),” Recusant History 22 [1995]: 280); also see M.E. Williams, “William Allen: The Sixteenth-Century Spanish Connection,” Recusant History 22 (1994): 123–40. ¹⁴⁶ Brian Lockey, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), 50. Accounts of Allen’s career have given competing estimates as to when Allen began to advocate the deposition of Elizabeth, whether 1583, 1576, or even as early as 1572: for these respective dates, see Thomas Francis Knox, ed., The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen (1882; Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1965), xliii; Martin Haile, An Elizabethan Cardinal: William Allen (London: Pitman, 1914), 238; Duffy, “William, Cardinal Allen”: 266. ¹⁴⁷ Duffy, “William, Cardinal Allen”: 278.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

31

the English College from Douai in the Spanish Netherlands to Rheims from 1578–93.¹⁴⁸ Allen’s shifting position is also indicative of his failure to separate theological issues from the political sphere. The conventional view of Allen is that of a doctrinal traditionalist who was limited to a pastoral and bureaucratic role in the exile community.¹⁴⁹ One historical account even memorably characterized him as a “mild, scholarly, rather dull man; more fit for the university than for international politics.”¹⁵⁰ Allen in fact gave strict directives that barred seminarians from discussing politics in the English Colleges.¹⁵¹ Contrary to this official position, however, even an earlier text like the Apologie reflects his active engagement with contemporary politics, from his defense of a liberty of conscience to his advocacy of an open national forum for theological debate. In addition, by publishing his texts from the setting of the English seminaries, Allen placed the English Colleges in a distinctly modern position. Allen extends to the diasporic context of exile some of the characteristics of a Habermasian public sphere: the traffic in news and published texts, the public use of reason, the transposing of a familial, audience-oriented subjectivity to a masculinist domain of civil society, all of which are predicated by a distance from the state and public authority. The modernity of his position is additionally reflected in the ways that it emerged from the context of exile, thereby exemplifying what Giddens has described as a form of “action from a distance.”¹⁵² As Allen himself implored, “oportere meliora tempora non expectare sed facere” [we cannot wait for better times; we must act now.]¹⁵³ A key component to Allen’s argument is his defense of the right of refuge, and he hearkens back to a model of transnational justice and citizenship that was increasingly rendered obsolete as the nation-state began to occupy the position of exclusive actor in an international states system. As Hannah Arendt has argued,

¹⁴⁸ Allen defended William Stanley’s defection to Spanish forces in The copie of a letter vvritten by M. Doctor Allen: concerning the yeelding vp of the citie of Dauentrie vnto his Catholike Maiestie, by Sir VVilliam Stanley knight (Antwerp, 1587). Even many English Catholics objected to Allen’s argument in this text (Thomas O. Hanley, “A Note on Cardinal Allen’s Political Thought,” Catholic Historical Review 45 [1959]: 332.) Allen’s inability to account for the continued loyalism of Catholics in England is similarly reflected in his defense of the Spanish Armada, which assumed that a general uprising of Catholics would occur in support of the invasion: see An admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland concerninge the present vvarres made for the execution of his Holines sentence, by the highe and mightie Kinge Catholike of Spaine. By the Cardinal of Englande (Antwerp, 1588). ¹⁴⁹ For such views of Allen, see J.C.H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), 54 and John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 26. For a full discussion of Allen’s career and writings, see Duffy, “William, Cardinal Allen,” revised in Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 132–67. ¹⁵⁰ A.L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth (1950; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 514. ¹⁵¹ Haile, An Elizabethan Cardinal, 146. ¹⁵² For a related discussion, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21–9, 55–78. ¹⁵³ Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen, 367.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

32

   

the right of asylum is the most fundamental and longest-standing obligation underlying the law of nations, one that extends from classical defenses of hospitality to the medieval principle of “quidquid est in territorio est etiam de territorio.” Arendt invoked this tradition in her analysis of the population of stateless persons displaced from nation-states of origin and yet denied the right of refuge elsewhere. These dislocations stemmed from a transformed model of citizenship, one no longer grounded as “an instrument of the law” but instead on an imputed ethnic basis as “an instrument of the nation.”¹⁵⁴ The process that Arendt traced in reference to twentieth-century totalitarianism had precedents in the early modern period. The right of sanctuary, a vested tradition throughout the medieval period, was banned under Henry VIII. Rights of asylum were prohibited by James I in 1623.¹⁵⁵ In opposition to these developments, Allen’s defense of English Catholic exiles defines English identity on the basis of deterritorialized principles of law and justice, forms of community not contingent on the standard markers of nationhood such as unconditional submission to the state, geographic residence, or ethnic origin. In his defense of the right of refuge, Allen counters the framework of the nation with the cosmopolitan model of the open city.¹⁵⁶ Allen calls attention to the long history of English transcultural links with the Continent, especially Rome, noting the historical precedents in which the English have availed themselves of the right of refuge “in such like cases of distresse.”¹⁵⁷ In describing an “English Roman life,” Allen emphasizes less the distinctiveness of English expatriate culture than Rome’s traditional role as the exemplary site of sanctuary: Rome, he observes, has always served as “the citie of refuge and recourse of al Christians out of al Nations.”¹⁵⁸ The right of refuge offers a universalist framework for law as social justice, one

¹⁵⁴ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 280, 275. ¹⁵⁵ The banning of asylum and sanctuary in the Jacobean period was intended to curtail the use of embassy chapels as gathering places for recusants, an issue that came to a head with the collapse of the chapel at the French embassy in London during a crowded mass (Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 6 [2002]: 354). ¹⁵⁶ Jacques Derrida examines the historical implications of the city of refuge in his essay “On Cosmopolitanism”: see On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–24. ¹⁵⁷ Allen, Apologie, B8v. ¹⁵⁸ Allen, Apologie, C1. In an example of the waning influence of the open city model, the anonymous text The State of Christendom (ca. 1594–95) comments that “I know that God ordained cities of Refuge, whereunto it was lawful for Innocents and men wrongly oppressed, to fly for safety; and yet even over such strangers it cannot be amiss to have a watchful eye, as well as to Cherish them” (The state of Christendom, or, A most exact and curious discovery of many secret passages and hidden mysteries of the times [1657], 125). The text, first published in 1657 as the work of Sir Henry Wotton, has been more recently attributed to Anthony Bacon, a fellow member of the secretariat under the Earl of Essex and similarly responsible for sending intelligence reports to his employer during this period. For discussion, see Alexandra Gajda, “The State of Christendom: History, Political Thought and the Essex Circle,” Historical Research 81 (2008): 423–46.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

33

that Allen sets in opposition to the nationalist agenda of recent anti-Catholic legislation. The English Mission had prompted the English state to issue a series of antiCatholic proclamations beginning in 1580.¹⁵⁹ Significantly, the first proclamation differentiated the general population of English exiles from those participating directly in plots against the English state.¹⁶⁰ A subsequent proclamation in 1581 was intended to reclaim loyal Catholic exiles by demanding their return from the Continent.¹⁶¹ One key stipulation called for families and guardians to provide authorities with the names of any family members living abroad, and to recall them home within the space of four months. While attempting to organize the national community as an aggregate of loyal households, this effort established a census-like surveillance over Catholic families, with unspecified penalties for those who did not voluntarily come forward to be identified. The ultimate failure of these efforts is reflected in the fact that these ultimatums had to be repeated in a third proclamation the following year. Composed in the wake of Edmund Campion’s execution, this edict testifies to the increasingly hardline position adopted by the English state. Unlike earlier legislation, it collapsed distinctions and deemed all Catholic exiles as “traitors.”¹⁶² The English state’s increasingly draconian stance toward Catholic exiles was in keeping with the positions outlined in the most influential contemporary statements on sovereignty and the law of nations. Bodin, for example, allowed for granting asylum to exiles only in limited circumstances, but stressed that this protection should always remain conditional and never be extended to pensions and active support. More significantly, for Bodin the rights of exiles remained subordinate to national law; if a nation demanded the extradition of exiled subjects, the host nation must necessarily repatriate them.¹⁶³ Gentili extended Bodin’s argument in De Legationibus libri tres (1585). Even a subject who had become naturalized in his host culture, Gentili asserted, cannot resist the efforts of his birth nation to reassert its “rights over him.”¹⁶⁴ In fact, exile itself is recast as a ¹⁵⁹ On the contexts of the Mission, see Alexandra Walsham, “ ‘This Newe Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England,” in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 315–40 and Robert E. Scully, SJ, Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011). ¹⁶⁰ “Supressing Invasion Rumors,” 15 July 1580, in Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 469. ¹⁶¹ “Ordering Return of Seminarians, Arrest of Jesuits,” 10 January 1581, in Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 482. ¹⁶² “Declaring Jesuits and Non-Returning Seminarians Traitors,” 1 April 1582, in Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 488–91. This classification was legally codified by the “Act against Jesuits and Seminary priests” (27 Eliz. I, c.2) (1585). ¹⁶³ Jean Bodin, Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (1606), V.6.617–18. ¹⁶⁴ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.x.86; for related comments, see Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, I.iv.23.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

34

   

form of “obstinacy and disobedience” that will “render them liable to punishment.”¹⁶⁵ Gentili’s argument was intended as a response to the Huguenot political theorist François Hotman, whose model of resistance theory had extended diplomatic recognition to rebels and other stateless persons, granting them status as lawful enemies in the law of nations.¹⁶⁶ Jean Hotman expanded on the implications of his father’s argument in his treatise The Ambassador: diplomatic rights, such as the promise of safe passage in sending heralds and ambassadors to negotiate with foreign powers, were extended not only to exiles and confessional minorities (“deuided subjects”) but also to “fugitiues, outlawes, or pirats.”¹⁶⁷ This universal application of the law of nations, Hotman added, was not merely strategic, as a way of finding a diplomatic solution to any conflict with rebel groups “in consideration of the Common good”; more significantly, the law of nations must be applied universally, without any exceptions: “the good of the Estate goeth aboue all lawes, and all respects.”¹⁶⁸ Gentili countered these arguments by insisting that exiles were not able to sever their allegiance to their home nations.¹⁶⁹ Even if deprived of the protections of citizenship, they were not granted any compensatory status under the law of nations: “rights,” he concluded, “are not acquired by offenses.”¹⁷⁰ Gentili placed exiles among the category of unlawful enemies, or hostes humani generis, denied status under the law of nations.¹⁷¹ As will be discussed further in the middle section of Chapter 3, this classification was later applied to Catholic exiles in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The English state argued that the unprecedented nature of the Plot freed them from any recognition of Catholic exiles’ rights of refuge or naturalized status in their host nations. Denying that the exiles held any protection under the law of nations, English officials demanded the extradition of leaders of the Catholic exile community.¹⁷² Over the course of the early modern period, political exiles were relegated to a status as stateless persons if not universal enemies. In addition to François and Jean Hotman, one of the few political theorists to offer a defense of the rights of exiles was Hugo Grotius. When he composed his magnum opus De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), Grotius was an exile himself, residing in Paris while serving as a diplomat for the Swedish state. His discussion was nonetheless extremely brief, comprising only several paragraphs within his voluminous work. Grotius

¹⁶⁵ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.x.86. ¹⁶⁶ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, II.vii.77, II.viii.80; see François Hotman, Quaestionem illustrium liber (Paris, 1573), VII (46–54). ¹⁶⁷ Hotman, The Ambassador, I7. ¹⁶⁸ Hotman, The Ambassador, I7–I7v. ¹⁶⁹ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.ix.84. ¹⁷⁰ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.vii.78. ¹⁷¹ Among many other considerations of this topic, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). ¹⁷² For discussion, see Chapter 3, “Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot,” below.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

35

defended exile by naturalizing the mobility of subjects as a mode of commercial life. A nation’s loss of subjects, he concluded, is offset by the “advantage” of the “Number of Strangers they receive in turn.”¹⁷³ Alluding to Cicero, who deemed an ability to leave the state voluntarily as the “Foundation of Liberty,” Grotius viewed migration solely in relation to an economic freedom enabling the transfer of residence and labor power.¹⁷⁴ Victoria Kahn has emphasized Grotius’s crucial role in articulating an emerging contract theory of government, a model that drew on a Ciceronian tradition in which political communities are grounded on bonds of voluntary association while also adapting itself to the conditions of commercial society and globalized trade.¹⁷⁵ Even though Grotius’s argument served as a defense of possessive individualism, it nonetheless opened up the possibility for a political freedom of agency and critique.¹⁷⁶ He rebutted the inter-state police function of the law of nations advocated by Bodin and Gentili, declaring that “the State has no Right over those whom they have banished” and “Nor has the State any Power over Exiles.”¹⁷⁷ Significantly, this defense of exile was framed not in reference to legal precedent but rather through recourse to literary tradition, and Grotius drew exclusively on literary sources such as Euripides and Isocrates to support his argument, showing how alternatives to a statist imagination were forged through literary templates rather than political frameworks.¹⁷⁸ By contrast, Grotius was critical of the semantic ambiguity he found in the precedents for exile in civil law, which codified transportation or banishment as a form of legal death, despite the fact that exiles “enjoyed their Freedom, and all the Advantages allowed by the Law of Nature and Nations” even if deprived of the rights of citizenship in their home state.¹⁷⁹ In addition, similar to Allen’s invocation of the model of the open city to defend the right of refuge, Grotius situated his defense of exile in terms of political traditions of amicitia and hospitality: to entertain exiles, he concluded, is not

¹⁷³ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk II, Chap V, XXV, 555. ¹⁷⁴ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 554. ¹⁷⁵ Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36–7. However, as Richard Tuck notes, in Cicero one finds a tension between his theorization of a common human society and what he assumes is an inherent inclination to prefer bonds of sociability and friendship within one’s community (Rights of War and Peace, 36–7). For further discussion of this point, see the final section of Chapter 3, “Lines of Amity,” below. ¹⁷⁶ See C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). ¹⁷⁷ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk III, Chap XX, XLI, 1575; Bk II, Chap V, XXV, 555. Hobbes follows Grotius’s precedent in concluding that banished persons are no longer subject to the authority of their former sovereigns, but emphasizes the importance of exiles becoming “subject to all the laws” in their new dominion (Leviathan, I.XXI.148). ¹⁷⁸ Warren discusses the interconnections between literary writing and the constructed nature of the law of nations in Literature and the Law of Nations, esp. 14–18. Grotius turned to literary writing to reflect on his own position of exile in his tragedy Sophompaneas (1635). ¹⁷⁹ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk II, Chap XVI, IX, 856.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

36

   

“contrary to Friendship,” and he deemed the right of refuge, “To receive the Banished, a Right common to all Mankind.”¹⁸⁰ As will be discussed at several points in this book, the languages of amity and sociability serve as a recurring frame of reference through which extraterritorial agents conceptualized their social place. Friendship offered a means for defining their social position in lieu of an overarching framework of sovereign authority. We will see this dynamic in examples such as Sir Henry Wotton’s grounding of his diplomatic practice on modes of sociability as well as the informal alliance between Sir Francis Drake and the Cimarrons. At the same time, models of cross-cultural amicitia were also predicated by corollary definitions of enmity, and this study will examine the central place of those groups exempted from sociable inclusion in definitions of the law of nations. The types of agents discussed in this study—travelers, soldiers, ambassadors—are juxtaposed with figures representing dangerous forms of agency: intelligencers, mercenaries, pirates and privateers, rebels and political exiles, colonial subjects, and other stateless persons and nonstate agents.

0.4 Outline of Individual Chapters The opening chapter—“The Information Economy of Early Modern Travel Writing”—examines information exchange as one of the chief ways that the power of the early modern state was extended in extraterritorial settings. England’s relations with European states were mediated through an information economy that depended not only on credential extraterritorial agents but also the illicit labor of individual travelers and other informants. The earliest forms of English travel writing emerged out of this context of the state’s networks of intelligence gathering. As I describe in my opening section, most travel texts from this period were not autobiographical accounts of personal travel but rather advice texts—often written by leading state officials—that outlined procedures for organizing the experience of travel and converting it into narrative form. My discussion shows how travel writing, like intelligence gathering, was concerned with the acquisition and management of information. The protocols of writing elaborated in these texts were particularly driven by an effort to maintain control over the agents and networks through which information was not merely transmitted but also potentially transformed. After an initial section surveying travel advice texts of the Elizabethan period, the chapter analyzes the influence of this tradition on the practices of writing and narrative forms of the first-person travel accounts that made a belated appearance

¹⁸⁰ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk III, Chap XX, XLI, 1575, 1576.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

37

in the Jacobean period. The middle section, on Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617), examines the forms of “narrative accounting” that structure his text. His travel account not only provides unparalleled insight into the economic underpinnings of travel but also complicates the reduction of travel writing to information exchange, offering instead a calculus of sociability, interiority, and dissimulation that correlates the management of risk with the care of the self. The final section discusses Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611) as an illustration of the material practices of travel writing. Coryat’s text emphasizes the underlying labor of travel: the embodied nature of composition, the physical and temporal limits of writing, as well as the networks of sociability through which travel knowledge circulates. His text also bears witness to the movement of travel writing from coterie manuscript circulation to a marketplace of print, a transition that reflects the state’s increasing monopoly over the circulation of information. Chapter 2—“The Mercenary State: English Soldiers in the Dutch Revolt”— discusses the textual production emerging from an extraterritorial context that is often elided in histories of early modern England: the nation’s numerous military interventions on the Continent. Throughout the late Elizabethan period, England’s population was incorporated in an ongoing military mobilization, with English armies maintaining a nearly constant presence on multiple fronts in the Low Countries as well as France and Ireland. Yet even as these conflicts generated numerous texts that disseminated military knowledge to a reading public, England’s foreign wars were nonetheless distanced from civil society: they were not only informal and often covert interventions but were additionally conducted by an increasingly specialized, expatriated class of subjects. Through an analysis of the autobiographical writings of English soldiers, I examine how the conditions of military service enabled them to reflect on their economic position as mercenaries, able to transfer their labor power, as a way of reimagining their ability to assert their agency as political subjects. The chapter looks at texts written by English military agents themselves, with an extended discussion of George Gascoigne alongside analysis of lesser-known figures such as Sir John Smythe and the Norris family. Gascoigne’s Spoyle of Antwerpe, his remarkable account of the destruction of the commercial hub during a mutiny of occupying Spanish forces, illustrates the complexities of extraterritorial violence, showing not only the attenuated control that states held over their delegated agents but also the role of mutinies as a form of labor organization and protest. The latter sections of the chapter examine the effects of extraterritorial military service on models of English domesticity, particularly the material histories of local communities, households, and families. England’s disastrous overseas military interventions in the 1590s prompted an outpouring of textual critique and popular protest against state policy. Using Jonson’s later representation of Penshurst and the Sidney family’s own history of service in the Low Countries as a point of reference, my discussion focuses on an

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

38

   

anonymous domestic entertainment staged during Elizabeth’s 1592 progress by the Norris family, one of the most prominent military families in the late Elizabethan period. Whereas Jonson’s poem uses the backdrop of overseas service as the inspiration for constructing a persuasive fiction of English domesticity, the Rycote entertainment offers a mournful reckoning of the personal as well as cultural toll of an increasingly militarized society’s foreign entanglements. Chapter 3—“Friends and Enemies in the Global History of Diplomacy”— juxtaposes three episodes in the history of early modern diplomacy: Sir Henry Wotton’s tenure as England’s ambassador to Venice; the English state’s efforts to extradite a group of Catholic exiles in connection to the Gunpowder Plot; and Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons in Panama. In my discussion of Wotton’s career and correspondence, I focus on the unique position of the embassy as a space of residence, domestic business, and social and pedagogical conduct. Wotton’s writings emphasize the literary and sociable foundations of diplomacy, a view that challenges the traditional model of diplomacy as an administrative process relegated to an instrumental role in formal negotiations between state bodies. His career as an ambassador demonstrates how the extraterritorial extension of state power relied on agents and networks operating outside the state’s own declared protocols. The middle section analyzes how early modern diplomacy was transformed in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. In response to this event, the English state circumvented the law of nations and extended English sovereignty beyond the nation in an effort to extradite several leading Catholic exiles on fabricated charges. In contrast to Wotton’s more autonomous model of state service, this episode reflects the extent to which emerging practices of diplomacy and theorizations of the law of nations made political agency coterminous with sovereign state institutions, and thereby excised any legal or conceptual place for the exile, extraterritorial subject, or nonstate agent. The final section extends this analysis to examine the modes of sociability and definitions of enmity applied to colonial and extra-European regions. An abiding fiction underwriting the history of the law of nations is the idea of the lines of amity, the premise that extraterritorial violence “beyond the line” did not disrupt peaceful relations among European states. Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons complicates the boundaries of the lines of amity, revealing the extent to which nonstate agents, stateless persons, and a range of colonial subjects wield political agency in the unstable domain of the colonies. Colonial rebellion, moreover, provided a framework for imagining the overthrow of sovereign authority. Nonetheless, as seen in Francisco de Vitoria’s recuperation of Spanish dominion in De Indis as well as in William Davenant’s entertainment The History of Sir Francis Drake, the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

39

Finally, the Afterword for the study—“The Cosmopolitical Bureau”—turns to the first citation of the term cosmopolitan, from James Howell, in order to explore some of the legacies of the early modern period that continue to resonate in our own historical moment. Howell’s model of cosmopolitanism is that of a comparative form of political knowledge, one deriving from a position of exile or social displacement that provides a framework for turning a critical gaze back to one’s national culture. Howell significantly correlates this critical, cosmopolitical outlook with the distinctive practices of writing that emerge from the “bureau” of state governance.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

1 The Information Economy of Early Modern Travel Writing 1.1 Irregular Travelers: Intelligence Networks and Travel Advice Literature Discussions of early modern travel are often premised on a search for origins, an effort to locate the earliest examples of what would come to be known in later periods as “the Grand Tour.”¹ Although this chapter’s analysis of travel writing will be critiquing the assumptions underlying this kind of chronology, we will begin with a textual scene that so often serves as an inaugural moment in early modern English literature: the initial frame of Thomas More’s Utopia. The text opens not in Raphael’s imagined “no-place” but in the precise social setting of More’s diplomatic mission to Flanders. In this cultural landscape populated by humanist servants of the state—including More and his host and counterpart, the diplomat Peter Giles— the traveler Raphael Hythloday is an eccentric intruder on the social world of diplomacy, a “stranger” of indeterminate origin. What enables his entrance into the conversation, as well as the narrative of the text itself, is the information he possesses: as Giles confides to More, “I was just on the point of bringing him to you . . . for there is no man alive today who can tell you so much about unknown peoples and lands; and I know that you’re always greedy for such information.”² Far from inhabiting distinct social spheres, the diplomat and traveler are brought together through the circulation of news and intelligence. In this information economy, the state relies on not only its own official representatives but also more shadowy figures possessing a tangential connection to state authority. The social and geographic distance of these informants from centers of power is what renders their information valuable, and by acquiring their intelligence the state is able to extend its control beyond its territorial and administrative boundaries. The state’s relation to its informal networks of spies and informants is necessarily mediated by its diplomatic agents, figures like More who not only receive and transmit intelligence but also maintain an authority over the irregular agents whose labor fuels this information economy.

¹ Michael Brennan offers a useful survey of early modern English travel to the Continent in The Origins of the Grand Tour (London: Hakluyt Society, 2004), 1–53. ² Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York and London: Norton, 1992), 4. Agents Beyond the State:The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Mark Netzloff, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Netzloff. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857952.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

41

This chapter will examine the ways in which the early modern concept of information was produced out of a specific cultural context: the practices of intelligence gathering that served as an integral component of state formation. What I will be describing as an early modern information economy took shape over the course of the sixteenth century in response to the institutional needs of the English state in forging diplomatic and commercial links with Europe. The earliest examples of travel writing emerged from this context of intelligence gathering, and attempted to codify travel in order to regulate the flow of information and thereby limit the dangerous agency of the informants on whom the state depended for information in the circulation of political intelligence beyond the nation’s boundaries. In the early modern period, information possessed a range of meanings that unsettles our conventional assumptions about the inert, factual, and ultimately depoliticized qualities implied by this term. Among the historical meanings listed in the OED: “the shaping of the mind or character”; “instructive knowledge”; “an item of training”; “a piece of advice”; “intelligence, news”; “an account or narrative.”³ Information was tied not only to the theorization of political life but also to practices of political intelligence, the gathering of information for the purposes of extending political knowledge. Information was therefore synonymous with action, and with the dangerous, destabilizing forms of knowledge enabled through the circulation of political intelligence. Information, seen as a process rather than a product, was constituted above all through narrative means. Instead of being associated with objectivity, it was linked with subjective intelligence, and, in particular, with the shaping of the mind through pedagogical and professional forms of training and advice. Studies of the history of information and knowledge production have analyzed information flows predominantly in reference to the state. In this context, the creation of a state bureaucracy managing the flow of information served as a key component enabling early modern states to centralize and consolidate their authority.⁴ John Michael Archer notes that intelligence, “[m]ore than just an instrument of discipline with the juridical model of power . . . was an integral component in a broader configuration of knowledge and power in early modern Europe.”⁵ But information, as well as the state servants wielding it, occupied an ambiguous position in relation to state authority. Contradicting a model of sovereignty that embodies power in the spectacular person of the monarch, ³ “Information,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2009). ⁴ Among discussions of the information state, see John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001). ⁵ Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, 5–6.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

42

   

intelligence was produced from networks that were complex, mediated, and diffuse.⁶ As Elizabeth Hanson observes, “English state power was enforced as much through ‘paper work’ as through theatrical displays of power.”⁷ The degree of mediation inherent in these intelligence networks, with information circulating laterally from hand-to-hand, spread out sovereign power, parceling and delegating authority to individual agents. Through its circulation, political intelligence moved into different contexts of writing, from manuscript circulation to an increasing appearance in print, thereby bringing information to a public sphere of readers.⁸ In addition, information circulated in far more diffuse and unpredictable ways beyond the nation’s boundaries. Intelligence gathering was more than just a mechanism that served the early modern state, and the flow of information in extraterritorial settings necessarily operated along more complex networks of transmission. What constituted the state were the agents who performed its functions, and while some of these operations took place along recognized channels, particularly in connection to the reception and interpretation of information, the state’s need for intelligence also created an information economy that was characterized by a centrifugal dissemination of state authority. Travelers possessed a unique status in that they occupied several positions in these networks: at various times functioning as the first-hand gatherers of information, the recipients of news conveyed from an informant, or the transmitters of information back to state officers in England. Intelligence gathering served an important role in the training of individuals to enter state service. As a result, diplomats and other state agents not only necessarily mingled with travelers and informants, they themselves took on the role of intelligencers as a necessary stage or component of their careers. Sir Thomas Elyot advocated travel because of its potential benefits for state intelligence in The Boke Named the Governor (1531), an example that demonstrates the ways that travelers served as crucial agents of the state.⁹ Indeed, travel constituted a key stage in the training of state officers, a development that Sir John Davies noted by remarking that Queen Elizabeth “had many Secretaries that have been great Travaylers.”¹⁰

⁶ For a suggestive consideration of early modern knowledge “networks,” see Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Ruth Ahnert traces Marian networks of diplomatic correspondence in “Maps Versus Networks,” in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 130–57. ⁷ Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 150n. ⁸ Brendan Dooley examines the transnational history of “how information first became a commodity” in The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 4. ⁹ James Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 50. ¹⁰ Qtd. in Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 51.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

43

According to John Aubrey, Elizabeth assumed an even more proactive position in this educational process, choosing “many ingenious young gentlemen out of the universities to travel pro bono publico in order to make them ministers of state.”¹¹ Direct governmental oversight of the careers of travelers is shown in the lists compiled by William Cecil, Lord Burleigh in 1579 noting “men who are fit to serve” alongside “those that have served” in extraterritorial service.¹² Overseas travel was an important matter of state concern throughout the sixteenth century, something reflected in the number of Royal Proclamations that attempted to regulate these matters. In principle, all travelers had to petition members of the Privy Council for a travel license before leaving the country. This restriction enabled the state to maintain a degree of surveillance over traveling subjects, particularly English Catholics. Although Elizabeth’s chief officers—including her successive Principal Secretaries, William Cecil and Francis Walsingham—maintained primary authority over the state’s intelligence gathering operations, there were nonetheless parallel and often competing circuits of information exchange among other counselors, which challenged the Principal Secretary’s monopoly over the flow of information and created a complex and decentralized framework in which state authority was dispersed among alternative networks of information exchange. These rival networks created a market for a labor pool of traveling subjects to gather information, and travelers were thereby able to access social networks and exercise forms of agency unavailable to them in English domestic culture, which prompted a debate in travel advice literature regarding the extent of power arrogated by these necessary yet potentially autonomous informants. The correlation of travel with intelligence gathering is reflected in the fact that the earliest examples of travel advice literature were written by Walsingham and Burghley, the two figures who directed England’s intelligence networks while serving as Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary.¹³ Like many examples of the genre, Walsingham’s letter provides counsel to a younger relative or dependent (in this case, his nephew), offering precepts for structuring the experience of the potential traveler. Prior to the voyage, Walsingham advises that a traveler pursue a course of reading that balances textual study—applying Roman history to contemporary

¹¹ John Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, ed. J.E. Stephens (1972; New York: Routledge, 2012), 135. Aubrey identified a similar practice among the Jesuits, who “send their company from one college to another” (135). ¹² Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 113. ¹³ On the practices of the Elizabethan state’s intelligence system, see Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services, 1570–1603 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992) as well as Stephen Alford, The Watchers: The Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2012) and “Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham,” in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46–62.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

44

   

politics, for example—alongside a practical knowledge of fields such as cosmography. His recommendations demonstrate the ways that humanist education was an active, goal-oriented enterprise, as the work of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton has shown.¹⁴ Unlike earlier humanists such as Sir Thomas Elyot or Sir Roger Ascham, who preferred textual study to the experience of travel itself, Walsingham stresses the importance of direct access to individual agents, “for books are but dead letters, it is the voice and conference of men that giveth them life and shall engender in you true knowledge.”¹⁵ In counseling his nephew to seek the company of “the learned sort,” he does not confine this category to the elite but instead advises him to seek out “secretaries, public notaries and agents for princes and cities. . . . men of experience as the world calleth them [who] will serve you as conduit pipes though they themselves have no water.”¹⁶ Walsingham’s comment marks an important shift in the representation of sovereignty. Power is no longer embodied in the person of the sovereign or constituted through proximity to the court but instead linked to knowledge and the wielders of information, the state servants who “have no water” themselves and possess merely a relational identity to persons of influence. Unlike later travel texts, which have a predominant concern for the formation of gentlemanly conduct, the identity of the traveler was above all a professional one: Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary and former ambassador to France, counsels his nephew to seek out his counterparts abroad, a necessary step in his training for state service. He thus outlines the contours of a new kind of career, recognizing that the operations of sovereignty depend upon an emergent class, a noblesse de robe, whose domain lies not with military accomplishments or courtly prowess but instead with the management and control of information. In this process, the identity of state servants seems to disappear: they become the “conduit pipes” for a new disembodiment of power and only wield authority instrumentally through the transmission of information. As a result, sovereignty itself is transformed: if it operates through circulation rather than embodiment, it becomes defined by its fluidity, and sovereign bodies, as much as state servants, “have no water.” In a culture of information, power must be constantly moving, ever seeking out new outlets and breaking down constraining boundaries. In outlining the role of travel as a pedagogical stage in the training of future stage agents, Walsingham presents class status as malleable and sovereignty as negotiable. These implications are reinforced though his choice of genre: the text’s use of the advice to a son genre models itself on Cicero’s De Officiis, which was addressed to Cicero’s son Marcus, and therefore situates itself in a tradition of ¹⁴ Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied For Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30, 40. ¹⁵ Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 1:19. ¹⁶ Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 20.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

45

republican thought as well as state service. Cicero similarly served as an inspiration for William Cecil throughout his career, an influence from his mentor Roger Ascham at Cambridge that he literally carried with him, as it was reported that he always kept a copy of De Officiis with him.¹⁷ Burghley nonetheless transforms the genre, reasserting forms of distinction and hierarchy, by moving away from Walsingham’s focus on the creation of a professional career and placing emphasis instead on his own paternalistic counsel as the means for preserving the hereditary privileges of office. Burghley wrote a series of letters to his sons Thomas (1561) and Robert (1584) as well as his ward Francis Manners, the Earl of Rutland (1571) prior to their travels on the Continent.¹⁸ The popularity of Burghley’s letters is reflected in the fact that they were often reproduced and continued to circulate widely in manuscript throughout the early seventeenth century, thereby serving as a stylistic model for later texts. As Burghley transposes Ciceronian public duties to the private households of officials, the means for imposing patriarchal authority is accomplished by making familial bonds congruent with the intelligence networks of state power, thereby creating subjects through an internalization of the workings of surveillance and the flow of information. Foucault describes this process as “governmentality,” a method that transposes the “meticulous attention of the father towards his family” and introduces it “into the management of the state.”¹⁹ As we see in Burghley’s text, state power is given shape and affective power as it is articulated through a paternalistic framework of familial relations. Moreover, the text shows how governmentality is also contingent on its mimetic potential, its ability to reproduce a filial loyalty among subjects. It is therefore constituted through a compositional process that disciplines subjects to think like the father and thereby conform to the logic of state authority. In inculcating rules for behavior and comportment, a primary disciplinary framework was methods of composition, of teaching the subject how to write. As Mary Thomas Crane has argued, the rhetorical practices of early modern humanism emphasized a pedagogy based not only on the gathering of textual fragments, including aphorisms, tags, and proverbs, but also the framing of these textual citations within a discursive and social context.²⁰ These procedures of travel advice are depicted on the stage with the precepts that Polonius offers to Laertes on the latter’s return journey to France in Hamlet; as with travel

¹⁷ Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 17, 142. On Burghley’s career, also see Norman Jones, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ¹⁸ Burghley’s letters to his two sons are included in Louis B. Wright, ed., Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 3–6, 9–13. ¹⁹ Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 92. ²⁰ Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3 and passim.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

46

   

advice texts, his well-worn aphorisms are intended to produce an effect, to be remembered as well as followed: “And these few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character” (1.3.58–59). The formation of “character” is likened to a compositional process in which the subject will “character,” or transcribe and write out by hand, a set of general rules or precepts.²¹ As with Hamlet’s earlier reference to the “table,” or writing tablet, of his memory (1.5.98), the subject is formed through the inscription of a mode of writing that leaves its material traces on the memory.²² As a way of regulating information, the experience of travel was contingent on its theorization through a set of compositional procedures outlined in advance,²³ a factor that explains why most texts dealing with travel in sixteenth-century England were advice texts rather than first-person narratives.²⁴ But advice texts provided more than a generic framework for the transmission of paternalistic homilies. Those stylistic features that seem derivative and repetitive to modern readers were what the original intended audience found valuable, since one of the primary functions of these texts was to offer compositional models for travelers to follow in writing accounts of their own travels. Advice texts, in this sense, established the methodological groundwork for later travel narratives. Burghley, for instance, advises his son Thomas to “keep a book like a journal” in which to write out his daily activities each night.²⁵ In contrast to a modern, autobiographical sense of journal writing, this document was always already a public one, and its eventual circulation was anticipated in the process of composition. These journals served not only to display travelers’ literary and rhetorical skills but also to testify to the knowledge they had acquired through travel. In addition,

²¹ A comparable example of the instrumental power of writing to “character” the subject is found in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 108: “What’s in the brain that ink may character” (l. 1) (The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997]). All subsequent citations of Shakespeare are drawn from this edition. ²² Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419. ²³ On the pedagogical contexts of writing instruction, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. 19–45, 75–100. Also see Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers’s analysis of “the material forms” and productive instruments of writing in their introduction to Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 1–14. ²⁴ On the method of travel writing and travel advice literature in other European cultural contexts, see Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 69–85; Kathryn Taylor, “Making Statesmen, Writing Culture: Ethnography, Observation, and Diplomatic Travel in Early Modern Venice,” Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018): 279–98; and Gerrit Verhoeven, Europe Within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585–1750) (Leiden: Brill, 2015). ²⁵ Burghley, Advice to a Son, 6. Similar recommendations for journal writing are offered in Francis Bacon, “Of Travel,” Essays, ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: J.M. Dent, 1972), 54–5; James Cleland, Hero-paideia, or the institution of a young noble man (Oxford, 1607), 254–5, 261; and Sir Robert Dallington, A Method For Travel. Shewed by Taking the view of France (1605), C1v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

47

the journals could be transformed into another kind of “advertisement” and be forwarded as intelligence reports to state officials. The journals functioned to internalize a paternalistic form of surveillance by forcing travelers to document their activities abroad through a disciplined regime of daily writing, one that would result in the material evidence of a written travel account.²⁶ As Burghley advises his son, he should keep his journal so that “at your return you may see as in a calendar your whole doings and travel,”²⁷ a record that could, of course, be made available in transparent and meticulously documented form for paternal surveillance as well. Journal writing offered a means for “accountability,” a mode that functioned analogously to the emerging technology of double-entry bookkeeping.²⁸ In this central practice of mercantile writing, the contents of the ledger, which chronicled the merchant’s transactions, would be transcribed into the finalized form of a journal: “a set of numbers,” as Mary Poovey has described, “arranged . . . to facilitate both a rapid assessment of the merchant’s accounts and a visual display of his rectitude,” or, in other words, his “accountability.”²⁹ As with the keeping of merchants’ accounts, many advice texts prescribed keeping two journals: one carried throughout the day in which travelers transcribed details as they saw them, and another composed each night in which they organized this material according to a system of organization based on “heads,” or rubrics, and their subsets.³⁰ Prefacing the three letters of travel advice contained in the compilation Profitable Instructions (1633), for example, is a detailed outline of “Most Notable and Excellent Instructions for Traueilers.”³¹ Written by the privy councilor and diplomat William Davison, this document delineates an elaborate structure for travelers to follow in gathering daily observations in their portable notebooks, a format intended to be replicated when framing their notes into the narrative form of a journal. The prescribed “heads” for observation are “The Countrey,” “The People,” and “The policy and gouernment,” each of which is divided further.³² To take one example (see Figure 1), after an initial heading, which treats the

²⁶ Clare Howard, English Travellers of the Renaissance (1914; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 39. ²⁷ Burghley, Advice to a Son, 6. ²⁸ Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 80. ²⁹ Mary Poovey, “Accommodating Merchants: Accounting, Civility, and the Natural Laws of Gender,” differences 8, 3 (1996): 2; also see her extended analysis of this issue in A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29–91. ³⁰ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 79. ³¹ Profitable Instructions, B1–C4v. Among recent discussions of travel advice texts, see Elizabeth Williamson, “A Letter of Travel Advice: Literary Rhetoric, Scholarly Counsel and Practical Instruction in the Ars Apodemica,” Lives and Letters 3 (2011): 1–22 and “ ‘Fishing After News’ and the Ars Apodemica: The Intelligencing Role of the Educational Traveller in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 542–62 as well as Noah Millstone, “Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 223 (2014): 101–3. ³² Profitable Instructions, B1v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

48

   

Figure 1 Categories of information gathering, from Profitable Instructions: Describing what special Obseruations are to be taken by Trauellers in all Nations, States and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable (London, 1633).

geographic qualities of the country, is a subheading (V.) asking travelers to evaluate the nation’s military strength and means of defense. This category is divided again, under subcategories of maritime and land-based defenses, then split further between “ports & hauens” along with “other defence,” with ports and havens finally separated into “accesse,” “capacity,” “traffik,” and “shipping.”³³ This theoretical framework, deriving from the classificatory system (or “method”) popularized by the French rhetorician Petrus Ramus, conferred an intellectual legitimacy to travel writing.³⁴ The biography of Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée), a French convert to Protestantism who formulated his ideas while living in exile in Basel, reflects the underlying political contexts that shaped the travel method outlined in ars apodemica texts.³⁵ However, despite the effort of Ramist ³³ Profitable Instructions, B4v–B5. In an example of a traveler following these prescriptive guidelines, the Earl of Rutland, the addressee of one of Burghley’s texts, surveyed fortifications during his travels on the Continent (Howard, English Travellers, 37). ³⁴ For a broader discussion of travel writing in relation to models of method, or analytical orders for moral and practical instruction, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See,” in Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 139–90. ³⁵ Justin Stagl, “Ars Apodemica and Socio-Cultural Research,” in Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern Travel Culture, 1550–1700, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Jan L. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 18.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

49

logic to create universal and objective compositional procedures for travel writing, a method for dividing topics into subtopics and adjuncts in order to reach a concrete level of “the essential nature of the things themselves,” in practice it was impossible for travelers to adhere to this kind of elaborate structure, which necessarily remained at the conceptual level.³⁶ These Ramist charts and taxonomies were a prominent feature of later published advice texts, including two that will be discussed further in this section: the Profitable Instructions compilation and Thomas Palmer’s Essay. A similar impulse informs Burghley’s letter to his son Thomas: in likening his son’s journal to a “calendar,” he is comparing its mode of organization to the classificatory system used for intelligence reports and other state documents. As Justin Stagl has noted, in these methods of systematization “the personality of the reporter is hardly evident.”³⁷ But that is precisely the intention: to eliminate any traces of the subjectivity of writers and thereby establish their information as having the status of fact. Because they were gathering politically sensitive information—as with the intelligence on sea defenses and possible locations for invasion found in Profitable Instructions—travelers had to convey reports that were replicable, reliable, and devoid of any personal imprint. One advice text, John Browne’s The Merchants Avizo (1607), extended this purpose even further. Intended as a guide for factors and apprentices, the text included templates for the most common types of letters they might write, allowing these agents merely to insert specific details without having to worry about the rhetorical aspects of writing, so that “they may the lesse trouble themselues, either with writing, inuention, or thought of these matters.”³⁸ These texts exemplify what Richmond Barbour has insightfully termed as a “corporate ³⁶ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 69–70. On the intellectual contexts of Ramism, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). In a continuation of the advice letter to Rutland, Bacon (writing on behalf of his employer Essex) recommends not to “tye your selfe to any one booke,” and singles out Ramus as “imperfect” (The Oxford Francis Bacon, Volume I: Early Writings 1584–1596, ed. Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012], 658). As Sir Henry Wotton later joked of the Ramist method in his Aphorisms of Education, “They show a short course to those who are contented to know a little, and a sure way to such whose care is not to understand much” (A Philosophical Survey of Education or Moral Architecture and the Aphorisms of Education, ed. H.S. Kermode [Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1938], 23). The tension between theory and practice in travel writing is seen with Robert Dallington’s texts on France and Tuscany, each of which includes a Ramist chart outlining its structure on its opening page but quickly digresses from this planned course: see A Method For Travel. Shewed by Taking the view of France (1605), A2v and A Suruey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany (1605), A2v. ³⁷ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 81. ³⁸ [John Browne], The Merchants Avizo. Uerie Necessarie For their Sons and Seruants, when they first send them beyond the Seas, as to Spaine and Portingale, or other Countries (1607), A2v. Richard Rambuss analyzes related guides for writing in Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 30–48. In contrast to the underlying effort to reduce if not eliminate any personalized details or rhetorical flourishes seen in Browne and other travel advice texts, Rambuss describes how other writing manuals, intended as guides for secretaries or more general correspondence, were able “to double as a kind of rhetorical handbook—a poetics, not just of letterwriting, but of letters in the sense of the literary” (33).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

50

   

writing culture,” protocols for writing and knowledge production that were codified in the practices of institutions such as the East India Company.³⁹ Such efforts reflect a movement away from the humanist basis of earlier travel advice texts, and they emphasized not the rhetorical frames used to organize information but instead the facticity of that information itself.⁴⁰ As a result, the referential content of these documents acquires an objective quality no longer contingent on their mode of organization.⁴¹ Browne’s text also illustrates the ways that mercantile writing—like intelligence gathering in the political sphere—depended on the pursuit of advantage through a monopolization of knowledge, and relied on an ethos of secrecy at odds with the public nature of the marketplace of print.⁴² Whereas the method of composition in Burghley’s text offered a patriarchal template in which the mimeticism of writing was intended to reproduce a patrilineal social order, the transposable and replicable nature of the compositional frames provided in Browne’s text extends to other class groups avenues of political participation through writing and the circulation of information. Although Burghley has been characterized as shaping Elizabethan statecraft to the dictates of “middle-class values,”⁴³ his text offsets the fluidity of class status and professional expertise inherent in Walsingham’s model, and he converts the potential meritocracy of public service to a hereditary dignity passed down from father to son.⁴⁴ However, despite the fact that Robert Cecil ultimately succeeded his father as Principal Secretary in 1596, the younger Cecil began his career by entering the information economy like many of his less elite counterparts, as seen with his earlier role in gathering intelligence reports as a member of the French embassy in 1583–84.⁴⁵ Moreover, in the period between Walsingham’s death in 1590 and Robert Cecil’s rise to power six years later, networks ³⁹ Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147. ⁴⁰ Daniel Carey discusses Spanish imperial precedents for late Elizabethan travel advice texts, and analyzes how Richard Hakluyt reoriented the genre away from political intelligence and towards the economic information needed for commercial and colonial expansion: see “Hakluyt’s Instructions: The Principal Navigations and Sixteenth-Century Travel Advice,” Studies in Travel Writing 13 (2009): 167–85. ⁴¹ Following Stephanie Jed’s analysis of the forms of secrecy underlying mercantile writing, I wish to highlight the juxtaposition of a humanist program, with its emphasis on using writing to foster a sense of “moral detachment,” and the experiential basis of mercantile writing, “grounded in the concrete experience of keeping accounts” (Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989], 96). ⁴² My phrasing alludes to Alexandra Halasz’s illuminating discussion of pamphlet literature, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ⁴³ Crane, Framing Authority, 127. ⁴⁴ For further discussion of this implication, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. xx, 184–7. ⁴⁵ For these documents, see David Potter, ed., Foreign Intelligence and Information in Elizabethan England: Two English Treatises on the State of France, 1580–1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Cecil’s promotion was secured at the expense of Sir Thomas Bodley, the rival claimant supported by Essex. When Bodley made some callous remarks regarding his hesitation to serve “in the declination of a monarchy,” Cecil was able to use this opening to further insinuate himself in Elizabeth’s favor (Bacon, “Of Cunning,” Essays, 70).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

51

of intelligence gathering flourished as they were driven by rivalries within Elizabeth’s court and Privy Council. Even though Burghley retained some oversight as Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex each vied to take over Walsingham’s former role and more aggressively courted potential agents and informants as a way of consolidating power.⁴⁶ It was in this immediate context that the Earl of Essex composed an advice text to Roger Manners, the 5th Earl of Rutland and son of the addressee of one of Burghley’s letters. Along with Burghley’s “Precepts,” this letter (ca. 1595–96) was one of the most widely circulating travel advice texts, and was frequently reproduced in manuscript form before it was first printed in the miscellany Profitable Instructions (1633).⁴⁷ Past discussions of the letter have focused on the text’s authorship, with competing attributions to Essex or Sir Francis Bacon, his secretary at the time. But it is more productive to reframe this debate by analyzing the letter in the context of the collaborative forms of writing intrinsic to the institutional, bureaucratic setting of intelligence gathering.⁴⁸ Due to the exigencies of diplomatic correspondence, which led to a proliferation of letters received from informants stationed abroad, a secretary like Bacon would inevitably have written documents in his employer’s name. My discussion therefore follows Alan Stewart’s recent conclusion that “Bacon was responsible for at least the majority of this letter.”⁴⁹ The demands of the information economy opened up possibilities of agency for the secretary, and he consequently could assume the role of author in composing documents himself rather than solely performing instrumental functions of copying or dictation.⁵⁰ As recent scholarship has shown, collaborative writing was far more pervasive than previously recognized.⁵¹ The intelligence

⁴⁶ See Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152–99. In a 1597 document, Sir Robert Cecil gave a list of his intelligencers along with their rates of payment: see The National Archives, SP 12/265/204; for another list from the same year, see SP 12/265/207. ⁴⁷ Secretary William Davison, ed., Profitable Instructions: Describing what special Obseruations are to be taken by Trauellers in all Nations, States and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable (1633); alongside the Essex/Bacon letter (attributed to Essex), this collection also includes Davison’s preface and a letter from Sir Philip Sidney to his brother Robert. For a list of manuscript copies of the Essex/Bacon letter, see Stewart, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, 1:619–37. ⁴⁸ See Paul E.J. Hammer, “The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville, and the Employment of Scholars,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 171–2. ⁴⁹ Stewart, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, 1:616. ⁵⁰ For discussion of the role of secretaries in the early modern period, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. 131–3, 248–9, 257–72; Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career; Stewart, Close Readers, 170–87; Paul M. Dover, ed., Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). ⁵¹ On collaborative writing and the theater, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Heather Anne Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); on lyric poetry, see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

52

   

networks of the English state constituted the largest collaborative textual project of the era, and the constant need for information produced an extent of contribution from numerous sources unrivaled in other settings. As Douglas Hollinger notes, the demand for information opened networks of power to those with “skill or access,” thereby helping “to institute an economy of travel that opened the door to public service to the lower classes.”⁵² Essex and Bacon open the letter to Rutland by acknowledging, “I hold it for a principle in the course of Intelligence of State, not to discourage men of meane capacity from writing vnto mee,” even if their reports merely repeated information provided in the “aduertisements” of regular, more socially elite agents.⁵³ They therefore separate access to information from compositional skill, asserting the underlying value of reports from those of “meane capacity,” a term that links humble class status with reliability as a narrator.⁵⁴ As with More’s portrayal of Raphael, it is the eccentricity of travelers, their social and geographic distance from the court and networks of state power, which makes them the best informants. Montaigne had also asserted the value of travelers as informants in “Of Cannibals,” remarking on the accuracy of reports he had received from a common sailor.⁵⁵ Many travel advice texts similarly urged travelers to seek out information from a range of class groups—merchants, sailors, craftsmen, and servants— subjects who were accessible to communicate with travelers because of their public status and yet could remain inconspicuous purveyors of information due to their marginal social position. As was the case with Walsingham’s representation of secretaries and state servants—wielders of information who “have no water themselves”—these groups are relegated to an instrumental role, as reliable informants who may transmit information but not shape it for their own ends.⁵⁶ ⁵² Douglas Lloyd Hollinger, The Literature of Travel Advice in England, 1560–1700 (unpublished PhD dissertation, Texas Christian University, 1996), 50. ⁵³ Profitable Instructions, 27–8. Essex also recruited some of these men into his service, including Sir Henry Wotton, who became one of his secretaries upon his return from continental travel in 1594, and Henry Cuffe, who was executed following Essex’s uprising in 1601: see Paul E.J. Hammer, “The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c. 1585–1601,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 26–51 and “Essex and Europe: Evidence from Confidential Instructions by the Earl of Essex, 1595–6,” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 357–81, as well as Alan Stewart, “Instigating Treason: the Life and Death of Henry Cuffe, Secretary,” in Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds., Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–70. ⁵⁴ In some manuscript versions of the letter, this passage refers to “men of meane sufficiencye,” an emphasis on the economic interests of potential informants rather than their subordinate class position (Stewart, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, 1:638). ⁵⁵ Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in Essays, ed. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1958), 108. Bacon makes a similar recommendation for the use of “a plainer sort” when choosing agents, or “instruments,” in “Of Negociating,” Essays, 144. ⁵⁶ Joseph Hall reflected on the pervasiveness of news and intelligence in his anti-travel satire Quo Vadis?, remarking that “Knowledge of all affairs is like music in the streets, whereof those may partake which pay nothing” (The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall D.D., ed. Philip Wynter [New York: AMS Press, 1969], 9:540). Intelligence did not circulate this freely, of course, but Hall’s obliviousness to the underlying economy of information is prompted by his stated opposition to travel; in other words,

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

53

The role of these mediating groups testifies to the intrinsically heteroglossic quality of travel narratives, revealing the extent to which they were always interspersed with the voices of others. As Mary Louise Pratt has observed, travel knowledge derives “not just out of a traveler’s sensibility and powers of observation, but out of interaction and experience usually directed and managed by ‘travelees,’ ” a category that could be extended to include informants and intelligencers.⁵⁷ Countering the conventional focus on the travel writer as author, early modern travel texts were never the sole domain of professionals or specialists.⁵⁸ Advice texts attempted to elaborate objective protocols for travel writing due to concerns regarding the mediated nature of information gathering and the role of the agents and networks through which information was not merely transmitted but also potentially transformed.⁵⁹ Even though the connection of travel to intelligence work receded over the course of the seventeenth century, these tensions nonetheless remained a dominant feature of travel writing throughout the period.⁶⁰ But the role of mediating agents diminished in the decades following the publication of the travel accounts of Fynes Moryson, Thomas Coryat, and others, as travel writing became synonymous with the model of the published, first-person travel narrative. In demarcating travel writing as the domain of the eyewitness, the intrepid and often solitary observer, subsequent texts elided the networks of information that produced these narratives, including the textual traces left by those reliable yet often suspect informants whose labor made possible the early modern information economy. A key text marking the transition from late Elizabethan manuscript letters of travel advice to the published single-person travel narratives of the Jacobean period is Thomas Palmer’s An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (1606). Palmer attempts to separate travel from its earlier association with intelligence gathering and differentiate the “honorable” traveler from his more suspect counterparts. Subjecting the classes of travelers to a rigorous, Ramist classificatory system, Palmer lists “such as goe vnder the name of Intelligencers” among those if news so easily reaches England, so that “we ofttimes better hear and see the news of France or Spain upon our Exchange than in their Paris and Madrid” (542), then physical travel for purposes of intelligence gathering—one of the few reasons for travel that Hall finds justified (530)—is rendered superfluous. ⁵⁷ Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 136. ⁵⁸ Pratt, “Travel Narrative and Imperialist Vision,” in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds., Understanding Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 216. ⁵⁹ For a provocative elaboration of this point in relation to scientific writing, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). ⁶⁰ Sara Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (New York: Brill, 1995), 50.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

54

   

Figure 2 The classification of travelers, including “Irregular” travelers: from Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (London, 1606).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

55

travelers deemed “not honorable” and defines travel as a prerogative reserved for the “temporall Nobilitie.”⁶¹ Nonetheless, as his text moves from its opening synoptic tables to its narrative sections, he progressively concedes that travel necessarily entails political intelligence.⁶² As a way of reconstituting the information economy as a safe domain for the elite, he emphasizes the informal, gentlemanly aspects of intelligence gathering. The traveler should remain a “Gentleman” and distance himself from the traits of “ambition” and “policie” associated with a “Machiavel.”⁶³ Rather than contacting the Privy Council prior to travel, which gives the impression of an underlying political motive for their journeys, they instead merely pass along whatever intelligence comes their way.⁶⁴ The “knowledge transactions” through which travelers gather information nonetheless traverse a variety of social locales, from the court and university to the tavern and street.⁶⁵ As Palmer concedes, “Finally, about these or any other, let not Trauailers omitte, to procure with their purse, what by discretion, obseruation, and friends, cannot be attained vnto.”⁶⁶ Although travelers enter into an information economy at one end of the circuit of exchange, buying intelligence from a range of informants, Palmer insists on maintaining monopolies within the English market: only members of the Privy Council may be purchasers of this information, and travelers must grant exclusive rights to a single counselor, entering his service and becoming one of his agents rather than shopping their wares among competing counselors.⁶⁷ Yet even in this more centralized information state, travelers serve a crucial role in maintaining and reproducing circuits of information. Upon their return to England, Palmer advises them to recruit other travelers for intelligence. Inserting themselves as middlemen in networks of information exchange, travelers may use their recruits to ensure the reliability of their own accounts, keeping abreast of “dayly intelligence” so as to keep their knowledge “in continuall tilthe.”⁶⁸ In order to assume the role of subjects, they must gain a proprietary interest in the production and circulation of intelligence.⁶⁹ ⁶¹ Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (1606), B2, F2. ⁶² Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, M3. ⁶³ Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, S1v. ⁶⁴ Palmer, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, R4. ⁶⁵ Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,” in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds., Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104. ⁶⁶ Palmer, Essay, R3v. ⁶⁷ Palmer, Essay, R4. For example, Wotton listed his political acquaintances and correspondents on the Continent upon entering Essex’s service as an intelligence agent and secretary. By making visible the transmission of his information, Wotton also forfeited his control over these networks, which were then placed—like himself—under Essex’s authority and oversight (Logan Pearsall Smith, ed., The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton [Oxford: Clarendon, 1907], 1:29–30 and 299–301). ⁶⁸ Palmer, Essay, S2. ⁶⁹ In an example reflecting the discrepant positions occupied by individuals within networks of information, Nicholas Faunt, a former intelligence agent on the Continent, echoed the comments of Joseph Hall (see above note 56) and marveled on the greater extent of knowledge he had access to in his

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

56

   

The longstanding association of Catholic exiles with travel intensified in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Writing in this immediate context, Palmer concedes that his entire project was motivated by a desire to counter England’s reputation as a supplier of fugitive subjects—“irregular travelers”—who have traveled without license and “haue communicated with all euill and mischiefe in their trauiles.”⁷⁰ What characterizes “irregular travelers,” particularly Catholic exiles, is the secrecy and opacity of their identities. In order to detect this group, another class of traveler is needed—the “base” intelligencer or double agent—who is able to pass as Catholic and thereby expose their hidden “affections.” However, these base intelligencers, described as “necessarie euils in a State,”⁷¹ must themselves be subject to some form of control. Palmer therefore creates a third and final class—of “honorable” intelligencers—gentleman travelers able to maintain surveillance over their double agent counterparts.⁷² This latter group assumes a position of paternalistic authority: having internalized the precepts offered in texts like those by Walsingham and Burghley, honorable intelligencers now wield this power themselves, enabling the state to extend its power over its expatriated subjects. The term Palmer uses to express the nature of this power is that of “conjuration”: although seemingly cast as a force of entreaty, reform, and possibly even expulsion, this term also takes on other associations. To “conjure” something is also to enter into a conspiracy with it, and to conjure, or entreat, entails becoming a kind of conjuror oneself. Intelligence thereby assumes a role similar to what Derrida described as a pharmakon, the simultaneous remedy and poison.⁷³ One of the most pervasive associations found in travel advice texts is that travel and contact with foreign cultures carries the risk of exposure to infectious ideas and practices: “those parts which are only thought worth our viewing,” Joseph Hall declares, “are most contagious.”⁷⁴ As Jonathan Gil Harris has argued, these metaphors reflect a shift from Galenic theories of humoral balance to a new emphasis on the boundaries of the body politic—and, I would add, to travel that forces subjects to cross these boundaries—“as the sites of potential corruption and contamination.”⁷⁵ Palmer and other travel advice writers therefore cast their task as inoculating travelers, enabling them to resist the toxins to which

new position as a secretary in London (Stewart, Close Readers, 181). Faunt also codified the organization of government records in a 1592 treatise: for the text, see Charles Hughes, “Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate, &c. 1592,” The English Historical Review 20 (1905): 499–508. ⁷⁰ Palmer, Essay, A4v. ⁷¹ Palmer, Essay, B3. ⁷² Palmer, Essay, B3–B3v. ⁷³ Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 70. ⁷⁴ Hall, Quo Vadis?, 532–3. ⁷⁵ Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

57

they are exposed through their journeys. Roger Ascham (1570) presents “true medicine against the enchantments of Circe,” and Secretary Davison (ca. 1596) offers “an Antidot against the infectious Ayre of other Countries,” while Thomas Neale (1643) provides “a remedy in this little treatise to mitigate this disease.”⁷⁶ Significantly, no advice text recommends a policy of quarantine, not even Ascham and Hall, who condemn most forms of travel. And by juxtaposing these texts, it becomes evident that the desire to offset the effects of travel (giving “true medicine” or an “antidote” against it) progressively gives way to an effort to manage its effects, as with Neale’s reference to attempting merely to “mitigate” this disease. It becomes a matter of regulation rather than prohibition, “arming” the traveler to control the forms of “infection” that travel carries with it.⁷⁷ As Justus Lipsius phrases it, drawing on the medicinal analogy, “As Physitions for the safetie of their patients, prescribe them poison for a time, to expell poison: so I wish you to frame your nature a little and for a time, to lighte and small dissimulation.”⁷⁸ Offsetting the invasive contagion of foreign bodies is a form of agency held to reside in the bodies of travelers themselves, or, more accurately, in an interiorized space within subjects. Because the inherent spatial movement and displacement accompanying travel inevitably exposes the body to pervasive forms of cultural “infection,” the only protected space for the subject is an interiorized one. In order to survive, travelers must blend in with their environment, remain inconspicuous, and even take on the identities of those around them. Travelers must learn, in other words, how to dissemble: “to reserve to a man’s self a fair retreat,” as Bacon defines the term in “Of Simulation and Dissimulation.”⁷⁹ This “capacity to selfdistance,” as Julie Robin Solomon perceptively describes it in her analysis of Bacon, offers a new method for mediating the experience of travel.⁸⁰ Later advice texts no longer codify travel through a preexisting theoretical template—whether that of paternalistic counsel or Ramist classification—but instead lay the groundwork for later first-person travel narratives by emphasizing the traveler’s bodily “travail” and presenting the labor of travel as conferring a form of professional expertise. As Harris notes, “Jacobean writers frequently argued that political ⁷⁶ Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 65; Davison, Profitable Instructions, A6–A6v; Thomas Neale, A Treatise of Direction, how to travell safely, and profitably into Forraigne Countries (1643), A11v. Among similar examples, see Robert Johnson, Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers (1601), E3v; Joseph Hall’s letter to the Earl of Essex in Epistles, The First Volume (1608), G1v-G2; Thomas Coryat, Crudities, 266. ⁷⁷ This point is indebted to Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s analysis of regimes of bodily control in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ⁷⁸ Justus Lipsius, trans. Sir John Stradling, A Direction for Trauailers. Taken out of Iustvs Lipsius, and enlarged for the behoofe of the right honorable Lord, the yong Earle of Bedford, being now ready to trauell (1592), C3–C3v. ⁷⁹ Bacon, Essays, 19. ⁸⁰ Julie Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 108.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

58

   

‘poisons,’ if properly administered by the body politic’s ‘physicians,’ could serve a medicinal function.”⁸¹ The representation of travelers as physicians reflects the increasing professionalization of travel that occurs with the transition from Elizabethan advice texts to the travel narratives of the Jacobean period. As Walter Ong explains, the procedures of medicine offered the earliest model of a critical method, one that was later extrapolated to other fields, including the theorization of travel.⁸² Medical analogies legitimated the role of travelers, replacing their longstanding association with intelligence work by situating them in reference to other professional groups, including ambassadors and similarly credentialed state agents. Nonetheless, as noted by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, while medicine offered one of the chief examples of the application of mētis—or “practical intelligence”—it was also inextricably linked with more subtle forms of intelligence, craft, and deceit.⁸³ In this professional framework, travelers become the physicians of the state, regulating not a human body but a body of information. The somatic analogy persisted as a way to naturalize the workings of intelligence networks by rendering them in physical form, lending shape and coherence to the disembodied, abstracted flow of information. The figuration of travelers as physicians also served to contain the implications of their inherently mobile, migratory status.⁸⁴ If the information economy of early modern travel was constituted through the networks in which intelligence was conveyed, these networks were themselves inevitably transformed through the travelers, agents, and spies who sustained them.

1.2 The Narrative Accounting of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary In contrast to the number of travel advice texts written or translated in the Elizabethan period, particularly after 1570, not a single first-person travel account ⁸¹ Harris, Foreign Bodies, 14. ⁸² Ong, Ramus, 226. ⁸³ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (1974; Atlantic Heights, NJ: Harvester, 1978), 3. Among discussions of mētis in early modern texts, see Solomon, Objectivity, 117 and Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8. ⁸⁴ In addition to being one of the professional groups most closely associated with travel, physicians also provided a frame of reference for discussing the practical benefits of the knowledge gained through travel: according to Baptist Goodall, “A trauailers experience as Phisition” may bring home previously unknown remedies for physical as well as psychological ailments (The Tryall of Travell [1630], E3v). Thomas Neale extended this point in relation to the ways that knowledge of “forraigne affaires” may similarly provide “exotique physick” to treat the body politic (A Treatise of Direction, E5–E5v). For a comprehensive survey of early modern travelers’ study of European political systems, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 17–68. In addition, many early modern medical texts included sections dealing with the health effects of travel, offering practical knowledge that effectively defused the more metaphorical associations with contagion attached to travel throughout the period: see, for instance, John Cotta’s A Short Discouerie of the Vnobserved Dangers of seuerall sorts of ignorant and vnconsiderate Practicers of Physike in England (1612), 111–14.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

59

was published in this span of time. There were some texts that circulated in manuscript, including Sir Thomas Hoby’s account of his travels in Italy (1547–64), but these narratives did not enter the marketplace of print.⁸⁵ As discussed in the first section, travel remained part of the information economy of intelligence gathering, and any printed text retained a primary intention of promulgating a theory of travel and compositional framework for regulating the flow of information from traveling informants. The political climate of counterReformation Europe further contributed to the paucity of travel narratives. It was only in the first decade of the reign of James I that the published travel account made its belated appearance, with Thomas Coryat’s idiosyncratic Crudities (1611) soon joined by Fynes Moryson’s voluminous Itinerary (1617).⁸⁶ The publication of these texts closely followed the establishment of peaceful relations between England and Spain in 1604, and the opportunities for educational travel in Habsburg territories led to a new market for published guides of European travel. Nonetheless, as I will discuss in the remaining two sections of this chapter, these narratives were still shaped by the terms of the Elizabethan information economy. George Parks has similarly noted the continuities between travel in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and has characterized travel in the period from 1570 to 1620 as having a primary aim of contributing to a “full political knowledge of foreign countries,” a gathering of knowledge that prepared the traveler for a political career. The more aesthetic goals of travel, such as interest in art and antiquities, only became an important factor from the 1620s onwards.⁸⁷ Like their advice text predecessors, Moryson and Coryat are concerned with the management of information, and both texts significantly incorporate sections of travel advice, a direct acknowledgement of the continued influence of the context of intelligence gathering on travel writing. However, the formal transition to the firstperson travel narrative also transformed the intentions of these texts: in representing not a theory of travel but its practice, these narratives foreground the irreducibly specific and concrete experience of travel. In Moryson’s text, the travel knowledge he acquires is contingent on his own abilities of dissimulation, which he defines as a prerequisite skill not only for navigating safely through Catholic Europe but even as a precondition for a transcultural mode of sociability. Through his skills of performance and the opacity of his identity and motives, Moryson often resembles a spy, an association he is insistent on denying. Such a comparison places him in an uneasy relation to Catholic exiles as well as “irregular travelers,” the social inferiors engaging ⁸⁵ For Hoby’s narrative, see The travels and life of Sir Thomas Hoby, kt. of Bisham abbey, written by himself, 1547–1564, ed. Edgar Powell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1902). ⁸⁶ William Lithgow’s travel narrative, A most delectable and true discourse (1614), was later expanded as The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Paineful Peregrinations of the long nineteen Yeares Travayles (1632). ⁸⁷ George B. Parks, “Travel as Education,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, ed. Richard Foster Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 265.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

60

   

in intelligence work. Yet his own experience reflects the professionalization of travel, and Moryson presents a travel account through an emphasis on the economic underpinnings of travel. What I will be describing as his “narrative accounting” is a logic that underwrites his text. Breaking from the Elizabethan information economy, the value of his account of his travel is contingent on the singularity of his experience and his own indispensable role as observer. Fynes Moryson is appropriately placed in the middle of this chapter, for he is a figure whose text marks a transition from an Elizabethan context of intelligence gathering to a Jacobean marketplace for published travel texts. The difficulty in situating Moryson is reflected in the scant critical attention he has received. In the few critical references to Moryson, he is cast as a figure seemingly devoid of personality, an anonymous transcriber of detail whose identity disappears within his voluminous, 2400-page text.⁸⁸ For Charles Hughes, Moryson “was lacking in poetic and artistic sensibility.”⁸⁹ In contrast to later seventeenth-century connoisseurs, Helga Quadflieg observes, “Moryson is the prototypical humanist ‘collector’ and ‘schematizer’ of . . . factual knowledge.”⁹⁰ But what these critics identity as the distinctive (and deficient) stylistic features of his text—from its comprehensive accumulation of detail, and formulaic accounts of locales, to its elision of a subjective narrative voice—were, in fact, necessary effects of the political contexts in which the travelogue emerged. Due to the fact that his travel took place in the late Elizabethan period, from 1591 to 1597, the political environment Moryson navigated was markedly different from that experienced in subsequent decades either by Coryat, traveling in 1608, or the elite travelers who constituted the readership of these texts. Since travel licenses at this time prohibited English travelers from visiting hostile nations, the circuit of Moryson’s travels—which extended from Rome and Habsburg Naples to wartime France and the Low Countries as well as extensively throughout the Ottoman Levant—was not only hazardous but also illegal.⁹¹

⁸⁸ Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland (1617; 3 vols. Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–08). Moryson’s text is comprised of three sections: Part One (Itinerary, 1:1–468, and 2:1–164), his travel through Europe in 1591–95 along with his journey to Jerusalem of 1595–97; Part Two, his narrative of the Tyrone Rebellion in Ireland, composed during his tenure as Secretary to Lord Deputy Mountjoy (Itinerary, 2:165–466 and 3:1–347); and Part Three, his section on travel advice, followed by a cosmographical survey of Europe (3:348–499 and 4:1–477). Portions of this final section were not published until the twentieth century: see Charles Hughes, ed. and intro., Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century. Being Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617) (1903; New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967), 1–497. ⁸⁹ Hughes, Shakespeare’s Europe, xlv. ⁹⁰ Helga Quadflieg, “Approved Civilities and the Fruits of Peregrination: Elizabethan and Jacobean Travellers and the Making of Englishness,” in Hartmut Berghoff, et al., eds., The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 31. ⁹¹ Howard, English Travellers, 86. Because most travelers were not able to confirm England’s current treaty status with foreign nations, this law became “only a verbal formality” (Howard, 87).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

61

References to Moryson’s Itinerary have not taken into account the transgressive character of his travels.⁹² Because he was traveling in violation of his travel license, Moryson—like many of his contemporaries—held the status of what Thomas Palmer termed an “irregular traveler.” And, although nominally retaining the legal privilege to travel conferred by his license, his geographic mobility, as he moved beyond the boundaries of safe Protestant territories, brought him into contact with national enemies as well as those suspect classes of “base intelligencers” whom Palmer had considered a “necessary evil” in extending English authority abroad. In titling his text as his Itinerary, Moryson emphasizes the access he had acquired by crossing the boundaries of the licit. If he comports himself as an anonymous, bureaucratic scholar, he makes it clear that this is a role that he adopts out of necessity. Throughout his travels Moryson shows a protean ability to traverse conventional boundaries and markers of identity (class, nationality, language, religion), a talent for dissimulation that he recommends for aspiring travelers in the section of travel advice that follows the narrative of his travels: for the voyce of the Vulgar, esteemes the vice of dissimulation proper to a Traveller, and highly doth reproch him therewith. Shall we then say, that hee who knowes so to live with Italians, Spaniards, and very barbarous Pagans, as he can gaine their well-wishing, will be at home and among his friends subject to the odious vice of dissimulation, the very plague of true friendship? . . . No doubt simulation in fit place and time is a vertue. He that cannot dissemble, cannot live . . . Therefore it is a point of art for a Traveller to know how to avoide deceit, and how to dissemble honesty (I meane to save himselfe, not to deceive others.) Let him have a cleare countenance to all men, and an open brest to his friend, but when there is question of his Countries good, of his enemies lying in waite for him, or of his owne credit or life, let him shut his bosome close from his inward friends . . . A Traveller must dissemble his long journeys, yet onely in dangerous places, and among suspected persons . . . a traveller must sometimes hide his money, change his habit, dissemble his Country, and fairely conceale his Religion, but this hee must doe onely when necessity forceth⁹³

Travelers must necessarily alter their identities according to changing contexts, whether in terms of political environment or the intentions of others. “The obligation to truth-telling,” as Steven Shapin perceptively comments, “was therefore relative to setting.”⁹⁴ For Moryson, the conventional image of the lying ⁹² Jeremy Black, for instance, mistakenly assumes that Moryson traveled in Europe after the treaty with Spain (Italy and the Grand Tour [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003], 2). ⁹³ Moryson, Itinerary, 3:409–10. All further references will be cited in-text. ⁹⁴ Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 103; italics in text. For a recent discussion, see Mareile Pfannebecker, “ ‘Lying by Authority’: Travel Dissimulations in Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary,” Renaissance Studies 31 (2017): 569–85.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

62

   

traveler, circulated by “the Vulgar,” overlooks the fact that different modes of affect are called for when one has moved beyond the safe confines of the nation, a space of intimacy, domesticity, and “true friendship.” Moryson attempts to recuperate dissimulation by removing the perception that it violates forms of sociability, instead arguing that the construction of a public identity and withholding of private motives enable travelers to gain the “well-wishing” even of national enemies. Dissimulation, in this sense, is a form of external comportment through which sociability can be extended in the extraterritorial contexts of travel and service on the Continent. Although Moryson is responding to the exigencies of late Elizabethan travel, he is also drawing on a long-standing defense of dissimulation: Cicero, for instance, had associated dissimulation not only with conciliatory rhetoric but also as a “condition for sociable conversation,” while Ramus presented it as a contingency when dialogue and sociability failed, an alternative method, “of prudence,” which allowed one to adapt “according to the condition of persons, things, times, and places.”⁹⁵ It is important to remember that Moryson composed his text over a period of time prior to the publication of any other first-person travel narratives. As Andrew Hadfield notes, Moryson’s text reflects the lack of generic models for travel writing in this period.⁹⁶ As a consequence, he shapes the descriptive sections of his narrative on the stylistic precedents available to him, including cosmographical texts such as Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), which presented geographic and historical overviews of regions with little personal commentary.⁹⁷ But whereas Elizabethan advice texts had attempted to reduce travel narratives to an informational component so as to ensure the accuracy of the political intelligence relayed in these accounts, Moryson’s own information economy is driven by an emerging commercialization of travel. He is aware that his text must enter a marketplace of print, and serve as a template for novice travelers to use in structuring their own experiences. In his prefatory remarks to the reader, he even acknowledges the “barrennes” of his preliminary sections on Germany, which he has included “only for the use of unexperienced Travellers” as a guide for them to follow at every stage of their journeys (1:xix). With an increasing number of subjects traveling on the Continent, he recognizes that educational travel has become part of a market that demands guidebooks. Although Moryson elsewhere claims that he is addressing his text “to the ⁹⁵ Jennifer Richards, “Assumed Simplicity and the Critique of Nobility: Or, How Castiglione Read Cicero,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 470; Ramus, qtd. in Ong, Ramus, 246. Sir Henry Wotton similarly hearkened back to this tradition in a 1638 letter to John Milton, reminiscing about the advice he had been given years earlier in Italy, “i pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto will go safely over the whole world” [Your thoughts close, and your countenance loose] (Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:382). ⁹⁶ Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing, 66. ⁹⁷ Although the Cosmographia is attributed solely to Münster, the text is actually the product of a large-scale collaboration, for Münster circulated a “system of local surveys” to humanists throughout Europe, adding their contributions to later editions (Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 119).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

63

Humanist” who “affects the knowledge of State affaires, Histories, Cosmography, and the like” (3:371), such knowledge circulates as a purchasable commodity no longer confined as the specialized domain of state servants. Moreover, Moryson protests that the political content of his own text is “unworthy” of the attentions of “great Statesmen” (1:xxi). Through this self-effacing statement, he attempts to extricate the political information found in his text from circuits of intelligence gathering, thereby enabling his narrative to attain an objective, factual quality prerequisite for a marketable handbook for European travel. Even as he distances his text from the specific social contexts of intelligence, Moryson still adheres to the protocols put forward in travel advice texts. In the absence of a state directly employing him or a paternalistic authority guiding him, Moryson internalizes the modes of comportment and processes of writing associated with the early modern information economy: in lieu of the state, in other words, he thinks like the state, retaining a mental framework, what Foucault describes as a governmentality, that shapes his response to his travels and guides him in converting this informational kernel into narrative form. His advice to aspiring travelers reflects the extent to which traveler and spy remained blurred identities. Although he addresses an emerging class of elite, fashionable travelers in his remarks, his mode of travel still conformed to the precedents and frames of reference established by “intelligencers,” particularly in terms of his recommendations regarding affect and modes of sociability. Like Walsingham, Moryson advises that travelers should visit men “of principall account” as a way to extract information: not only will these notables be flattered that a stranger has visited them, Moryson explains, they may even offer a guide free of charge (3:384).⁹⁸ Significantly, the accountability of European politicians and scholars is seen in terms of the valuable information that can be extracted from them. Moreover, the value of social interaction, even with men of “account,” is defined in reference to how it facilitates the writing of a narrative account. The traveler’s identity becomes a textual self, as he learns to view himself in reference to a body of information that he collects. Following the model of advice texts, Moryson directs travelers to learn cosmography (geography) before traveling in order to navigate the landscapes they encounter. Moryson takes this further, recommending that travelers objectify their experience and learn to view their journey from a distance in which they see themselves and their movement as if on a map or grid (3:376). This aloof, analytical position is preserved during the course of travel itself. Upon arriving in a new locale, travelers should view the city from its highest point, achieving what

⁹⁸ Similar to Secretary Davison’s recommendations in Profitable Instructions (1633), Moryson lists a set of political questions that a traveler should demand of his informants, including “whether the Prince be a Tyrant, or beloved of the people, what Forces he hath by Sea for Land, the military discipline . . . and whether they use subjects or strangers for their Marriners” (3:373).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

64

   

Mary Louise Pratt has described as the “monarch of all I survey” trope in travel writing, a convention that she associates with the “panoptic apparatuses of the bureaucratic state.”⁹⁹ But this spectacular position of mastery is intended for a textual purpose. Travelers should return to their inns and draw a map of the city from memory (3:384), a program of daily journal writing that follows the regime outlined by Burghley. Noting the value of travelers’ “rare observations” (3:373), Moryson cautions them to keep their writing secret, forwarding notes back to England on a regular basis, and to compose journals “in Ciphers and unknowne caracters,” so that they could “give a fained interpretation of them to any Magistrate” (3:374). Moryson’s model of travel is that of the solitary figure who remains aloof from his surroundings, one whose intentions and identity are withheld from the inquiry of acquaintances. “In stead of a companion,” Moryson advises, “let the Traveller have alwayes with him some good Booke in his pocket” (3:387)—although a book, he cautions to add, that should not contain any dangerous political content (3:387). This practice of self-distancing, with the self reserved to “a fair retreat,” as Bacon had phrased it,¹⁰⁰ is a necessary strategy for English travelers in CounterReformation Europe. As Jessica Wolfe notes, the Greek tradition of mētis—a term that links practical knowledge and professional expertise with cunning and dissimulation—is a defensive tactic for the weak to use against a greater force.¹⁰¹ As Moryson is described by one of his traveling companions, a French Franciscan who suspects his hidden nationality, “En verité vous estes fin,” or “in truth you are crafty [as your name imports]” (2:43). Solitariness, anonymity, opacity, and dissimulation become the characteristic traits of a distinctly English mode of travel. “I never observed any to live lesse together in forraigne parts, then the English” (3:379), Moryson comments approvingly. Not only does avoiding the “conversation” of other English people on the Continent abet educational travel and language acquisition, it is also a matter of realpolitik, evading one’s compatriots so as not to provoke the notice of state or church authorities (3:385). The practice of travel necessarily transforms the assumed attributes of Englishness: as Moryson remarks, the English are the most pliable culture, able “to subject themselves to the Lawes, customes, language, and apparrel of other Nations” (3:397). Similarly, to quote Henry Wotton, whose own mastery of dissimulation will be discussed in Chapter 3, “he travels with mean consideration . . . that is ever one countryman.”¹⁰² Moryson’s own remarkable talents of disguise support this generalization: at various times he impersonates a “bohemian,” or gypsy, to escape roaming gangs of freebooters in Germany (1:79); his own servant, in order to relay communication to a friend, continuing ⁹⁹ Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 201 ff., 78. ¹⁰⁰ Bacon, “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” 351. ¹⁰¹ Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature, 8. ¹⁰² Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:258.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

65

the role even when drafted into manual labor by local authorities (1:80); and a pauper, to enter the Habsburg stronghold of Milan (1:367). As these examples demonstrate, Moryson’s performances cross both national and class boundaries. In fact, he advises that travelers should begin their voyages in Germany precisely because of the mingling of social groups that typifies travel in this region (3:383). Such encounters, he asserts, inculcate an ethos of mētis, providing practical knowledge as well as the skills of accommodation and dissimulation necessary for an English person abroad. Moryson’s dissimulation most often entails concealing his national identity, a piece of information that must be hidden not only from political authorities but also his fellow Englishmen, especially Catholic expatriates. When Moryson meets with Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, one of the leading Catholic theologians of the period, he is dressed “like an Italian” (1:304),¹⁰³ and when he travels from Naples to Rome with an English priest, even sharing a bed with his companion, he does so while successfully disguising the fact that he too is English (1:260). But at other moments, English Catholic exiles represent the one group whom Moryson genuinely fears. Although Moryson recounts his visit to Bellarmine twice in his text to illustrate his skills of performance, he also concedes how he had to avoid the gaze of English Catholics who were attending the Cardinal (3:414). He similarly panics when encountering a group of Catholic exiles outside Rome out of fear that some will recognize him from Cambridge: “neither was the hearing of the English tongue, or the sight of English-men, ever before so unpleasing to me” (1:223). The recognition that Moryson is so careful to avoid is more than just a personal one, as in the case of an encounter with a former classmate. More importantly, he fears that someone will recognize his performance as a role. As an English Protestant on the Continent, Moryson assumes the position of the recusant. Although he carefully denies this identification, the moments that elicit anxieties of detection are consistently provoked by this comparison. Moryson is aware not only of the general risk that a fellow English person might see through his disguise—by hearing an underlying English accent, for instance—but also of the specific knowledge that an English Catholic would possess of dissimulation, the codes of secrecy and outward conformity that the recusant shares with the traveler and intelligencer. These are skills to which early modern religious minorities frequently had to resort. But despite their shared predicament, as Perez Zagorin has shown, confessional minorities— Catholic recusants and Protestant Nicodemites alike—persistently refused to acknowledge the underlying similitude of their social positions.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰³ Moryson later claims to have visited Bellarmine disguised as a Frenchman (3:413). The inconsistencies in his account might result from the sheer number of personae he assumes in the course of his travel. Pfannebecker offers a fascinating analysis of this encounter in “Lying by Authority”: 579–80. ¹⁰⁴ Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 12–13. For a more recent discussion, see Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

66

   

As was discussed in the Introduction, William Cardinal Allen had presented Rome as the paradigmatic open city and site of sanctuary, and in the process even attempted to forge a strategic alliance between Catholic exiles and Protestant nonconformists. It is fittingly in Rome, then, where Moryson encounters Allen. In contrast to his successful performance with Bellarmine, his meeting with Allen offers a rare moment of disclosure in which Moryson reveals his identity as an English Protestant. The underlying resemblance of his position to that of Catholic recusants manifests itself in the confessional tone he adopts with Allen, and is further reinforced as Moryson remains under Allen’s protection while touring Rome (1:259). Confronted with a recognition of likeness, Moryson must distinguish his position as a traveler from that of Catholic exiles. As a way of offsetting his powerlessness and indebtedness to Allen, Moryson makes a point to violate the codes of sociability underwriting their relations of hospitality and patronage, and he seems to relish recounting how he promptly ducked from his Catholic guides and violated the terms of his agreement with the Cardinal (1:260). Given his efforts to distance his own mode of dissimulation from that of English Catholic exiles, it is ironic that he is apprehended on his return to England in 1595, and interrogated at Dover, on suspicion of being “some Popish Priest” (1:422).¹⁰⁵ Because Thomas Palmer served as the harbormaster at Dover, it might have been the author of the Essay, later to rail against “irregular travelers” in print, who interrogated Moryson. Two years later, on his return from his second journey abroad, Moryson was again mistaken for a priest because of his Italian dress, even though, he notes in exasperation, “the crafty Priests would never have worne such clothes as I then did” (2:115).¹⁰⁶ As he crosses back to England, the skills of performance and dissimilation suitable for travel instead mark him as a foreign and potentially suspect figure. His experiences confirm the accusation he had noted in his earlier defense of dissimulation, that the strategies “proper to a Traveller . . . will be at home and among his friends” seen as a vice and violation of “true friendship” (3:409). As he is converted into an embarrassing spectacle upon his return to England, Moryson attempts to distinguish himself from English Catholic missionaries, insisting that no priest would have worn such a markedly foreign costume. But in the process, he ¹⁰⁵ In both instances, Moryson is saved by individuals who recognize him: in 1595, by the Mayor’s assistant, who was a friend of Moryson’s brother Richard, and, in 1597, by an innkeeper with whom Moryson had stayed (1:422, 2:115). ¹⁰⁶ Moryson relates several comic episodes dealing with English travelers whose sartorial choices lead to their detection and arrest: an English agent, identified as “Master W.M,” arrives in Rome “apparelled like a Switzer, and (as it seemed to me) too much disguised” (1:342), escaping just ahead of the Inquisition, while another English traveler adopts an exaggeratedly “strange” and colorful manner of dress that he assumes is native to Italy, becoming a literal fashion victim when he is apprehended by the Jesuits in Rome (3:412). Thomas Nashe depicts a similar episode, of an English traveler wearing the gaudy clothing he assumes is common in Rome, in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594): see The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 326.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

67

becomes associated, instead, with actors. He had similarly compared travelers to actors in his section on travel advice, where he cautioned against staying abroad for extended periods of time, and thereby becoming like “rude Stage players, who to the offence of the beholders, spend more time in putting on their apparrell, then in acting their Comedy, (for life is compared to a stage, and our Parents and Kinsmen expecting our proofe, to the beholders)” (3:363–64).¹⁰⁷ Moryson’s experience with port officials reflects the extent to which he has acquired European “habits” in the course of his travels. In a literal sense, he forgets that Italian clothing would stick out in Dover, an ironic slip given the ridicule he had earlier directed at an English traveler whose flamboyant costume had led to his detection in Rome. But his habit, his costume, also marks another form of habit—the workings of custom—and thereby exposes the ways that travel inevitably effects a transformation of the self.¹⁰⁸ A similar moment of exposure occurs while attending church service in Geneva with the Calvinist theologian and Huguenot exile Theodore Beza: on entering the church, Moryson unconsciously reaches for a font of holy water, an instinctive gesture acquired through repeated attendance at Catholic mass (1:390), and a practice he had in fact justified by likening his presence to attendance at “a stage-play” (3:415). Far from being an aloof spectator of Catholic ritual, laughing at the “mimicall gestures” of Catholic priests (3:362), once again Moryson is converted into a spectacle himself, and is consequently reprimanded by Beza for his mistake. Although Moryson’s skills of performance place him in comparison to actors, Catholic priests, and other “irregular travelers,” they are also the skills that mark his credentials as a professional traveler and establish his authority for offering advice through his published text. The novice travelers most in need of his counsel are in fact those who remain intransigently English throughout their journeys. One example Moryson cites is that of an English merchant who dines with him at an inn near Pavia. Lacking Moryson’s skills of dissimulation, the merchant is unmistakably English: when asked his nationality, he says he is Dutch, but is then unable to respond in that language; changing his story, he claims to be from a French-speaking region, but is unable to carry on a conversation in French either; when Moryson is forced to speak to him in Italian, the merchant’s unmistakably English pronunciation exposes his underlying nationality. The merchant’s subsequent fear of detection, and his belief that Moryson—characteristically disguised, in this case as a poor man—is a spy, forces Moryson to reveal that he too is ¹⁰⁷ In his letter of travel advice to his brother Robert, Sir Philip Sidney had drawn on the analogy with actors to describe travelers who gained only a superficial knowledge of other cultures, joking that “ere it bee long, like the Mountebanks in Italy, wee Travellers shall be made sport of in Comedies” (Profitable Instructions, G.) ¹⁰⁸ As Dallington remarks in A Method For Travel (1605), “He therefore that intends to Trauell out of his owne country, must likewise resolue to Trauell out of his country fashions, and indeed out of himselfe” (B). For similar comments, see Jerome Turler, The Traveiler (1576), 101–2; Lipsius, A Direction for Trauailers (1592), C2; Bacon’s letter to Rutland, Profitable Instructions, D2v–D3v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

68

   

English, a disclosure that leads to a rare moment of intimacy, as the merchant embraces him and later shares his bed with him: “he was soone content to stay all night, and to take me in my homely apparell for his bedfellow” (1:362). At one level, this episode reflects how Englishness acquires new importance in the context of overseas travel; when placed in this isolated environment, national identity trumps class and other markers of difference. Pointing to the fraternal, egalitarian implications of national sentiment, the merchant takes Moryson to bed, dirty boots and all. Significantly, though, this moment of bonding results from failure— the merchant’s poor language skills that mark him as hopelessly, and helplessly, English. And Moryson’s own disclosure is provoked out of sympathy, to put the poor merchant at ease and reassure him that he will not be packed off to the Inquisition. But even in revealing his identity, Moryson still retains the aloof, analytical stance that had characterized his exchanges with most European Catholics. Far from embracing the merchant as a fellow Englishman, Moryson does so solely to preserve the secrecy of his own identity. And when he repeats this anecdote in his later section on travel advice, he presents the merchant as a cautionary tale for English travelers (3:381). These encounters dissever the alignment of sociability and nationality: in an extraterritorial context, it is dangerous to fraternize with fellow Englishmen, whether Catholic exiles or unskilled novice travelers. As a result, Moryson internalizes an ethos of dissimulation and intelligence gathering not only as a mode of survival but also a means for extending the codes of sociability across cultural and linguistic boundaries: to draw on the terms of his earlier defense of dissimulation, he is consequently able to “live with” and “gain the well-wishing” of others, even those across the confessional divide, by reconciling dissimulation with “true friendship” (3:409–10). Moryson therefore avoids the company of other Englishmen throughout his travels: finding too many English in Florence, he relocates due to the fact that “solitarie conversing with the Italians best fitted my purpose” (1:333). There are practical reasons for this strategy, which enables him to improve his language skills. But more deliberately, in order to navigate his cultural landscape, Moryson has to adopt the solitary and opaque persona that marks his participation in the Elizabethan-era information economy, and assimilate himself to a process of intelligence gathering that necessarily elides any subjective traces of personality in the attempt to reduce his travel narrative to its useful informational kernel. The transcultural bonds of sociability that Moryson forges through these extended periods of residence and language immersion also have an effect on the formal aspects of his text, and mark a transition from the descriptive format prescribed by advice texts to an epistolary form that emphasizes, instead, the subjective and sociable contexts of his narrative account. Offsetting the solitary and opaque persona of his descriptive sections, Moryson interjects his account with the transcription of letters written to friends from his travels. Moryson’s

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

69

bond with a circle of Italian humanists is not only established through a shared interest in letters, the study of language and literature, but also mediated by the writing and circulation of letters as material objects.¹⁰⁹ In order to provide his readers with a template for writing sociable letters, Moryson includes samples of his correspondence, and reproduces letters—in Italian along with English translations—that he had written to his new acquaintances Nicolao della Rocca (1:339–41, 346–48) and Raphaele Columbano (1:334). The letter to della Rocca is significant because it is the only instance in which Moryson willingly reveals his nationality to a confidant. Unlike his other moments of disclosure, which are prompted by concern for self-preservation or the safety of others, it is also one of the few moments of personal intimacy expressed in Moryson’s text. In his letter, Moryson outs himself as an Englishman, explaining to della Rocca the reasons for his disguise, “lest you should thereby doubt, that you have cast your love upon an Jugler” (1:347).¹¹⁰ As with his earlier comparison of travelers to “rude Stage players” (3:346), the antithesis to Moryson’s sociable mode of dissimulation is the theatricality and vagrancy associated with actors and other performers. The epistolary sections of Moryson’s text provide the occasion for a disclosure of self because the letter form offers a literary template and sanctioned space for such revelations and expressions of intimacy. Through these rare personalized accounts of himself, we glimpse the person of Moryson emerging from behind textual layers of description and dissimulation. Whereas Moryson’s text most often constructs a descriptive account, one not contingent on his own experience that may thereby offer a replicable framework, his letters instead foreground the literary qualities of his text. The epistolary form is a mode of writing that draws attention to its literariness, “proclaiming itself as writing in the process of correspondence,” as Claudio Guillén has noted.¹¹¹ And it does so through a play of ¹⁰⁹ By contrast, it is appropriate that the linguistically-challenged Englishman whom Moryson encounters is a merchant, given the ways that the mercantile attitude toward language acquisition tended to view language merely as a useful instrument to facilitate commercial transactions: see, for example, John Browne’s advice to merchants’ factors and apprentices in The Marchants Avizo (1590), A2v. ¹¹⁰ The “closet,” what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described as an interplay of “secrecy and disclosure, and of the private and of the public” becomes the framework for representing national identity in Moryson’s text. For Moryson, nationality—like sexuality—imposes a boundary between the affective self, performed in public contexts, and the hidden self, a seemingly private, interiorized center of identity: see Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3, 71. ¹¹¹ Claudio Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Barbara K. Lewalski, ed., Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 80. Among related discussions of the literary qualities of letter writing, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, esp. 231–78; Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, ed., Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Seattle: Folger Shakespeare Library and University of Washington Press, 2004); Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds., Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

70

   

absence and presence, what Angel Day, author of one of the most popular handbooks on letter writing, describes as “the familiar and mutuall talke of one absent friend to an other.”¹¹² It is in this space of simultaneous intimacy and “solitude, separation, silence, privacy, or even secrecy” in which an intersubjective interiority emerges in Moryson’s text.¹¹³ Through the formal means of “letters to friends,” as Foucault notes in his discussion of Stoic techniques of self, one finds a “disclosure of self.”¹¹⁴ The epistolary form also enables rare moments of narrative to emerge in Moryson’s text. Although Moryson had acknowledged the “barrennes” of his early sections on Germany (1:xix), his relation of his journey from Stade to Emden moves from the descriptive mode of writing found throughout his Itinerary to a much more self-consciously literary style. What transforms his narrative is the transition to the epistolary form, with Moryson narrating the first section of his journey in a letter to Francis Markham, an English friend in Heidelberg. In addressing his absent friend, Moryson reveals the intersubjective networks through which news of his travel is transmitted. Uncharacteristically, he also emphasizes the sociable dimensions of his journey. Rather than moving anonymously as a solitary witness through a seemingly depopulated landscape, Moryson describes at length his interactions with his fellow passengers, two Flemish cloth merchants and a Dutch traveler, whose antipathy to Moryson for having taken the best seat in the coach escalates into a national quarrel over the course of the journey (1:76–78). Moryson continues his narrative in a letter to Aegidus Hoffman, a Flemish acquaintance from Heidelberg (1:78–80). Finishing the last section of his journey to Emden on foot, Moryson relates how he managed to evade a group of Spanish freebooters, deserters from the army in the Netherlands, who were robbing travelers and targeting the English in particular (1:78). Moryson again breaks custom by naming and individuating his fellow “travelees”: the freebooters’ leader, Hans Jacob; his fellow travelers, who one by one turn back from the journey; his sole remaining companion, a citizen of Emden named Anthony. He also builds up a surprisingly engaging, suspenseful narrative through a sequence of dramatic moments—the decision regarding which of two equally dangerous paths to take, followed by the evading of the freebooters’ spies at an inn, all leading up to a final confrontation with the soldiers, who release the disguised Moryson because they mistake him for a “poore m[a]n, and a prey unfit to be followed” (1:87). The emergence of narrative within the descriptive, log-derived linearity of the itinerary form depends on “unfortunate” travel. It is in these moments of danger ¹¹² Angel Day, The English Secretary (1599), 18. Rambuss analyzes Day’s text and other writing manuals in Spenser’s Secret Career, 30–48. ¹¹³ Guillén, “Notes,” 100. ¹¹⁴ Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 34.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

71

that a representation of self appears from behind the prescribed confines of the travel diary. Countering the imperative to reduce experience to Ramist categorization,¹¹⁵ these episodes instead accentuate the labor of the traveling subject. But if a writerly voice asserts itself in these moments, it is nevertheless a self-consciously literary persona. With Moryson, it is not only the intrinsically fictionalized self that he adopts in relating his narrative in epistolary form, but also the protean, dissimulating persona of the traveler that he assumes throughout the journey itself. His skills of dissimulation are, in fact, what allow his journey to continue until its appropriate end. Whereas at other times his abilities of disguise enable him to elide his identity and navigate the landscape anonymously— inconspicuously slipping in to spy the fortifications at Milan, for instance (1:367)—in this case his skills of dissimulation provide the means for his narrative itself: upon arriving at Emden, Moryson reveals his name to the sentry, a resumption of identity that signals a return to the descriptive narrative voice of his itinerary; resuming his role as “Fynes Moryson,” he promptly disappears again within the text. Aside from these scant narrative sections, Moryson otherwise provides what is essentially a travel account, a textual form in which subjective traces are subsumed in a methodical tabulation of expenses and economic transactions. It is telling that Moryson has garnered the interest of economic historians more often than literary critics.¹¹⁶ As Justin Stagl has noted, the diary form of writing originates not as a means of chronicling the thoughts of the self but rather as a way to collect receipts and catalogue expenses.¹¹⁷ Instead of presenting the traveling subject as a disembodied and detached observer, the travel account draws attention to the intrinsically somatic qualities of the experience of travel. Moryson’s person is tied to the fate of his purse, and the physical depletions wreaked through travel are charted by the dwindling life-flow of capital that must be preserved over the course of travel. This economic vulnerability undermines the sense of the solitary, opaque self that Moryson fashions throughout much of his text. So too do the interpersonal networks through which travelers’ money must necessarily circulate. Because journeys were financed through bills of exchange, sums that were either

¹¹⁵ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 47–94. ¹¹⁶ See Edward H. Thompson’s articles, “Elizabethan Economic Analysis: Fynes Moryson’s Account of the Economies of Europe,” History of Economic Ideas 3 (1995): 1–25 and “Shakespeare’s Europe Revisited—Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary,” in Studii de Limbi si Literaturi Moderne,” ed. H. Parlog (Romania: Timisoara University Press, 1993), 72–86. ¹¹⁷ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 50. The parallel between travel narratives and the keeping of accounts is demonstrated in Sir Charles Somerset’s travel diary, which concludes with four pages listing “The Charges of my Travelling”: see The Travel Diary (1611–1612) of an English Catholic, Sir Charles Somerset, ed. Michael G. Brennan (Leeds: The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1993), 307–11. Robert Dallington refers to money as “the soule of Trauell” and gives estimates of a traveler’s daily expenses in A Method For Travel (1605), C. Alison Games discusses travel diaries as expense accounts in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

72

   

sent ahead for travelers to collect or which followed them to reimburse expenses, Moryson advises prospective travelers to retain a “faithfull friend at home” who will be able to oversee repayments and thereby ensure that their credit stays in “good report” during their absence (2:133). The economic historian Craig Muldrew has argued that relations of credit operated in an interpersonal context in the early modern period, one in which “credibility,” or the ability to repay loans, was a key marker of sociability and community standing.¹¹⁸ The intersubjective contexts of economic transactions offset the increasingly abstracted conditions of economic exchange that resulted from elaborate credit mechanisms such as bills of exchange. Indeed, among the few people mentioned by name in Moryson’s text are those who loan him money or secure the transfer of his bills of exchange, from two exiled English brothers, Sir Charles and Henry Davers (1:418), to one “Paynter,” a carrier on the post between Paris and London (1:418).¹¹⁹ As Steve Clark notes in his historical survey of travel writing, the low literary value assigned to travel texts often stems from their “unabashedly commercial” character.¹²⁰ Moryson is not unique in emphasizing the economic underpinnings of his travel. The compositional models outlined in travel advice texts had similarly derived from mercantile models, with the ledger form and practices of double-entry bookkeeping providing conceptual and stylistic frameworks for the travel account. Moreover, as Thomas Palmer’s text demonstrated, travelers’ reports created a market for news and intelligence. But whereas Palmer and other advice texts relegated travelers to an instrumental position in networks of intelligence gathering, Moryson reveals how travel was beginning to occupy a social role distinct from its place in an information economy. This change was reflected in the altering economic relations that funded travel. This chapter began with a discussion of the Elizabethan state’s sponsorship of travelers and investment in the training of potential state servants. With an increasing demand for political intelligence, these networks of patronage became more diffuse, with

¹¹⁸ See Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England,” Social History 18 (1993): 163–83 and The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). ¹¹⁹ Despite his efforts to represent the economics of travel as part of social networks linking friends and gentlemen, Moryson later conceded that these economic bonds are much less reliable, noting that some of those with whom he had invested money during his absence refused to repay him, and “deale not therein so gentleman-like with me, as I did with them” (1:427). John Taylor experienced a similar problem with an estimated 750–800 of the 1650 subscribers who had funded his 1618 “Pennyless Pilgrimage” to Edinburgh, and devised a creative solution—publicly shaming them by naming them in print: see The Scourge of Basenesse (1624), a revision of his earlier A Kicksey Winsey (1619), in All the Workes of Iohn Taylor The Water Poet (1630), Dd1. For discussion, see Bernard Capp’s The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578–1653 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 64–5. Despite these problems, Taylor did make an estimated £450 on the voyage (Capp, 65), reflecting the ways that travelers could take advantage of their entrance into market relations. For further discussion of Taylor and the subscription system for publication, see Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, 189–203. ¹²⁰ Steve Clark, “Introduction,” in Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999), 1.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

73

leading courtiers such as the Earl of Essex providing parallel funding for travelers and other informants. Traveling in the 1590s, Moryson’s economic vulnerability and social marginality made him ideally suited for this context: as a younger brother, unemployed Cambridge graduate, and aspiring secretary, his livelihood was dependent on the state’s demand for the specialized knowledge of informants like himself. But by the time Moryson finally published his Itinerary in 1617, more than two decades later, this information economy had changed considerably. The earlier, more centralized system, based on patronage and alliance, had become subject to the market, and non-elite travelers like Moryson increasingly had to scrape for their own sources of funding. One mechanism used to fund travel was the “travel wager,” a scheme alternately referred to as “putting-out” or “adventures upon return.”¹²¹ In this system, travelers invested, or “put out,” a sum of money that was to be repaid at a rate of 3:1 or 4:1 upon their return. If they died during the voyage, however, that amount was forfeited to their investors. As with modern actuarial science, this arrangement concretized the value of labor, but based on a calculation that hinged on the dim chances of travelers’ survival. The travel wager was grounded on the same principle—managing risk—that serves as the thematic core of Moryson’s travels: his characteristic skills of dissimulation, his text’s most memorable narrative moments, and the economic underpinning of his travel account all correlate the management of risk with the care of the self. Moryson had financed his journeys through a travel wager, putting out £100 at a rate of 3:1 in order to receive £300 upon his return (1:427). In defending this practice as an “honest meanes” to recuperate the economic losses sustained through travel (1:425), he differentiates travel wagers from “other base adventures for gaine” (1:425). Even as he entered into market relations that commodified his labor if not his life, Moryson distances this economy from one that he associates with his social inferiors, “bankerouts, Stage-players, and men of base condition” (1:428). Like Thomas Palmer before him, he attempts to preserve distinctions between gentlemanly intelligence gathering and its “base” counterpart. Yet Moryson was nevertheless more intimately bound up with the market than he would care to admit. Describing the status in England of younger brothers like himself as worse than that of illegitimate offspring on the Continent (1:39, 1:425), he later acknowledges how the small amount of his inheritance, one of the few vestiges of his gentlemanly status, was depleted when his travel expenses exceeded the amount he had received through his travel wager (1:428). Noting that courtiers have “justly cast off” the putting-out system because these wagers are increasingly used “by the common people, and by very Stage-players themselves” (1:428),

¹²¹ On travel wagers, see Anthony Parr, Renaissance Mad Voyages: Experiments in Early Modern English Travel (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

74

   

Moryson’s precarious economic position situates him in an uneasy relation to these latter groups.¹²² The financial exigencies of travel therefore place Moryson in the unprecedented role of a professional traveler. His skills of dissimulation, in particular, demonstrate the combination of practical knowledge and cunning, or mētis, required of an English traveler in counter-Reformation Europe. At the same time, however, he adamantly refuses to see himself in this vocational and commercial context. For example, in his cautionary tales of English travelers who fail to practice dissimulation—such as the merchant whose faulty language skills make him recognizably English (1:362, 3:381) and the fashionable traveler arrested in Rome after his gaudy clothes alert the Inquisition to his presence (3:412)— Moryson links the potential dangers of travel to figures who are too closely tied to the market: the merchant who possesses only rudimentary, commercially-based language skills or the fashionable traveler who assumes that the rules of conspicuous consumption apply as much in Rome as in London. By contrast, even in his defense of dissimulation, Moryson associates mētis with gentlemanly conduct, rebutting the imputations of the “vulgar” and defending these practices as a way to extend sociability abroad. And although the opaque and profoundly asocial persona that Moryson adopts in his travels would seem to be at odds with this framework, it is a role, as he proposed, contingent upon context. The selfdistancing that travelers must necessarily practice—preserving their intentions if not identities within an interiorized space—enables them to navigate an environment populated by Spanish authorities, freebooters, and English Catholic priests. Such practices of dissimulation also maintain a distance from the ignominy of the “public means” of professionalism, what Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 111 as a force able to taint the self “To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”¹²³ Denied a social place in England in the patrilineal system, Moryson, like so many other younger brothers and unemployed scholars in the Elizabethan period, turned to travel as a way to eke out a living. But travel itself was undergoing a transformation in this period, and Moryson was placed uneasily between two models: on the one hand, the networks of intelligence gathering that relied on mediators such as informants, travelers, and secretaries, and, on the other, an emerging market economy that prized not secrecy or objectivity but instead the forms of publicity and speed of circulation associated with print culture and a traffic in news. By the time Moryson published his Itinerary in 1617, more than

¹²² Early modern plays frequently mentioned the putting out system: see Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humor (1599), 2.1 and 3.1, wherein Puntarvolo plans to put out £5000 at 5:1 for his voyage to Constantinople with his wife, cat, and dog; Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Noble Gentleman (1606), 1.1.174; Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), 3.3.47–9; Richard Brome, The Antipodes (1636), 1.6.77–85; James Shirley’s The Ball (1632), 2.1. Like Moryson and John Taylor, the character of Freshwater in Shirley’s play is unable to convince his investors to repay him on his return. ¹²³ Shakespeare, Sonnet 111, ll. 4, 7.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

75

two decades after his travels, the conditions of travel and travel writing had altered dramatically, and Moryson, to his financial peril, failed to recognize these changes. After having spent years revising his travel account, and even translating it from Latin to English, Moryson produced a text whose sheer compendiousness made it too unwieldy for a market that demanded cheaper, more portable travel guides. As Andrew Hadfield notes, the fortunes of his text suggest that “Moryson did not really understand the medium of print or the audiences of printed books.”¹²⁴ His text, approximately 900 pages in its original published form, was never reprinted, and Moryson never again ventured into the marketplace of print, instead serving as secretary to Lord Mountjoy, Lord Deputy of Ireland, in the final decisive years of the Nine Years’ War’s campaign against Irish resistance. Travel was increasingly shaped by the speed of the market, a process that demanded new kinds of agents, travelers whom Palmer would have certainly deemed “irregular,” and that Moryson himself might have dismissed as “bankerouts, Stage-players, and men of base condition” (1:428)—figures, in other words, like Thomas Coryat.

1.3 Thomas Coryat: Sociability, Labor, and the Market Speed of Print Thomas Coryat, whose travelogue Crudities (1611) derived from a five-month tour of Europe, offers a stark contrast to Moryson: hopelessly indiscreet, insistently sociable, incapable of dissimulation if not devoid of guile, this son of a Somerset parson, aspiring member of Prince Henry’s court, and honorary member (and satiric target) of literary coteries has become a popular case-study in discussions of early modern travel, often to the detriment of Moryson, who is just as consistently overlooked. For Andrew Hadfield, Coryat’s Crudities represents “the first self-consciously styled work of English travel writing.”¹²⁵ William Sherman similarly notes the precedent established by Coryat, seeing him as the first English writer who traveled solely in order to produce a written account of his journey.¹²⁶ Coryat’s text attests to the ways that travel writing was inextricably tied to the market. As Richmond Barbour has argued, part of Coryat’s innovativeness is the extent to which “he commodifies travel.”¹²⁷ Whereas Elizabethan travel advice literature and Moryson’s Itinerary emerged from an information economy tied to networks of intelligence gathering, with Coryat and other Jacobean texts we see this economy increasingly detached from its original political context and

¹²⁴ Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing, 82. ¹²⁵ Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing, 58. ¹²⁶ William H. Sherman, “Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720),” in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20. ¹²⁷ Barbour, Before Orientalism, 124.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

76

   

instead linked to a commercial marketplace of print and accompanying ethos of literary celebrity. According to the guidelines set out in early modern travel advice texts, travel writing consisted of two distinct activities: a process of note-taking and the gathering of observations, collected at the scene of travel, followed by another stage, temporally and spatially removed from the experience of travel, in which travelers converted their notes into the chronological structure of an organized narrative. Recognizing that travelers needed some kind of template for converting their experience into narrative form, advice texts suggested following a method originally formulated by the Renaissance rhetorician Petrus Ramus. As shown in the taxonomic graphs included in Thomas Palmer’s Essay, Ramist logic offered a model for organizing knowledge that arranged information in spatial terms (see Figure 2). Because its classificatory system of categories and subdivided adjuncts could be graphically made visible on the page, Ramism was a system that lent itself to the format of print.¹²⁸ But in the process of using this template to organize their narratives, travelers necessarily had to efface their earlier stage of writing along with the labor of travel it recorded. This elision was enacted in the process of composition itself, for travelers’ notebooks, the writing tables containing their daily observations and notes, would be discarded and replaced by the narrative account.¹²⁹ In Coryat’s Crudities (1611), the earliest first-person travel narrative published in English, this recommended process of composition remains in a state of tension with the physical experience of travel that it both organized and abstracted. As Katharine Craik has argued, humanist pedagogy often employed somatic and gastronomic analogies as a way to describe the physicality of the experience of composition. If good writing was like good digestion, then in order to digest information one had to break it down into its component bits, or, in rhetorical terms, “perform its orderly breakdown into adjuncts,” as seen with the detailed taxonomies in Thomas Palmer’s text, for instance. By titling his text Crudities, or “textual leftovers which have been improperly absorbed,”¹³⁰ Coryat instead emphasizes how his experience of travel resists its methodological mastication, and his text stages a process of information overload in which the available conceptual frameworks of writing are unable to keep pace either with the sensory excess of travel or the labor expended in its compositional arrangement. In the numerous mock-commendatory poems that preface Coryat’s text, this failure is ascribed to Coryat’s writing style, especially his penchant for detail. As Raymond Jean Frontain has observed, Coryat is targeted for lacking “a sense of

¹²⁸ For further discussion, see Ong, Ramus. ¹²⁹ See Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables.” ¹³⁰ Katharine Craik, “Reading Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” SEL 44 (2004): 80, also included in Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 93–114.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

77

discrimination” as he chronicles what seems to be every object and person he encountered in his travels:¹³¹ “He cannot passe by so much as a wallnutt tree,” one depiction of Coryat remarked, “but he needs must have a flinge at it.”¹³² The sense of “distinction,” Pierre Bourdieu has argued, expresses the ways that class differences are given form through aesthetic matters of discernment and taste.¹³³ With Coryat, we see how compositional style and modes of writing likewise provide the means for social differentiation. Humanist and Ramist approaches to writing aspired to offer a method enabling the subject’s mastery over information, an “almost sovereign” power over the raw data of experience, as Justin Stagl has described it.¹³⁴ But Coryat spurns this preference for selectivity and organization, and instead prizes his text’s comprehensiveness and attention to detail: as he boasts, “for the short time that I was abroade I observed more solid matters then any English man did in the like space this long time” (1:11). Far from mastering information, and thereby eliding the process of writing and its necessary labor, Coryat emphasizes the physical effects and somatic travails of his travel experience. His text is appropriately termed Crudities because these textual leftovers result from too much matter digested too quickly. As Samuel Purchas observed, commenting on Coryat’s later journey to India, he “was indeed a curious viewer of so much as his bodily eyes could comprehend.”¹³⁵ Although travel writing conventionally grounds its authority on the empirical truth of the eyewitness account, Coryat’s characteristic efforts to accumulate information press against the intrinsic somatic limits of perception and writing. There is a limit to how much one body can observe or transcribe, and Coryat repeatedly foregrounds how limits of time, lack of access, and indecipherable texts and monuments all conspire against his efforts to encounter as much “matter” as he can.¹³⁶ His text therefore accentuates the speed of his travel, emphasizing on the titlepage that his observations were “Hastily gobbled up in five Moneths travells.” Whereas a movement through space provides the conventional organizing structure of the travel account—as with Moryson, the travel narrative as itinerary— Coryat’s journey is also predicated by movement over time, or, more accurately, a movement through space against time, as he vies to cover as much ground, and as ¹³¹ Raymond Jean Frontain, “Donne, Coryate, and the Sesqui-Superlative,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29 (2003): 221. ¹³² This passage derives from the anonymous entertainment Boote and Spurre (ca. 1622–25), qtd. in Craik, “Reading Coryat’s Crudities,” 85. ¹³³ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). ¹³⁴ Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 50. ¹³⁵ Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625; Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905), 10:443. ¹³⁶ For examples of indecipherable inscriptions, see Coryat’s Crudities (1611; Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905), 1:284–85, 1:343, 1:288, 2:35, and 2:166; among sights to which Coryat is unable to gain access, see 1:345, 2:45, 2:206, and 2:214. All further references will be cited in-text.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

78

   

much “matter,” in as little time as possible. His journey moves with accelerating velocity, a process that undermines his aspirations for comprehensiveness. He remarks, for instance, that he was not able to observe as much as he would have liked in Brescia, “if I had remained there but one whole day” (2:41), or at Gorkum (Gorinchem), where he arrives late at night and leaves early the next morning (2:362), or, in the most extreme case, at Düsseldorf, where he claims to have stayed for only fifteen minutes (2:350)! The demands of this kind of schedule lead to feats of impressive compositional output, a textual outpouring against constant deadlines, so that despite staying in Strasbourg for only twenty-four hours, Coryat still manages to produce thirteen pages of text (2:195), and a period of six hours in Worms nonetheless gives him sufficient time to transcribe the prophecies of several Sibyls (2:260). These moments reenact the scene of writing, drawing attention to the impressive speed of Coryat’s transcription. Rather than eliding the process of composition, Coryat exposes travel’s underlying labor, not only its bodily experience but also the physical and temporal limits against which it must always strain. And instead of presenting travel from the perspective of its completion, thereby giving his itinerary an overarching coherence, Coryat depicts his journey from the ground level, ushering the reader with him as he emphasizes the travail that constitutes his experience of travel.¹³⁷ This effect leads John Donne to joke in one of the commendatory poems that Coryat writes in a way that “Almost for every step he tooke a word” (1:71). In this temporal movement across space, an interplay which Bakhtin terms a “chronotope,” “time becomes,” as Bakhtin comments, “palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.”¹³⁸ In Coryat’s formulation, his travel is constituted by his “industry capitall, digitall, and pedestriall.”¹³⁹ Correlating the body’s constituent parts—head, hands, and feet— the labor of travel is inextricably linked to the mechanical process of composition as well as the mental, or “capital,” framework of invention. Knowledge, experience, writing, dispositio are thereby neither preexisting categories through which travel is rendered sensible nor the results of a process of abstraction and selfdistancing. Instead, they are interrelated somatic processes that are nonetheless never fully subsumed in a coherent subjective whole.

¹³⁷ In her discussion of eighteenth-century travel texts, Chloe Chard similarly notes how the advent of tourism depends on an elimination of travel’s velocity of motion, as an effect of which the Grand Tour becomes “a series of static confrontations with sights, wonders, curiosities, and other objects of observation” (“Introduction,” in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds., Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996], 25). ¹³⁸ M.M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981), 250. ¹³⁹ Thomas Coryat, Coryats Crambe, or his colwort twise sodden, And Now serued in with other Macoronicke dishes, as the second course to his Crudities (1611), A2v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

79

But for Coryat’s critics, his indiscriminate fascination for detail reflected merely the mindlessness and aimless curiosity of his travels. Coryat’s travel account became, in the words of Sir Nicholas Tufton, “Onely the story of his shoes.”¹⁴⁰ Humanist pedagogies had emphasized the elision of labor in the compositional process, an erasure of the self and its idiosyncratic stylistic traits through a mimetic internalization of the organizational template of method.¹⁴¹ Coryat, however, is nothing but idiosyncratic, and the eccentricity of his writing style is consistently linked to the oddness of his physical being. Ben Jonson describes Coryat in his prefatory “Character of the Author” by comparing him to an automaton in a mechanical clock: “He is an Engine, wholly consisting of extremes, a Head, Fingers, and Toes” (1:16). Jonson represents Coryat as an assemblage of parts, incongruent somatic functions of perception, composition, and movement. Offsetting the disjunctions among these bodily features, Jonson lends coherence to the somatic experience of travel by attributing the “character” of Coryat to an interiorized force, an “engine.” This term, which, as Jessica Wolfe has argued, “denotes both wit and machinery” in the early modern period,¹⁴² on the one hand foregrounds the irreducible idiosyncrasy of Coryat’s writing style as well as his person. As with Coryat’s own comic self-fashioning, it is only by playing the buffoon and emphasizing his eccentricities that he may assume the position of author. But in being cast as an “engine,” he is also likened to an automaton and relegated to a mechanical, instrumental status in the construction of his narrative. In this sense, he becomes merely a tool—a technology, like writing itself, that is limited to mechanical operations: transcribing, detailing, but not inventing or functioning on its own. Contrary to the image of Coryat presented in the mock-commendatory verses, it was precisely the informational component of his text that was valued in the early modern information economy, the textual networks through which travelers on the Continent channeled news, intelligence, and even gossip to the English state.¹⁴³ ¹⁴⁰ Coryats Crambe, B. Michael Strachan attributes this commendatory poem to Tufton (The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate [London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 289). ¹⁴¹ For discussion of humanist pedagogy’s influence on travel writing, see Stagl, A History of Curiosity. ¹⁴² Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature, 3. Among earlier discussions, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963) and Solomon, Objectivity in the Making, esp. 69–73. On Jonson’s reference to Coryat as an “engine,” also see Benjamin Bertram, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 213–15. ¹⁴³ The seriousness with which Coryat pursues his documentation of inscriptions and monuments in his travel narrative is often at odds with his comic portrayal (and self-fashioning) in the commendatory poems. As Edward Chaney notes, “Coryat’s often comic travelogue turns out on close reading to contain some of the best early descriptions of architecture in the English language” (The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance [London: Frank Cass, 1998], 13). But at other moments, even Coryat himself admitted that some of these details were superfluous. When his detractors insinuated that only four of his text’s 650 pages had any value, Coryat defended his text by protesting that “at least fiue hundred” pages were indeed “worthy the reading” (Coryats Crambe, H2). In conceding that one-quarter of his text was extraneous, he was likely placing some of his text’s numerous transcriptions within this category of expendable matter.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

80

   

As Richard Badley jokes in his prefatory poem, while “some travellers lament / Their better notes to have bene from them rent,” Coryat offers such a compendious account that “If Schedules of this nature had bene found / About Sir Politick, ’twold have made him swound” (1:107). Badley’s comment reflects the dimming influence of the early modern information economy in its Elizabethan, state-directed form, as the proliferation of alternative outlets for news made such efforts to monopolize the flow of information hopelessly outmoded. Badley’s “Sir Politic,” like his namesake in Jonson’s Volpone (1606), represents the comically inept political wannabe, a figure who indiscriminately accrues information for its cultural capital as evidence of access to state intelligence.¹⁴⁴ Instead of mastering information, however, he is mastered by it, and Sir Politic’s somatic response to information is described as physically overwhelming him. By associating Coryat with such a comically outdated figure, Badley presents him as better suited for the grunt tasks of state service rather than the refined exercise of wit within the literary coterie. Jonson’s poem had similarly emphasized the ways that news and information produced a somatic response in Coryat: “But a Dutch-Post doth ravish him. The mere superscription of a letter from Zurich sets him up like a top: Basil or Heidelberg makes him spinne. And at seeing the word Frankford, or Venice, though but on the title of a Booke, he is readie to breake doublet, cracke elbowes, and overflowe the roome with his murmure” (1:17). Even if the material in his text was deemed superfluous, and even if it marked Coryat as hopelessly out of date and out of the loop, access to the sundry forms of information possessed an intrinsic pleasure. Before news could be reduced to an objective, instrumental status as information, there was an intensely physical pleasure gained through its circulation, a sensuousness that causes the body itself to take on the characteristics of centrifugal velocity associated with the transmission of news and intelligence. Although Badley had associated the political aspects of travel with a past age, the anxieties provoked by the information economy still persisted in the Jacobean period. Contemporaries were troubled by their inability to separate information from the subjective perceptual and compositional capacities of its transmitter. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously observed.¹⁴⁵ And due to the fact that early modern media consisted of the intersubjective channels through ¹⁴⁴ Sir Politic Would-Be, the English traveler residing in Venice in Volpone, offers a satire of earlier travel literature. He draws on the language of advice texts, for instance, with the paternalistic and homiletic counsel he offers Peregrine (4.1.2 and ff.), an emphasis, Peregrine notes, on the “forms,” or general theories, of travel “and nothing else” (4.1.39). Sir Politic also feigns knowledge of political intelligence, including such comic details as procedures for passing on “weekly intelligence . . . in cabbages” (ed. Philip Brockbank [New York: Norton, 1988], 2.1.69, 71). For discussion, see Mark Netzloff, “Jonson’s Volpone and the Information Economy of Anglo-Venetian Travel and Intelligence,” in Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Islands, Entrepôts, Empires, ed. John Watkins and Kathryn Reyerson (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 73–89. ¹⁴⁵ This now-ubiquitous phrase originally derives from McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 7. For a recent engagement with McLuhan’s dictum, see the essays in Rhodes and Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

81

which information circulated, there was a concern regarding the uncertain status of those groups—described in advice texts as “base intelligencers” or “irregular travelers”—whose labor was instrumental to the early modern information economy.¹⁴⁶ The sociable relations that Coryat maintained with his “travelees,” the guides and informants who had assisted him in his travels, are described disparagingly in the commendatory poems as evidence of his “popularity” (1:17). Indeed, this affective mode proved to be detrimental upon his return to England, when he unsuccessfully tried to ingratiate himself among court circles and literary coteries. But these traits worked to his advantage over the course of his travels, enabling him to initiate contact with others as a means for gathering information. Instead of merely using his interlocutors as sources of information, Coryat acknowledges the extent to which his knowledge is produced as a result of dialogue. When juxtaposed with a contemporary traveler such as Fynes Moryson—who remains silent and guarded, and also recommends this course of action in his section of travel advice¹⁴⁷—the fact that Coryat is even having these conversations reflects a novel development. In contrast to Moryson, he also names and individuates his travelees. It is not a “French friar,” as Moryson would have described him, but one “Carolus Wimier,” with whom Coryat debates the adoration of images on the road leading out of Calais: “I found him a very good fellow and sociable in his discourses,” Coryat notes (1:161). The amiable tone of his encounters is often at odds with their contentious subject matter, particularly with a series of impolitic conversations that Coryat initiates: upon meeting Wimier the Friar, he naturally brings up the topic of Catholic idolatry; encountering a Turkish scholar in the French ambassador’s retinue, he wants to know his opinion on the divinity of Christ (1:212); and, oblivious to the consequences, he demands a Venetian rabbi’s opinion on prospects for the conversion of the Jews (1:374–75). Not surprisingly, these meetings do not go well, lending credence to references to Coryat’s obtuseness.¹⁴⁸ The Turkish scholar and Venetian rabbi are also among the few of his travelees who remain anonymous, a choice that reflects how the fraternal sociability he extends to European Catholics is at the same time denied to Muslims and Jews. ¹⁴⁶ The term “information” derived from the technological innovation, first developed by Bell Labs during World War II, which literalized the abstraction of information through the mechanical encoding and transmission of messages via electronic transmitters. But the theoretical underpinning of this idea was initially formulated in the field of literary studies three decades earlier, in Andrei Markov’s study of chains of symbols in literature (Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction, trans. Susan Gruenheck Taponier and James A. Cohen [London: Sage Publications, 1998], 43). ¹⁴⁷ Moryson, Itinerary, 3:399. ¹⁴⁸ Sir Henry Goodier jokes that Coryat’s dimwittedness actually enabled him to resist Jesuit influence: “Our spies write home no ill of him; he went, / He staid, he came an even Innocent. / The Jesuites could not shake him: for he would not / Take orders, but remaine an Idiote” (Crudities, 1: 28). William Austin makes a similar comment in 1:84.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

82

   

It is only appropriate that these encounters take place not in any given location but instead on the road, so to speak, en route from one place to another. The spaces of sociability are produced from the circumstances of travel itself, a process of movement that entails, as Bakhtin observed, not only a “collapse of social distances,” the leveling of vertical boundaries of class and status, but also a compression of geographical distance and cultural difference.¹⁴⁹ These ephemeral, chance encounters attest to the irreducibly unique circumstances of Coryat’s travel, and offset the seemingly commodified form of his travel account.¹⁵⁰ In contrast to the recommendations of advice texts such as Thomas Palmer’s Essay, which counseled travelers “to procure with their purse” what they could not gain through their own stealth,¹⁵¹ Coryat garners intelligence from the unmotivated and unremunerated sociability that marks his encounters with new acquaintances and informants: an exiled Irish gentleman in France (1:195); a Dominican Friar, Vincentius de Petrengo, his guide in Bergamo, who also helps him evade the Inquisition (2:58); and one Jonas Keinperger, who shows him the Jesuit library at Speyer (2:249). Many of these informal bonds are inaugurated through mutual interest in monuments, and Coryat’s travelees often introduce themselves after having seen him busily copying inscriptions. It is also through his interest in monuments that Coryat stumbles upon numerous markers attesting to England’s long history of political, theological, and social links with the Continent, the physical remains of a transcultural Englishness that persist even in a postReformation cold war as well as a history of cultural exchange that is reenacted through Coryat’s own sociability and intellectual curiosity.¹⁵² Coryat differentiates his reliance on informants from the context of intelligence gathering by emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of his search for information. Michelle O’Callaghan has observed that “Coryat’s method of narration can be likened to a catalogue” in that he obsessively attempts to transcribe and record entire rooms and collections of objects.¹⁵³ In aestheticizing these objects, and removing them from political contexts, Coryat dissevers the cultural position of the traveler from the information economy of the state. Sir Henry Wotton ¹⁴⁹ Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 243–4. David J. Baker analyzes the images of circulation and fluidity in Coryat’s text in “ ‘My Liquid Journey’: The Frontispiece to Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 118–36. ¹⁵⁰ A similar emphasis can be found in Tim Moore’s Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist (London: Abacus, 2001), in which Moore retraces Coryat’s journey in a rundown Rolls Royce. ¹⁵¹ Palmer, Essay, R3v. ¹⁵² Coryat remarks upon monuments commemorating the presence of the English at Calais (1:154) and the University of Paris (1:171), as well as markers noting Richard I’s election as Emperor (2:266), Boniface’s role as Archbishop of Mainz (2:274), and funerary monuments to Lord Windsor in Venice (1:363), the exiled Edward Courtney, Earl of Devonshire (1:287), and Edmund Campion, whose portrait was displayed at the Jesuit college at Lyons (1:210). ¹⁵³ Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

83

similarly distances himself from politics in his preface to his Elements of Architecture (1624). Fashioning himself as a person who has retreated from state service and returned home to resume a role characterized by “mine own simplicity,” the former intelligence agent and ambassador opts to discuss the safe topics of architecture and monuments, “these plaine compilements, and tractable Materials; then with the Laberynthes and Mysteries of Courts and States.”¹⁵⁴ Architecture is safe subject matter due to its form as matter, and the solidity, referentiality, and tractability of these objects offers an alternative to the labyrinthine workings of the state and its textual networks of intelligence. Undermining this contrast, however, Wotton’s formulation recognizes that even the solid matter of architecture requires textual reassembly, a process that is equally dependent on the informal, intersubjective networks of the early modern information economy. Coryat also emphasized the “matter” contained in his text, boasting that it recorded “more solid matters” than any of his predecessors, and, like Wotton, protested that his attention was confined to monuments and architecture rather than “affaires of state,” topics which he purposefully avoids, “because I am a private man and no statist, matters of policie are impertinent unto me” (1:11–12; emphasis added). One of the chief ways in which Coryat’s obsessive gathering of information manifests itself is with a compulsive transcription of the textual features of monuments and plaques, a fixation that leads him to describe himself as a “tombestone traveller” (1:12). Although relatively few of the objects described by Coryat are indeed tombs, this figure offers an appropriate metaphor for his travel writing. Like tombs, his textually reproduced transcriptions serve as material objects that embody loss and thereby preserve memory. Anthony Parr describes Coryat’s meticulous documentation of inscriptions, epitaphs, and memorials as “an act of humanist retrieval,” a documentation of lost objects that ensures their preservation through their inclusion in his published text.¹⁵⁵ In contrast to the documentary networks of intelligence gathering, in which the intersubjective circulation of news becomes a disembodied and often anonymous circuit of information, the tombstone lends a solidity to the informational component of Coryat’s text. As a physical object, the tomb also possesses a spatial dimension that facilitates information retrieval. Similar to early modern theaters of memory, or the Ramist method of composition that derived from this tradition, objects are remembered more easily when placed in a visual, spatial arrangement.¹⁵⁶ Coryat deviates from this model, however, in that he responds to ¹⁵⁴ Sir Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture (1624), A1v; passage reprinted in Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), 198. ¹⁵⁵ Anthony Parr, “Thomas Coryat and the Discovery of Europe,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 590. ¹⁵⁶ My discussion is indebted to Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

84

   

Figure 3 Monuments and inscriptions, from Thomas Coryat, Crudities (London, 1611).

these objects more often as documents than monuments. He rarely describes the visual or physical features of such objects, for instance, but instead treats them as texts to be transcribed and reproduced (see Figure 3). Offsetting a sense of these objects as frozen in time, the transcription and reproduction of these monuments serve to concretize not time per se as much as

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

85

time’s passing. What is emphasized is the irretrievable labor required for the object’s textual reassembly, and the accelerated pace of Coryat’s travel remains in tension with the expenditure of time and labor demanded by his regime of writing. The fact that Coryat felt compelled to test the limits of his compositional endurance, writing as much as possible in the span of a day, or even six hours, also defied the method of earlier travel writing and its recommendations for organization and selectivity. But his efforts make sense in the terms of the marketplace and its demands for maximizing production. For an earlier generation of Marxist theorists, capital is noted for its rationalization of time, its ability to impose time-management regimes of increasingly brutal efficiency over labor.¹⁵⁷ With Coryat we also see how the market depends on an incessant speeding up of production, an ever-accelerating pace, as Paul Virilio has noted, that always carries with it the risk of failure, if not spectacular self-destruction, a “crash” resulting from unsustainable speed.¹⁵⁸ If the market demands speed, that very velocity also courts its own demise: “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels famously observed, in a “constantly expanding market” that chases its subjects “over the whole surface of the globe.”¹⁵⁹ Recent discussions of early modern economics have emphasized the power of the marketplace to effect a kind of disappearing act. Labor becomes generalized as a result of increasingly disembodied networks of exchange, and the market itself is transformed from a specific site of interpersonal commerce, the market-place, to an abstract and ubiquitous condition, the market.¹⁶⁰ But as the emphasis on Coryat’s bodily experience of travel makes clear, these processes of abstraction are never totalizing or complete, and the labor of travel (as “travail”) is never fully generalized.¹⁶¹ As Coryat describes the physical and financial toll of his travel, “I haue as hardly gotten my money as poore laborious Brickmakers eight pence a day for making Brick.”¹⁶² All that is solid may melt into air, yet the labor of Coryat’s traveling body remains: a reminder of labor expended and time and money lost, the remainders that were inconvertible in his travel account. Coryat’s text stresses the labor of both the experience of travel and its textual inscription by

¹⁵⁷ See, for example, Max Weber, “The Market: Its Impersonality and Ethic (Fragment),” in Economy and Society, 1:635–40 and E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97. ¹⁵⁸ Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). For a similar point about time–space compression, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 201 and ff. ¹⁵⁹ Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Penguin, 2002), 223. ¹⁶⁰ Among other discussions of this process, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 175–80. ¹⁶¹ For discussion of travel as “travail,” see Daniel Vitkus, “Labor and Travel on the Early Modern Stage: Representing the Travail of Travel in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare’s Pericles,” in Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 225–42. ¹⁶² Coryats Crambe, D4v-E1.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

86

   

calling attention to those moments of failure in which writing is unable to keep pace with the speed of travel and its sensory input. This speed, in fact, even outpaces the time frame instituted by the body itself. As a result, Coryat, traveling by foot, may nonetheless represent himself as moving at an accelerated speed— fifteen minutes through Düsseldorf !—even when it physically takes longer to traverse this space.¹⁶³ This chronotopal disparity, the disjunction between the pace of Coryat’s physical movement through space and the time frame of his narrative, shows the effects of the speed of velocity demanded by an everaccelerating marketplace of print. As a result, the labor of his travel is made to conform to the speed of a market-driven demand for information. Coryat could be said to be a tombstone traveler in another sense, for the velocity of his travel always courts the risk of failure, if not death. This level of risk was, in fact, intrinsic to his economy of travel, for Coryat—like Moryson before him—had financed his journey through a travel wager. Prior to his journey, Coryat had deposited £40 with Joseph Starre, a linen-draper from his hometown of Yeovil in Somerset, an amount that was to be repaid at a rate of 3:1 upon his return.¹⁶⁴ When Coryat, to Starre’s chagrin, actually managed to make it home alive, the draper refused to honor the bet. Citing “the smalnesse and commonnesse of [the] Voyage,”¹⁶⁵ he argued that Coryat’s degree of risk did not warrant this rate of profit. For Starre, the speed of travel was creating a shrinking world, one in which Europe became nearer, and grand tours became smaller, because of the speed of travel, the ubiquity of bodies traversing these boundaries, and the proliferation of news and information linking these cultures. He was also, of course, just being cheap. Coryat countered these charges by emphasizing the concrete labor that constituted his experience of travel, “to expose ones body to such a world of iminent dangers both by Sea and Land as I did.”¹⁶⁶ Although he posits his labor as the incontrovertible foundation of his travel, its value was nonetheless an effect of market principles, a marketability that was contingent on a deadly level of risk. Investors like Starre agreed to travel wagers solely because they believed in the likelihood of the traveler’s demise, the precondition, after all, for their own profit. At the same time, travelers could attract investors only if the level of risk was sufficiently high—if there was a chance, in other words, that they would never make it home alive. After a protracted legal dispute, Coryat finally received compensation from Starre, and this award was used—and promptly consumed—in the self-financed publication of his travel account.¹⁶⁷ Coryat’s travel experience and travel narrative coexisted in an economic circuit of investment, expenditure, and potential profit

¹⁶³ As Barbour notes, Coryat repeatedly emphasizes the distances between spaces he has traversed, constantly tabulating the number of miles he has traveled (Before Orientalism, 120). ¹⁶⁴ Strachan, Life and Adventures, 15. ¹⁶⁵ Coryats Crambe, D3v. ¹⁶⁶ Coryats Crambe, D3v. ¹⁶⁷ Strachan, Life and Adventures, 120.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

87

or loss, a cycle that was renewed and extended with successive waves of textual responses and sequels to his original text. His Crudities became a textual commodity in a larger network of transmission, a key feature of which was the series of mock-commendatory poems that introduced the text in its published form. The extent to which these poems often dictate the response of readers is reflected in the fact that critical discussions of the text tend to devote far more attention to the prefatory material than to Coryat’s own account of his travel. Yet the poems and his travel narrative derive from two fundamentally distinct environments of literary production: a coterie context of manuscript circulation and a marketplace of print. In the context of the literary coterie, the proliferation of texts, a chain of circulated poems and responses, reflects the kinds of surplus-value specific to this more exclusive setting: the exercise of wit, the competition for one-upmanship, the forging of bonds of sociability. In the commercial marketplace, by contrast, this mass of prefatory material worked against Coryat’s own economic interests. With the size of his text increased by one-third, the costs of production exceeded any profits from sales, and Coryat—who had financed the printing of the text— consequently had to bear these economic losses himself. Countering the financial onus of publishing these poems, Coryat assumed that their cultural capital outweighed their cost, and that forging ties to a literary coterie associated with Prince Henry’s court would open up avenues for future patronage. But even as he vied for the favor of coterie and court, Coryat was keenly aware his position depended on a larger print market, and he advertised his connection to these elite spheres in order to promote himself and his text. He even staged a series of formal presentations of copies of his text to members of the royal family, and, in one instance, arrived riding a donkey and carrying his text with the motto “asinus portans mysteria” [the ass carrying the icons].¹⁶⁸ Recognizing that court patronage was blocked to him, Coryat converted the inevitability of this social failure into a success of textual self-promotion, and he turned these episodes into the narrative center of his sequel, Coryats Crambe (1611). Much of this latter text was also intended to counter Coryat’s numerous critics and detractors, including the unnamed individual who had published The Odcombian Banquet (1611), a pirated text that printed the commendatory verses to his Crudities while excluding his travel narrative itself. Adding to the insult to his writing, and the insinuation that only the prefatory poems were worth printing, was also a financial injury, since this pirated edition cut into the sales of his self-published text.¹⁶⁹ Coryat’s travails in the literary marketplace intensified as the poet John Taylor proceeded to mock him in a series of pamphlets, an

¹⁶⁸ Strachan, Life and Adventures, 131. ¹⁶⁹ The person responsible for The Odcombian Banquet was most likely Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Coryat’s Crudities (Strachan, Life and Adventures,136).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

88

   

episode that demonstrates the extent to which he additionally provoked the hostility of popular, professional writers.¹⁷⁰ Despite his contact with a range of social spaces of literary production—court, coterie, and print—Coryat was never accepted as a member in any of these spheres, and it was this lack of social position that made him vulnerable to such insistent, vicious attacks. While his experience as a traveler provided a point of entry to all of these social contexts, the attributes that served him so well over the course of his travels—a protean ability to adapt to changing circumstances, a sociability and openness to new acquaintances—proved to be liabilities in the social landscape of London. Ben Jonson, who was generally sympathetic to Coryat, remarked in his “Character of the Author” that at court “he hath not bene costive of acquaintance to any, from the Palatine to the Plebeian; which popularity of his (it is thought by some of his Odcombians) may hurt him. But he free from all other Symptomes of aspiring, will easily outcary that” (1:17). Coryat’s “popular” status stems from his traversal of social boundaries, the fact that he mingles with nobles as well as commoners. Unlike other provincial outsiders—such as his friends and patrons from Somerset, Sir Edward Phelips and his son Robert (“his Odcombians”)—he fails to recognize the rigidity of class relations in the metropole. The charges against him are inherently contradictory, of course, as they simultaneously cast him as too “popular” because he mingled with social inferiors as well as too “aspiring” because he intruded on his social superiors.¹⁷¹ But in order to offset the suspicion that he was using these social ties for selfadvancement, Coryat had to make himself into a spectacle and participate in the rituals of his abasement. The precise nature of Coryat’s social position has remained an unsettled issue in critical discussions of his career.¹⁷² Thomas Fuller, writing in the late seventeenth century, was the first to represent Coryat as an aspiring courtier, a servant and pensioner of Prince Henry.¹⁷³ As this characterization became generally accepted over the ensuing centuries, it has led to some odd scenarios in which Coryat was

¹⁷⁰ For discussion of the Coryat–Taylor pamphlet exchange, see Strachan, Life and Adventures, 149–57 and Capp, The World of John Taylor, 13–14. ¹⁷¹ The contradictory nature of responses to Coryat is reflected in the comments of John Taylor: In some instances, Taylor alludes to Coryat as his social superior, mocking him in The Sculler (1612) as a privileged member of an elite literary coterie (“Foole thou it at the Court, I on the Thames” [B1v]). Elsewhere, he derides the publication of Coryat’s travel account, with its penchant for detail, as an effort to appeal to “the vulgar people” (Odcombs Complaint [1613], in All the Workes of Iohn Taylor The Water Poet [1630], Ff2). ¹⁷² Melanie Ord discusses the complexity of Coryat’s cultural position, and the interplay between his provincial origin, foreign travel, and place in urban literary culture, in “Provincial Identification and the Struggle over Representation in Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” in Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, eds., Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 131–40. ¹⁷³ Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England (1662), Ddd4.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

89

relegated to the lowest rung of courtiers and cast as a “privileged buffoon,” albeit “a buffoon with ambitions.”¹⁷⁴ These accusations show a contradictory logic, defining Coryat both as a foppish aristocrat—a downwardly mobile one at that, operating in the furthest ambit of the court—as well as a social climber whose ambitions invited the subsequent attacks made against him. But the contemporary record presents a much more complex situation. The portrait Jonson offers of Coryat staying at court “in his owne cloathes, and at his owne costs” (1:17) is much more accurate, for no evidence exists that Prince Henry ever gave Coryat a regular stipend or any other form of patronage.¹⁷⁵ Coryat’s anomalous position as a figure situated uneasily between coterie and print cultures is confirmed in a contemporary Latin poem attributed to John Hoskins, “Convivium philosophicum,” which notes that “Coriate liveth by his witts.”¹⁷⁶ This poem is significant because it offers the only contemporary account of the “Mermaid club,” a literary coterie that met at the Mermaid and Mitre taverns.¹⁷⁷ Although it names fourteen members of this group, including many who contributed prefatory verses to Crudities, the figure dominating the poem is Coryat, who is cast as coterie jester and “anvil” of its wit, or, less euphemistically, the social inferior forced to bear insults with equanimity. The poem attests to how Coryat occupies a celebrity status in the coterie, a star quality that threatens to disrupt its social intimacy. By injecting an undercurrent of individualism and aspiration, he is blamed more generally for introducing the codes of the market to this homosocial cultural space. As Hoskins puts it, Coryat “looseth nothinge that he getts / Nor playes the fool in vayne.”¹⁷⁸ Coryat confidently appropriates the theatricality of his position, performing the role of “Thomas Coryat” according to a new logic of exchange, and loses nothing in the process, at least at the level of celebrity. What enables Thomas Coryat to be “Thomas Coryat” is print culture, a commercial market for travel accounts that includes a popular related subgenre:

¹⁷⁴ These examples come from August Jessopp’s entry on Coryat in The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12 (259–61) and Brandon S. Centerwall, “ ‘Lo here’s a Man, worthy indeede to travell’: Donne’s Panegyric upon Coryats Crudities,” John Donne Journal 22 (2003): 78. But even if Coryat was “taken for a buffoon,” Barbour notes, he nonetheless “was no fool” (Before Orientalism, 117). ¹⁷⁵ Strachan, Life and Adventures, 13. ¹⁷⁶ Qtd. in Strachan, Life and Adventures, 143; the Latin original is included in Louise Brown Osborne, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 196–9. ¹⁷⁷ The poem describes a gathering at the Mitre Tavern on September 2, 1611 that included Christopher Brooke, John Donne, Lionel Cranfield, John Hoskins, Sir Henry Goodier, and Inigo Jones, along with Coryat (Strachan, Life and Adventures, 142). In subsequent decades, the poem acquired a documentary status through its retelling by the literary biographers Thomas Fuller, John Aubrey, and Anthony à Wood. For discussion of this literary coterie, see Michelle O’Callaghan, English Wits, 70–80 and “Tavern Societies, Inns of Court, and the Culture of Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century London,” in Adam Smyth, ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 46–51. ¹⁷⁸ Qtd. in Strachan, Life and Adventures, 143.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

90

   

the form of travel as publicity stunt undertaken by figures such as the comic actor Will Kemp and the waterman and popular pamphleteer John Taylor.¹⁷⁹ As with Kemp’s Morris dance from London to Norwich or Taylor’s journey from London to Queenborough in a boat made of hemp, the success of Coryat’s travel hinged on its marketability as a textual event. The journey did not convey news; it was news. This kind of travel did not do anything, and its utter uselessness was the source of its pleasure as media event and textual commodity. In the staging of such spectacular—and spectacularly stupid—travel stunts, what conferred value was the conspicuous expenditure of labor, the bodily travail endured (and selfinflicted) for no apparent reason at all.¹⁸⁰ The popular genre of celebrity stunt voyages offered a counter-tradition to the efforts of the English state to manage travel and thereby regulate the flow of news and information. In addition, through their embrace of the commercial power of print culture, these voyages also challenged the codes of the literary coterie, a social space whose characteristic terms of exclusivity and intimacy were contingent on a distance from market relations. As Michelle O’Callaghan has shown, these Jacobean tavern societies more accurately bridged public and private spheres, since their physical location was in private rooms within larger public spaces such as taverns or ordinaries.¹⁸¹ In his discussion of the emergence of the public sphere, Habermas similarly situates the “public sphere in the world of letters” in a diagrammatic space located between the “private realm” and the “sphere of public authority.”¹⁸² For Habermas, this liminal realm of letters was constituted through both literary clubs and the “press,” coterie poetry as well as the circulation of news and information. But just as the literary production of the coterie was predicated by its distance from the inherent stigma conferred by the marketplace of print, so too, as Habermas notes, the “traffic in news” relied upon the proviso that “the decisive element—publicness—was lacking.”¹⁸³ By contrast, Coryat’s “popularity,” like that of his fellow publicity travelers, depended on the publicness of his voyages. These examples reflect an emerging separation between literature and news, the two cultural practices that constitute ¹⁷⁹ For discussion of Kemp, see Max W. Thomas, “Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market,” PMLA 107 (1992): 511–23 and Daryl Palmer, “William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder and the Transmission of Performance Culture,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5 (1991): 33–47. On Taylor’s travels, see Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, 189–203, expanded as “Pamphlet Surplus: John Taylor and Subscription Publication,” in Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, eds., Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 90–102; Capp, The World of John Taylor, esp. 18–28, 58–9, 64–6; William Wooden, “The Peculiar Peregrinations of John Taylor the Water-Poet: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Travel Literature,” Prose Studies 6 (1983): 3–20. ¹⁸⁰ On travel publicity stunts, see Parr, Renaissance Mad Voyages. Comparing the travels of Coryat and Kemp, John Strangeways notes in his commendatory poem that Coryat has surpassed the labors of his predecessors (Crudities, 1:34). ¹⁸¹ O’Callaghan, “Tavern Societies,” 39. ¹⁸² Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30. ¹⁸³ Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

91

Habermas’s “world of letters.” Through the increasingly public status of the “press,” the textual circulation of news was no longer confined to coteries— including the informal networks of state intelligence—and entered the domain of an institutional framework, a “news trade.” The earliest examples of serialized newspapers in England derived, in fact, from the demand for information from the Continent, a market that began with interest in the French civil wars of the 1590s and accelerated over the course of the Dutch Revolt and Thirty Years’ War, leading in 1620 to the first news corantos published in England, texts which were modeled on the circulation of news in the Low Countries.¹⁸⁴ This period also overlaps with the initial publication of the earliest first-person travel narratives, a development that occurred just as news-sheets were beginning to take over a central domain of travel writing: the conveying of intelligence from the Continent. From this point forward, the circulation of news became more pervasive, more inclusive, and increasingly more public. It is no coincidence that reports from travelers largely disappeared from the State Papers by the end of the seventeenth century.¹⁸⁵ As news entered the public sphere, it also became the specialized field of private individuals, those who were not agents of the state. At the same time, the traffic in intelligence became the province of professionals, of diplomats and spies, and was restricted to the monopolistic domain of the state and its official agents. The political significance of an early modern information economy receded even further following the creation of the Royal Post in 1635.¹⁸⁶ As the state went postal, the intersubjective, epistolary channels through which news and intelligence circulated consequently lost their anomalous, liminal position—one that traversed public and private spheres—and the boundaries demarcating state service from private correspondence were ever more sharply drawn. When the members of the Mermaid Tavern coterie gave Coryat a mock passport before he left for India in 1612, this gesture offered a teasing reminder of the attenuated ¹⁸⁴ In fact, one-fourth of texts published from 1591–94 dealt with “news,” with 450 such texts published in 1590–1610 (Anthony Parr, intro., Ben Jonson, The Staple of News [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988], 23). On news texts from the Continent, see Paul J. Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001); Jayne E.E. Boys, London’s News Press and the Thirty Years’ War (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 98–160; Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 60–90; and, for a more overarching history, Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). ¹⁸⁵ Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller, 50. Howard similarly lists the rise of news journals as a factor contributing to the decline of educational travel, and its accompanying advice texts, over the course of the seventeenth century (English Travellers of the Renaissance, 190). ¹⁸⁶ Stewart and Wolfe, eds., Letterwriting in Renaissance England, 123. On the postal transmission of letters, see Mark Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014); Mark Brayshay et al., “Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: the Speed of the Royal Post in Early Modern England,” Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998): 265–88; Nikolaus Schobesberger et al., “European Postal Networks,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern England, 19–63.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

92

   

nature of the early modern state’s power over its extraterritorial subjects. If the state’s authority passed through individual agents and alternative networks of association—such as the semi-autonomous intelligence offices run by Elizabethan courtiers, for instance—then what precluded this authority from being delegated more broadly, and even arrogated by a literary coterie?¹⁸⁷ But, of course, the underlying joke points to the increasing monopoly the state held over the domain of travel: who but the state, after all, could issue passports? Whereas Habermas situates the cultural space of the public sphere as occupying a parallel and competing position in connection to state authority, he insists that it maintains an agonistic relation to the market.¹⁸⁸ As Alexandra Halasz remarks, however, “the central issue in the notion of a public sphere, either at its inception or in its transformation, is the question of the marketplace.”¹⁸⁹ The model of the public sphere depends on warding off the incursions of market relations, which one finds conjured in Habermas’s work as a spectral presence, threatening to gate crash the old boys’ club. One finds a similar set of assumptions informing some critical discussions of early modern travel, which is often presented as taking place in a commercial vacuum or representing purer varieties of travel that flourished before the market infiltrated this cultural practice, reduced travel to a standardized commodity, and ushered in the unwashed masses. The class bias and nostalgic elitism pervading this kind of coffee-table criticism on the Grand Tour is often surprisingly blatant. As a result, the complex social field of early modern travel is converted into, to cite Chloe Chard’s memorable phrasing, “the province of snobbish gentlemen-scholars and latter-day connoisseurs, deferentially chronicling the foibles of unremarkable aristocrats.”¹⁹⁰ Ironically, this belletristic critical framework is directly indebted to the early modern information economy that has been described in this chapter. The term “the Grand Tour” was itself first coined by an exiled Catholic priest named Richard Lassels. After having made his living as a tour guide for aristocratic travelers on the Continent, Lassels assembled his observations in The Voyage of Italy (1670), a text that retained a canonical status as one of the primary guides for European travel throughout the period.¹⁹¹ Long after Lassels had retired from traveling to become ¹⁸⁷ See Coryat, Thomas Coriate Traueller for the English Wits (1616) for his letter to the “High Seneschall of the right Worshipfull Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentleman” (38). ¹⁸⁸ Demonstrating Habermas’s ambivalence toward market relations, while his argument presents the emergence of a public sphere as an effect of the “traffic in news” resulting from international trade, one in which the circulation of news follows commodity flows and market principles, he elsewhere decries the process wherein “the news itself became a commodity” (Structural Transformation, 21). ¹⁸⁹ Halasz, Marketplace of Print, 45. ¹⁹⁰ Chard, Transports, 20. ¹⁹¹ On Lassels, see Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and “The Voyage of Italy” in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985). Howard sees Lassels’s text as the first guide-book in English (English Travellers of the Renaissance, 194), a point reinforced by Giles Barber in his survey of the genre (“The English-Language Guide Book to Europe Up To 1870,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Journeys Through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade [New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999], 97).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

       

93

Professor of Classics at the English seminary at Douai, founded by William Cardinal Allen a century earlier, his text continued to circulate, a seemingly innocuous guidebook passing along its information to subsequent generations of English travelers. Taken out of the context of its production and dissemination, its labor abstracted as information, Lassels’s text became as much an object of consumption as the networks of travel that his text outlined, named, and commodified as “the Grand Tour.”

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

2 The Mercenary State English Soldiers in the Dutch Revolt

2.1 Early Modern England’s Forgotten Wars In the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the English nation was in the midst of an extended period of demilitarization. This process was partly an effect of the debilitating expense of a series of large-scale military ventures in the 1540s: Henry VIII’s final, disastrous invasion of France (1544–46) and Protector Somerset’s incursion into Scotland, “the rough wooing,” to force a marriage alliance between Edward VI and Mary Stuart (1547–49). As Paul E.J. Hammer points out, the Elizabethan state was still paying the bills for these foreign misadventures years later. Forced to sell crown lands to finance the legacy of Henry’s war debts, Elizabeth’s revenues were only half the size of her father’s, a decline in income that made it even more difficult to surmount the resulting cycle of indebtedness.¹ Successive monarchs and their advisors were justifiably wary of replicating the military excesses of their immediate predecessors. England did not deploy troops abroad again until 1562–63, when Elizabeth sent a contingent to relieve Huguenot forces in France, and another decade elapsed before another force was sent, with an expedition to the Low Countries that began in 1572. The loss of Calais, England’s final Norman outpost on the Continent, which closely followed Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, encapsulates the cultural environment of English insularity and increasing distanciation from continental affiliations that characterized this period, as Jeffrey Knapp has shown.² Even though England’s absence from European wars was a short-lived phenomenon, it contributed to an abiding myth of the strategic pragmatism of the Elizabethan state. A traditional interpretation has emphasized the extent to ¹ Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5–6. The English state spent £3.5 million on wars from 1538–52, or £450,000 per year, at a time when state revenues amounted to only £200,000 per year. This war debt was not fully paid off until 1578, and was financed in part by selling off seized monastic properties (Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 [1988; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 62). By contrast, military expenditures over the period of England’s undeclared war against Spain, 1585–1603, totaled £5.3 million—a large sum, but only one-third the cost of Henry VIII’s wars (Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 240). ² See Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7 and passim. Agents Beyond the State:The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Mark Netzloff, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Netzloff. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857952.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

95

which Elizabeth and her counselors, led by Lord Burghley, wisely avoided costly military entanglements on the Continent, concentrating resources instead on defensive preparations and only committing troops in a limited capacity and as a last resort. “Elizabethan England,” J.R. Hale concludes, “was an unmilitaristic country where armies were raised with the greatest difficulty.”³ This kind of narrative, as Curtis Breight has noted, presents England as a reluctant military power that only went to war out of self-defense or necessity.⁴ Contrary to these assumptions, however, war was not demarcated from national life but rather an integral component of English state policy. Military interventions, as well as the expenditures they entailed, were a key impetus for the consolidation of centralized state authority. As Geoffrey Parker has argued, the logistical demands of raising and equipping early modern armies gave shape to the administrative capacities of the state.⁵ Extending this observation, Anthony Giddens remarks that preparations for war “provided the most potent energizing stimulus for the concentration of administrative resources and fiscal reorganization that characterized the rise of absolutism.”⁶ In contrast to the demilitarization of the mid-sixteenth century, English armies were a constant presence in European conflicts throughout the final thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign. The precedent set by the deployment of English troops to aid the Huguenots in France (1562–63), was followed by a series of expeditions in support of the Dutch Revolt against Spanish authority, beginning with the earliest contingents in 1572, a group that included George Gascoigne. It is often assumed that English intervention in the Low Countries was limited to the mission led by the Earl of Leicester (1585–86), which included his nephew Sir Philip Sidney among its officers, but English troops in fact remained in the region throughout the early modern period. A constant presence of 10,000 English soldiers was based in the Low Countries throughout 1585–1603, during England’s undeclared war with Spain, and English forces were even stationed there throughout the nominally peacetime reign of James I.⁷ England similarly maintained a military presence in France throughout the late Elizabethan period: between 1589 and 1594, as many as 20,000 English soldiers fought in support of Henri de Navarre under a series of English leaders (Sir John Norris, Lord Willoughby, and the Earl of Essex).⁸ In contrast to the military disengagement of the early Elizabethan period, in the final years of her reign England was fighting wars on multiple fronts, not only in France ³ J.R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), 487. ⁴ Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 2. ⁵ Parker, Military Revolution, 2. ⁶ Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 112. ⁷ John S. Nolan, “The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,” Journal of Military History 58 (1994): 397, 404. An additional 5000 troops remained in France throughout much of the period (Nolan, 408). ⁸ John X. Evans, intro., The Works of Sir Roger Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), ciii; Nolan, “Militarization”: 406.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

96

   

and the Low Countries but most crucially in Ireland, where the number of English troops skyrocketed to 20,000 during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603).⁹ As is evident from these figures, Elizabethan England maintained a nearly constant military presence on the Continent throughout the period, a fact that belies the abiding image of a defensive, insular English nation remaining aloof from the European bog of war. Nonetheless, historians and literary critics alike have continued to reinforce a perception that Elizabethan England lacked a formal, permanent military force. John S. Nolan notes a longstanding perception among historians that “studying the Elizabethan army is like studying the Swiss navy,”¹⁰ while Stephen Greenblatt makes a comment representative of literary scholars in assuming that the Elizabethan state was one “without a standing army, without a highly developed bureaucracy, without an extensive police force.”¹¹ A number of valuable recent critical studies have all contributed to countering this kind of argument, and have emphasized instead the extent to which Elizabethan England was a society in the midst of a thorough process of militarization.¹² Far from lacking an army, the population of England was incorporated in an ongoing military mobilization of unprecedented scale and duration. As many as 385,000 people, or 10 percent of early modern England’s population, were involved in military activities of some kind, including overseas voyages and domestic militias.¹³ England’s multiple wars demanded a constant stream of military labor. The large number of conscripts impressed for state service from 1585–1602—a number estimated at 117,525—testifies to the ways that warfare enabled the state to extend its authority over its subjects in increasingly direct and coercive ways.¹⁴

⁹ Nolan, “Militarization”: 397. Except for the period of Leicester’s expedition to the Low Countries, English military expenses in Ireland far exceeded the cost of forces on the Continent throughout Elizabeth’s reign (C.G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army [Oxford: Clarendon, 1966], 283–4; Evans, ed., Works of Sir Roger Williams, ci). ¹⁰ Nolan, “Militarization”: 391. ¹¹ Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 64. ¹² Breight, Surveillance; Nick De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998); Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001); Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002); Yuval Noah Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004); Simon Barker, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Patricia Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); David R. Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Rory Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Adam McKeown, English Mercuries: Soldier-Poets in the Age of Shakespeare (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009); Bertram, Bestial Oblivion. ¹³ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 248. ¹⁴ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 245.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

97

There are a number of reasons why the English presence in these continental wars of attrition has been largely overlooked.¹⁵ The most important cause derives from the covert and informal nature of English military involvement in these conflicts. It is not wholly accurate to describe these interventions as English, for English soldiers fighting on the Continent, even when nominally led by English commanders, functioned as mercenaries leased by the English state to other sovereign bodies. The English state formalized this arrangement in the Treaty of Nonsuch, signed with representatives of the Dutch States General in August 1585. The English agreed to send a contingent of more than 6000 troops; in exchange, England was granted an extraterritorial authority over the cautionary towns of Brielle (Brill) and Vlissingen (Flushing).¹⁶ As Hugh Dunthorne has shown, the rebel army of the Dutch States General was an English force as well, and throughout the period one-eighth to one-third of this nominally Dutch army was English.¹⁷ The fact that the groups employing English soldiers were often nonmonarchical institutions (the States General) or forces rebelling against the ruling state (Henri de Navarre as well as the Dutch) complicated the extent to which English soldiers, under foreign pay, remained loyal to the English state. In the final section of Chapter 3 I will return to the importance of the Dutch Revolt as a rebellion that succeeded and transformed rebels into a recognized sovereign authority. As I will discuss in this later section, whereas early modern theorizations of sovereignty were unable to account for these historical changes, the practices of extraterritorial service reveal the transformative political effects stemming from the agency allotted to individual subjects in the commercial economy of early modern war. The mercenary conditions of extraterritorial warfare potentially transformed English soldiers through their tenure in rebel armies, and mercenary service offered a point of reference that could be used to examine the terms and conditions of the bonds linking subjects to the English state. England’s military intervention in the Low Countries from 1572 onwards represented the Elizabethan state’s first ongoing deployment of forces abroad. As the English state entered the mercenary economy of European warfare, it ¹⁵ On the Dutch influence on English culture, see Marjorie Rubright’s Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Patricia Parker surveys the global contexts of Brabant (the Spanish Netherlands) in Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 210–72. Lisa Jardine examines late seventeenth and eighteenth-century contexts in Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). ¹⁶ R.B. Wernham, Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485–1588 (New York: Norton, 1972), 371. ¹⁷ Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67–9. These numbers peaked in 1586, when 10,600 English and Welsh and 2000 Scots comprised 32.3 percent of the States General’s army of 39,000 soldiers (Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 67). There was a smaller yet steady number of British recruits in the Spanish Army of Flanders, from 1722 in 1588 (or 2.7 percent of the force) to a peak of 6500 (7.5 percent of the total) in 1636 (Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 69).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

98

   

asserted its monopoly over the agency and labor mobility of its subjects. Even as the Treaty of Nonsuch formalized the economic terms of Anglo-Dutch diplomacy, essentially trading English troops for an extraterritorial foothold with the cautionary towns, the English state needed to extend its authority over English military labor in the Low Countries. In October 1575, English subjects were barred—for the first time—from serving foreign governments, and a statute passed the following month specifically prohibited “engaging in the service in the Low Countries, or of any other foreign prince or state, as mariners or soldiers.”¹⁸ But this ruling had little effect on curtailing the ability of English soldiers to sell their labor power abroad. Three decades later, James I’s first public statement on mercenary service effectively conceded defeat on this issue, and acknowledged the state’s ultimate inability to control the labor mobility of its subjects abroad. Rather than suppressing this economy, James simply attempted to regulate it. His 1606 proclamation limited its reach to stipulating that Englishmen enlisted in foreign armies should take the Oath of Allegiance to King James.¹⁹ In the context of continental warfare, ideology and national origin were subordinated to the mercenary logic of the transnational military economy.²⁰ Moreover, due to the constantly changing positions of the English state, policies which were often not openly stated, “neither states nor people could be certain of which practices were backed by state authority and which were not,” as Janice E. Thomson has noted.²¹ This chapter is entitled “the mercenary state” in order to emphasize the central role of an extraterritorial military economy in the administration of the English state. What we find throughout the Elizabethan period is a textual effort to impose a distinction between English culture and the mercenary wars happening overseas, a context that is represented as solely involving mercenary subjects fighting dubious causes for materialist motives without any official state sanction. As reflected in the etymology of “mercenary,” the term only progressively carries with it a negative association, of practices and subjects exempt from the law of nations.²² In the early modern period, it is a descriptive term for the commercial conditions of military service that were the norm rather than the exception for

¹⁸ J.R. Hale, intro., Certain Discourses Military by Sir John Smythe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), xviii. For discussion of this topic in a wider geopolitical context, see Nabil Matar, “English Renaissance Soldiers in the Armies of Islam,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 21 (1995): 81–94. ¹⁹ For discussion, see Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 52. ²⁰ In the Thirty Years’ War, prisoners of war regularly joined the opposing army, demonstrating how the demand for experienced veterans trumped political and religious ideology (Parker, Military Revolution, 52). ²¹ Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 44. ²² “Mercenary,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2001).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

99

extraterritorial violence. David Parrott has therefore emphasized “the centrality of mercenaries both in early modern armies and in debate about the nature of war.”²³ In focusing on the writings of military agents themselves, this chapter looks at the ways that their positions as laboring military subjects and writers entering a public sphere of print were mutually constitutive, as they drew on their expertise and the contractual terms of mercenary service to reflect on and negotiate their own relation to the state. The former half of this chapter will move chronologically through textual responses to English participation in the mercenary economy of extraterritorial war. These initial two sections move beyond the territorial state, focusing on English involvement in the Dutch Revolt, a context that is especially pertinent due to the association of Dutch rebels with an emergent culture of capitalism as well as anti-monarchical and anti-imperial political ideas. George Gascoigne’s literary production stemming from his period in the Low Countries (1572–73 and 1576) shows the interconnections of literary writing and military service. The expertise of extraterritorial agents is a central concern of the texts discussed in the following section, military treatises written by former soldiers in the period of formalized English involvement in the Dutch Revolt after the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585 and Leicester’s period of service as Governor General of English forces (1585–87). The final two sections of the chapter return to England and examine the effects of English military interventions on definitions of domestic culture in the 1590s. In one of the most poignant examples, the domestic entertainment staged for Queen Elizabeth at the home of the Norris family (1592) reflects on the extent to which foreign service transforms the various models of the domestic, from household and family to region and nation. The concluding section focuses on the crucial year of 1596, when the mercenary conditions of foreign war threatened to undermine the separation of foreign war from domestic culture, with resistance to military conscription registering itself in print as well as through popular protest.

2.2 George Gascoigne, Literary Mercenary As reflected in the Latin tag used as his motto, George Gascoigne (Figure 4) possessed a dual career as soldier and poet. As a literary writer, the list of Gascoigne’s innovations span an impressive range of accomplishments: the first English treatise on poetics, the first translation of Italian prose comedy, the first translation of Greek tragedy, the first nondramatic use of blank verse, the first English short story, the first sonnet sequence in English, and, with The Spoyle of ²³ David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 29.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

100

   

Figure 4 Portrait of George Gascoigne, from The Steele Glass, with The Complainte of Phylomene (London, 1576). Reproduced by permission of the Newberry Library.

Antwerpe (discussed later in this section), the first example of a journalistic reporting of a historical event.²⁴ Gascoigne is also a central figure in the history of authorship, and is arguably the first professional writer in England. The model Gascoigne uses to describe the unprecedented position of the professional writer is that of the mercenary: like a soldier of fortune, his pursuit of elusive patronage sends him from one paymaster to the next, while his movement into the marketplace of print places his literary output in a decidedly commercial context. For his detractors, the domains of his literary production and military service were not only intertwined but equally suspect, as reflected in the anonymous letter sent to the Privy Council just prior to his departure for the Continent that described

²⁴ C.T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 284.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

101

Gascoigne as “a notorious Ruffianne and especiallie noted to be bothe a spie; [and] an Atheist and godlesse personne.”²⁵ Gascoigne casts his military career in a parallel and equivalent position to his literary production: as much for Mars as Mercury, as his motto emphasizes. When critiquing soldiers in his blank verse poem The Steele Glas (1576), he had similarly cast himself “of that profession.”²⁶ It is important to recognize, however, that Gascoigne’s history of military service took place solely in the anomalous extraterritorial context of English involvement in the Dutch Revolt, and that this period of service was not incidental but rather integral to the course of his poetic career. During the final five years of his life, the most productive and successful stage of his literary output, Gascoigne was in the Low Countries for more than half of this period on three separate missions as a soldier and intelligencer: from July to November 1572, from March 1573 to October 1574, and from September to November 1576. He was part of English efforts in the region from the start, arriving initially with Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition in July 1572 (which was only the second group following a contingent that arrived the previous month). Over the course of his second tour in 1573–74, Gascoigne left English forces, due to a conflict with his commanding officer, and entered the service of William of Orange. Finally, as will be discussed later in this section, he returned to the region as an intelligence agent from September to November 1576, where he witnessed the Sack of Antwerp by the mutinying mercenary soldiers of the Spanish Army of Flanders. Gascoigne’s first major publication, the miscellany A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), was printed during his second period of service in the Low Countries. As Wendy Wall has shown, Gascoigne concealed his own authorship and presented the work as a collaborative product of a literary coterie, the “devises of sundrie Gentlemen,” which had illicitly entered print.²⁷ With the publication of an expanded version, The Posies (1575), Gascoigne used the publicity generated by the initial volume as a means for declaring his own authorship. The title-page attributed the works to “George Gascoigne Esquire” and emphasized the authoritative status of the texts, “Corrected, perfected, and augmented by the Authour.”²⁸ Gascoigne prefaced the volume with letters to “reverende Divines,” whom he claimed had objected to his work (359–63), as well as a letter to young male readers in which he delineated the text’s thematic division into sections of flowers, herbs, and weeds (364–69).

²⁵ SP 12/86/235. ²⁶ George Gascoigne, The Steele Glas, in The Glasse of Governement . . . and other poems and prose works, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 155. ²⁷ Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 245. ²⁸ Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575), title-page.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

102

   

Rather than seeing Gascoigne’s history of extraterritorial service as anomalous to his literary career, this context was integral to the writing of his texts, the structure of his collection(s), and their subsequent publication history. His absence during the initial text’s printing became his pretext for offering an expanded and attributed revision. As he declares in his preface, he was “in Hollande in service with the vertuous Prince of Orenge” [sic] (359) and innocent of their wider circulation and scandalous reception. The writing of several of his works derives from his service as well. His best-known poem, the autobiographical “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” in which he famously defines himself in terms of his previous thwarted career paths, was itself composed in the winter following his return from the first campaign in the Low Countries (1572–73); significantly, it is the failure of his most recent occupation, military service, which leads him to pursue a final shot through a literary career. Even though the poem presents a narrative of literary production superseding the precariousness of service overseas, he was back in the Low Countries again by March 1573. Gascoigne’s concurrent history of extraterritorial service is a central factor in the publication history of his texts. One detail in particular helps to offset the tendency to bracket off his service overseas as incidental to the course of his literary career. One of the final texts included in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres is his narrative of his return voyage to the Low Countries in March 1573 for his second period of service. In the 1573 edition, this text is situated in a precise and recent context, “Gascoignes last voyage into Holland in Marche.”²⁹ Even though the printing of the text took place while Gascoigne was out of England, he was sure to send this poetic report of recent events back to London to be included in his collection. C.T. Prouty argues that the narrative was sent to London within a week or two of Gascoigne’s arrival in the Low Countries, and that it was published as part of the collection within the month.³⁰ In this sense, his text trades on its currency as a report of recent events and serves as an important precedent for the published news-sheets that circulated news from the Continent beginning in the 1590s. Gascoigne’s extraordinary efforts to have this particular text included in his collection reflects the extent to which he intends for it to represent his professional service as well as his literary output, emphasizing that in his dual career he is indeed as much for Mars as Mercury. The degree of self-promotion involved with the publication of both collections is therefore as much a program of promoting his military service. His reference to Orange, in this regard, draws attention to his personal connections in the Low Countries, advertising his suitability for a future assignment in the region. This recognition explains why he ends his satirical poem, The fruites of Warre, written during his second tour of service and included

²⁹ Gascoigne, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573), A.i.v. ³⁰ C.T. Prouty, “Gascoigne in the Low Countries and the Publication of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres,” The Review of English Studies 12 (1936): 145.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

103

in The Posies, with an offer of continued service, and anticipates a future career path in which he will renounce literature in favor of state service: “If drummes once sounde a lustie martch in deede, / Then farewell bookes, for he will trudge with speede” (439). In positioning himself in relation to English state service on the Continent, Gascoigne works within the generic templates discussed in the previous chapter: the travel advice letter (“Gascoignes councell given to master Bartholomew Withipoll a litle before his latter journey to Geane [Genoa]. 1572”) and the firstperson travel narrative (“Gascoignes voyage into Hollande, An. 1572”). The poem to Withipoll is an irreverent sendup of the advice tradition: mocking the “grave advise” (l. 13) typical of the genre, it positions itself not in terms of paternal counsel but in the homosocial banter of the literary coterie, a “friendly touch” (l. 7) reflected in its irreverent and digressive structure (“What was I saying?” [l. 31]). The occasional context of the poem reflects the economic terms of travel: Withipoll is traveling to claim part of his inheritance, which had been invested with Genoan bankers.³¹ What enables his travels, moreover, are the bills of credit he carries with him: associating his person with his purse (“thy pursse is lyned wyth paper” [l.64]), these economic mechanisms also make Withipoll vulnerable to the attacks of Catholics on the Continent, and Gascoigne playfully ranges over scenarios of poisoning worthy of Jacobean revenge tragedy. As with Fynes Moryson, English identity is defined by its opposition to the European environment that travelers must navigate, which also entails a concerted differentiation of their own fashionable or economic travel from the political exile of English Catholics (“flee from them, whiche fled with every wynde / From native soyle, to forraine coastes by stealth” [ll. 39–40]). Offsetting these dangers, Gascoigne ends with a promise to meet Withipoll in August at Spa, the prototypical resort near Liège (ll. 150–51). Gascoigne’s poem to Withipoll dates from early 1572, just prior to English intervention in the Low Countries, and the composition of his subsequent poems reflects a shift from the context of travel discussed in the previous chapter to that of military service. A transitional text is his account of his “voyage into Hollande,” detailing his return trip to Brielle for his second tour in March 1573. The treacherous coastline near Brielle is cast as terra incognita: the English Master of the ship even acknowledges his ignorance of this nearby port, where English merchants rarely “bend their bowe / To shoote at” (ll. 104–05), preferring more distant and profitable locations, something reflected in the Master’s own history of service throughout other regions, from Denmark to Greece (ll. 101–02). Brielle is also exempted from trade routes because of its history as a focal point for piracy: the privateers among Dutch rebel forces, the watergeuzen, used the region as the

³¹ G.W. Pigman III, ed., A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 652n.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

104

   

base for their activities, especially after Elizabeth had barred them from English ports.³² As Gascoigne lands there, it was the sole territory controlled by Dutch rebels, and therefore represented a kind of pirate state. Emphasizing his expertise and ability to navigate his new environment—lacing his poem with Dutch phrases, for instance—he is able to redeem himself from his own prodigal reputation (as “heddy youth” traveling “without a guide” [l. 16]) by distinction from the mercenary conditions at Brielle, a site he populates with dangerous, unreliable, and incompetent characters: the treacherous Dutch pilot, who absconds with their supplies (ll. 266–69); the Governor, too drunk to be roused from sleep to help them (l. 276); the local nuns, who have adapted to the military economy of occupying rebel forces by engaging in a side-business of sex work (ll. 326–37). Anticipating the fuller critique offered in The fruites of Warre, Gascoigne casts English intervention as a futile and unreciprocated offer of cross-cultural friendship, “For whom we came their state for to defende” (l. 246). But his own return to duty reflects that he is inextricably tied to this mercenary economy of warfare, and that he is using this service for self-interest and self-promotion, as reflected in the fact that he sends back the poem for its lastminute insertion into his collection. Addressing the poem to his patron Lord Grey of Wilton, he promises further intelligence on his return to England, accounts which he will additionally support “In Cartes, in Mappes, and eke in Modells made” (ll. 355–56), an offer that anticipates his later intelligence report on the Sack of Antwerp three years later. The most extended literary product from his period of service is the long narrative poem, The fruites of Warre. In the title-page to the work, Gascoigne emphasizes the occasional nature of its composition, “written by peecemeale at sundrye tymes, as the Aucthour had vacaunt leysures from service, being begon at Delfe in Holland” (398). As he adds in his prefatory letter to Wilton, the text was “written by stelth at such times as we Loytered from service” (399). Whereas much of Gascoigne’s work innovates through its importation of continental forms, from the sonnet to Italian comedy, this poem is one of a number of his works originating from the location of his military and state service in the Low Countries.³³ Another text, his play The Glasse of Government (1575), is not only set in Antwerp, the site of his later intelligence work, but also derives from Dutch models, and is the earliest example of a prodigal son play in English, one

³² Charles Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (London: Macmillan, 1970), 26–7. ³³ The title-page of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres divides Gascoigne’s works into two types: the foreign, those gathered from “outlandish” gardens of foreign models, and the domestic, those invented from “our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande” (1), without acknowledging the extent to which his original works (i.e., which are not translations) themselves derive from his experience of foreign travel and service.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

105

appropriately located in the commercial hub that often served as a cautionary tale of the effects of wealth for English audiences.³⁴ In The fruites of Warre, as he narrates the history of his Dutch service from the position of his period of residence at Delft, Gascoigne represents an experience for which there were no generic templates or literary precedents.³⁵ Although his poem bears a marginal position in relation to the collection The Posies as a whole, coming at the very end of the first section, “Flowers,” in many ways it epitomizes the formal innovations that Gascoigne had designed. The Flowers, as he notes in his preface, are characterized by “some rare invention and Methode before not commonly used” (367). The form of Gascoigne’s poem marks how the conditions of European warfare had been transformed during the period coinciding with England’s mid-century military demobilization. Gascoigne and other English soldier-poets were confronted with the startling features of modern warfare, the effects of which many historians have termed as an early modern “military revolution.”³⁶ The lack of literary precedents for representing these new conditions leads Gascoigne to struggle to locate ways for describing his war experience. Previous poets, he realizes, “faine to farre” (stanza 8, 401).³⁷ However, in his effort to present a poem grounded in the authenticity of an authorial and experiential self, his resulting narrative lacks a cohesive “plot.” Experience, in his case, is overrated, and fails to provide a coherent framework for organizing his poem. Like Coryat’s mode of travel writing, he is overcome with the details of his experience and unable to extract from it any general meaning that could structure his narrative. Yet it is precisely through the undirected, episodic form of his narrative that he is able to represent the comparable aimlessness of English intervention in the Low Countries. Gascoigne opens the autobiographical latter half of his poem by declaring, “For I have seene full many a Flushyng fraye” (stanza 95, 417). What follows, however, is a series of skirmishes that are as undistinguished as indistinguishable from each other. As a result, Gascoigne builds inconclusiveness into the structure of his poem, casting his own process of writing as one of indirection: “So shall you see my Muse by wandering” (stanza 34, 405). This digressiveness serves as a way to

³⁴ For discussion, see Richard Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 50. ³⁵ In “Gascoignes Epitaph uppon capitaine Bourcher late slayne in the warres in Zelande,” he draws on the elegy tradition in commemorating a fallen colleague from his first tour of service the previous year, noting that “no man writes one word to painte his praise” (l. 9) (Pigman, ed., A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 300). ³⁶ For a helpful overview of the critical debates surrounding an early modern “military revolution,” see David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 6–42. ³⁷ Gascoigne, The fruites of Warre, written uppon this Theame, Dulce Bellum inexpertis, in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. Pigman. All references will be cited in-text. For an earlier edition of the poem and commentary, also see The Posies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 1:139–84.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

106

   

mark his own mercenary status in the Low Countries. His initial period of service, under Sir Humphrey Gilbert, consisted of a series of inconsequential skirmishes over the period from March to November 1572, instances that seemed to lack any narrative cohesion: at one point, about to enter Vlissingen, the town bars its gates, forcing the English to remain waiting outside in full armor.³⁸ These military encounters are defined more by comic ruse than open conflict: their attempt to enter Sluis is prevented by the town’s governor, who forces them once again to wait outside the gates until Spanish reinforcements arrive.³⁹ The English soon learn to play the game themselves: duping the Spanish defenders of Aardenburg into thinking that they are a larger force, they loot the supplies that the garrison had left behind them.⁴⁰ This first expedition comes to an abrupt end following a surprise attack from Spanish forces, after which the English troops disperse and Gascoigne returns to England for the winter.⁴¹ Gascoigne’s second tour in the Low Countries began the following spring, and he initially served under an English commander, Sir Thomas Morgan, until he left the English regiment, by his own account, in protest of the looting committed by English forces and their violation of “martiall lawe” (stanza 110, 420). In doing so, he essentially became a mercenary military agent himself, “a hyred man” (stanza 113, 420) who pledged to “learne to live as private Souldiours do” (stanza 111, 420). It is during this period when Gascoigne resided in Delft and began to draft his poem: C.T. Prouty describes his status at this time as that of “a lone adventurer in the Low Countries,” an appropriately mercenary position for the drafting of his poem on mercenary service. Gascoigne’s social and geographic errancy—“I romed have about, / . . . . / As . . . chance did seeme to call” (stanza 99, 417)—is finally offset as he entered the service of William of Orange. As Laurie Shannon has argued, Gascoigne’s loyalty to Orange forges a “supranational order of martial masculinity,” showing how Gascoigne’s affiliation with Mars is a “practice of friendship rather than war.”⁴² However, this transcultural mode of homosociality possesses a mercenary underpinning: even before he entered Orange’s service in an official capacity, it is the Dutch who served as the English soldiers’ paymasters throughout the period. During his service under the nominal leadership of Morgan, the Dutch failed to pay their hired English troops, and Orange ultimately dismissed Morgan and other leaders in order to employ cheaper soldiers.⁴³ Gascoigne himself delayed his own departure from Morgan while he waited to collect back wages,⁴⁴ and his idealization of the aristocratic Orange is not incidentally linked to his generous remuneration from his patron, with back pay along with an additional 300 guilders, terms which he proudly advertises in his poem ³⁸ Prouty, George Gascoigne, 52. ³⁹ Pigman, intro., A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, xxx. ⁴⁰ Prouty, George Gascoigne, 53. ⁴¹ Pigman, intro., A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, xxxi. ⁴² Laurie Shannon, “Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s ‘Friendly Verse,’ ” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2004): 474, 476. ⁴³ Prouty, George Gascoigne, 68. ⁴⁴ Prouty, George Gascoigne, 73.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

107

(stanza 141, 425). The final period of his service marked the ascendency of a mercenary economy of war through a complete breakdown in the homosocial codes of friendship and honor that Gascoigne had associated with Orange. Gascoigne’s service under Orange came to an abrupt close after he is suspected of being a mercenary and colluding with the Spanish in negotiating an end to a siege at Valkenburg.⁴⁵ Distrusted by both Dutch and Spanish (stanza 185, 433–34), he remained a prisoner of Spanish forces for several months, until he was returned to England as part of an Anglo-Spanish compromise that repatriated English soldiers in exchange for allowing Spanish ships to resupply in English ports.⁴⁶ This complicated, prodigal narrative of extraterritorial service is only fitting given the circuitous trajectory of Gascoigne’s literary career: as R.W. Maslen comments, “He seems, in fact, to have lived his life as a literary mercenary.”⁴⁷ The narrative drift of his poem enables Gascoigne to wander across the threshold of the licit and thereby intimate a critique that could not be openly stated. The only narrative thread linking these fragmentary, episodic moments is the profit motive that underlies each encounter. A battle at Ramekins, for instance, is settled when English troops pay off the Spanish garrison (stanza 102, 418) while the focal point of the naval confrontation at Hoek is the looting of seized Spanish ships (stanza 107, 419). Gascoigne’s lack of fortune is reflected in his literal lack of fortunes and inability to profit from an economy of military expropriation: he complains of not receiving his share from the spoils at Hoek, which makes him realize the futility of “haplesse warres” (stanza 108, 419) that seem “ledde by chaunce” (stanza 174, 431). Lacking literary templates that could describe the mercenary economy of warfare, his poem reveals how this context undermines other distinctions as well: of civilian and military life, war and commerce, legal and illicit economies, and territorial and maritime spheres. It is appropriate that Gascoigne’s mercenary service blurs into piracy, since the Dutch Revolt itself was made possible through the successes of piracy: the first rebel-held territory was Brielle and Vlissingen, seized in 1572 by the Sea Beggars (watergeuzen), privateers commissioned with letters of marque from William of Orange.⁴⁸ For a brief period, Gascoigne himself fought alongside the geuzen— “There [in Flushing] once agayne I served upon seas” (stanza 134, 424)—and it is in this piratical context that he first entered the service of his “chieftayne,” Orange (stanza 134, 424). In the following decade, during the next crucial period of English intervention in the Dutch Revolt, the piratical economy linked land⁴⁵ Pigman, intro., A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, xxxiv–xxxviii. ⁴⁶ Prouty, George Gascoigne, 74, 77. ⁴⁷ R.W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 128. ⁴⁸ Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1550–1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: Routledge, 2000), 154.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

108

   

based mercenary military service with a global history of anti-Habsburg rebellion. The Treaty of Nonsuch (1585), which transferred authority over the cautionary towns to England, also coordinated Anglo-Dutch privateering ventures: Sir Francis Drake’s raids on the Spanish coast and colonial settlements in the Americas served to divert Spanish forces away from the Low Countries during this crucial period of 1585–86.⁴⁹ The direct interconnections between these contexts is shown most memorably with Sir Philip Sidney’s overlapping involvement in both: famously, he had joined Drake’s mission and even left harbor, only to be taken from the ship when his commission to join Leicester’s expedition to the Low Countries unexpectedly arrived.⁵⁰ The final section of the next chapter will further analyze the juxtaposition of political rebellion in Old and New Worlds, as the Dutch Revolt intersects with concurrent events in the Americas, including Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons and Huguenot privateers in Panama, which takes place in 1572, the same year that the Dutch geuzen turned the Dutch Revolt into an open conflict and prompted England’s initial intervention in the Low Countries. Gascoigne makes the transition to an autobiographical account of his service midway through his poem (stanza 95, 417). In the first half of the text, he outlines a more conventional critique of the motives behind war, and, working within the medieval tradition of estates satire, offers a general and homiletic indictment of the motives behind war, particularly an outdated aristocratic ethos of honor (or “Haughty hart” [stanza 39, 406]) as well as a mercantile commercialization of war (“Greedie minde” [stanza 60, 410]). Even in this initial section, he distances himself from the implications of his critique by casting his observations as incidental: “But whether now? my wittes are went awrie” (stanza 32, 405). He further directs his comments away from aristocratic and mercantile targets by indicting himself as a representative of a third group, the “miser,” associated not with miserliness and hoarding but with the miseries of service, a status deriving from exile—“learnde the leape out of their native lande” (stanza 82, 414)—that also makes possible a dangerous inquiry into affairs of state: “Wryters and rimers for to turne their penne / In humble style unto the loftie states” (stanza 86, 415). Similar to his own experience at the conclusion of his service, in the poem it is Gascoigne the mercenary who plays the role of scapegoat. Gascoigne’s inability to express a more direct critique is additionally reflected in his closing section, the Peroratio, in which he addresses Elizabeth and leading nobles such as the Earl of Leicester along with his patron Lord Wilton (stanzas 193–207, 435–37). Aware of the limits of what can be said—“Go little Booke, God graunt thou none offende” (438)—this section exculpates English leaders from the mercenary context of continental warfare. Like the military writers of the ⁴⁹ Wernham, Before the Armada, 371. ⁵⁰ Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Pimlico, 2001), 273–4.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

109

following two decades discussed in the next section of this chapter, Gascoigne is aware of the need to couch his critique in more general terms and avoid reference to any individuals in power. Significantly, the rhetorical term he uses to describe this section is peroratio. As noted in the earlier discussion of Fynes Moryson’s practices of dissimulation, Petrus Ramus had associated this device with a “method of prudence” to be availed of when “there is not always place for what is best,” a rhetorical mode of dissimulation that adapts itself “according to the condition of persons, things, times, and places.”⁵¹ Contemporary readers were similarly aware of the implications of Gascoigne’s critique. In a fascinating example of a contemporary response, Gabriel Harvey annotated his copy of Gascoigne’s poem with the following marginal comments: “A sory resolution for owre Netherland Soldiours. A good pragmatique Discourse; but unseasonable, & most unfitt for a Captain, or professed Martiallist.”⁵² Although Harvey reads other texts such as Livy for their pragmatic use in informing political judgment, he critiques Gascoigne, despite their friendship, for violating military codes of hierarchy and deference.⁵³ The extent to which Gascoigne is out of order with his “unseasonable” text is reflected in formal terms as his final section violates the rules of classical rhetoric: the peroration should sum up the argument and castigate one’s opponents while eliciting pathos for oneself. Instead, Gascoigne elicits pathos for the leadership of the English state and lays blame solely on himself, not only for his temerity in attempting to “speake so plaine” (438) but also in excluding from representation “many a tale, of blouds that were not base,” such as of Leicester and his “noble deedes” (438). While casting his entire poem as a digression and violation of decorum, his comments nonetheless expose the underlying irrelevance of antiquated aristocratic codes of martial conduct as well as the pretense of any disinterested role for the state. One reason for Gascoigne’s inability to represent the history of English intervention in the Low Countries stemmed from the inherent indirection of state policy itself. English troops actually had no objectives to achieve, and were stationed in the region solely to ensure that none of the participants in the conflict—Dutch, French, or Spanish—made any substantial gains that upset the balance of power. Their task was to make sure the war continued, and they functioned to preserve a state of disorder in which English interests would not be harmed. The mercenary status of English troops was therefore a result of the

⁵¹ Petrus Ramus, Dialectici comm. tres (1546), qtd. in Ong, Ramus, 246–47. Ramus’s method of prudence was also intended “to persuade an audience which resists” (Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 70). ⁵² G.C. Moore Smith, ed., Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 165. ⁵³ For the classic analysis of Harvey’s action-oriented program of humanist reading, see Jardine and Grafton, “Studied for Action.”

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

110

   

directives of the English state itself, which leased out troops to foreign powers so as to be able to maintain a pretense of neutrality and minimize the expense of war. Gascoigne’s final period of service, from September to November 1576, is the most shadowy, an aspect that was a necessary result of his role as a statesponsored intelligence agent. With this final mission, he made the transition from mercenary service to the information economy of intelligence gathering discussed in the previous chapter. What qualified him for this role was not only what he knew, from his earlier service in the region, but also who he knew. His network of friends and acquaintances, figures mentioned and addressed in his literary writings, were already well situated in this context. His companions on his return trip to Brielle in 1573, described in his “voyage into Hollande,” were Rowland Yorke and William Herle. Yorke served alongside Gascoigne under Gilbert and Morgan, but was subsequently imprisoned by the Dutch for conspiring with Spanish authorities. After escaping Dutch custody, and serving in the Spanish army during the siege of Antwerp (1584–85), he was allowed to return to England and join Leicester’s expedition in 1585–86. Yorke changed sides once again, and infamously handed over control of his garrison at Zutphen to Spanish forces in 1587.⁵⁴ Whereas Yorke was a prime example of the flexible loyalties of military agents, particularly English Catholics, Herle was embedded more directly in intelligence networks. As Robyn Adams has shown, Herle served as Burghley’s chief intelligence agent in the Low Countries throughout the period, and is therefore a key link connecting Gascoigne to networks of state intelligence gathering.⁵⁵ Gascoigne’s final period of service has generated the most critical attention because of the important literary product of this mission: his account of the Sack of Antwerp, The Spoyle of Antwerpe, which he brought back with him to England and was published under state authorization within a month of events. Although the text has finally received long-overdue attention in recent criticism, these discussions have tended to be brief, relegating the text to a position as a contextual backdrop for either Gascoigne’s overarching literary career or the subsequent play based on the Sack, A Larum for London (ca. 1599).⁵⁶ In her recent biography of Gascoigne, Gillian Austen has provided a full account of his final period of service: contacted on short notice, he was directed to proceed to Paris in September. Probably following unwritten instructions relating to his true mission, one not even shared with the English ambassador to France, Gascoigne arrived in Antwerp ⁵⁴ On Yorke, see Sarah Clayton’s entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, volume 60 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 855–6 and Simon Adams, “A Patriot for Whom?: Stanley, York and Elizabeth’s Catholics,” History Today 37, 7 (July 1987): 46–50. ⁵⁵ Robyn Adams, “A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence,” in Adams and Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, 63–81. ⁵⁶ Recent discussions of The Spoyle of Antwerpe include Cahill, Unto the Breach, 169–70 and 177–8; McKeown, English Mercuries, 83–9; Linda Bradley Salamon, “Gascoigne’s Globe: The Spoyle of Antwerpe and the Black Legend of Spain,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14, 1 (May 2008): 37 paragraphs; Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 235–9.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

111

in late October, just prior to the attack that began on November 3. He left the city on November 12, while events were still unfolding, and reported to Walsingham on November 21. Five days later, on November 26, The Spoyle of Antwerpe was published, only three weeks after the events took place.⁵⁷ Gascoigne’s text is further linked to the culture of intelligence gathering in terms of its process of composition: as Raymond Fagel has recently shown, Gascoigne’s account shares roughly half of its content with a Dutch pamphlet that was later translated into French.⁵⁸ When Gascoigne arrived in Paris, he communicated directly with Burghley, offering news from the French court while also informing him of his intention to travel to Flanders in order to better appraise the situation there.⁵⁹ Gascoigne’s subsequent period in Antwerp is therefore evidence of the flexibility of his instructions, which gave him the agency to respond to changing reports and move closer to the source of events. Antwerp was one of few locales where the English state lacked a resident intelligence agent, and so Burghley would have been receptive to allowing Gascoigne this degree of agency in order to gather information directly from the city.⁶⁰ Gascoigne’s mobility could also stem from secret instructions that were not openly stated in his correspondence. When Gascoigne returned from Antwerp, he was debriefed by Walsingham—not Burghley—hinting that his exchanges with Burghley might relate to his official, openly stated mission while he had another channel of communication and set of instructions from Walsingham, a scenario that illustrates the overlapping but sometimes competing networks of intelligence gathering discussed in the previous chapter. Gascoigne’s description of the Sack of Antwerp by its Spanish garrison in 1576 is important as a historical document, an account of the massacre of at least 8000 civilians that has been described as “one of the worst atrocities of the sixteenth century.”⁶¹ The Sack of Antwerp was a turning point in the history of the Dutch Revolt: outrage at this event led the formerly loyalist provinces of the Spanish ⁵⁷ Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 180–3. ⁵⁸ Raymond Fagel, “Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe as an Anglo-Dutch Text,” Dutch Crossing 41 (2017): 101–10. The Dutch pamphlet is Warachtige beschrijvinghe van het innemen van Antwerpen (The true description of the capture of Antwerp); the French version, Brieve et veritable histoire de la prinse d’Anvers, et du cruel meurtre, embrasement de feu, et autres actes inhumains des Espagnols: le 4. iour de Novembre, 1576, traduite de Flamend en François (1576). ⁵⁹ Gascoigne to Burghley, from Paris, September 15, 1576 (SP 70/139/169; CSP, Domestic, 1575–77, 376). Gascoigne informed Burghley in a subsequent letter of October 7 that he intended to travel to the Low Countries the following day (SP 70/140/23). ⁶⁰ Significantly, neither Walsingham (ca. 1580–90) nor Burghley’s son and successor, Sir Robert Cecil (in 1598) had a resident intelligence agent based in Antwerp, despite both having extensive networks of agents throughout Europe: see the lists of agents provided in Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 323–30. Writing in 1592, in the period following Walsingham’s death, Robert Beale advised to get intelligence on Antwerp via weekly posts from merchants (“A Treatise on the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to her Ma [jes]tie,” in Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 1:437). ⁶¹ Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 178. Gascoigne gives a much higher estimate of civilian deaths—17,000—and notes that at least 5000 were killed during the process of looting and kidnapping that followed the attack (The Spoyle of Antwerpe, 597).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

112

   

Netherlands to align with the Northern provinces, delegitimizing Spanish authority and turning the Dutch Revolt into a national fight for political independence.⁶² The status of Antwerp was of vital national interest for England, and although English state policy did not change course immediately following the Sack, England made the decision to openly support the Dutch Revolt when Antwerp was again under threat of attack in 1585. One of the most troubling aspects of the early modern military revolution and the mercenary conditions of extraterritorial violence was a dissolved boundary separating the theater of war from civil society. War was no longer confined to the battlefield or demarcated from civilian populations but became, instead, a series of surprise attacks or drawn-out sieges that often targeted urban spaces and their inhabitants.⁶³ As with Gascoigne’s The fruites of Warre, English responses to the Sack of Antwerp struggled to make sense of events and locate frames of reference that would render this atrocity intelligible. Antwerp became a cautionary tale for English audiences: as reflected in the title of the anonymous play based on events, A Larum for London (ca. 1599), it served as a symbol of the dangers arising from a cultural mood of insularity and disengagement from political concerns. In the first wave of military treatises published in the 1570s, many of these texts similarly drew on the example of Antwerp to demonstrate the risks of a society unprepared for war.⁶⁴ A significant development in these responses is that they located political rather than theological causes for the Sack, a skeptical position shared by Gascoigne. Although some sermons and ballads continued to see Antwerp, one of the wealthiest cities in Europe at the time, as having suffered divine punishment for its worldliness,⁶⁵ Gascoigne distances his own account from these conventional explanations and refuses to draw theological meanings from the atrocities he had encountered. The text, in this regard, is similar to his earlier The fruites of Warre, in which he had likewise mocked the longstanding perception that war served as providential retribution for cultural prosperity.⁶⁶ ⁶² One text, written in support of William of Orange and Dutch forces, reported that the Duke of Alba attributed recent military defeats and the overall erosion of Spanish rule as effects of the Sack (Pierre Loyseleur, A treatise against the proclamation published by the King of Spayne, by which he proscribed the late Prince of Orange [1584]), I4v). ⁶³ As John Cruso recognized, “the actions of the modern warres consist chiefly in sieges, assaults, sallies, skirmishes, &c. and so affoard but few set battells” (Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie [1632], 105). Cruikshank similarly notes the absence of major battles in the period of English involvement in the Low Countries; with the possible exception of the battle of Nieuwpoort, English soldiers for the most part experienced a series of inconclusive skirmishes or drawn out, debilitating sieges of urban areas (Elizabeth’s Army, 288). ⁶⁴ See, among other examples, Barnabe Riche’s Allarme to England foreshewing what perilles are procured, where the people liue without regarde of martiall lawe (1578), F1 and Thomas Churchyard, A lamentable, and pitifull description, of the wofull warres in Flaunders (1578), 60. ⁶⁵ For a related depiction of Antwerp, see the anonymous play A Larum for London (ca. 1599, publ. 1602). A popular ballad responded to the Sack, A warning to London by the fall of Antwerp (1577), although part of its message warned against the dangers of provisioning mercenary troops and the “craft” of a “ciuill foe.” ⁶⁶ See The fruites of Warre, stanzas 9–12, 401 and stanza 18, 402.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

113

Despite the importance of his text as a first-hand account of a major historical event, The Spoyle of Antwerpe has occupied an anomalous place in relation to Gascoigne’s other writings, a position reflected in its inclusion as a separate appendix in Cunliffe’s edition of Gascoigne’s works from 1910, the only time when the text has been republished.⁶⁷ Not only is it the sole example among his works of a prose account of a contemporary event, it is also a text that largely elides his own role as author and is at odds with the prodigal self-fashioning and authorial self-promotion central to so many of his writings, including The fruites of Warre. But the distinctive stylistic qualities of the text are entirely appropriate and even necessary given the institutional context of its composition: his account derives from his role as an intelligence agent sent to collect information on the political and military situation in Antwerp, and, as a result, he adopts a position of anonymity and objectivity that is suited for the information economy of intelligence gathering. Moreover, as Fagel has recently argued, in putting together his narrative Gascoigne not only drew on his own experience but also consulted a Dutch account of the Sack so as to provide a more authoritative version of events for his state sponsors.⁶⁸ Gascoigne’s well-honed prodigal persona is therefore at odds with the genre of the text, which is firmly situated in relation to a flourishing market of histories, pamphlets, news-sheets, and even published versions of state documents relating to the Low Countries.⁶⁹ Nonetheless, Gascoigne’s remarkable text does not limit itself to the generic conventions of the intelligence report, and Gascoigne’s distinctive authorial signature remains evident throughout the text. Even in sections that largely derive from the account of a Dutch pamphlet, as Fagel has shown, Gascoigne is able to imaginatively insert himself within the narrative of events.⁷⁰ As a result, in dramatizing moments in the siege that he did not experience himself, Gascoigne assumes a degree of authority as a narrator of events and a mobility as witness, able to move through the city, remarkably unharmed in the midst of a civilian massacre.⁷¹ At one point, for instance, after having nearly been trampled to death by the city’s Walloon defenders, who were hastily fleeing from approaching Spanish forces instead of holding their position, Gascoigne wonders aloud, “What in Gods name doe I heare which have no interest in this action? synce

⁶⁷ Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576), in The Glasse of Governement, ed. Cunliffe, 586–99. All further references will be cited in-text. ⁶⁸ Fagel, “Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe as an Anglo-Dutch Text,” 101–10. ⁶⁹ Susan Doran estimates that one-third of English texts on France from 1561–1600 were translations of French state documents such as treaties and declarations (“The Politics of Renaissance Europe,” in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, eds., Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe [London: Thomson, 2005], 23–4). ⁷⁰ Fagel, “Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe as an Anglo-Dutch Text,” 104. ⁷¹ Arthur Kinney refers to Gascoigne as “the first English war correspondent” (Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986], 98).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

114

   

they who came to defend this town are content to leave it at large, and shift for themselves” (595). The one section of his text that derives exclusively from his own experience is his account of the mutineers’ attack on the residence of the English Merchant Adventurers, where Gascoigne was staying during his mission to Antwerp. The Merchant Adventurers had a long commercial history centered on Antwerp, where they first opened a house for trade in 1407. Their power grew substantially during the Elizabethan period, and the company’s monopoly over the cloth trade in Antwerp was conferred through their formal incorporation and official state license in 1564.⁷² Throughout the sixteenth century, the company controlled the export of finished cloth from England to Europe.⁷³ The collaboration between company and state is significant: the company’s extraterritorial commercial monopoly paralleled the English state’s own territorial political monopoly. Moreover, the company’s internal organization represented a kind of extraterritorial sovereignty, in that its governing structure was based not in London but Antwerp, with the Governor and his assistants elected by the company’s overseas members.⁷⁴ The mutineers’ attack on the company properties was comparable to an infringement of the extraterritorial rights of an embassy or, more accurately, a foreign commercial state in the heart of the city. What Gascoigne refers to as the English House was in fact a complex, the Hof van Liere, prominently situated in the city and comprising four two-storied buildings, enclosed interior spaces, and numerous storerooms.⁷⁵ One effect of the Sack was that it forced the Merchant Adventurers to move their operations from their historic base in 1582. Three years later, when Spanish forces successfully assumed full control over Antwerp, the Spanish also asserted their own monopoly over the cloth trade of the city.⁷⁶ Gascoigne’s presence at the English House locates him at the intersection of English commercial and political interests in the Low Countries. After all, Gascoigne was chosen for this mission not for his literary reputation but his experience of service in the region as well as his connections with networks of individuals. When he immediately returned to England, he carried with him ⁷² William E. Lingelbach, ed., The Merchant Adventurers of England: Their Laws and Ordinances with Other Documents (Philadelphia: Longman, Green, & Co., 1902), xxv and xxxi. ⁷³ On the significance of the cloth industry in early modern England, see Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). ⁷⁴ William E. Lingelbach, The Internal Organisation of the Merchant Adventurers of England (Philadelphia, 1903), 46; George Unwin, “The Merchant Adventurers’ Company in the Reign of Elizabeth,” Economic History Review 1 (1927): 37. ⁷⁵ Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 55. ⁷⁶ Jan van der Stock, Antwerp, Story of a Metropolis: 16th-17th Century (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1993), 25. G.D. Ramsey argues that the English trade in Antwerp was already in decline in 1576 due to the disruptions of war, and that the company moved to Middelburg so as to ensure that their trade was not further impeded (The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975], 190).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

115

letters from the Merchant Adventurers. The company Governor, Thomas Heton, explained to the Privy Council that he did not put into writing his own “discourse of the tragedies” but instead left it to Gascoigne to relay his account to the Privy Council. Heton further praised Gascoigne as one “whose humanitie in this tyme of trouble we for our partes have experimented.”⁷⁷ Gascoigne’s account works to support this assessment, and there is a degree of self-promotion in emphasizing his rhetorical abilities in assuaging the mutineers as they raided the English House: “I used mine uttermost skyll and ayde for the safegarde of theyr lyves, aswell as mine owne” (598). Whereas many of Gascoigne’s literary works describe his elusive chase of patronage and official favor, shots that always seem, drawing on his central metaphor in “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” to go “awrie” (l.2), his mission to Antwerp was a resounding success, as reflected in the remuneration of £20 he received on delivering his report.⁷⁸ Rather than individuating himself through his literary performance as author, Gascoigne’s role is cast by the state, and it is state authority that underwrites this official account of events, described on its title-page as “Faithfully reported, by a true Englishman, who was present at the same” (587). The state’s sponsorship of the text’s publication, which is noted as having been “Seene and allowed” by authorities (587), speaks to the text’s role in circulating a particular narrative of events, a version that serves to exculpate the state—English and Spanish—from responsibility for the devastation wreaked on Antwerp’s civilian population. In a prefatory note “To the Reader,” Gascoigne insists that the massacre was performed only “by the comon Souldiers,” who were acting without the state’s sanction, and not on the direction of those “of any charge or reputacion” (589). Moreover, he declares his hope that the episode will induce King Philip not only to restrain his troops but also to reinforce his ties with England (589). Because the English government’s declared position throughout the Dutch Revolt endorsed a return to the status quo preceding the war, with the Low Countries possessing some autonomy under the Spanish crown, this statement reminds readers of the state’s official stance while also emphasizing the Elizabethan regime’s neutrality and moderation. Gascoigne’s text records a more complicated relation between the state and its agents, however, and its remarkable descriptive features illustrate the devastating effects of the sanctioned violence delegated to these instruments of state authority. If Gascoigne can glean conclusions that are at best tentative, his conceptual impasse stems from a realization that the various possible causes of the Sack are all equally disturbing. On the one hand, Gascoigne’s account gives every reason to

⁷⁷ Qtd. in Prouty, George Gascoigne, 95. ⁷⁸ Matthew Woodcock notes that the £20 Gascoigne received was in keeping with payments made to Thomas Churchyard and other agents sent on missions to relay information from the Continent: see Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, Ego (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

116

   

believe that the Sack of Antwerp occurred with the tacit approval if not direct authorization of the Spanish state. Contradicting the circumspect tone of the text’s preface, he begins his account by observing that the spontaneous violence at Antwerp was, in all likelihood, “longe pretended by the Spanyerds,” who had “lien in wayte” for the opportunity to retaliate against its unruly subjects (590). The state acts as the mercenary, not its agents. Although Gascoigne’s text gestures towards conclusions that might be at odds with the official state policy towards Spain, it reflects its value as an intelligence report, one that presents a complex picture of recent events so that state officials—as well as readers of the printed account—can draw their own conclusions. This more critical attitude toward Spain also reflects divisions among Elizabeth’s advisors. Gascoigne’s handlers, Burghley and Walsingham, held drastically different positions in terms of policy in the Low Countries, with Burghley serving as the architect of the non-interventionist position that guided English policy in the region prior to the 1570s and Walsingham leading the faction advocating intervention and open alliance with other Protestant leaders, a stance that was pursued by Leicester and his deputy Sir Philip Sidney in their expedition of 1585–87. Significantly, Gascoigne delivered his letters to Walsingham, who debriefed him in a meeting at Hampton Court on November 21,⁷⁹ evidence that it was Walsingham who ensured the quick publication of the text, whose sensational account of the atrocities of the Sack certainly bolstered his own policy recommendations. But Gascoigne’s narrative cannot be reduced to a particular position, and the text suggests another possibility other than Spanish complicity: that the Spanish state indeed had no control over its mutinying troops. In realizing the attenuated power held by the state over its extraterritorial agents, he finds that that the state’s monopoly over violence is a lesser evil when compared to the generalized, anarchic state of war made possible in the absence of sovereign authority.⁸⁰ It is only appropriate, in this regard, that Gascoigne writes his account of the Sack in the same year that Bodin offers his own defense of sovereignty in Six Livres, a text that is inspired by the internecine conflicts and atrocities of the French Wars of Religion. However, rather than attributing the Sack solely to the absence of an overriding sovereign authority, Gascoigne represents the relation of the state to its agents as mutually constitutive. The mutineers, the anti-state, actually replicate sovereignty, if not surpass the state in terms of the effectiveness of their exercise of power. As a result, Gascoigne is awed by the ruthless speed and devastating impact of the violence unleashed on the city.

⁷⁹ Austen, George Gascoigne, 182. ⁸⁰ Among the meanings gleaned from the Sack, one text warned English Catholics that they might meet a similar fate as merchants in Antwerp if they used Catholic mercenary forces from the Continent to overthrow Elizabeth (Thomas Lupton, A persuasion from papistrie vvrytten chiefely to the obstinate, determined, and dysobedient English papists [1581], 45).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

117

Through his emphasis on the spectacle of destitute common soldiers laying waste to Antwerp’s commercial wealth, Gascoigne presents the Sack of Antwerp as class revolt, rendering it as a spontaneous, undirected, and acquisitive force of violence. Enacting scenes of carnivalesque inversion, Spanish soldiers literally appropriate signs of bourgeois prosperity and, in an exaggerated performance of conspicuous consumption, even parade around town draped in seized wealth (597). These scenes offer a synecdoche of the massive expropriation of wealth that occurred during the Sack: the soldiers carried with them an estimated 2600 tons of moveable goods on their march home, a massive transfer of riches valued at 20 million ducats.⁸¹ Other records indicate how the politics of the Sack were more local, providing the opportunity for settling longstanding grievances of inequality and service within the commercial metropolis: a Flemish servant in a Spanish household named Marie de Soeto, for instance, served as a native informant for mutinying soldiers, directing them in targeting which homes to ransack for valuables.⁸² Although Gascoigne’s representation of the Sack as spectacle seems to elide the role of the state, the state’s conspicuous absence also marks its interest in orchestrating such scenes of ostensibly spontaneous violence. The Sack of Antwerp, as Michael Howard notes, was the paradigmatic example of an early modern state setting loose a destitute, unpaid band of its own mercenary forces on a civilian population.⁸³ In this context, the state does not monopolize the use of violence exercised in its name but, as Janice E. Thomson astutely observes, instead “exploits individual violence and entrepreneurship.”⁸⁴ It is wholly appropriate, then, that the mercenary soldiers assume the mantle of their civilian, mercantile counterparts, for they too take on an entrepreneurial position as venturers in the commerce of early modern war. By allowing its troops to gorge on the wealth of Antwerp, the Spanish state—whose war expenses had driven it to bankruptcy the previous year⁸⁵—was able to maintain a massive professional army it could no longer support, in effect paying them in loot rather than wages.⁸⁶ This policy also ⁸¹ Parker, Military Revolution, 59, 58. ⁸² Lauro Martines, Furies: War in Europe, 1450–1700 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 72. ⁸³ Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 29. ⁸⁴ Thomson, Mercenaries, 143. ⁸⁵ Parker, Military Revolution, 63. In 1575, Spain defaulted on its debts to bankers in Genoa and elsewhere; as a result, these lenders withheld further credit, which prevented Spain from paying its troops in the Low Countries over the next year (James Conklin, “The Theory of Sovereign Debt and Spain under Philip II,” Journal of Political Economy 106 [1998]: 483–513). A more recent and competing assessment argues that funds were not disbursed to the troops due to conflicts within the Spanish administration in the Low Countries following the death of the viceroy Requesens earlier in 1576 (Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014], 155–6). ⁸⁶ The cost of settling a previous mutiny in Antwerp in 1574 has been estimated as more than one million florins, or £100,000 at the exchange rate of the time (Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands: Ten Studies [London: Collins, 1979], 111).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

118

   

worked to salve the seething resentment of Spain’s mercenary troops; instead of rebelling against the employer who failed to pay them, and left them to die in massive numbers in a decade-long war of attrition, they instead lashed out at the wealthy neutral city that made the mistake to house them.⁸⁷ The actions of its seemingly autonomous agents reaped huge dividends for the Spanish state: not only did the Sack effectively punish a recalcitrant province—a city that, not incidentally, had also been the source of war loans to Spain—it also left Antwerp intact enough to rebuild and resume its prosperous commercial position.⁸⁸ As he roams the city of Antwerp, a horrified witness to the violence around him, Gascoigne cannot help but be impressed by the deliberate and efficient course that the Spanish “fury” assumes. Perhaps even more disturbing than the thought of uncoordinated outbreaks of violence, Gascoigne observes the precision with which the Spanish Army of Flanders, one of the first professional armies of Europe, applied its regime of military discipline to a massacre of a civilian population, “wherin I noted their good order which wanted no direction, in their greatest furye” (593). This orchestrated spectacle of violence “wanted no direction,” of course, because it likely occurred with the tacit approval of the Spanish state. Nonetheless, this is a possibility that Gascoigne, in offering the official report of events on behalf of the English state, Spain’s nominal ally, is unable to express directly. But there is also another sense in which this violence did not require direction. Armed with military technology previously unknown in Europe, and trained in the most recent developments of military strategy, the Spanish garrison unleashed an unprecedented force of violence that registered the devastating effects of the early modern military revolution. In its speed and destructiveness, this violence erased any traces of agency on the part of the state as well as its agents, seemingly becoming a force of its own. Gascoigne is left in amazement, unable to explain the overturning of the rules of war, as a much smaller band is able to overwhelm a city’s defenders within hours: “it passeth all mens capacity, to conceive howe it should be possible” (595). As in The fruites of Warre, Gascoigne is left grasping for frames of reference in which to represent the effects of modernized warfare. In one of his text’s most chilling scenes, as Gascoigne examines the charred corpses of the city’s defenders left in the wake of the Spanish advance, he is unable to derive meaning from these human remains. Peering into the body cavity of a decapitated soldier, he can render this ⁸⁷ The Spanish army had suffered massive casualty rates, losing 49,000 of its 60,000 soldiers in the course of 1576 alone (Parker, Military Revolution, 58). ⁸⁸ As McKeown notes, Antwerp merchants similarly financed the debts of the English state (English Mercuries, 85). Antwerp never regained its former prosperity, however, a factor that contributed to the rise of Amsterdam as a commercial hub. Of Antwerp’s 80,000 citizens at the time of the Sack (and later siege of 1585), nearly half of the population, 38,000 people, subsequently migrated to the North as well as further abroad, including England (Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 219).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

119

bodily spectacle intelligible only through textual and artistic rubrics: such a scene reminds him of anatomical treatises, an embodied extension of a previously forbidden knowledge, “so that you might looke down into the bulk & brest and there take an Anatomy of the secrets of nature” (596). Surveying the landscape around him, he likens it to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” finding that “a man might behold as many sundry shapes and formes of mans motio[n] at time of death: as ever Mighel Angelo dyd portray in his tables of Doomes day” (596).⁸⁹ Because of the unprecedented speed and precision of the Spanish “fury,” the military component of the Sack of Antwerp was relatively brief, but was followed by a far more extensive process of looting and expropriation. During this latter phase, the mercenary soldiers replicated the exacting capabilities of state power, taking on the role of deliberate tax officials: waiting patiently while forcing wealthy merchants to gather together their wealth, and even assisting their victims in finding ways to borrow on credit for additional payments. Gascoigne notes that most of the violence occurred not in the heat of battle but in subsequent and recurring scenes of ransom (597). These forms of expropriation have the most longstanding impact on Antwerp’s relation to the Spanish state. In sanctioning the looting of Antwerp, the Spanish state had broken its contractual bond with the propertied class of its commercial hub. As a consequence, the Sack of Antwerp radicalized the political stance of the city and its mercantile elite: previously a bystander in the Revolt, Antwerp became an active ally of the Dutch rebels following the Sack. The commercial importance of Antwerp also forced the English state to intervene in the Dutch Revolt and protect its economic stakes in the region to prevent the city from falling again to Spanish forces in 1585.⁹⁰ The Sack of Antwerp ultimately led to the irrevocable erosion of Spanish credibility in the Low Countries. The following spring, the Spanish viceroy, Don John of Austria, was forced to sign the Perpetual Edict, pledging the withdrawal of Spanish forces from the region. Spanish forces would remain until 1648, evidence of the state’s perennial inability to formulate an exit strategy. Nonetheless, the Sack of Antwerp served as the turning point in the conflict, marking the end of Spanish legitimacy and the emergence of the Dutch Revolt as a national struggle.⁹¹ The Sack also exposed the mercenary logic defining relations between the state and its subjects. In figuring political alliances as extensions of commercial ⁸⁹ Patricia Cahill discusses Gascoigne’s representation of violence in Unto the Breach, 177–8. ⁹⁰ As evidence of the wide circulation of news of recent political events in the Low Countries, readers in London had access to the Duke of Parma’s negotiations with the city of Antwerp, in A letter sent from the Prince of Parma vnto the borrowmaisters, sherifes, and magistrate of the towne of Anwerpe (1586) as well as A true report of the yeelding vp of the cittie of Antwarpe, vnto the Prince of Parma, which was on the seauenteenth day of August last past. 1585, an English text published in Amsterdam that included the terms of Antwerp’s surrender. Another text, An historicall discourse, or rather a tragicall historie of the citie of Antwerpe (1586), saw the Sack as just one chapter in a series of Spanish offenses against the city carrying up to its recent surrender. ⁹¹ Anne Hecox Bozzay, The Dutch Muses: The Dutch Revolt in the Elizabethan Imagination (unpublished PhD dissertation, Washington University, 2000), 51; Parker, Flanders, 203.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

120

   

interests, the state was supported on a fragile contractual basis, a foundation that allowed for the agency of subjects to act like mercenaries themselves and lobby for better terms, if not leave the state’s service altogether. Although the Spanish state made a disastrous political miscalculation in sanctioning if not directly authorizing the Sack of Antwerp, this decision may have been triggered by the state’s inability to control its own agents. In other words, the risk of alienating Dutch subjects was seen as a lesser evil compared to the threatening autonomy of mercenary forces. The revolt of Spain’s military agents remained a likely prospect throughout the period: the Spanish Army of Flanders mutinied on forty-five occasions from 1572 to 1609, with some of these revolts lasting more than a year.⁹² Mutinies were, in effect, work stoppages used to negotiate better labor terms, with demands that could range from the immediate payment of back wages to the replacement of an incompetent superior officer.⁹³ These were not violent outbreaks but more accurately represented, in Geoffrey Parker’s terms, “one of the earliest chapters in the history of collective bargaining in Europe.”⁹⁴ Ironically, whereas the state-sanctioned violence of the Sack of Antwerp collapsed distinctions between military and civilian spheres by placing the city within the purview of battle, mutinies imposed civilian notions of compromise and negotiation on military life.⁹⁵ With state authority suspended during the course of a mutiny, sovereignty was assumed by the mercenary soldiers themselves: they could confer executive authority on an elected representative, the electo; appoint a secretary, who would retain an archive of the mutineers’ correspondence; and even have officers serve as ambassadors to negotiate with the soldiers’ former employers as a foreign power.⁹⁶ The correspondence between mutineers and their erstwhile commanders attests to the extent to which the soldiers were recognized as figures to whom the terms of diplomatic recognition and negotiation were extended. Tellingly, the registers used for these exchanges were those of friendship and family, a dynamic that will be further explored in the next chapter’s discussion of the role of amity in early modern diplomacy and international law. The Duke of Alba, the Spanish viceroy who ruthlessly suppressed Dutch rebels in his tenure from 1567–73, nonetheless retained the terms of amicitia with his soldiers, even in the midst of their own uprising, addressing

⁹² Parker, Military Revolution, 59 and Flanders, 185. ⁹³ Parker, Flanders, 190–1. For discussion, also see David J.B. Trim, “Ideology, Greed, and Social Discontent in Early Modern Europe: Mercenaries and Mutinies in the Rebellious Netherlands, 1568–1609,” in Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jane Hathaway (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2001), 47–61. ⁹⁴ Parker, Flanders, 188. Sir Roger Williams praised the military discipline exercised even in the midst of Spanish mutinies, noting “if there can bee any good orders in mutinies, the Spanish doe theirs in good order” (Actions, 132). ⁹⁵ For a related discussion, see Gervase Philips, “To Cry ‘Home! Home’: Mutiny, Morale, and Indiscipline in Tudor Armies,” Journal of Military History 65 (2001): 315. ⁹⁶ Parker, Flanders, 187, 200.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

121

the mutineers as “Magnificos señores hijos” (magnificent and honored sons) and signing his letters to them as “Vuestro buen padre” (your good father).⁹⁷ Having apportioned part of its monopoly over violence to its extraterritorial agents as a necessary consequence of waging foreign wars, the state was confronted with a greater threat in the course of these mutinies as their agents fully assumed the prerogatives of the state. The state itself became an imagined community, not an intrinsic condition for political order, one that could in fact be radically reimagined. Some mutinies declared themselves as politically independent communities, openly referring to themselves as “Republics.”⁹⁸ Military rank, which often simply replicated class hierarchies, was suspended in the course of a mutiny, with elected officials drawn from all ranks of the regiment. These leaders subsequently took on sovereign authority, including the imposition of discipline on their troops.⁹⁹ Given this history, English leaders in the Low Countries were understandably concerned about the possibility of mutiny among their own forces. Among the laws and ordinances promulgated by the Earl of Leicester as Governor General of English forces in 1586, the death penalty was conferred not only for mutiny but any “vnlawfull assemblies vpon priuate, secrete, or hidden purpose”: the outbreak of mutiny, in other words, was attributed to political debate among common soldiers.¹⁰⁰ As Governor of Flushing during Leicester’s administration, Sir Philip Sidney braced for an imminent mutiny among his troops for want of pay, a threat that pressed him to go over the head of his uncle and commander and appeal for funds directly to Walsingham and the Privy Council.¹⁰¹ The political organization of mutinies in the Spanish Army of Flanders ensured representation for the various nationalities among the forces, with separate German and Spanish electos. Ironically, whereas the Protestant United Provinces and Catholic Spanish Netherlands were generally unable to overcome their differences and unite in a common cause, it was the mutineers who provided an example of a multinational representative political system.¹⁰² Ultimately, a ⁹⁷ Parker, Flanders, 170. ⁹⁸ Parker, Flanders, 202. ⁹⁹ Parker, Flanders, 188–9. As Fernando González de León points out, officers from all ranks joined the mutinies, often motivated by factors such as clientage or regional and familial loyalties rather than purely economic grievances. Some mutineers even successfully rose up through the military hierarchy, evidence that their experience gave them particular expertise for successfully negotiating with superiors (The Road to Rocroi: Class, Culture, and Command in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567–1659 [Leiden: Brill, 2009], 112, 114). ¹⁰⁰ Lavves and ordinances set downe by Robert Earle of Leycester, the Queenes Maiesties Lieutenant and Captaine General of her armie and forces in the Lowe Countries (1586), 4. Trim points out that English troops in Dutch service rarely mutinied despite their pay remaining in arrears, which he attributes to the ideological commitment of strongly Protestant volunteers to the Dutch cause (“Ideology, Greed, and Social Discontent,” 50). ¹⁰¹ Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life, 308. ¹⁰² In other instances, mutinies exposed national divisions within multinational military forces. One 1589 mutiny stemmed from conflicts between Spanish and Italian troops in the company: in opposing their Spanish military commanders (one of whom, Count Mansfield, was in fact German), they

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

122

   

rallying point among the provinces and political factions of the Low Countries was a unified opposition to the continued presence of Spanish mercenary troops throughout the region. A key clause of the Pacification of Ghent, which the delegates passed immediately following the Sack on November 8, 1576, called for the immediate withdrawal of not only mutineers but all Spanish forces.¹⁰³ The Spanish government itself took measures to disavow responsibility for its own military agents. If in the course of a mutiny the mercenaries took on the attributes of the state, one finds that in response to these collective protests the state assumed the qualities of disloyalty and greed typically associated with mercenaries. In many cases, after the Spanish state had agreed to a general pardon for mutineers as a condition for resuming service, officials would nonetheless contrive a way to arrest and execute the leaders on trumped-up charges. At other times, the state would release mutineers from service, leaving them destitute in the midst of enemy territory and subject to reprisals from a vengeful local population. And, in many instances, when mutineers were found to be indebted to the state and its creditors even after back wages were distributed, they could then be sentenced to galley slavery.¹⁰⁴ What linked the varied responses to the Sack of Antwerp was a shared effort to place blame on the mercenaries. Despite the fact that their labor power served as the foundation for the commercial networks of extraterritorial warfare, they were excluded from a status among competing political factions and commercial interests, who were thereby united through the constitution of a shared enemy, a hostis humani generis.¹⁰⁵ By comparison with the mutineers, George Gascoigne could make himself look downright respectable, and legitimate his transition from prodigal author and mercenary soldier to remunerated intelligence agent for the state. With state sanction, his text could offer a defense of the competing positions of English state authorities, whether to reinforce traditional alliances with Habsburg Spain or to intervene in the Low Countries in order to defend commercial allies at risk from the depredations of Spanish forces. The disparate political factions of the Netherlands, separated by primary provincial loyalties and divided along confessional lines, could at last unite against a common enemy, creating a short-lived nationalist statement in the Pacification of Ghent and the

appealed to the intervention of Philip II, declaring “God saue the King, let vs cast off euill gouernment” (Emmanuel van Meteren [and Thomas Churchyard, trans.], A true discourse historicall, of the succeeding gouernours in the Netherlands, and the ciuill warres there [1602], 110). ¹⁰³ Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 177. ¹⁰⁴ Parker, Flanders, 193–4. The pamphlet Aduertisements from Britany, and from the Lovv Countries. In September and October (1591) reported on the negotiations between the Spanish military governor, the Duke of Parma, and a group of 1500 mutinying troops near Antwerp. ¹⁰⁵ For further discussion of the concept of hostis humani generis, see the Introduction on the place of exiles in the law of nations, above, and Chapter 3, “Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot,” below.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

123

subsequent Union of Brussels. This latter statement was the first—and last—time the provinces united their cause, and the region would split along permanent regional and confessional lines, of Protestant North and Catholic South, only three years later.¹⁰⁶ The Spanish vice-regal government itself disavowed its own forces, and the new Governor General, Don John of Austria, agreed to the terms of the Pacification of Ghent in February 1577.¹⁰⁷ Don John, the legendary victor over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto only five years earlier, conceded defeat regarding his ability to control his own troops in the Spanish Army of Flanders. Expelling the mercenaries also served to redeem the commercial foundations of war by transposing its mercenary conditions to the base common soldiers who came to embody the violent and volatile character of the business of extraterritorial warfare. The mercenaries were enemies of common markets as well as common humanity, as reflected in the commercial effects of the Sack. As with other mutinies, money and goods ransacked from Antwerp circulated in a flourishing black market among merchants in the region. The wealth expropriated from Antwerp, which has been estimated as more than double that of Spain’s annual revenue from the Americas, was quickly reincorporated into networks of capital and finance.¹⁰⁸ By comparison, a final anecdote: in the wake of the Sack, a mutinying soldier, who had seized some bills of exchange in Antwerp in lieu of his wages from a bankrupt state employer, attempted to trade his bills for money on his return home, only to be told that the bills of exchange, identified as stolen property, had been declared null and void: a cancelled contract, like his mercenary service to the mercenary state.¹⁰⁹

2.3 Delegation, Expertise, and the Extraterritorial Economies of War Following my discussion of Gascoigne’s writings in the context of responses to the first wave of English military involvement in the Low Countries in the 1570s, the remaining sections of this chapter will focus on the increasing militarization of Elizabethan culture that marked the period of England’s undeclared war against Spain (1585–1603). As Anthony Giddens has observed, in class-divided societies,

¹⁰⁶ Israel, The Dutch Republic, 196–205. ¹⁰⁷ Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 258. ¹⁰⁸ Martines, Furies, 71. ¹⁰⁹ In February 1577, Spanish authorities in Antwerp had stipulated that departing troops would be allowed to retain bills of exchange in lieu of back wages. Although it was in their interest to pay off their troops by any means, merchants in the region clearly felt differently. An edict of the States General had in fact barred accepting bills of exchange from Spanish troops following the Sack (SP 70/144/35; CSP, Foreign, 1575–77, 541).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

124

   

“the sanction of the use of violence is quite indirect and attenuated.”¹¹⁰ The demands of fighting extended wars on multiple fronts necessitated that the English state delegate an unprecedented degree of authority to its extraterritorial agents. One of the central concerns of this section is to examine the implications of delegation: how theoretical models of sovereignty were reconstituted through the practices of extraterritorial warfare, which necessarily operated through delegated authority, with state power represented in the form of vice-regal deputies and other military agents. The commercial foundations of early modern warfare also transformed the functions of these military representatives themselves, whose administrative roles were at odds with a military ethos traditionally rooted in feudal and chivalric values. The most astute commentators on these changes were soldier-writers of the late Elizabethan period, who followed Gascoigne’s precedent in making the transition from one commercial context—the mercenary economy of war—to the marketplace of print. What I will be emphasizing as the distinctive expertise of military writers such as Simon Harward, Matthew Sutcliffe, Roger Williams, Humphrey Barwick, Thomas and Dudley Digges, Barnabe Riche, and Sir John Smythe was an effect of global networks of labor mobility, a context in which their service traversed national and confessional affiliations: the Spanish Army of Flanders, the French crown, and French Huguenot and Dutch rebels, as well as English forces in Ireland, France, the Low Countries, and privateering voyages across the globe. One aspect of what could be described as their mercenary position is that they drew on their expertise and labor mobility in order to provide an analytics of the workings of extraterritorial violence, a unique insight into the economic underpinnings of war and the transformation of political relations through a logic of capital. Throughout her reign, Elizabeth and her Privy Council maintained a pretense of neutrality, a position that enabled the state to shift its position in relation to other European powers and remain free from the more permanent obligations mandated by a formal alliance. But this stance of plausible deniability was more often directed toward England’s own subjects serving abroad, as Janice E. Thomson has noted.¹¹¹ In this way, the English state relied on the initiative of its agents, their ability to work independently of explicit instructions, so that the state would not be implicated in their actions. And even if English agents were operating with covert instructions, the state could disavow this connection. When, after much delay, the English state deployed a military regiment to the Low Countries in 1572, Elizabeth instructed one of its leaders, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to act “as thoughe he and his companies departed out of England thether without Her Majesties assent.”¹¹² Blurring distinctions between mercenary forces and

¹¹⁰ Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 16. ¹¹¹ Thomson, Mercenaries, 21. ¹¹² Qtd. in Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 148. When the Spanish protested the departure of English forces for the Netherlands in 1572, Elizabeth promised to recall their commission, but waited until the ships had left port before having this message delivered (Prouty, George Gascoigne, 75).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

125

those acting with explicit state directives, the authority delegated to subjects served to conceal the state’s own role.¹¹³ An unintended consequence, however, was that the state consequently became dependent on the relative autonomy of its agents, and was ultimately unable “to exercise effective control over those it authorized to use violence beyond its borders.”¹¹⁴ The stance of plausible deniability extended to the English state’s official foreign policy. Even though the period of 1585–1603 is often referred to as marking the duration of an Anglo-Spanish “war,” neither nation ever legitimated this conflict by officially declaring war. At one level, this sidestepping of the law of nations may have reflected the desire of both nations to avoid the expense of full-blown conflict. The Spanish state went bankrupt in 1575, an event that precipitated the mutiny of Spanish forces in Antwerp, while England was not able to pay off Henry VIII’s outstanding war debt until 1578, and was itself nearly bankrupted as a result of the expense of defending itself against the Armada.¹¹⁵ The seemingly pragmatic course pursued by both nations resulted not from the toll of extraterritorial violence itself but the undue expense incurred by adhering to a legal definition of war. For England, it was precisely the illegality of its uses of violence—from mercenary service to privateering and coastal raids—that redeemed foreign interventions by making them profitable. Textual responses to the undeclared Anglo-Spanish war were consistently silent regarding the theological and legal ramifications of this course of action. Many English divines, rather than using their sermons as a forum for debating definitions of just war, were instead remarkably bellicose in their unwavering advocacy for war, even going so far as to justify the state’s peculiarly novel way of conducting it. Simon Harward, the puritan chaplain of New College, Oxford, was also an experienced state servant, having served as a chaplain on voyages under the Earl of Cumberland. His text, Solace for the Souldier and Saylour (1592), provided a compendium of arguments for rallying troops stationed abroad. But it also functioned to quell discontent, and to counter the insinuation, as he notes in his preface, that “these my voyages vpon the seas haue beene some blot and discredite to the doctrine which is or shall by me bee deliuered vpon the land.”¹¹⁶ Appropriate to his erstwhile role as pirate chaplain, he derided accusations that

¹¹³ In another instance, Elizabeth considered sending Sir John Smythe to the Low Countries in 1585 to negotiate with the Duke of Parma, the Spanish viceroy, despite the fact that the Earl of Leicester had just departed for the region as the head of English forces. Smythe was chosen precisely because of his marginal political position, so that his actions could be disavowed if needed; in the end, however, Smythe was never sent (Hale, intro., Smythe, xxvii–xxix). ¹¹⁴ Thomson, Mercenaries, 43. Gascoigne’s release was secured in exchange for opening English ports to Spanish ships. Forced to concede the presence of its troops in the Low Countries, the English state was able to maintain an official position of neutrality by claiming that the soldiers were unauthorized mercenaries (Prouty, George Gascoigne, 77). ¹¹⁵ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 121–2, 153; Parker, Military Revolution, 62. ¹¹⁶ Simon Harward, Solace for the Souldier and Saylour (1592), A3v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

126

   

current state policy endorsed “priuie intrapping and laying in waite.”¹¹⁷ Legal writers similarly dismissed the declaration of war as a mere formality. Matthew Sutcliffe, who had served as Judge Advocate in the Low Countries during Leicester’s tenure as Governor General, opened his treatise on military law, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes (1593), by casually noting, “That warres are not proclaimed, it skilleth not.”¹¹⁸ In rejecting the use of legal mechanisms to evaluate the justifications for conflict, Judge Sutcliffe undermined distinctions separating war from civil society. Without a declaration of war to inaugurate it, or a theater of war to spatially contain it, what resulted was a permanent state of war, a pervasive environment of siege mentality that naturalized war by forcing civil society to follow its logic. Tellingly, Sutcliffe’s text was published under the auspices of Christopher Barker, the crown’s own printer, reflecting state sponsorship of pro-war treatises in the 1590s. On his title page, Sutcliffe announces his intention to draw up rules of engagement on the basis not only of legal and theological precedents but also the practices of modern combat, “described out of the doings of most valiant and expert Captaines.” His text is dedicated to the Earl of Essex, the figure most closely associated with the ascendant military ethos of the 1590s. Despite Essex’s association with a tradition of English militarism, the Sutcliffe text is one of only a small number of military treatises dedicated to him.¹¹⁹ Even though many of these writers were veterans of continental campaigns, they were aware of the marginal position of military service in the context of court favor and state authority. As I will discuss shortly, military writers established a cultural space for themselves through an emphasis on their expertise, and opened up possibilities of critique by positing this professional status as an alternative form of authority. Nonetheless, most of these writers distanced themselves from recognizably oppositional figures such as Essex, a choice that reflects how military leaders were recognized as competitors to state power. As Janice E. Thomson comments, “the unintended consequence of authorizing nonstate violence was the empowering of individuals to act independently of their home state . . . the ties between the state and its subjects were tenuous; given the chance, individuals would express their independence from state goals, interests, and policies, and go their own way.”¹²⁰ The position of military leaders was therefore similar to that of mercenaries and other nonstate agents such as pirates and joint-stock

¹¹⁷ Harward, Solace for the Souldier and Saylour, D. ¹¹⁸ Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes (1593), A3v. ¹¹⁹ The only other example of a military treatise dedicated to Essex was a posthumous publication, William Garrard’s The Arte of Warre (1591). A more significant work dedicated to Essex was Gentili’s influential statement on international law, De Jure Belli Libri Tres (1588, rev. 1598). For discussion of Sutcliffe, Gentili, and other writers connected to Essex’s circle, see Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ¹²⁰ Thomson, Mercenaries, 68.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

127

companies: each group potentially “challenged the sovereignty of the nascent national state itself.”¹²¹ Contemporary observers were well aware of the autonomy exercised by the state’s extraterritorial agents and deputies. In his discussion of mutinies among Spanish forces, Sir Roger Williams, who had earlier served in the Spanish Army of Flanders himself, saw this practice as a means for “ambitious Chiefes” to align themselves with the “multitude” of their common soldiers and use this military support “against their owne States and Masters.”¹²² Commenting on the French civil wars, another writer warned of the possibility of military leaders acquiring enough power to act on par with state authority, so that they could make alliances or wage war according “to their own wills, and to the height of their Ambition.”¹²³ Drawing on the examples of contemporary France and Flanders, Giovanni Botero concluded that wars led to the creation of a military class able to turn against its home nation.¹²⁴ As these examples demonstrate, for an early modern state it was much easier to manage an army of foreign mercenaries than maintain authority over its own deputies. V.G. Kiernan therefore concludes that the mercenary economy of early modern warfare actually helped to stabilize early modern states.¹²⁵ Although states recognized the tenuousness of their power over their extraterritorial agents, these risks were outweighed by the benefits stemming from groups who could exercise authority on their own initiative and without explicit state directives. The space beyond the nation’s boundaries and outside the state’s immediate jurisdiction was a cultural location in which agents could operate with a relative degree of autonomy. Early modern states conceded such power to their agents out of a recognition that it was more dangerous to have ambitious or discontented subjects at home and far safer, in the words of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, “to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels”: to use war not only to deflect attention from domestic ills but also to remove dangerously active subjects from the center of political life, with “action hence borne out” and carried far from the realm.¹²⁶ Drawing a similar conclusion, Dudley Digges cites his approval for

¹²¹ Thomson, Mercenaries, 68. Perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon occurred when Leicester accepted the post of Governor of the Low Countries and effectively assumed sovereign authority in the region. After Elizabeth objected on the grounds that Leicester’s authority in fact derived from her, Leicester was forced to renounce any claim over this title (Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 48). On Dudley’s period in the Low Countries, also see Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 92–6. ¹²² Williams, The Actions of the Lowe Countries (1618), in Works, 132. ¹²³ Jean De Serres, A General Inventorie of the History of France (1607), 960. ¹²⁴ Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State (1589), ed. Robert Bireley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 158. ¹²⁵ V.G. Kiernan, “Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560–1660 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 139. ¹²⁶ Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 4.5.213–15.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

128

   

the policy of Charles V, who “procured the place of Spayn and his own safety by keeping his actiue subiects in continual employment, farre from home, where their Eagle-like piercing eyes might not come to prie into his Actions, nor malitiously obserue the distastes his gouernment occasioned.”¹²⁷ One interesting feature of Digges’s formulation is that he places the power of surveillance in the hands of ambitious subjects, not the state. Rather than monopolizing the power of surveillance, the state fears the potential diffusion of its workings, particularly in the hands of ambitious, vigilant subjects. Surveillance becomes a tool not of state domination but of subjects’ critical discernment, with the “piercing eyes” of subjects inquiring into the abuses of government. The potential autonomy of state agents was a necessary precondition for waging war in the early modern period. As Michael Howard remarks, early modern warfare was largely financed not by the state but by an international group of contractors, or condottiere, “on a purely commercial basis.”¹²⁸ The authority of nonstate actors to commission extraterritorial violence created an economy of warfare in which state regimes were dependent on transnational military contractors. For instance, a German prince, John Casimir, Count Palatine, recruited, funded, and personally led one of the armies commissioned to defend the Dutch States General in the 1570s, fighting alongside English mercenary forces in the region as well as against English Catholic volunteers in the Spanish Army of Flanders.¹²⁹ During the Thirty Years’ War, Count Albrecht von Wallenstein, perhaps the wealthiest man in Europe at the time, used his land holdings in the German region of Friedland as a base for an army leased to the Holy Roman Emperor.¹³⁰ Contradicting the arguments of Max Weber and others, the early modern state did not hold a monopoly over sanctioned violence, particularly in an extraterritorial military context. The condottiere system represented a far more fluid transfer of labor and capital: in addition to Wallenstein, there were 1500 individual contractors providing troops for the armies of the Thirty Years’ War.¹³¹ Although Wallenstein used his military wealth to create a neofeudal enclave, the real source of his power derived from the circulating mass of capital linked to his personal army. As an effect of the condottiere system, the formerly dominant military class, the European aristocracy, was challenged by new mercenary classes: not only socially mobile adventurers but also financiers who lacked any direct stake in the outcome of a conflict. ¹³² Charles Tilly therefore ¹²⁷ Thomas Digges, Foure Paradoxes, or Politique Discourses (1604), 106. Dudley Digges, Thomas’s son, wrote the third and fourth of the text’s paradoxes. ¹²⁸ Howard, War in European History, 24. For a recent discussion of the financing of early modern warfare, see Parrott, The Business of War. ¹²⁹ John S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 36. ¹³⁰ Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 80; Kiernan, “Foreign Mercenaries,” 140. ¹³¹ Parker, Military Revolution, 64. ¹³² Howard, War in European History, 28.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

129

terms the early modern era as a “brokerage period” of warfare, with extraterritorial violence conducted by mercenary forces, led by nonstate actors and adventurers, organized by contractors, and financed by an international class of capitalists.¹³³ For a martial, aristocratic class to retain its prominence, it had to adapt to the emerging capitalist conditions of warfare. As a result, even as they retained a quasi-feudal position, representing themselves as knights errant at the head of military adventures, English nobles functioned as investors responsible for organizing profitable economic ventures. One sees the assimilation of military adventure to the terms of capitalist enterprise most blatantly with foreign military expeditions that additionally served as privateering voyages, such as Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake’s raids on the Portugal coast (1589) and the Earl of Essex and Lord Admiral Howard’s strike on Cadiz (1596). In each case, state authority was delegated to these leaders, and they were granted responsibility for raising volunteers, outfitting ships, and otherwise maintaining the flow of capital necessary for these voyages.¹³⁴ This level of entrepreneurial activity was even an integral component of English defenses against the Armada: the state provided only one-sixth of English ships, and instead relied on merchant vessels to fill up the ranks.¹³⁵ In contrast to privateering voyages, in which the promise of seized wealth offset the initial capital required of investors and the state, the protracted nature of landbased military expeditions made them a far less profitable commission. The Elizabethan state usually limited its financial obligations for these campaigns, guaranteeing payment for only a portion of expenses and committing resources for a limited period of time, often one or two months. The onus for financing these missions therefore fell on the leaders themselves. The Earl of Leicester, for instance, was responsible for all expenditures exceeding the amount budgeted by the state for his 1585–87 service in the Low Countries,¹³⁶ and was consequently held liable for a sum (£150,000) that in fact exceeded the state’s own contribution (£126,000). Because the state limited its own financial stake in advance, military leaders often assumed massive amounts of debt as a result of their foreign service.¹³⁷ When Leicester left the region for the final time in December 1587, he cast blame not on England but the Dutch States General, and significantly represented his terms of service as decidedly mercenary in character: “Let the ¹³³ Tilly, Coercion, 122. The first English expedition to the Low Countries in 1572, for instance, was financed by Flemish and Walloon refugees in London (Lawrence, The Complete Soldier, 28). ¹³⁴ Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 23. For an expanded discussion, see Neil Younger, “The Practice and Politics of Troop-Raising: Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, and the Elizabethan Regime,” English Historical Review 127 (2012): 566–91. ¹³⁵ Giddens, Nation-State, 111, 115. ¹³⁶ Nolan, Norreys, 95. ¹³⁷ In general, the English state minimized the enormous labor costs of waging war—an average of £177,000 per year throughout the period—by shifting the financial burden for wages either to private investors, particularly military leaders themselves, or local governments (Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 250).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

130

   

States get others to serve their mercenary turn, for me they shall not have.”¹³⁸ Sir John Norris led a contingent in the Low Countries in 1578 and was not remunerated by the English state for nearly a decade, while lack of pay forced Lord Willoughby, commander of another regiment in the region in 1587–88, to outlay £2000 of his own money to keep his men supplied, a situation that Essex similarly faced in Normandy in 1591 after his campaign extended beyond the two months the English state had agreed to fund.¹³⁹ It was through the financial terms of military service that the potential autonomy of state agents was most effectively curtailed. Because they shared in the risks and actual costs of expeditions, military leaders were forced to align their political and economic interests with the state’s own fortunes. But if agents were bound to the state in what was essentially a financial connection, a key and unintended effect was that political relations were consequently reconstituted as having a primarily contractual foundation.¹⁴⁰ Contracts, of course, can not only be made but also broken, and the intrinsically mercenary terms of foreign service therefore contained the potential for radical political transformation.¹⁴¹ English mercenaries contributed significantly to the increasing professionalization of military service. It is only appropriate that this contractual model emerged from English involvement in the Low Countries, the site of many innovations associated with the early modern military revolution.¹⁴² Texts correlated the contractual basis of service with the commercial nature of the Dutch government itself, a state run by merchants that allowed the rules of commerce to permeate all areas of life, including the martial discipline of war. Sir John Smythe, for instance, referred to the region’s conflicts as “tumultuarie, & confused warres,” a violation of “all order & discipline Militarie, where both mercenaries and subiects, haue serued vnder subiects, called by the title of States.”¹⁴³ The dominance of a Dutch plutocracy opened the door for republicanism, if not popular rule, and the leveling of political life under the United Provinces and States General was tied to the mercenary conduct of wars in the region where, in Barnabe Riche’s panicked description, “both Mercenaries and subiects haue serued, but vnder a popular

¹³⁸ Qtd. in Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 101. ¹³⁹ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 113–14, 171, 178. ¹⁴⁰ For a related observation, see Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 87. ¹⁴¹ For an expanded analysis, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 43–8 and passim. ¹⁴² Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 173. ¹⁴³ Sir John Smythe, Certain Discourses, . . . Militarie (1590), **3. Barnabe Riche similarly described England’s wars on the Continent as “tumultuary and licentious,” and marked by “spoyle, disobedience, confusion, and disorder” (A martial conference pleasantly discoursed betweene two souldiers, the one Captaine Skil, trained vp in the French and Low Country seruices, the other Captaine Pill, only practised in Finsburie fields in the modern warres of the renowmed Duke of Shordich and the mightie Prince Arthur [1598], E3v).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

131

gouernment, consisting of diuers heades, where the hirelings of seuerall nations were drawne together.”¹⁴⁴ Given the association of the Dutch Revolt with mercenaries, burghers, and republicans, it is evident why Elizabeth’s proclamation announcing her reasons for openly intervening in the region in 1585 would cast her action as a defense of the Dutch aristocracy against Spanish violations of their ancient prerogatives.¹⁴⁵ Yet this same proclamation also reflected the extent to which the English monarchical state was implicated in a logic of capital, for it justified English action so as to protect “lawful commerce and entercourse of friendship and marchandise.”¹⁴⁶ As the phrasing suggests, the bonds between England and the Low Countries were above all economic ones. The “intercourse” between these nations refers specifically to England’s longstanding commercial dependence on the financial markets of Antwerp,¹⁴⁷ an appropriate focus given the fact that it was the threat of an imminent Spanish attack on Antwerp that finally prompted English intervention in the region. However, these intentions were based on a form of nostalgia, in this case for late medieval economic conditions that were no longer in place. As discussed in the previous section, the English Merchant Adventurers had recently closed their traditional operations in Antwerp in 1582, putting an end to nearly three centuries of English commerce there. Nonetheless, these customary economic conditions were a comforting and simpler frame of reference to invoke in distinction from the region’s constantly shifting political landscape and underlying mercenary conditions of warfare. The characterization of the Dutch States General as a republican many-headed monster and force capable of reducing warfare to profitable commerce also stemmed from the complex and overlapping networks of political jurisdiction that characterized the Low Countries. English texts attempted to translate the region’s distinctive, federated political arrangements into a more recognizable language of monarchical sovereignty and represent William of Orange as the de facto leader of Dutch forces, a pseudo-sovereign able to unite military and political leadership under his sole leadership.¹⁴⁸ Nonetheless, even as the position of

¹⁴⁴ Riche, A martial conference, E4v. For a contextual discussion of republicanism in late Elizabethan England, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54–118. ¹⁴⁵ See Elizabeth I, A declaration of the causes mooving the Qveene of England to giue aide to the Defence of the people afflicted and oppressed in the lowe Countries (1585), 6. ¹⁴⁶ Elizabeth I, A declaration of the causes, 19. ¹⁴⁷ Ramsey, The City of London in International Politics, 22. Conciliatory policies toward Spain were also influenced by English merchants with commercial interests in the Iberian Peninsula (Jason Eldred, “ ‘The Just Will Pay for the Sinners’: English Merchants, the Trade with Spain, and Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1563–1585,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 [2010]: 5–28). ¹⁴⁸ In The fruites of Warre, Gascoigne praised the aristocratic code of honor that Dutch nobles such as William of Orange shared with their Spanish counterparts, and contrasted both to the mercenary motives of Dutch burghers (stanza 128, 423; stanza 141, 425; stanza 169, 431).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

132

   

Stadholder became an inherited position in the Orange–Nassau dynasty, with William succeeded by his son Maurice, the power of this executive position remained constrained by the authority of provincial governments and their representatives in the States General.¹⁴⁹ In Orange’s Apology (1581), he addressed the States General as his fellow lords and emphasized their shared defense of their property and traditional privileges.¹⁵⁰ In a Dutch context, the problems inherent in delegated authority centered on William of Orange’s centralization of power. Ironically, whereas the Dutch political environment became more comforting and familiar for English observers as the Prince of Orange seemingly took on the attributes of a sovereign, this process had the opposite effect among rival political elites in the Low Countries, and in fact William’s reputation was at a low ebb at the time of his assassination in 1584.¹⁵¹ As martyr, Orange could become a rallying point for competing factions, and was posthumously represented as a foundation for regional identity in opposition to the occupying forces of Habsburg Spain.¹⁵² The problem of delegation was similarly intrinsic to Spanish forces in the Low Countries, which were led by a succession of viceroys and generals, including the Duke of Alba (1567–73), Don Luis de Requesens y Zuñiga (1573–76), Don John of Austria (1576–78), and the Duke of Parma (1578–1592).¹⁵³ Although the appointment of high-ranking nobles as Governor General was an attempt to unify military and administrative spheres under the command of a leader of impeccable credentials, there nonetheless remained a division between the military duties of the Governor and his administrative functions of governance. The Governor General also had to navigate the overlapping and competing jurisdictions of civic and provincial governments as well as their constantly shifting allegiance to Habsburg authority. The complex political terrain of the Low Countries defied any easy translation to a framework of monarchical sovereignty. Given that the Elizabethan state itself was led by a Queen and civilian administrators like Burghley, the exigencies of extraterritorial warfare prompted a nostalgia for a simpler era in which “some excellent martiall King,” as Sir John Smythe expressed it, would once again lead the nation and unite the military and administrative ¹⁴⁹ Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 146–7. ¹⁵⁰ William I, Prince of Orange, The apologie or defence of the most noble Prince William, by the grace of God, Prince of Orange . . . against the proclamation and edict, published by the King of Spaine, by which he proscribeth the saide lorde prince . . . presented to my lords the Estates Generall of the Lowe Countrie (1581). Orange’s text was printed in Delft and circulated in English and French versions. H.G. Koenigsberger discusses the “problem of sovereignty” inherent in Orange’s position in Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 257. ¹⁵¹ Lisa Jardine, The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Handgun (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). ¹⁵² For discussion of this context, see Peter Arnade, “Father of the Fatherland: William of Orange as Civic Patriot,” Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots, 260–303. ¹⁵³ For a full list of Spanish commanders and viceroys in the Low Countries, see Parker, The Army of Flanders, 281–2.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

133

functions of governance under a single sovereign authority.¹⁵⁴ A similar urge typified the political negotiations of the 1580s: the Dutch offered Elizabeth sovereign authority during the negotiations of the Treaty of Nonsuch, which she declined in deference to Spanish interests. The Dutch offer was a desperate measure following the collapse of power and death of the Duke of Anjou, who had been installed as sovereign of the Netherlands (1581–83), an effort equally supported by Orange and the southern States General in order to draw on traditional Franco-Burgundian alliances as a pretext for abjuring recognition of Habsburg authority.¹⁵⁵ In order for the English state to extend its power abroad, it was forced to delegate its sovereignty and place its authority in the hands of deputies such as the Earl of Leicester, who held the position of Governor General of English forces in the Low Countries from 1585–87. Thomas Digges, one of Leicester’s officers and most ardent supporters, drew on his service to remark that “in this our age Kings generally haue made their warres not so much with their own people, as with mercenaries and hired Souldiers.”¹⁵⁶ Noting the very recent demise of feudal terms of warfare, Digges acknowledged that modern wars were no longer conducted with kings leading their own armies and overseeing which policies are “profitable or discommodious for themselues and their Realmes.”¹⁵⁷ Although the deputation of authority over military command would seem to challenge monarchical sovereignty, with subjects standing in for the monarch and assuming power in extraterritorial service, what linked these agents to their regal predecessors was a shared concern for the economic implications of their activities. Like martial kings before them, these military leaders determined which actions would be profitable, albeit not directly for themselves but “for the King or State that paies them.”¹⁵⁸ Deputies, like mercenaries, were linked to the state in a commercial, contractual arrangement, a shared financial interest that enabled private profit to be aligned with the public interests of the nation.¹⁵⁹ In an argument that anticipates Adam Smith and political economists from a later era, Digges grounded communal affective ties on mutual economic selfinterest.¹⁶⁰ The only way of countering the inherently mercenary terms of early modern war was to concede its underlying financial logic and thereby align economic interests with shared political ends. The transition from feudal warfare ¹⁵⁴ Sir John Smythe, Instructions, Obseruations, and Orders Mylitarie (1595), ¶¶¶4. ¹⁵⁵ Israel, The Dutch Republic, 209–14. ¹⁵⁶ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 67. ¹⁵⁷ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 67. ¹⁵⁸ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 67. ¹⁵⁹ By contrast, William Segar’s Honor Military and Ciuill (1602), a text that attempted to resuscitate the ceremonial, martial rituals of aristocratic male identity, specifically barred merchants from participating in warfare due to their pursuit of “priuate profit” (8). ¹⁶⁰ As Smith argues in the classic statement from The Wealth of Nations (1776): “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages” (An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], I.ii.26–7).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

134

   

to the early modern brokerage system challenged traditional forms of social cohesion and reinforced emerging social relations that were defined by their mediated and abstracted character. Sovereignty took on a diffused quality as it was delegated to a class of deputies and military commanders, and this authority was dispersed even further due to the increasingly prominent role of captains as heads of their regiments. With deputies leading mercenary armies, the military community no longer replicated domestic social hierarchies, with regional aristocrats heading armies comprised of their tenants and retainers. The military regiment began to be organized according to the rules of capital. What linked this group was not place of birth, social position, or traditional feudal obligations but instead contractual bonds of labor. I will return to this issue in the final section of this chapter in my discussion of the division imposed between England’s domestic army, the county militias, and its foreign forces. As we will see, national identification assumed a greater importance in the context of overseas service, offsetting the residual influence of regional identities and neo-feudal social bonds. For the moment, though, I wish to emphasize the common logic of nationalism and capital as political ties and economic networks that proceed from similar rules of abstraction. As the nation’s traditional elites receded in prominence as the leaders of early modern armies, military ranks began to be constituted along bureaucratic divisions that no longer replicated domestic social hierarchies. Because it was an absent state authority that established grounds of distinction, networks of patronage and promotion derived not from local connections or bonds within the military camp but instead from an invisible paymaster and diplomatic paper trail. As military relations took on the mediated and abstracted character of state power, they also produced more fluid forms of social identification. Distanced from the stratification of domestic social hierarchies, military service could open up new possibilities of social mobility, “to raise a man from the Cart to be a Soueraigne Captaine,” as Thomas Trussell remarked.¹⁶¹ As Trussell’s word choice inadvertently reveals, the mediation inherent in the delegation of authority could enable a military agent to appropriate a portion of the state’s sovereignty. And, since social advancement through the military ranks offered a rare example of meritocracy, enabling a commoner to become an officer, this process also conferred authority on those unable to occupy positions of power in a domestic context.¹⁶² As David Trim has shown, the mutinies that occurred in English

¹⁶¹ Thomas Trussell, The Souldier Pleading His Owne Cause (1619), 10. ¹⁶² A number of military texts emphasized the humble origins of generals, thereby asserting a meritocratic basis to military hierarchies: see, for example, Garrard, The Arte of Warre, 337; Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes, 35–6; Robert Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres (1598), 9. Among military writers, only Thomas Digges, Leicester’s loyal assistant, insisted that generals should be of noble birth (Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: the Books and the Practice [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965], 56).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

135

armies in the Low Countries were “frequently expressions of the old, aristocratic social order,” as more elite members of extraterritorial forces attempted to assert their traditional prerogatives against the encroachments of civilian and military officials hailing from lower social backgrounds.¹⁶³ One of the other prominent venues for the social advancement of new men was, of course, state administration itself, a role exemplified by commoners such as Burghley, Walsingham, and Robert Cecil who successively occupied the position of Principal Secretary. In his retrospective discussion of the Elizabethan court, Sir Robert Naunton identified two chief factions divided in terms of their military versus administrative role, a militia and a togati, closely approximating the French classifications of a noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe.¹⁶⁴ Because Leicester and Essex served as representatives of this former group, studies of Elizabethan militarism have often assumed that this faction responded to their increasingly marginal position in a centralized state bureaucracy by resuscitating a nostalgic image of a feudal, martial aristocracy.¹⁶⁵ But just as the brokerage system of early modern warfare caused these leaders to adapt and assume an entrepreneurial position, so too the bureaucratic state’s growing authority over the conduct of war forced military leaders to become administrators rather than warriors. In representing the state and extending state power abroad, aristocratic military leaders assumed the character of the state with its distinctively mediated, abstracted features. When discussing the experience of a campaign, military treatises acknowledged that commanders, like the state they represented, were conspicuous in their absence. Sir John Smythe noted the extent to which leaders seemed indifferent to the fate of their troops while other texts proposed strategies for manufacturing camaraderie in order to build morale: in language that anticipates Shakespeare’s Henry V, they advised that the general should seek his men’s counsel, lodge with them, and even learn some of their first names.¹⁶⁶ The official who filled the power vacuum opened up by the relative absence of military superiors was the regimental Captain. Because he was the figure chiefly responsible for distributing pay to his men, the Captain had a visible, material power over the daily lives of common soldiers, and consequently occupied a central role in networks of administration and economic exchange. In outlining the duties of the Captain, military treatises attempted to normalize his prominence by adapting his behavior to the social codes of his superiors. One sees this at work, for example, with recommendations that captains should adopt aristocratic ¹⁶³ Trim, “Ideology, Greed, and Social Discontent,” 53. ¹⁶⁴ McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 10. ¹⁶⁵ For discussion of the continued resonance of chivalric values in early modern military culture, see McCoy, Rites of Knighthood; David J.B. Trim, ed., The Chivalric Ethos and the Military Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture. ¹⁶⁶ Smythe, Certain Discourses, ***1v. For these recommendations, see Sutcliffe, Practice, 46; Garrard, Arte of Warre, 144; Cruso, Militarie Instructions, 9. (Cruso’s advice is directed to regimental Captains.)

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

136

   

codes of openhanded liberality. For Barnabe Riche, a good captain need not be someone possessing inherent personal virtues but instead one of “reuenue,”¹⁶⁷ who “hath money in his purse, and will disburse it to purchase a companie of Souldiours.”¹⁶⁸ Sir Roger Williams similarly advises captains that their “hearts must be open vnto the multitude, and liberall to confesse good deserts as well as with their purses.”¹⁶⁹ The distribution of pay was an inherently mercenary aspect of the captain’s role, for he was allowed to pocket up to 6 percent of the funds earmarked for his regiment. He could add to this income by listing “dead pays,” keeping dead soldiers on the books and, in other cases, adding fictitious names to the rolls as a way of collecting additional pay. Although the state was well aware of this practice, little could be done to curb these abuses, which were recognized as offering a needed reward to offset the poor terms of service.¹⁷⁰ In Barnabe Riche’s A martial conference, the figure of Captain Pill justifies skimming from his soldiers’ pay, noting that “he that hath an office and cannot gain by it, is a foole.”¹⁷¹ By placing these words in the mouth of Pill, the militia captain who has never set foot abroad, Riche locates the mercenary economy of the Elizabethan army closer to home rather than at the safe distance of England’s undeclared wars on the Continent. Pill nonetheless critiques the excessive waste of continental campaigns, finding that the English leadership in the Low Countries has been “too prodigal of their souldiours liues.”¹⁷² His interlocutor, the veteran Captain Skill, counters this accusation by defending the effectiveness of modern military innovations like siege warfare.¹⁷³ Ironically, it is the comically inept and inexperienced Pill, a conservative clinging to antiquated notions of combat, who perceptively diagnoses that the horrific casualty rate in English campaigns stemmed from the inability of leaders to recognize the brutal effectiveness of new military technologies. In a twisted inversion of the Erasmian tag, “dulce bellum inexpertis,” the experience of war along with the expertise it confers, as represented by Captain Skill, is what provides a defense of militarism that silences any possible critique, thereby making war once again respectable. One of the most trenchant critiques of the mercenary motives of English captains came from a figure whose social position closely resembled that of Riche’s Captain Pill: Sir John Smythe. Smythe’s Certain Discourses . . . Militarie (1590) was suppressed by official order, with its published copies called in, due to his accusation that English military leaders treated their men as cannon fodder and sent them ¹⁶⁷ Riche, Faultes Faults and nothing else but Faultes (1606), O4. ¹⁶⁸ Riche, A martial conference, B1v. ¹⁶⁹ Williams, A Briefe discourse of Warre (1590), in Works, 5. ¹⁷⁰ Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 147. ¹⁷¹ Riche, A martial conference, B2. Shakespeare’s second tetralogy offers a similar critique, both in terms of Falstaff ’s abuse of his position as recruiter (2 Henry IV, 3.2) as well as Pistol’s plans to profit from his role as Captain and “sutler,” supplier of provisions to the camp (Henry V, 2.1.111–12). ¹⁷² Riche, A martial conference, G3. ¹⁷³ Riche, A martial conference, G3v.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

137

on pointless missions.¹⁷⁴ In addition to accusing them of incompetence, Smythe also speculated that captains were motivated to kill off their men so as to retain their pay, while other commanders used these battles to rid themselves of disgruntled soldiers.¹⁷⁵ For Smythe, a strict adherence to classical models of military discipline provided the only means for curtailing the mercenary economy of warfare and ensuring that sovereignty could be successfully transferred to deputies stationed overseas.¹⁷⁶ Although a concern for discipline is a given feature in early modern military treatises, these texts revealingly correlate discipline with the underlying economic and political implications of war. The first of the four “paradoxes” in Thomas Digges’s text, for example, addressed the unprecedented conditions enabling nations to gain rather than lose wealth through war. Digges attributes the source of this profit to military discipline, which can maximize the productive capacities of an army’s labor while minimizing its costs.¹⁷⁷ Discipline induces soldiers to fight for years without pay or for subsistence wages on behalf of a state that might not even acknowledge their existence. The state occupies the role of the mercenary, not the soldiers in its pay. Indeed, the English state profited in a direct way from its soldiers in the Low Countries. From 1594 onwards, the supply of English soldiers to the Dutch States General became a formalized financial transaction, with the English state receiving a payment of £4000 for every 1000 recruits it sent to the region.¹⁷⁸ In 1592, while Elizabeth and her Privy Council were at the estate of the Norris family at Rycote, as discussed in the next section, Henri de Navarre had offered similar terms, agreeing to fund an additional 1000 English troops in Brittany, above the number already committed and funded by the English state, contingent on how many could be impressed into service in England, of course.¹⁷⁹ Although the English state essentially sold its troops to mercenary service, the pretense was nonetheless maintained that the troops were kept under English authority: the forces impressed into service in Brittany in 1592, for instance, were nominally led by Sir John Norris. After all, as Matthew Sutcliffe noted, military discipline was far easier to impose on subjects than mercenaries. The affective ties of the nation provided a “straiter bond,” so that “Wanting of pay or part of their pay . . . they notwithstanding continue constant, and loyal.”¹⁸⁰ Demonstrating that this loyalty was not taken for granted, however, the English state made it a policy to withhold the full pay due to soldiers. Instead of being paid every six months, troops were given “imprests” or “lendings,” subsistence wages that would merely keep them

¹⁷⁴ ¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷⁸ ¹⁷⁹

Smythe, Certain Discourses, ***2. ¹⁷⁵ Smythe, Certain Discourses, ***2v. Smythe, Certain Discourses, **3v. ¹⁷⁷ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 7. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 228; Nolan, “Militarization”: 396. CSP, Domestic, 1591–1594, 265–6. ¹⁸⁰ Sutcliffe, Practice, 71.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

138

   

alive and fighting in the hope of gaining their full wages.¹⁸¹ In the perverse logic of this system, conscripted soldiers, having been forcibly impressed into service, were “lent” only a portion of the pittance owed them by the state, making impoverished soldiers quite literally indebted to the very state that had expatriated them. Whereas Barnabe Riche had aligned the interests of veteran soldiers with the state, other military writers offered remarkably candid critiques of English policy. These writers supported their arguments by drawing on their professional expertise as former mercenary soldiers. In the process, they demystified military service by evaluating it in reference to social relations and labor conditions. Humphrey Barwick, who had served in English, Spanish, and French armies, analyzed his experience solely in economic terms: Spain, he observed, offers substantial pensions, albeit not in his own case, while the French army had the best pay rates, “I haue been offered in Fraunce better pay and greater aduancement than euer I had or desired.”¹⁸² As Barwick generalized the condition of the mercenary as intrinsic to the economy of war, he notably omitted any reference to the benefits of fighting for one’s country or remaining loyal to the state. For writers like Barwick, the mercenary terms of military service endowed their labor with a degree of agency, and the extent of their mobility and autonomy was proportionate to their ability to confer their labor power on the open market of continental warfare. “Here is every man for himself,” Sir Roger Williams observed, leaving Dutch service in 1582.¹⁸³ As a result of the contentiousness of his tenure in Dutch service, Williams advised his readers not to align their own interests with those of their employer: “I would wish all men of warre, an they can to be in al strange Princes or estates debts, rather than they in yours.”¹⁸⁴ If the state was indebted to a soldier, Williams joked, it is unlikely that he will ever be paid. Even as these writers offered a critique by drawing on the implications of their experience as mercenaries, they nonetheless refrained from open comparisons to domestic politics. Williams and Barwick, for instance, reflected on the practices of other states, not the underlying mercenary logic of England’s own regime. Indeed, like Gascoigne in his conclusion to The fruites of Warre, they consciously avoided any direct political commentary.¹⁸⁵ Sutcliffe, for example, acknowledged that he

¹⁸¹ Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 143; Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 169. Similarly, among Spanish forces in the Low Countries, a general mutiny was prevented only because soldiers held out hope for receiving their wages in full (Parker, Army of Flanders, 195). ¹⁸² Humphrey Barwick, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of all Manuall Weapons of Fire (1591), B1v. ¹⁸³ Evans, intro., The Works of Sir Roger Williams, xix. ¹⁸⁴ Williams, A Briefe discourse of Warre, in Works, 46. ¹⁸⁵ In comments reprimanding Barwick, Sir John Smythe limited military expertise to a gentlemanly officer class and scolded Barwick for criticizing his military and social superiors in print, claiming that “a nobleman well brought up is able to attain to more knowledge in the art and science military in one year than a private soldier in seven” (Hale, Smythe, lxxiv). Smythe assumed that his own class position granted him the prerogative to critique his “fellows,” and he indeed stipulated that he was not laying blame on soldiers who had served in the Low Countries but only those in “the highest places of office &

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

139

drew on foreign histories for models and precedents, rather than “domesticall examples,” so as not to do “hurt to any particulars.”¹⁸⁶ Despite his own trenchant remarks, Digges similarly insisted, “My meaning is not to call in question any priuate persons of our Nation, for any errors committed in forraine countries.”¹⁸⁷ Through his disclaimer, Digges tacitly acknowledged the extent to which continental warfare remained excluded from popular consciousness as well as state policy. As Barnabe Riche commented, “souldiours must learne of other men to speak for them selues, for there is no body else that will.”¹⁸⁸ Recent critical work by Alan Shepard, among others, has shown that late Elizabethan England was in the midst of a period of militarization, a ubiquitous concern for national security in which the nation was placed on a constant war footing.¹⁸⁹ Through the growth of military administration at the local level, one of the chief ways that state power could spread itself through each region of the country, “military affairs were injected into national life at the lowest levels, where they touched the life of almost every citizen.”¹⁹⁰ The unprecedented textual production of military treatises further contributed to the militarization of the population, widely disseminating knowledge of military ranks, strategy, and even drills and battle formations to a reading public. But these texts were not mouthpieces for state policy, and often dissented from the state on issues such as military conscription. Contrary to Anthony Giddens’s conclusion that early modern military science created a limited audience of professional “experts,” and differentiated this group from “a de-skilled population of ordinary soldiery,” these texts in fact addressed common soldiers along with a broader public, and their dissemination of military knowledge had the effect of inculcating a critical stance toward state military policy.¹⁹¹ The tangential position that English soldiers occupied in their professional lives as mercenary soldiers was paralleled by the skeptical, analytical position assumed by soldier-writers in their published texts. More military texts were published in the early seventeenth century, when England was officially at peace, than during the wartime Elizabethan years, a fact that reflects how these texts did not operate in a crudely mimetic fashion, spreading support for the militarization of English culture.¹⁹² These Elizabethan writings charge to commaund our English nation in those parts” who had corrupted military discipline through their own greed and contempt for common soldiers (Certain Discourses, B1v). Revealingly, authorities did not differentiate Smythe’s defense from Barwick’s critique, and suppressed the publication of both texts. ¹⁸⁶ Sutcliffe, Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes, C2, C2v. ¹⁸⁷ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 69. ¹⁸⁸ Riche, A Path-way to Military Practise (1587), B2v. ¹⁸⁹ Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers, 6. Related discussions include De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War and Cahill, Unto the Breach. ¹⁹⁰ Nolan, “Militarization”: 412. ¹⁹¹ Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 113. ¹⁹² As John Nolan notes, fifty-eight military books were published from 1560–1599, whereas ninetyfive titles appeared from 1600–43 (“Militarization”: 403n). For a listing of published works, see Maurice Cockle, A Bibliography of Military Books up to 1642 (London: Holland Press, 1957).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

140

   

possessed an oppositional potential shared by their Jacobean and Caroline successors, texts that often advocated a policy of continental military intervention at odds with state policy.¹⁹³ Even as the model of a citizen soldier assumed an increasingly prominent domestic presence, this role was separated from the context of overseas military service. England’s multiple and ongoing foreign wars were consequently distanced from civil society and the consciousness of daily life. As military writers drew on their own claims of expertise to support their critiques, their professionalism also served to set them apart from the society they served. Most of the English, Geoffrey Gates lamented in his Defence of Militarie Profession (1579), “despise the profession of Armes.”¹⁹⁴ As the military historian C.G. Cruickshank notes, “by Elizabeth’s time war had become a profession, and could no longer be regarded as a mere appendage to the everyday life of the citizen.”¹⁹⁵ Military service was becoming the province of a specialized class of subjects, and, since their service usually entailed long periods of expatriation, it was an experience that only widened the gap between professional soldiers and English society. Over a thirty-year period, for example, the poet-soldier Thomas Churchyard participated in nine campaigns in France, Scotland, Ireland, and the Low Countries, and at various times served England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch States General.¹⁹⁶ Someone like Churchyard, absent from England for most of his adult life and employed by several different states, challenges the parameters of English identity. Early modern commentators were well aware of the implications stemming from the creation of a professional class of soldiers. Machiavelli, for example, speculated that professional soldiers, separated from civil society during years of ongoing warfare, would be transformed through this experience and consequently removed from “all ciuill use.”¹⁹⁷ Even while escalating the war against Irish rebels, Lord Mountjoy had emphasized that he sought “not to make the warres my occupation.”¹⁹⁸ Recognizing that the respectable avenues for social advancement resided at court and not in overseas service, Mountjoy was ¹⁹³ For discussion of these later texts, see Netzloff, “Sir Francis Drake’s Ghost: Piracy, Cultural Memory, and Spectral Nationhood,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates: The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650 (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–50. ¹⁹⁴ Geoffrey Gates, The Defence of Militarie Profession (1579), 43. ¹⁹⁵ Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 286. ¹⁹⁶ For an overview of Churchyard’s career, see Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard and G. Geoffrey Langsam, Martial Books and Tudor Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 150–4. ¹⁹⁷ Niccolò Machiavelli, The Arte of warre (1560), A1. Machiavelli turns to the issue of mercenaries later in the text, claiming that states who resort to mercenary labor remain free for less than forty years, as ambitious citizens can bribe and enlist these military figures to claim power; the mercenaries also pose a threat of seizing power themselves, so that a city “feareth at one instant the straunger, whiche it hireth, and the Citezein” (Machiavelli, The Arte of warre, D2). In The Prince, Machiavelli emphasized the central role of military training and participation in the militia as part of a citizen’s role in a republic, and cast as the antithesis of this model the state’s hiring of foreign mercenaries: “anyone who relies upon mercenaries to defend his territories will never have a stable or secure rule” (XII.43). ¹⁹⁸ Mountjoy, from a 1601 letter to Robert Cecil, included in Moryson, Itinerary 2: 427.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

141

well aware of the need to complete his tour in Ireland as quickly as possible. The tenuous cultural position of expatriated professional soldiers was exacerbated by their general inability to represent themselves. As Mountjoy had recognized, a marked feature of these state agents was their subsequent disappearance from networks of power, a process reproduced through an absence from literary forms of cultural production.

2.4 Foreign Service and Domestic Households: Rycote and Penshurst Despite the relative absence of extraterritorial state agents from textual representation, foreign service had a profound impact on the imagination of domestic English culture. These transnational contexts were typically kept at a distance from configurations of the domestic, not only in terms of national culture but also in relation to the workings of the private world of domestic households. A canonical example of this dynamic is Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (ca. 1611). Jonson presents the Sidney estate as the embodiment of an ideal of both domesticity and Englishness while ignoring the fact that its current head, Sir Robert Sidney, often served abroad: on diplomatic missions to Scotland and France, on military campaigns in the Low Countries, and, most extensively, as Governor of the English garrison at the strategic Dutch port of Flushing (Vlissingen) from 1588 to 1616. In Jonson’s poem, Sidney’s foreign service does not disrupt the continuity of the family estate, and foreign affairs remain at a distance from English history and at odds with its constituent parts: the region, the estate, and, especially, the family. As Jonson famously concludes, in contrast to rival estates “their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.”¹⁹⁹ But when Jonson was in residence at Penshurst in 1611, the likely time of the poem’s composition, Robert Sidney was not home, but instead tending to matters stemming from Dutch service at court, initially while in London and later while following the court on progress.²⁰⁰ Several months later, he would once again be stationed in Flushing, one of several of his extended tours abroad.²⁰¹

¹⁹⁹ Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin, 1988), l. 102. All further references will be cited in-text. Contrary to Jonson’s image of Penshurst, the wider public knowledge of Robert Sidney’s extraterritorial military service is reflected in the pamphlets reporting his role in the siege of Turnhout; as with Gascoigne’s report on the Sack of Antwerp, these accounts were published in London within two weeks of the events (Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 177). ²⁰⁰ David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 179. ²⁰¹ Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 165; Sidney’s letters from Flushing resumed in August 1612 (174).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

142

   

Many of the most influential readings of Jonson’s poem have nonetheless bracketed off these foreign contexts from their analysis of the models of domesticity constructed around Penshurst. Don Wayne’s book-length contextual study of the poem, for instance, does not make a single reference to Robert Sidney’s career abroad.²⁰² Jonson’s poem is haunted by the changing social landscape of rural England in a period of agrarian capitalism: the walls of Penshurst are “reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; / There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them down” (ll. 46–7).²⁰³ But if the poem registers the presence of more local and immediately evident cultural changes, it also obliquely reveals the impact of the Sidney family’s long history of diplomatic and military service abroad. The most notable tree in the adjoining woods, set at the “great birth” of Sir Philip Sidney (l. 14), serves as a visible reminder of the toll of England’s foreign wars, one whose growth charts the receding memory of Philip’s life. It also marks the accidental nature of Robert Sidney’s title over Penshurst, secured only through the death of his elder brother in the Low Countries, and tenuously held during a protracted legal battle with his cousin Robert Dudley over the inheritance of the Leicester title. The rivalry between Sidney, the governor of an English cautionary town in the Netherlands, and Dudley, an exile in Florence in service to the Duke of Tuscany, exemplifies the extent to which the domestic space of Penshurst is inextricably bound up with transcultural contexts of exile, migration, and service. Foreign service transformed the lives of the members of the Sidney household. Whereas Jonson’s poem celebrates the “Lady’s oak” under which Barbara Gamage gave birth to one of their children (l. 19), their eldest son William was in fact born in the Low Countries, a complication which later required parliamentary decree to grant him naturalized status in England.²⁰⁴ The Sidney heir was named after William of Orange, at whose home the Sidney household resided at the time, with the Princess of Orange serving as his godmother. These Anglo-Dutch alliances were celebrated in a poem by William Gamage, who cast the newborn William Sidney as a child of the Netherlands rather than England: “Zealand did blaze thy birth,” holding the promise, Gamage adds, of future transcultural links between the Sidney and Orange families.²⁰⁵ Because Robert Sidney spent as much time in the Low Countries as England during these years, each period of service forced the Sidneys to either distribute their children among friends or reluctantly move the household to Flushing. The trepidation over traveling with the children was confirmed with the death of their second son, Henry, during one stay in

²⁰² Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). ²⁰³ The classic reading of the poem in this context is Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 32. ²⁰⁴ Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester (1563–1626) (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 183. ²⁰⁵ Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 31.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

143

Flushing.²⁰⁶ Their daughter Mary, better known later in life as Lady Mary Wroth, stayed for three periods of her childhood in the Low Countries, an early acquaintance with European politics that later served as an important backdrop to her Urania.²⁰⁷ Jonson was well acquainted with the Low Countries himself, having served as a volunteer with English forces in the region under Sir Francis Vere from 1591–92.²⁰⁸ Jonson’s canonical image of the Sidney household offers a counterpart to a much lesser-known example of the literary production of the household: an anonymous domestic entertainment performed for Elizabeth I on her progress of 1592 by the Norrises, one of the most important military families in the late Elizabethan period. A comparison of the entertainment staged at the Norris estate at Rycote with Jonson’s depiction of Penshurst illustrates the cultural impact of foreign travel, migration, and service on the literary representation as well as everyday life of the domestic household. The forms of absence and loss produced out of a period of militarization and cultural expansion—as a result of which Robert Sidney as well as all seven children of the Norris family are quite literally not home—lead to a compensatory emphasis on the household as a metonym for a national community. But whereas Jonson’s poem uses this backdrop as the inspiration for constructing a persuasive fiction of English domesticity, the Rycote entertainment offers a mournful reckoning of the personal as well as cultural toll of an increasingly militarized society’s foreign entanglements. The Rycote entertainment is a rare example of military agents shaping their literary representation. The performances took place during Elizabeth’s royal progress of 1592 and her stay at Rycote from September 28 to October 2. Significantly, Elizabeth was accompanied on this visit by members of the Privy Council, and in addition to being entertained with the performances they sat down for council meetings in which the main order of business was to review the impressment of troops for foreign service conducted at the local level by officials such as Sir Henry Norris in his duties as Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire and Berkshire.²⁰⁹ The form of the entertainment is unusual in that it gives a large speaking part to its host rather than confining the performed roles to professional actors. We can see this as a reflection of the extent to which Norris and his family are attempting to shape the terms of their representation and make a personal appeal directly to the Queen. The performances staged for the Queen take the serialized form of the presentation of a series of letters arriving at Rycote from ²⁰⁶ Hay, Life of Robert Sidney, 183. ²⁰⁷ Mary Sidney Wroth resided in Flushing for several months in 1590, 1592, and 1597. For extended discussion, see Hannay, Mary Sidney, xxvii–xxix and 29 and ff. ²⁰⁸ Riggs, Ben Jonson, 17–18. For a fuller account of Jonson’s service, see Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87–90. Jonson wrote an epigram to Sir Francis’s brother, Sir Horace Vere (Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, 64). ²⁰⁹ Nolan, Norreys, 198–9. A letter of September 30 delegated authority to Sir Henry Norris for finding additional recruits to join his son’s expedition to Brittany (SP 12/243/36).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

144

   

the Norris children serving abroad: in these episodes, a messenger associated with the cultural location of their service arrives, reads a letter from the absent agent, and presents gifts to their sovereign. Masques and other court entertainments provide a fitting medium for representing and mythologizing monarchical sovereignty. But this entertainment challenges this framework due to the fact that the Norris family are defining the terms of the entertainment not only by staging it at their home but also more directly through their involvement in the composition of the text as well as its performance. It is a text, in other words, concerned not with sovereignty but state service, and the agency of the Norrises in shaping the entertainment is indicative of the considerable authority they take on in extending state power abroad. In his discussion of the Jacobean masque, Jean-Christophe Agnew notes the connections between parallel innovations in theatrical machinery and military technology, suggestively commenting that the form shows “a symbolic assertion of sovereignty in which the mercenaries had changed from soldiers to players.”²¹⁰ The entertainment reverses this process, transforming actors back to soldiers. It also repositions the focus of the masque form; shifting its attention away from any spectacular reenactment of monarchical sovereignty, it instead offers a theatrical confirmation of the loyalty of the Norris family as subjects and state agents. Offsetting the implication that Lord Norris and his sons are merely a family of mercenaries, an arms dealer and soldiers of fortune, the entertainment attests to their loyalty by emphasizing the toll that service has exacted on them. Addressing his Queen, Norris pledges the lives of his sons in Elizabeth’s service, “that their lives maye be imployed wholy in your service, and their deathes, bee their vowes sacrifice.”²¹¹ The Norris children are reduced to an instrumental position, existing solely in terms of their ability to extend state power abroad. Their service is also rendered as a kind of suicide pact, one that commits them “wholy” to the state and obliges them to sacrifice nothing less than their lives. Lord Norris’s declaration takes on an added, tragic weight when read in hindsight: of the Norrises’ six sons, five would be dead by the end of the decade, casualties of England’s ongoing foreign wars on the Continent and in Ireland. Once committed to foreign service, the Norris children never returned home. The structure of the entertainment, with messengers arriving at Rycote bearing gifts and letters ostensibly sent from the Norrises’ sons, provides a mutually reassuring fantasy for hosts and honored guest. The impressive expense of the ²¹⁰ Agnew, Worlds Apart, 146. ²¹¹ The text of the Rycote entertainment is published in Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980), 47–52; quote is from 48. All further references will be cited in-text. The entertainment was first published as part of the text Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse, at the Right Honorable the Lady Russels, at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lord Norris, at Ricorte [sic] (Oxford, 1592). The text of the entertainment is also included in John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Elizabeth Goldring et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3:617–21.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

145

gifts conferred to the Queen, like a gold dart encrusted with diamonds delivered from Ireland (48), recasts Elizabeth’s debilitating military expenses as bringing a profitable return for the crown. By having such figures as an Irish lackey and a Flemish skipper offer the gifts (48–49), the presentations stage a fantasy of national enemies surrendering to the Queen’s forces and meekly bestowing their riches in homage, an elision of the ongoing resistance to English intervention in Ireland, the Low Countries, and France. In casting such figures in instrumental and deferential roles as servants and messengers, these resolutely Catholic populations are incorporated in an English polity through relations of fealty and clientage. The Norris brothers were the agents responsible for imposing English authority abroad in much more coercive terms, as reflected in the most notorious examples: in 1573, Sir John Norris led the English force that massacred more than 200 civilian followers of Sir Brian MacPhelim O’Neill in Ulster.²¹² Two years later, after a garrison of Ulster Scots at Rathlin Island surrendered, Norris ordered the execution of a group of 200 people, including civilians, and then led his troops in killing 300–400 others hiding in the island’s caves, including the entire family of the rebel Scots-Irish leader, Somhairle Buidhe Mac Domhnaill (Sorley Boy McDonnell).²¹³ The presentation of gifts minimizes the state’s reliance on the labor of its agents: despite the fact that these military representatives are integral in extending state power abroad, the entertainment reorients their interests back to the domestic space, ensuring that their primary loyalties remain at home. As the riches accrued from foreign wars return to England, the agents responsible for this extraction conveniently disappear, as do any lingering questions regarding their own potentially mercenary motives. The Flemish skipper, granting Elizabeth the keys to the strategic garrison at Ostend on behalf of its governor, Sir Edward Norris, assures her that “the wards are made of true harts, treachery cannot counterfeit the Key, nor treason her selfe picke the locke” (49). The declaration of fidelity assumes added pertinence in light of the well-known instances of English captains selling the Dutch garrisons they were defending to Spanish forces. In some cases, as with William Stanley or Rowland Yorke, Gascoigne’s companion in his voyage to the Low Countries, English Catholic captains chose to align themselves along confessional and ideological lines.²¹⁴ More often, though, lack of provisions from their

²¹² Nolan, Norreys, 26. ²¹³ Nolan, Norreys, 30. As Matthew Woodcock notes, when Thomas Churchyard recounted the history of English colonialism in Ulster in the 1570s in his A general rehearsal of warres (1579), he omitted any reference to either the O’Neill or MacDonnell massacres (Thomas Churchyard, 180). ²¹⁴ A former ally of Leicester, Sir William Stanley and the Irish troops in his command defected to the Spanish and handed over the garrison at Deventer in 1587. Yorke served under Leicester, abandoned his patron for Spanish service, rejoined English forces, only to transfer his garrison at Zutphen to Spanish control in 1587. For discussion, see Albert J. Loomie, The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), 129–81 and Adams, “A Patriot for Whom?: Stanley, York and Elizabeth’s Catholics”: 46–50.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

146

   

state sponsors forced the captains to exchange control over their forts for enough money and supplies to survive the length of their tour. In 1588, conditions at the garrison of Ostend were so dire that soldiers went above the head of their commander, Sir Edward Norris, and appealed directly to the Queen for relief. After nothing was done to alleviate their conditions, the soldiers mutinied; in response, Norris implemented martial law and executed thirteen participants.²¹⁵ The stark contrast between this instance and the negotiations and redress of grievances that often followed from mutinies in the Spanish Army of Flanders, as discussed earlier, is not only a reflection of timing, as the mutiny occurred in the state of emergency following the Armada, but also the precariousness of Norris’s own position governing a vulnerable garrison in the midst of enemy territory. In enacting the return of the Norris sons, even if solely in the mediated form of letters and gifts, the entertainment provides a comforting fantasy to its hosts, the Norris family. Lord Norris’s initial speech to the Queen is a remarkably personal address given the formality of an entertainment staged for the itinerant court. This degree of candor was made possible by the Norrises’ long and intimate connection to the Queen: Sir Henry Norris, Lord Norris’s father, was executed alongside Anne Boleyn on trumped-up charges of adultery, an event that helped forge a longstanding connection between the families. One rumor even suggested that Henry Norris, not Henry Tudor, was Elizabeth’s father. This imagined consanguinity was closely linked to the estate at Rycote itself, where Elizabeth had stayed following her release from the Tower in 1554 and to which she returned several times throughout her reign.²¹⁶ Through these visits, she developed a close bond with Lady Margery Norris, one of her few lifelong female friends, to whom she gave the pet name “the crow,” in reference to the latter’s dark hair.²¹⁷ Norris’s speech to the Queen invokes this shared history, calling attention to the fact that the Rycote which Elizabeth visited in 1592 was an empty nest. Drawing on the implications of his wife’s nickname, Norris reveals the personal toll exacted by the absence of their children, noting, “I know not whether it be affection, or fondnes, but the crowe thinketh her owne birds the fairest, because to her they are dearest” (48). After having recently heard a rumor of one of her son’s deaths, he notes, Lady Margery’s heart has become as black as her hair (48). Through this bittersweet banter, the Norrises, having stood by Elizabeth for more than half a century, tease out what

²¹⁵ William Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 127. ²¹⁶ Nolan, Norreys, 9; Wilson, Entertainments, 51. The Norrises previously hosted Elizabeth for extended visits in 1566, 1568, and 1570 (John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Goldring et al., 4:60). ²¹⁷ For an expanded discussion of Margery Norris, see Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 83–5.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

147

might be unthinkable for them: What are the limits to loyalty? At what point is the price of sacrifice too high?²¹⁸ In discourses of nationhood, the equation of nation and family has become axiomatic. In such conventional usage, the model of the family serves as a comforting frame of reference through which to naturalize the abstract, anonymous counters of the nation, bestowing on it the immediacy and affective bond of familial ties. Here, though, the familial metaphor stands at odds with its national analogue. Service to the nation brings about the dispersal of the Norris family, the emptying of the country house, and the threatened—and ultimately confirmed— loss of the family’s successors. The Norrises were one of the most accomplished families in Elizabethan England, a status that derived from their military service, particularly that of Sir John Norris, one of the Norris sons, whom Andrew Hadfield describes as “the most trusted soldier of the Queen.”²¹⁹ Sir John Norris’s prominence is reflected in the dedicatory sonnet that Spenser addresses to him prefacing The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s acquaintance with the Norris family dated back to 1569, when he was paid to relay a message from Sir Henry Norris to the Queen.²²⁰ In Ireland, Spenser worked directly under Sir John Norris during the latter’s tenure as the President of Munster, and the two were in fact neighbors, as the younger Norris lived in a recently confiscated estate near to Spenser’s home at Kilcolman. As Hadfield suggests in his recent biography of Spenser, in the early years of the Munster plantation, Sir John Norris and his successor, his brother Thomas, “effectively ruled the province alone.”²²¹ Given this degree of autonomy, something that was unobtainable in England, particularly for a supernumerary son, foreign service was therefore not necessarily a kind of exile from home. William Camden remarked on Sir John Norris’s unusual request to extend his service in Ireland, seeing it as an example of “the cunning of militarie men, who are pleased that warre be drawne out at length, knowing they are no longer esteemed then they are of use.”²²² As John Nolan points out, the Norrises disappeared from subsequent histories of the Elizabethan period due to the fact that the family line ended within a generation.²²³ The eldest son, William, had died in Ireland in 1579. Confirming Lady Norris’s prediction of looming tragedy, the youngest son, Maximilian, was killed in the Brittany campaign led by his brother Sir John in 1593, just months

²¹⁸ The Norrises were quite literally indebted to their monarch: at the time of the performance, they were unable to mortgage their lands, owned by the crown, in order to finance the debts accrued by their sons during their service (Kolkovich, Elizabethan Country House Entertainment, 78). The entertainment can therefore be seen as part of an effort to emphasize the toll of their service in order to appeal to Elizabeth for financial relief. ²¹⁹ Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 130n. ²²⁰ Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 130n. ²²¹ Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 228n. ²²² William Camden, Annales, or, The History of the Most Renowned and Virtuous Princesse Elizabeth (1635 ed.), 453. ²²³ Nolan, Norreys, 245, 241.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

148

   

after the entertainment performed for the Queen.²²⁴ Sir John, the best known of the siblings, General of English forces in the Netherlands and France, died in Ireland in 1597. His brother Thomas, John’s deputy in Ireland and later his successor as Lord President of Munster, died from injuries in Ireland in 1599, the same year that a fifth brother, Henry, was also killed in Elizabeth’s Irish war.²²⁵ In a remarkable document, Queen Elizabeth wrote to her old friend Margery Norris on September 22, 1597, following the death of her son John. Consoling her against the “flux of your immoderate greeving,” Elizabeth attempted to reinforce the congruence of losses to family and state: “nature Can haue stirred no more dolorous affection in you, as a mother for a deare sonne, then gratefulnes & memorie of his seruice past hath wrought in vs his soueraigne, apprehension of our misse, of so worthy a seruant.” Offsetting the loss of her son, she held out the promise of recompense to the surviving family members, assuring “you & yours, that are lefte, in valuinge all their faithfull, & honest indeuours.”²²⁶ In contrast to Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” which implies that Sir Robert Sidney can return from service overseas and resume his role as patriarch of his family seat, the Rycote entertainment offers a different assessment, acknowledging the fundamental ways that the domestic fortunes of the Norris family were irrevocably linked with England’s ongoing, overlooked foreign interventions. The militarization of English society was additionally accomplished through a cultural and familial process of masculinization. Despite the fact that the Norris family had gained possession of Rycote through Lady Margery Norris and matrilineal inheritance, the entertainment focuses solely on the subsequent military accomplishments of her sons, relegating Lady Norris, a dominant figure in her own right, to a position as mourner and passive witness. It is Lord Norris, presented as “an olde gentleman, sometimes a souldier,” who greets the Queen as host, not his wife. Denying a space for familial succession, the entertainment reflects how even the Norris women have been inserted into an economy of state service. The final presentation of a letter staged in the entertainment, which is performed the following day to mark Elizabeth’s departure, is said to arrive from the Norrises’ ²²⁴ The entertainment mentions that Sir John Norris had planned to be in attendance at Rycote for Elizabeth’s visit but was prevented due to his recent deployment in Brittany: his letter is referred to as coming “from the Sea coast” (50). A month later, on October 19, Norris was in fact still waiting to embark from Southampton, and wrote to Burghley requesting additional conscripts to make up for those who had run away from service (SP 12/43/144). ²²⁵ The only son who survived his tenure of overseas service and lived past Elizabeth’s reign was Sir Edward Norris, the governor of the English garrison at Ostend in Flanders, who was known to be exceptionally corrupt, even by the lax standards of English service in the Low Countries. In a similar example, Sir John Norris was later charged with corruption and recalled from his position as General of English forces in the Low Countries. These accusations may have been unfounded, and drummed up by Leicester and his assistant Thomas Digges in order to cover up their own inefficiency (Nolan, Norreys, 107); nonetheless, Norris’s characteristic loyalty to his family often did cross the line of nepotism, as shown in the number of positions he arranged for his younger brothers Henry and Thomas. ²²⁶ John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Goldring et al., 4:59–60.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

149

daughter Catherine, who is similarly living abroad, having accompanied her husband Sir Anthony Paulet, the Governor of Jersey (50). Married into another family of state agents, and daughter-in-law to a former Ambassador to France,²²⁷ her position speaks to the dissevering of foreign service from domestic culture. Home, for these state agents, is now elsewhere, in a diaspora of foreign service. State agents like the Norris children, even if they return, are also transformed by that experience, and bring something of the foreign with them into the seeming insularity of the domestic space. In the entertainment, Sir Thomas Norris’s message from Ireland, read by the figure of an Irish lackey, acknowledges that “I am a stranger in mine owne countrye, and almost unknown to my best frends, onely remembered by her Majestie” (48). Rendered alien through his service, and the distance from national culture it brings about, Thomas Norris is linked with the conspicuously Irish figure bearing his message: if he has not become Irish, he is, at the least, no longer English. The lackey notes his own cultural transformation by distinguishing his gift, “an Irish weapon,” from his own “English hearte” (49). In his inability to occupy a cultural location, the only position available for Norris, like his messenger, is an instrumental one as an agent of the state. Far from assuming a mercenary role, this reshaping of his identity forges a remarkably personalized affective bond with the Queen. Forgotten by the fraternal, corporate body that was his nation, and displaced from the maternal space of the family estate, Elizabeth is figured as the sole bearer of Norris’s memory. He has done the state some service, and only the Queen seems to know it. One form of service that Sir Thomas Norris indeed provided for his Queen was to protect her and the state from its own soldiers. In 1596, it was Norris who was sent to quell an uprising of rioting soldiers in Chester. In an instance of remarkably bad timing for the state, decommissioned English soldiers and deserters returning from Ireland had run into a mass of recently conscripted troops preparing for embarkation. Because the English state had prohibited news from Ireland throughout the late 1590s, the recruits were most likely hearing for the first time accurate reports concerning the condition of service in Ireland. As a result, they refused to board ship and began rioting throughout the city.²²⁸ In addition, the Rycote estate itself became the focal point of another large-scale protest that same year. The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596, a protest against enclosure and grain hoarding, culminated in an unsuccessful effort to seize the armory housed at Rycote, a cache of weapons that Lord Norris retained in his official capacity as Lord Lieutenant for the counties of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The protestors had targeted Norris for a reason. In addition to his post, which was ²²⁷ Amias Paulet, his son’s predecessor as Governor of Jersey, had also served as Mary Stuart’s jailor. On his embassy to France, see Octavius Ogle, ed., Copy -Book of Sir Amias Poulet’s [sic]Letters written during his Embassy to France, A.D. 1577 (London: J.B. Nichols, 1866). Sir Henry Norris had served as English ambassador to France from 1567–1570. ²²⁸ Nolan,Norreys, 229.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

150

   

responsible for organizing local militias and domestic defense, Norris engaged in a side-business, stockpiling arms that he bought with militia funds to resell to English foreign services.²²⁹ The leader of the Rising, Bartholomew Steere, had worked as a carpenter for Norris at Rycote, and he attempted to recruit two of Norris’s servants—his coachman, Henry Tanner, and carter, Thomas Ingolsdy— for transporting the seized armaments to London.²³⁰ Norris was apparently shocked that the perpetrators of this civil unrest had come from his own household, and that they had included his estate as their final and decisive raid on their progress to London.²³¹ In addition to his cache of weapons, another key reason why they singled out Norris was due to his notoriety for enclosing his lands. As Lord-Lieutenant, he had ignored petitions from a large group of forty to sixty desperate tenants earlier in 1596.²³² Following the arrest of rioters, the Privy Council clamped down on enclosing landlords in the region,²³³ but Norris escaped prosecution, most likely because of his political connections and role in apprehending and examining the rioters. After the conspirators were transported to London, the elder Norris recommended that torture be used to extract confessions. Although other leaders of the Rising were executed—symbolically, at Enslow Hill, the intended meeting point for a march to London—Steere disappears from the archives while still under questioning in Bridewell, where he most likely died, perhaps as an effect of torture.²³⁴ Juxtaposing these two events from the same year reflects on the complicated cultural position occupied by the Norris family: loyal state servants, if not the brutal instruments of state violence, but also mercenary profiteers, exploiting the degree of autonomy inherent in their deputized authority. In addition, I wish to highlight how both of the moments of social crisis arose at the cultural boundaries demarcating the domestic from the foreign: the riot erupting at the site of embarkation, the uprising targeting weapons earmarked for foreign troops. Both instances expose the domestic impact of the foreign frays that were typically kept at a distance from public debate and national consciousness. Significantly, Elizabeth’s visit to Rycote was punctuated with Privy Council meetings regarding troop impressments at the local level. During her stay, when she wasn’t being entertained by her hosts, Elizabeth directed the Lord Lieutenant of Kent to levy 150 men to supplement Sir John Norris’s forces in Brittany; the council put together a list of eleven other counties where recruits were to be levied; ²²⁹ Nolan,Norreys, 16–17, 207, 244. On Norris’s role in the 1596 Oxfordshire Rising, see John Walter, “A Rising of the People? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 90–143; Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 221–6; Richard Wilson, “ ‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 1–19. ²³⁰ Walter, “Rising,” 98, 100; SP 12/261/69; CSP, Domestic, 1595–1597, 323. Peter C. Herman includes the depositions of those apprehended for participating in the Rising in his edition of Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 161–7. ²³¹ Manning, Village Revolts, 226. ²³² SP 12/262/5; Walter, “Rising,” 98; Manning, Village Revolts, 221. ²³³ Walter, “Rising,” 132. ²³⁴ Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions, 90.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

151

and, immediately on her return from Rycote, she ordered Exchequer officers to direct payments for troops, noting that Henri de Navarre had offered to fund 1000 additional troops for the next two months.²³⁵ As mentioned earlier, one of the Norrises’ sons, Maximilian, would be killed in the Brittany expedition within months following the performance. Prior to his leadership of the campaign in Brittany, Sir John Norris was directly responsible for the impressment of troops to the Low Countries under the terms of the Treaty of Nonsuch. A series of Royal Proclamations in 1588–89 imposed martial law and a penalty of death for soldiers who disobeyed Norris, whether by avoiding impressment and not reporting for duty or later selling their supplies, and extended these punishments for any vagrants impersonating returning soldiers.²³⁶ As will be discussed further in the next section, by the final years of Elizabeth’s reign the effects of England’s multiple and ongoing foreign wars were brought home to transform many of the conventional registers of the domestic, disrupting traditional hierarchies of the family, estate, and region. These effects are palpably evident in the fate of the Norris family itself. Following the entertainment, and the subsequent deaths of Maximilian (1593), Sir John (1597), Sir Thomas (1599), and Henry (1599), the Norrises successfully lobbied Elizabeth to relieve their final remaining son, Sir Edward, from his post at Ostend.²³⁷ Given the fact that he left Ostend just prior to the legendary Spanish siege of the garrison that lasted nearly three years, from 1601 to 1604, this forced repatriation probably ensured his survival. Margery Norris died shortly thereafter in 1599, never having recovered from the immoderate grief noted in Elizabeth’s letter, followed by Sir Henry Norris’s own death in 1601, along with their remaining children, Catherine in 1602 and Sir Edward in 1603. In the Jacobean period, the sole grandson and surviving heir, Sir Francis Norris, advanced to the peerage as Earl of Berkshire through political connections and a politic marriage. But his character and ultimate fate reflect the ways in which the aggression and violence that defined the family’s collective successes in extraterritorial service could not be safely contained when transposed back to a domestic setting. After early travels on the Continent, he settled in for a political career, although one disrupted through outbursts of violence: quarrels, duels, even assaulting a fellow peer outside the House of Lords. In 1622, returning to the family seat at Rycote, he killed himself with a crossbow.²³⁸

²³⁵ CSP, Domestic, 1591–1594, 265–6. ²³⁶ Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume III: The Later Tudors (1588–1603) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 26–7, 32–3, 46–8. ²³⁷ See Elizabeth’s letter to the Norrises, September 6, 1599, in The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. G.B. Harrison (London: Cassell, 1968), 268. ²³⁸ For biographical accounts, see Nolan, Norreys as well as the entries in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: David J. Trim on Sir Edward (34–6) and Sir John (49–56); Susan Doran on Sir Henry Norris (40–2); and Judith Hudson Barry on Sir Thomas (65–7) (Volume 41; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

152

   

The end of the family line was closely followed with the erasure of the family seat, as the estate of Rycote was destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century.²³⁹ The subsequent disappearance of the Norris family from national memory was additionally effected through their absence from representation. Unlike the veterans of England’s extraterritorial wars discussed in the previous section, they did not draw on their expertise and enter the marketplace of print.²⁴⁰ As we have seen, narrative forced those writers to abstract from their experience, and print demanded a message to be communicated to a public. The Norrises seem largely devoid of reflection, and their primary concern remained a steadfast adherence to endogamous bonds with family as well as their adopted kin, their sovereign. Perhaps the complex itineraries of their service—from Ireland to the Low Countries, from Brittany and the French Wars of Religion to privateering incursions in Portugal—defy any easy translation to narrative form, as does the episodic, serialized nature of the skirmishes, sieges, and casual slaughters that collectively comprise their military experience. They are even deprived of dramatic death scenes—surely the most reliable of military narrative conventions. Not a single brother dies in battle, in a final tragic scene: Sir John Norris dies a private man, shortly after he was relieved of his post; his brother Sir Thomas, at his residence in Ireland, from wounds that had not been given medical treatment. The brothers die at a relatively young age, not with a bang but a whimper, as instruments of state violence untimely worn out through use. What narrative frames can be used to represent the history of the Norris family? One writer found an answer: Philip O’Sullivan Beare was an exile himself, an Irish Catholic who had fled Ireland during the Nine Years’ War and spent his career in the military service of Habsburg Spanish forces on the Continent. In 1621, he published a Latin text, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae, which offered a counternarrative to English histories of Ireland. In his memorable recounting of Sir John Norris’s death, worthy of being cited at length, Beare drew inspiration from the twenty-four-year period that had elapsed between the Ulster massacres and Norris’s untimely death, and created an account that restaged the tragic finale of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

²³⁹ In 2013, the Bodleian Libraries compiled a fascinating digital resource on the Rycote estate and Norris family, “Rediscovering Rycote: The History of a Lost Tudor Mansion”: see http://rycote. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. ²⁴⁰ The closest thing to first-person narratives of the Norris brothers’ service takes the form of Thomas Churchyard’s collection of accounts of Norris expeditions in A true discourse historicall, of the succeeding gouernours in the Netherlands, and the ciuill warres there (1602). Churchyard translates and condenses Emmanuel van Meteren’s history of the Low Countries and supplements this historical text with accounts of service drawn from English soldiers, although not from the Norrises themselves. Among the texts he includes is the account of a member of Sir John Norris’s expedition to Brittany in 1594, earlier published as Newes from Brest. A diurnal of al that Sir Iohn Norreis hath doone since his last ariuall in Britaine (1594). For discussion, see Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 110.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

153

The Presidency of Munster was left to Norris, and he filled this office for three years until he met a most extraordinary death. It is said that as he was amusing himself by night at Mallow, a person of black visage and garments suddenly entered the room, with whom Norris, leaving his game, retired into his bedroom, whence all witnesses were excluded except one boy, who concealed himself near the door and heard the conversation which is said to have been somewhat as follows: “It is time,” said the Black one, “for us to put the finishing touch to our plans.” “I don’t wish to do it,” said Norris, “until we have wound up the Irish War.” “On no account,” said the other, “will I wait longer than the appointed day which is now come.” Suddenly a great uproar was heard, attracted by which, those at play and the servants forced the door and burst into the room, when the Black one, who undoubtedly was the Devil, was nowhere to be found, but Norris was on his knees with his neck and shoulders so twisted that the top of his chest and his face were over his back. He was, however, still living and ordered the trumpeters and drummers to be called to sound his death-knell, and whilst they were clamouring, he died about midnight.²⁴¹

Beare has several details that mirror Marlowe’s play: the final feasting of his protagonist just prior to his time of judgment (5.1.6); a loyal servant, like Wagner, attending his master up to the end; remorse from the tragic figure that his end has come, as well as a bargaining for his time to be extended (5.2.138); a familiar rapport between the hero and his demonic collaborator; the demise at the toll of midnight (5.2.183); the off-stage business of the demons’ cataclysmic arrival to seize their victim (5.3.1); and the concluding spectacle of the mangled corpse (5.3.8).²⁴² Beare’s Marlovian account stages a demonic manifestation of what had amounted to a Faustian pact in the Norris entertainment, “that their lives maye be imployed wholy in your service, and their deathes, bee their vowes sacrifice” (48). In the Norris family’s collective suicide pact with their sovereign, they are relegated to an instrumental position as the agents of state violence; their tragic end is assumed, which also serves to erase them from any memorialization outside of their bond of service. Beare offers Norris a kind of homage by making him the tragic hero of the story, perhaps appropriate given Beare’s comparable position as an exile and military agent on the other side of the confessional divide. Of course, in this narrative the devil has his due, reimposing his authority over his wayward agent, despite the fact that Norris has not completed his service, with the Irish war still to be fought.

²⁴¹ Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Ireland Under Elizabeth (ca. 1621), trans. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1903), 97–8. Beare, an Irish Catholic exile, spent his career in the Spanish army on the Continent and published his Latin text in Spain in 1621. ²⁴² References are drawn from the B-Text of the play, first published in 1616 (Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993]).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

154

   

Similarly, in funerary verses written by members of Oxford University on Queen Elizabeth’s death, the losses of state agents responsible for extending English sovereignty include their local notables, “the noble stock of the House of Norris.”²⁴³ It is inevitably through the framework of the family that the Norrises entered representation and memorialization, and only through the literal destruction of the private sphere—the loss of all family members and even the destruction of the family seat itself—could the private become public, and the family stand in as a microcosmic analogue for the national body. In this process of abstraction, it is not the individual histories or deaths that matter but instead the collective loss of this familial—now corporate—body. The brothers are interchangeable; they only register as a collective body count. The story is rendered intelligible, given meaning, and seen as worthy of commemoration because of the extremity of loss: the death of five brothers, the end of a family line. In his discussion of Dutch genre painting, a medium that is often presented as the paradigmatic model of early modern constructions of domesticity and the household, Richard Helgerson notes that these domestic spaces often feature the incongruent, seemingly intruding figure of soldiers.²⁴⁴ Helgerson reads the presence of soldiers in domestic interiors as a means through which Dutch artists struggled with the legacies of the military origins of Dutch political independence and commercial prosperity. Drawing on Helgerson’s insights, we see that the household, along with the models of domesticity that it represents, is not a space demarcated from the political conflicts that seemingly lie outside it. Rather, the domestic is itself constituted as an effect of these political contexts, a marker of the histories that do not lie somewhere far away but instead reside at the center of the household and everyday life. The domestic and the foreign are inextricably bound up together. Or, as Salman Rushdie’s character of Whisky Sisodia memorably—and stutteringly—puts it in The Satanic Verses: “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.”²⁴⁵

2.5 1596: Bringing the War Back Home The organizational structure of the Elizabethan military replicated the strict demarcation of the domestic from the foreign. The militarization of Elizabethan culture focused largely on domestic defense, a process that reflects the inwardturning, insular character of England at this time. In 1558, the same year that

²⁴³ John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Goldring et al., 4:574. ²⁴⁴ Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 79–119. ²⁴⁵ Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Vintage, 1997), 353.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

155

England lost its final continental outpost at Calais, the Militia Act implemented the first overhaul of military recruitment and training in three centuries.²⁴⁶ It created a system of local militias, county-based regiments of soldiers, and placed them under the authority of the regional Lord Lieutenants, like Sir Henry Norris in Oxfordshire, who controlled the military resources of each county. Because they were in charge of defending their respective counties from invasion or insurrection, the Lord Lieutenants were vitally important during England’s undeclared war with Spain. Their increasing prominence further attests to the steady erosion of boundaries separating civil society from military culture in Elizabethan England.²⁴⁷ Even though militia service was mandatory for all men aged sixteen to sixty, organizing such a massive group proved to be logistically impossible, and therefore ensured that the militia remained a smaller and more professionalized force.²⁴⁸ A local militia gathered together for musters, or general training exercises, only on extremely rare occasions or at times of national emergency. In all practical terms, the militia existed solely in terms of a core group of professional soldiers, the Trained Bands, first created as an institutional body in 1573.²⁴⁹ Because the militia was organized within the county community, this body also preserved a quasi-feudal character, led by members of leading families and staffed by landholding yeoman farmers.²⁵⁰ Its central objective was to defend the region, especially the area’s propertied classes, and the militia was in fact barred not only from overseas deployment but even from service outside its home county.²⁵¹ There was consequently little connection between domestic and foreign military forces, a distinction that reinforced the conceptual separation of the nation from extraterritorial contexts. In contrast to their resolutely provincial counterparts ²⁴⁶ De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 109. ²⁴⁷ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 141. This development is also seen in the codification of the position of provost-marshal, responsible for imposing martial law on civilian populations. This position was first developed by English forces in Ireland and imposed on England’s population from 1588 onwards (Hammer, 187), showing how the norms of overseas warfare increasingly seeped into English civil society. For discussion of martial law and early modern English culture, see Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers, esp. 11–14. ²⁴⁸ Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, 137. Popular support for local militias is reflected in their impressive size, with 183,000 men appearing for musters in thirty-seven counties in 1575 (Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 25) and 40,000 organized for Armada defenses (Nolan, “Militarization”: 405). But the expense of such large forces was unsustainable, prompting counties to concentrate their resources on the Trained Bands. ²⁴⁹ De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 109. Significantly, the Trained Bands were formed following the start of the Dutch Revolt and the perceived need to defend against possible Spanish invasion (Lawrence, The Complete Soldier, 32). ²⁵⁰ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 146. ²⁵¹ Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 12. The militia’s statutory exemption from foreign service was frequently overruled, beginning with the impressment of domestic forces for deployment to France in 1562–3 (Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 66). The state’s attempt to deploy militias overseas was nonetheless met with stiff opposition. Although the 1577 statute made as many as 250,000 men eligible for military service, the regional Lord Lieutenants discovered a civilian population increasingly unwilling to serve abroad, and only one-tenth of that number was ever sent abroad (Cruickshank, 287, 24).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

156

   

in regional militias, in foreign expeditionary forces national identity trumped any regional allegiances: English soldiers became English soldiers, not Kentish or Cornish ones.²⁵² National affiliation was, nonetheless, a secondary factor in the mercenary economy of warfare, and soldiers’ primary loyalty derived not so much from national origin as from financial indebtedness to the state authority that paid them. And even as their actual composition blurred regional identities, England’s overseas armies derived from a local context in another sense, as their ranks were filled with the conscripts forcibly impressed at the local level by county authorities such as the Lord Lieutenant. Whereas the local militia defended the area’s propertied classes, the staffing of foreign armies additionally functioned to rid the locality of its propertyless population, a concern that was particularly acute in 1596 at the time of the Oxfordshire Rising. This final section will examine the cultural anxieties provoked by common soldiers, particularly those subjects conscripted into foreign service. Even more than autonomous deputies or corrupt captains, the figure of the common soldier addressed most directly the contradictory effects of militarization on Elizabethan society. Among military writers, Sir John Smythe offered the most candid commentary on this issue: as noted earlier, his text Certain Discourses, . . . Militarie (1590) was suppressed by official edict after he had suggested that English commanders were literally profiting from the deaths of their soldiers. But the most subversive of Smythe’s remarks occurred not in print but in public remarks that subsequently led to his arrest, imprisonment, and political fall. After the suppression of Certain Discourses, Smythe largely retreated from public life and eked out a living as a drill instructor for local militias. This occasional employment allowed him to retain a self-fashioned role as a landholding man of means, and he tenaciously clung on to this neo-feudal image as a martial knight responsible for his tenants and social inferiors. In Lear-like fashion, he preserved a group of twenty-two unpaid, liveried retainers, even as he was forced to sell off his few remaining properties.²⁵³ The visibly anachronistic aspects of his position carried over to the vestiges of his professional responsibility. From all reports, his antiquated notions of military discipline made him a bemusing spectacle, particularly among his colleagues who were veterans of continental warfare and trained in the increasingly professionalized conduct of warfare.²⁵⁴ But local militia leaders humored Smythe, tolerating his eccentricities and allowing him to participate in local military preparations. ²⁵² Recognizing the implications of this transition, Digges advocated having England’s foreign regiments organized by region, with commanders drawn from the same community as common soldiers (Foure Paradoxes, 46). ²⁵³ Hale, Smythe, lxxxiv. ²⁵⁴ Smythe boasted that other captains, veterans of continental campaigns, had witnessed his drills and gained knowledge “that they had never seen in the wars of France nor Flanders,” painfully unaware that his earnestness made him the butt of jokes (Hale, Smythe, xxxii). As Leicester put it, “[y]ou would laugh to see” his musters (Hale, xxii).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

157

But on June 12, 1596, in the midst of musters for the local militia in Essex, Smythe seized the opportunity to make public statements even more radical than his earlier printed remarks. Addressing the recruits as they stood in file, Smythe took a bold stance against state conscription and the illegal overseas deployment of militias, declaring to them “if you will go with me you shall not go out of the land.”²⁵⁵ Pointing to dignitaries in the audience, including his distant kinsman Thomas Seymour, whose family had a claim to the English throne through the line of Edward VI, Smythe offered Seymour as a potential leader for their rebellion and, in characteristic fashion, presented himself merely as a loyal assistant. Although several of the common soldiers stepped forward in support of Smythe, Seymour immediately rode off to report events to the Privy Council, and Smythe was quickly arrested and brought to the Tower. Imprisoned for the next year and a half, his papers seized and searched, he was released only after signing a confession, one probably written for him by Lord Burghley, in which he disavowed his remarks. Utterly crushed by the state’s response, Smythe pleaded to be allowed to slink away in retirement, and “not to be seen in any public place in the world.”²⁵⁶ Finally granted this request, he lived out the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest, surrounded by his loyal retainers and playing out his role as a neofeudal knight in arms.²⁵⁷ Smythe opposed military conscription because it eroded the power of a region’s ruling elites and undermined a traditional system of hierarchy and deference. He appropriately directed his wrath at Lord Burghley, the figure most closely associated with the administrative networks of the state, and attempted to rally his potential troops under a martial, aristocratic figure in Seymour. Smythe recognized the ways that his class position, like that of other local elites, was tied to the land. Overseas military service, which subordinated regional identities to a national one, took them away from the source of their power and rendered them as mercenaries dependent on the state’s largesse. Smythe foresaw that the state’s impressment of a civilian population could set a precedent for the imposition of state control over the higher strata of rural English society. He was not opposed to conscription itself, however, and had in fact endorsed these practices as a safety valve that ensured the stability of agrarian England. Smythe was alarmed by the leveling effects of these state policies, which rendered all class groups susceptible to state control and forced displacement. In his suppressed treatise, he had attempted to alert a reading public to the dangers of conscription by arguing that England’s foreign wars were consuming the lives of gentlemen and yeoman, members of the propertied classes, and not just vagrants and superfluous groups as was commonly perceived.²⁵⁸

²⁵⁵ Hale, Smythe, lxxxvii. ²⁵⁶ Hale, Smythe, lxxxvii. ²⁵⁸ Smythe, Certain Discourses, A1.

²⁵⁷ Hale, Smythe, xciv.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

158

   

Smythe’s critique hinged on differentiating the interests of the landed, propertied classes, who held domain over local administration and defense, from the masterless, displaced classes who formed the labor supply for England’s foreign wars. One can see these distinctions in Smythe’s unpublished writings as well. In an earlier letter to Burghley, Smythe reported a conversation he had overheard between two local landlords on the eve of Norris and Drake’s expedition to Portugal, who expressed their hope that the laborers conscripted for the voyage would not survive so that they could raise rents with new tenants.²⁵⁹ What Smythe opposed was not conscription itself but rather the destabilization of feudal, agrarian bonds between landlords and their tenants. Whereas the mercenary economy of foreign war created an opportunity for a parish to rid itself of the increasingly superfluous members of the underclass, opening up a market in which to sell them, these commercial relations also returned home to transform the domestic space itself. In another document outlining his support for policies of conscription, Smythe had written a modest proposal to Burghley, “A meane how the realme should be disburdened of the greatest part of the thieves, and roges that are dispersed throughout England.” Backing the forced impressment of England’s landless population, Smythe advocated using overseas service to banish these groups permanently, and even recommended death sentences for vagrants returning to England.²⁶⁰ Smythe speculated that the poor would make ideal soldiers because they would be best suited to withstand war’s physical demands: “the Roges can abide more hunger, cold, and trauaile, and therwithall prouide, and make better shift for them selues, then the other sort of soldiers can.”²⁶¹ This emphasis on the physical fortitude of vagrants speaks to the depredations marking the condition of England’s rural poor; indeed, his statement implies that conditions in agrarian England were actually worse than in England’s wars on the Continent. Even though Smythe’s objections to conscription were limited to its effects on the propertied classes, his public remarks had, after all, attempted to rally support from common soldiers. And it was this possibility—of opposition to the state drawing on armed mass support—that triggered the state’s quick and decisive response. Smythe had chosen a particularly impolitic time in which to make public statements critiquing the state’s use of conscripts for military service. In 1596, rioters in Oxfordshire had attempted to raid Lord Norris’s armory, and in that same year the state had sent his son, Sir Thomas Norris, to quell a rebellion in Chester among conscripted soldiers bound for Ireland. The volatility of this ²⁵⁹ Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Part IV (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892), 4. ²⁶⁰ For the proposal, see British Library, Landsdowne 65, ff.176–7; for discussion, see Hale, Smythe, xxxvii–xxxviii. ²⁶¹ Landsdowne 65, f. 177.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

159

issue stemmed from how practices of mass conscription registered most directly the impact of England’s foreign wars on its constituent regions. In keeping with its use of delegated authority to extend its power abroad, the state relied on its regional deputies to forcibly impress conscripts for its foreign armies. But the progressive drain of money and men caused by fighting wars on multiple fronts— with English regiments stationed abroad in Ireland, France, and the Low Countries—led to a critical need for new recruits. As a result, the state exerted additional pressure on its local officers to staff their forces, leading these officials to adopt increasingly desperate strategies of coercion. In 1596, the same year as Smythe’s arrest, some of the most extreme examples saw military recruiters in London seal church doors while they searched the pews for potential conscripts during Good Friday and Easter Sunday church services: 1000 men were captured and mobilized for service.²⁶² Another search for recruits even extended to rounding up spectators at London playhouses.²⁶³ In the crisis year of 1596, opposition to England’s foreign wars and the state’s policies of conscription was particularly intense.²⁶⁴ As Edward P. Cheyney notes, “it is evident that under the surface of the carefully regulated Elizabethan administration, there was deep discontent and constant danger of revolt.”²⁶⁵ The state’s desperate need for military labor exposed the underlying vulnerability of its power. Conscription, as Charles Tilly observes, “made any state vulnerable to popular resistance, and answerable to popular demands, as never before.”²⁶⁶ In his still-canonical account of the Elizabethan army, the historian C.G. Cruickshank goes so far as to conclude that Elizabethan state officials’ “main struggle” was not against foreign enemies but “against their own citizens, whose enthusiasm for military service, never great, diminished in direct proportion to the demands made on them.”²⁶⁷ The Elizabethan state attempted to undermine any unified opposition by reinforcing the distinctions between domestic and foreign forces inherent in the structure of the Elizabethan military. Offsetting any potential strategic alliances among those affected by these policies, a threat contained in Smythe’s public remarks at the musters in Essex, the state instead worked to set these groups against one another. Often it did so in a literal, coercive manner, using local militias to suppress resistance to forced impressment, as was the case with Sir Thomas Norris in Chester. In other cases, militias were even used against

²⁶² These men were later released at Dover once news had arrived that Calais, their destination, had fallen to the French (John Stow, The Annales of England [1600], 1281–2). ²⁶³ De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 108. The number of recruits reported to have been seized on this occasion—4000—is most likely an exaggeration, given the fact that county levies throughout England impressed an average of 5790 recruits per year during this period (Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, 130). ²⁶⁴ The number of men conscripted into service in 1596—8840—was the second-highest number of any year in the period (Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, 130). ²⁶⁵ Edward P. Cheyney, A History of England (New York: Peter Smith, 1948), 2:35. ²⁶⁶ Tilly, Coercion, 83. ²⁶⁷ Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 16.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

160

   

returning veterans. In the most notable example, the militia violently suppressed a protest in London organized by veterans of the disastrous 1589 expedition to Portugal: of nearly 20,000 men, only 6000 had made it home alive, alongside another 3000 who had wisely deserted as quickly as they could; left destitute, without pay or supplies, these former soldiers chose to take up arms and demand reparations.²⁶⁸ Alongside these popular uprisings, there was also a vocal critique of state military policies in the published texts of military writers such as Digges, Barwick, Williams, and Smythe. But any printed critique was sharply circumscribed: Barwick’s and Smythe’s texts were suppressed, while Digges’s and Williams’s writings only appeared posthumously, most likely as a result of selfcensorship. The more illustrative examples of opposition to state policy are to be found in the records of rare public statements like Smythe’s and, especially, in mass demonstrations of resistance such as the Chester riot and the uprising of veterans of the Portugal expedition.²⁶⁹ Resistance also came in the form of mass desertions, as soldiers opposed conscription or the extension of service by withdrawing their labor power and returning home. On average, one-seventh to as many as one-third of soldiers in England’s foreign armies deserted, including 300 of the 1100 recruits who had accompanied Leicester on his mission to the Low Countries as well as the 3000 soldiers who abandoned Drake and Norris on their fool’s errand to Portugal.²⁷⁰ And, as was discussed earlier, mutinies were the most direct example of the negotiating power that soldiers could exert. The bargaining power possessed by soldiers when stationed abroad stood in marked contrast to their utter destitution and lack of leverage once they returned home, as the Portugal veterans discovered to their peril. The return of a radicalized population of ex-soldiers—a group literally armed and dangerous, left destitute and with unaddressed grievances against the state— presented a challenge that threatened the stability of the Elizabethan regime. These figures served to collapse the illusory divide separating England’s domestic national space from its extraterritorial interventions, countering the elision of these overseas conflicts from public memory and state accountability by bringing the war back home. The urgent demands for military labor made it no longer possible to keep England’s foreign wars at a conscious distance from domestic

²⁶⁸ Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 187; Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 166; Hale, War and Society, 119; Nolan, “Militarization”: 405. England’s continental wars were notorious for their incredibly high casualty rates: of the 4000 men in the regiment that Essex led to Rouen in 1591, only 380 returned (Hale, War and Society, 80). Of the 20,000 English troops deployed to France before 1594, 10,000 had died by 1593 (Nolan, “Militarization”: 406). To put this all in contemporary perspective, Curtis Breight estimates that the loss of life for Elizabethan English forces was fifty times that of American troops in Vietnam (Surveillance, 232). ²⁶⁹ For discussion of other mutinies among conscripts or returning soldiers, see Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 168, 171 and Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 187. ²⁷⁰ Hale, War and Society, 79; Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 165.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

161

concerns. But the mercenary logic that underwrote England’s wartime economy was deflected through an emphasis on the mercenary nature of the soldiers forced to fight these conflicts. In Barnabe Riche’s A souldiers vvishe to Britons welfare (1604), for instance, the character of the Constable, in the midst of rounding up the parish’s masterless poor for overseas service, justified his actions by claiming that “When the warres shall be reformed, and reduced to a more honourable course, we will endeauour our selues to finde out men of better worth, in the meane time, these may serue, as best befitting the Discipline of this age.”²⁷¹ Countering the efforts of writers such as Smythe to normalize England’s mercenary wars through the imposition of a code of discipline, this comment concedes that the stability of the state in fact depended on the preservation of disorder. Within the domestic space of the nation, the social body’s inability to provide for its most destitute members necessitated their expulsion. In foreign conflicts, the mercenary terms of service must be preserved, for were these interventions to become a national effort, one openly endorsed by the state, they would mandate the participation of the nation’s propertied elite and not just its displaced underclass. In Thomas Nashe’s caustic formulation, “There is a certain waste of the people for whom there is no use, but war,” a process in which the state must “exhale all these corrupt excrements.”²⁷² Tellingly, those writers who were most candid in their assessment of the conduct of England’s foreign wars did not extend their critique to the state’s escalating use of forced conscription, despite the fact that these policies consistently generated the most fervent opposition from England’s general populace. Differentiating his own position from those unnamed critics, who “oft condemne the warres for murdering our men, and wasting our money in lingring fruitlessnesse,” Dudley Digges rationalized that “many times the fault is in our souldiers disabilitie, poore hunger-starued snakes halfe dead ere they go out of England.”²⁷³ Such statements disregard any pretense that military service will lead to moral reformation. Unlike Smythe, they do not presume that the imposition of military discipline will transform conscripts into productive members of their communities upon their return. Rather, these formulations repeat English state policy and assume that there will be no return. As with Nashe’s statement above, foreign wars of attrition productively “waste” the excess labor of the English countryside. The starkest effect of the commercialization of war and an ascendant mercenary ethos was this acknowledgment of the ultimate inconvertibility of the laboring poor into networks of exchange.²⁷⁴ ²⁷¹ Riche, A souldiers vvishe to Britons welfare (1604), 63. ²⁷² Nashe, Piers Penniless (1592), in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, 112. ²⁷³ Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 80. Sutcliffe similarly acknowledges that, given the circumstances of war, with most men “sent to ye slaughter,” “these men are the fittest to be sent” (Practice, 63). ²⁷⁴ This context importantly sets a backdrop for the labor practices of colonial transportation in the ensuing decades. For discussion of the Virginia Company and the “venting” of excess labor to the

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

162

   

Many of these soldiers did return, however, a remarkable feat given the casualty rates of early modern soldiers. The spectral presence of the common soldier returning from England’s mercenary wars posed a threat to the legitimacy of state authority, representing as it did the breakdown of the economy of early modern warfare. In his Certain Discourses, Smythe had cast returning veterans, “sicke and starved Souldiers,” as literally spectral figures, describing them as “miserable & pitiful ghosts, or rather shadowes of men.”²⁷⁵ As A.L. Beier has shown, not only did the dispossessed poor form the bulk of England’s foreign forces, returning soldiers and sailors also constituted the largest group among England’s vagrant population.²⁷⁶ These soldiers returning from England’s continental wars brought with them the characteristics of the foreign conflicts that were insistently kept at an imaginative distance from the domestic national space. As Geoffrey Gates commented, they seem “rather to come from hel, then from the exercise of warlike armes.” Because their presence disrupted England’s preserved condition of “ciuill peace and gouernment,” he recommended that the state devise some means for them “to bee vometed out of the bulke of the common wealth, then to be nourished in the same.”²⁷⁷ In Gates’s terms, returning soldiers were a disruptive force because of the ways that their presence collapsed distinctions between civil society and the mercenary commerce of war. But what particularly concerned Gates, like the English state itself, was the possibility that these soldiers would draw on the mercenary conditions of continental warfare as a frame of reference for analyzing domestic social relations. If they were mercenaries abroad, where they were paid, what was their status at home, in a nation that had no place for them?²⁷⁸ And if they could bear arms against other state authorities on the behalf of rebels, the perceived threat was that this experience potentially trained them to act against the Elizabethan regime as well. The implied danger in these texts is that of armed class revolt, a conflagration set alight by a radicalized population of displaced veterans. Alarmed at the implications of arming “hirelings,” a propertyless group of wage laborers colonies, see Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), 91–134. ²⁷⁵ Smythe, Certain Discourses,***4. ²⁷⁶ A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 93–4; also see Linda Woodbridge, “The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, and Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England,” in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, eds., Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 64–87. ²⁷⁷ Gates, Defence of Militarie Profession, 43. ²⁷⁸ Among comments seeing the propertyless classes as having an inherently mercenary position in relation to the English nation, see Sutcliffe, Practice (“For how can captaines encourage those to fight for their countrey, lands, goods, and honor, that haue neither house nor home” [63]) and Riche, A Souldiers Wishe to Britons Welfare (“what then, to defend their lands and liuings, why they haue nothing to loose, and lesse to care for . . . why then what lawe to enioyne them, what loue to induce them, or what gods to coniure them?” [65]). For a similar observation, also see Digges, Foure Paradoxes, 46.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

  :      

163

and servants, Gates saw this is a catalyst for rebellion: “the armed seruant wil be a comander of his vnarmed master.”²⁷⁹ Writing in 1579, in the midst of a wave of treatises that attempted to familiarize a relatively demilitarized English society with the modernity of continental warfare, even a hawk like Gates was alarmed about the possible effects of militarism on domestic culture. Nearly two decades later, as the human and social toll of England’s interventions became all too clear, the events that marked the end of Elizabeth’s reign would only confirm Gates’s trepidation. Conscripted soldiers, as well as returning veterans, would draw on their economic position as mercenaries, as subjects who could transfer their labor power, as a way of asserting their agency as political subjects. If political bonds could be reduced to a commercial relation, defined by a cash nexus, then this contractual analogy also opened up a possibility not only of conferring labor power but also of withdrawing the political consent that accompanied it. Returning soldiers consequently drew on their roles as mercenaries in order to reevaluate the terms of their bond with the English state.

²⁷⁹ Gates, Defence, 52. Following his reference to landlords profiting from the deaths of their tenants in foreign service, Smythe had similarly viewed this example as a portent of class revolt, noting that “Commonly the beginnings are very small and therefore lightly regarded, but once begun, they suddenly grow great, and then they turn all to blood and fire” (Calendar of the Manuscripts of . . . Salisbury, 4:5).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

3 Friends and Enemies in the Global History of Diplomacy 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, Douglas Biow, and Tracey Sowerby and literary scholars including Timothy Hampton and John Watkins, among others.¹ As Watkins has argued, “the time has come for a multidisciplinary 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 If diplomacy’s time has come, the impetus for this overdue examination of the historical foundations of the diplomatic system is the catastrophic failure of diplomacy in the early twenty-first century. At a historical moment when states have actively circumvented not merely diplomatic protocol but also, and more significantly, the foundational premises of international law, we find ourselves turning to what is accurately described as a problematically conservative field. This is a position that is oddly reminiscent of the early modern period.³ 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 Thomas Hobbes and ¹ Among recent studies, see Daniela Frigo, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); the essays collected in the special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spring 2008, ed. John Watkins; Gitanjali Shahani and Brinda Charry, eds., Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Hampton, Fictions of Embassy; Adams and Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture; Jason Powell and Will Rossiter, eds., Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017); Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings, eds., Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2017); Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood, eds., Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ² John Watkins, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 1 (2008): 1. Tracey Sowerby provides an invaluable survey of recent work in the field in “Early Modern Diplomatic History,” History Compass 149/9 (2016): 441–56. Also see Toby Osborne and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Introduction: Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 313–30. ³ Bruce Holsinger analyzes the contemporary recourse to premodern social forms and political language in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Agents Beyond the State:The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Mark Netzloff, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Netzloff. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857952.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

165

the English Revolution.⁴ But these figures also inaugurated a tradition in which theories of sovereignty were analyzed at a remove from diplomatic practice, something that continues to characterize much contemporary work on diplomatic history and international relations. “Diplomacy,” as Der Derian notes, “has been particularly resistant to theory.”⁵ As a way of reflecting on the theoretical preconditions that informed diplomatic practice, this chapter juxtaposes three episodes in the history of early modern diplomacy: Sir Henry Wotton’s tenure as England’s ambassador to Venice; the English state’s efforts to extradite a group of Catholic exiles in connection to the Gunpowder Plot; and Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons in Panama. These examples all show the extent to which early modern diplomacy was forged through codes of sociability and intersubjective networks of friendship and alliance. Diplomatic amity was at the same time premised on the interplay of amity and enmity, most particularly in relation to the individuals and groups denied the rights of diplomatic recognition in the law of nations, including stateless persons and nonstate agents such as exiles, political and religious dissidents, rebels, and colonial subjects. In my discussion of Wotton’s career and correspondence, I focus on the unique position of the embassy as a domestic household located beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation. Wotton’s ambassadorial household demonstrates the extent to which the business of diplomacy was forged through networks of friendship, mentorship, and sociability that linked the ambassador with members of his household as well as his diplomatic colleagues. Wotton’s writings emphasize the literary and interpersonal foundations of diplomacy, a view that challenges the traditional model of diplomacy as an administrative process relegated to an instrumental role in formal negotiations between state bodies. His career as an ambassador—or as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” to use his own memorable definition—demonstrates how the extraterritorial extension of state power relied on agents and networks operating outside the state’s own declared protocols. Wotton’s ethos of friendship was challenged as a result of the political state of emergency that followed in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, the notorious attempt by a group of English Catholics to blow up Parliament in 1605. In response to this event, the English state circumvented international law and extended English sovereignty beyond the nation in an effort to extradite several leading Catholic exiles who were, in fact, not connected with any conspiracy. In contrast to Wotton’s more autonomous model of state service, this episode reflects

⁴ James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987), 112. ⁵ James Der Derian, “Mediating Estrangement: A Theory for Diplomacy,” Review of International Studies 13 (1987): 91.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

166

   

the extent to which emerging practices of diplomacy and theorizations of international law made political agency coterminous with sovereign state institutions, and thereby excised any legal or conceptual place for the exile, extraterritorial subject, or nonstate agent. The final section extends the chapter’s consideration of modes of sociability and definitions of enmity and statelessness to examine the role of the colonies in formulations of the law of nations. A central fiction underwriting international law is the idea of lines of amity, which placed extraterritorial violence in the Americas and other regions “beyond the line” of legal jurisdiction. This section explores an alternative framework for the lines of amity, examining the ways that interstate competition in the colonies also enabled unexpected alliances among groups opposed to Spanish imperial hegemony. Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons illustrates the extent to which nonstate agents, stateless persons, and a range of colonial subjects wield political agency in the unstable political domain of the colonies. Despite such examples, the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination, a transformation accomplished through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register and thereby denied the political and historical coevalness of the colonies.

3.1 The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing This initial section 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 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.”⁶ This section therefore analyzes the everyday matter of the embassy: not only gossip, informal espionage, and even interior decorating, but especially the material practices and social contexts of letter writing. “The early modern state,” Lynne Magnusson notes, “transacted its administrative business,

⁶ Der Derian, On Diplomacy, 114.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

167

for the most part, in personal letters.”⁷ 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 reimagined 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 withdrawn resident embassies from most European states over the course of Elizabeth’s reign,⁸ James had to revive these institutional structures to manage inter-state negotiations. His efforts to inaugurate a mode of public diplomacy led to a broader cultural examination of the role of ambassadors and other diplomatic agents, with the initial publication of Jean Hotman’s diplomatic handbook The Ambassador occurring early in his reign.⁹ 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.¹⁰ Logan Pearsall Smith, the early twentieth-century editor of Wotton’s letters, encapsulates the critical assessment that this figure has traditionally received: “Wotton is of more interest to us as a writer of letters, full of wit and gossip, than as a statesman.”¹¹ This comment is indicative of what has traditionally counted as the subject of the study of diplomacy, and is premised on the ⁷ Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 92. ⁸ M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–1919 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 11. At James’s accession, England had not had a resident ambassador in Venice since Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 or in Spain following John Man’s expulsion in 1568. The last English envoy to meet with the Spanish government in the Netherlands returned in 1578. Under the terms of the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585), two English councilors were appointed to the Dutch Council of State. English ambassadors remained in Paris throughout the Elizabethan period, including Sir Henry Norris in his tenure from 1566–71. For details, see Gary M. Bell, A Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives 1509–1688 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990). ⁹ Jean Hotman, The Ambassador (1603), republished as A casket full of rich iewels For the ornament, and adorning, both of the minde and habite, of the most absolutest ambassador (1609). Most diplomatic memoirs and compilations of documents were first published during the Cromwellian period, including the posthumous collection of Wotton’s own writings, Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651). For discussion of this context, see András Kiséry, “Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere,” in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Sowerby and Craigwood, 136–49. ¹⁰ On the context of Wotton’s initial appointment to Venice in 1604, see Carol Chillington Rutter, “ ‘Hear the Ambassadors!’: Marking Shakespeare’s Venice Connection,” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 279–86. ¹¹ Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:176. Contrary to Smith’s separation of “wit” from political life, the term itself refers to the practical knowledge, secrecy, and ability to manage unpalatable social contexts required of a diplomat: see Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3, 7.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

168

   

assumption that the ambassador solely maintains a public, bureaucratic role, an identity that necessarily excludes the subjective traces of his own personality. It reflects the extent to which the analysis of diplomacy is shaped by a modern paradigm—the Weberian model of bureaucracy—that confines diplomacy to the domain of an “administrative process,” relegating it to an instrumental position in the formal negotiations between state bodies.¹² But as Daniela Frigo has argued, early modern diplomacy is more effectively analyzed in terms of the role or office of the ambassador rather than in an abstracted sense of a “sphere of formalized actions.”¹³ 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 ambassadors 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.¹⁴ Early modern ambassadors vied to establish a bureaucratic identity for themselves as a way of claiming a degree of political agency. Particularly since resident ambassadors hailed from civic, professional classes or were younger sons of gentry or aristocratic families, the nascent civil service offered them an extraterritorial route for meritocratic social advancement.¹⁵ 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, as 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, institutional forms of writing of Wotton’s colleagues, such as Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels or Sir Charles ¹² Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 99–101. Weber himself was critical of what he identified as the very recent ascendancy of the rational, “inescapable” monopoly of bureaucratic power in the nineteenth century: see, for example, “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order” (1918), in Weber: Political Writings, 156–9. ¹³ Daniela Frigo, “Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 16. For a related point, see Paul M. Dover and Hamish Scott, “The Emergence of Diplomacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750: Volume II: Cultures and Power, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 668. ¹⁴ Significantly, some of the most influential narratives charting the rise of the bureaucratic state premise the emergence of formal institutions of governance by opposing them to the personalized, informal social relations associated with the household. Geoffrey Elton, for example, distinguishes the innovations of early Tudor ministers such as Cromwell from what he characterizes as the household management of the medieval period (The Tudor Revolution in Government, 4–5 and passim). ¹⁵ Hamilton and Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy, 33. As Gary M. Bell notes, nobles and peers only served in the capacity as ambassadors extraordinary on limited missions throughout this period (“Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation: Its Nature and Variety,” Journal of British Studies 20 [1981]: 3).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

169

Cornwallis in Madrid, were countered by the ways that Wotton himself maintained a distinctive style throughout his correspondence.¹⁶ 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 subjective 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.”¹⁷ The identity of a professional diplomatic corps began to take shape under the direction of James and with the establishment of permanent embassies at Venice, Paris, Brussels, The Hague, and Madrid.¹⁸ The lateral relations forged among ambassadors played a vital role in this process of nascent professionalism, as did the social life within the embassy, particularly the affective, everyday commerce between diplomats and members of their staff. As reflected in Wotton’s comment to Aston, diplomats represented their social environment in the terms of the literary coterie, with its dominant languages of friendship and sociability. The interplay of sovereignty and intimacy, which, as Laurie Shannon has demonstrated, served as a register through which sovereigns forged bonds with their subjects and advisors, was just as integral a framework in defining relations among state agents.¹⁹ In initiating his correspondence with Sir Ralph Winwood, for example, Wotton subordinated professional duties to the ties of friendship: “I will not only interchange with you the offices of a public minister, but as diligently and more affectionately the respects and duties of a friend.”²⁰ The central importance of codes of sociability and personal affect is seen most fully in the extensive correspondence between Wotton and his colleague Sir Dudley Carleton. The increasing enmity that marks their epistolary exchanges ¹⁶ According to Charles Carter, ambassadors such as Cornwallis and Aston at Madrid, Carew and Edmondes at Paris, and Winwood and Carleton at The Hague did “journeyman service” but were not “movers and shakers” (“The Ambassadors of Early Modern Europe: Patterns of Diplomatic Representation in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly [New York: Random House, 1965], 285). ¹⁷ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:213: to Sir Walter Aston, from Venice (June 8/18, 1621). ¹⁸ For a discussion of the professionalized bureaucracy of the Principal Secretary’s office in Elizabethan England, see F. Jeffrey Platt, “The Elizabethan ‘Foreign Office,’ ” The Historian 56 [1994]: 725–40). Tracey Sowerby has cautioned against applying the term professionalism too broadly as a standard for characterizing diplomacy in this period (“Early Modern Diplomatic History,” 443). My own analysis emphasizes the transformative effects of the reestablishment of resident embassies early in the Jacobean period, which contrasts with the more informal, delegated kinds of information gathering and extraterritorial service of the late Elizabethan period examined in the previous two chapters. ¹⁹ See Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); for a related discussion, also see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). ²⁰ Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:319: to Winwood, from Dover (July 19, 1603).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

170

   

stemmed in part from the inherent competitiveness of diplomatic service: Carleton had succeeded Wotton as ambassador to Venice in 1610, only to be replaced in turn by Wotton when the latter began his second term in 1616. Throughout this period, each vied for the resident ambassadorship at The Hague, Carleton’s former post and a more desirable position, a rivalry that led to a rapid decline in the civility of their correspondence. The brief tenure of most ambassadors, and the frequency with which they exchanged posts, facilitated the professionalization of diplomatic service by limiting the extent to which office and office-holder were equated. The constant jockeying for position also enabled the English state to limit the power of their overseas agents by pitting them against one another.²¹ Personal rivalries and animosities often played out in the context of the circulation of news and intelligence. Although resident ambassadors were obliged to share intelligence with their colleagues, at times it was in their interest either to withhold information or ensure that they were receiving some reciprocal news or benefit in return.²² One of the chief functions of the ambassador and his staff was managing the flow of information with state officials in England as well as among the nation’s newly established network of resident embassies. Much of the daily life of the embassy was therefore devoted to writing, to maintaining a nearly constant output of intelligence reports. In an example of an embassy’s prodigious textual production, one early modern Venetian ambassador sent 472 dispatches in a single year.²³ By comparison, Wotton sent an average of forty letters to Secretary Cecil, eighteen to fellow diplomats such as Edmondes in Brussels, and eight to King James each year during his first term in Venice.²⁴ “Diplomacy,” Timothy Hampton points out, “is thus a political practice that is also a writing practice.”²⁵ The burdens of writing offset the increasingly bureaucratic terms of diplomatic service and exposed, instead, the personal and intersubjective qualities of the ambassador’s role. Diplomatic letters are surprisingly self-referential, and acutely aware of the precariousness of their bureaucratic project: preoccupied with the number of letters lost or delayed; the missing gaps in news and intelligence; the deeply personal resentment stemming from having written more often or more fully than one’s correspondent. John Chamberlain, Carleton’s friend and associate in London, reported that English soldiers in the Low Countries, ²¹ After having been promised a post in 1613, Wotton was forced remain close to the court until a position finally materialized the following year (Life and Letters, 2:35: to Sir Edmund Bacon, from Royston [November 16, 1613]). ²² In contrast to the competitive professional relationship of Carleton and Wotton, other ambassadors drew on Venetian models of diplomatic writing and wrote relazioni briefing their successors on the current state of affairs, as Sir Charles Cornwallis did for Sir Walter Aston in the handover at the Madrid embassy in 1608 (Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 108). ²³ Hamilton and Langhorne, Practice of Diplomacy, 33. ²⁴ Gerald Curzon, Wotton and his Worlds: Spying, Science and Venetian Intrigues (London: Xlibris, 2003), 93. For a list of Wotton’s letters, see Life and Letters, 2:417–54. ²⁵ Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 7.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

171

dependent on news from Wotton, were frustrated by his frequent epistolary silences, describing him as “being very retired and nothing affable, ever busie, but dispatching little.”²⁶ At another time, Chamberlain complained that Wotton wrote too much, sending him letters every time he received a scrap of news, which produced a stream of overlapping messages that lacked any overarching narrative coherence.²⁷ As Carleton’s own professional relationship with Wotton progressively deteriorated, he even considered taking the unprecedented step of ending their correspondence, declaring to Chamberlain, “Fabritio’s correspondence and mine is at present at a stand, for he puts me in expectation of his next, and, in answer, I have referred him to my last; which I mean shall be my last to him.”²⁸ Wotton retained a degree of agential power by asserting his control over the textual exchanges of information that were channeled through his embassy. When Carleton and Chamberlain mockingly renamed him “Fabritio,” or “the father of lies,” this characterization derived from what they identified as his distinctive modes of writing. As Carleton wrote to Chamberlain, “The world is much confused in conjecture at Fabritio’s late dispatches, which strangers write hither, out of his letters to his friends, [and they] are matters of the greatest moment that ever Legatus peregre missus, etc., sent to his prince.”²⁹ Rather than using his diplomatic correspondence as a depersonalized, instrumental means for conveying news, Wotton ensured that the value of his information was contingent on his own indispensable role as its reporter. Moreover, instead of discreetly sending secret intelligence back to England, his writings became more widely distributed, circulating not only between friends and within domestic coteries but also across national boundaries and among foreign readers. It is appropriate that Carleton elsewhere likened Wotton’s letters to “gazettes” (or news-sheets), a comment that reflects the extent to which the secret writing of diplomacy had entered what Habermas identifies as a chief domain of an emergent early modern public sphere: the transcultural traffic in news.³⁰ Blurring the boundaries of public and private in

²⁶ SP 14/80/15; CSP, Domestic, 1611–1618, 270. ²⁷ John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols., ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2:84. ²⁸ SP 84/79/129. The deterioration of Wotton’s relationship with his boss, the Secretary of State Sir Ralph Winwood, similarly played out through their correspondence. In 1616, the Venetian Secretary in England observed that Wotton’s weeks-long silence “excites wonder” at court (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 328). By the following year, he notes, Wotton “writes occasionally, but simply speeches, whereby he has become so obnoxious that his letters sometimes remain three or four days upon Winwood’s table without being read, and when they are read they are treated with contempt” (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 571). ²⁹ Dudley Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624, ed. Maurice Lee, Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 240. ³⁰ Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 235. For Habermas’s discussion, see Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 15–16. For recent analysis, see Tracey Sowerby, “Elizabethan Diplomatic Networks and the Spread of News,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 305–27 and Jason Peacey, “ ‘My Friend the Gazetier’: Diplomacy and News in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 420–42.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

172

   

his writings, Wotton disseminated these documents in order to promote himself and advertise his suitability for other appointments. This degree of publicity undermined the traditional association of diplomacy with secrecy, and of the diplomat as a dignified spy, an ironic reversal given Wotton’s own personal history as a figure trained in intelligence work. Even though Carleton and Chamberlain attempted to transform their rival Wotton into an embarrassingly public spectacle, their own well-known correspondence reflects the porous boundaries separating public and private spheres in early modern diplomacy: Carleton freely imparted state secrets to his friend Chamberlain, despite the fact that the latter never held an official government position. For his part, Chamberlain, writing from London, often had access to more information and foreign news than diplomats stationed abroad, and his letters reflect a broader public knowledge of the workings of diplomacy. The personal and political are inextricably bound together throughout the correspondence between Carleton and Chamberlain, with state intelligence circulating alongside personal anecdotes and court gossip. But the overriding concern of their letters is the pursuit of office, a scenario in which Carleton and Wotton were often competing for the same post.³¹ Over the course of his career, Wotton gained notoriety for making public the secret workings of diplomacy. The most scandalous incident occurred in 1610, when the Catholic polemical writer Gaspar Scioppius published a statement that Wotton had made years earlier describing the role of the ambassador as that of “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”³² This episode was used to discredit James I’s efforts to institute a mode of public diplomacy and cited as evidence of the underlying deceitfulness of English policy. Wotton’s infamous pun—lying abroad—speaks to two key anxieties relating to the perceived duplicity inherent in diplomatic practice. The first is a spatially defined distinction premised on the assumption that the extraterritorial workings of state power entail a state of exception: when lying abroad, the state’s representatives may broadly lie. Moreover, as discussed in the last chapter regarding military agents, states relied on this loophole in order to maintain a policy of plausible deniability toward their own extraterritorial representatives, so that an ambassador caught in a lie could be discredited as a rogue agent acting on his own initiative.³³ Indeed, the English state ³¹ The pursuit of office often changed Carleton and Chamberlain’s assessment of Wotton: when it was thought that he would gain the post of Principal Secretary, he was deferentially referred to as “Wotton” (Carleton, 294; Chamberlain, 1:359); but when he was a rival for office, he became “the litle [sic] ambitious man” (Chamberlain, 2:277; cf. 2:286). ³² For discussion of this episode, see Reliquiae Wottonianae, 21 and 400–05 and Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:49 and 1:127. Wotton was a frequent contributor to alba amicorum (or friendship albums), such as the one in which his statement was originally written: see June Schlueter and Markus Dubischar, “Traces of Henry Wotton in Continental Alba Amicorum,” Renaissance Studies 30 (2016): 666–83. ³³ Ambassadors were often given two separate sets of instructions: their letters of credential, the official statement of their mission to be presented at court, along with a covert set of directives that were

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

173

treated Wotton precisely in this manner following the scandal. After Wotton was recalled to England, bringing his first embassy to a premature close, he was forced to spend the next six years lobbying at court and accepting temporary assignments until he could regain his post in 1616. Wotton’s opponents also used this episode to bar him from any positions in England.³⁴ Ironically, in relegating him to the suspect space of extraterritorial service, they only confirmed Wotton’s assessment of the ambassador’s social role. Wotton’s statement reflected on a second, more fundamental anxiety relating to the duplicity of state power: the intrinsic “craft” of statecraft. In order for the state to maintain its legitimacy, state authority must be abstracted from the means through which it is maintained. The position of the state as authorizing force is contingent on its separation from the actions of its agents. The theoretical elaboration of sovereignty depends on a kind of sleight of hand: by eliding the practices through which the state is constituted, sovereign authority can be represented as the prime mover of political agency, the point of origin and foundation of legitimacy. And in order to minimize the significance of their practices of writing and forms of agency, diplomatic agents are relegated to an instrumental, bureaucratic status, as cogs in a mechanism that, ostensibly, they can only manage, not control. In contrast to the modern definition of diplomacy as a “craft of the state,” in the early modern period diplomacy still adhered to its etymological root: the diplomat was defined by his function as the writer of diplomas, literally, official documents folded together. Diplomacy, in this sense, offered a competing model of agency—a “craft of the hand,” to use Costas Constantinou’s phrasing—one that was constituted through acts of writing and intersubjective means of transmission. The historical foundations of diplomacy as an instrumental component in establishing sovereign authority and maintaining the interstate system stemmed from a key transition at the beginning of the modern era that gave priority to “the different political styles and effects of political authority and less [importance] to the hand of the scribe and acts of to be kept secret (Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy [Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 86). For Wotton’s 1610 visit to the French court, Salisbury refused to give him specific instructions in writing that could implicate the English state, informing him that “wee haue forborne at this time to write particularly to our Leiger ambr” (SP 78/56/245v). In another document, Salisbury added that Wotton’s experience justified allowing him more latitude in his mission, “yett there needs much lesse to be said vnto you whose former legations . . . giues you so many aduantages of Experience” (SP 78/56/235). ³⁴ In the interim, Wotton served as English emissary on a mission to Turin (1612) and during negotiations of the Juliers–Cleves dispute (1614–15). According to the Venetian ambassador in London, his reappointment to Venice in 1616 was necessitated by the debts he owed in England (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 575). Walton argued, contrarily, that Wotton quickly regained James’s favor, and was, in fact, “more confirmed in his Majesty’s estimation and favour than formerly he had been” after promising that in the future he would “become more industriously watchful over his tongue and pen” (“The Life of Sir Henry Wotton,” in Izaak Walton’s Lives [London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1926], 109, 110).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

174

   

handwriting that produced the material or diploma” and which comprised the content of interstate negotiations.³⁵ One of the unique stylistic features of Wotton’s diplomatic correspondence is the frequency with which his letters revealed the social contexts of their composition and circulation. In drawing attention to the personal signature of his diplomatic hand, his letters prized not the craftiness of diplomacy but the care intrinsic to the labor of writing—the underlying humanity, in other words, of the bureaucratic project itself—whether in terms of the inescapably personal loyalties or jealousies that motivate public duties or the ways that the all-too-human limits of the writing hand always press against the state’s prescribed writing regime.³⁶ In one instance, he composed a letter in his own hand to Sir Thomas Edmondes, his counterpart in Brussels, presenting the document as a testament of his personal bond to his colleague as well as a peace offering to compensate for a recent lapse in his correspondence.³⁷ On other occasions, the absence of his secretary, sent as a messenger for a previous letter, forced Wotton to compose his letter himself.³⁸ Many of his letters presented diplomatic writing as a collaborative process: in the midst of a winter cold spell that he claims had “benumbed” his secretary’s hand, Wotton took over the quill himself.³⁹ Another letter graphically represented the collaborative relations that characterized the embassy, and featured the alternating hands of Wotton and his secretary as they took turns composing the letter.⁴⁰ Wotton’s letters additionally emphasized the social and intersubjective contexts of their circulation by making reference to the messenger bearing the text to its addressee. Many of his letters served a double function: not only transmitting information to the court or his diplomatic colleagues but also acting as a letter of introduction for the bearer, a person who was, in most instances, a young member of Wotton’s embassy. When referring to these agents, Wotton described them in terms that blurred the boundaries separating public and professional life from a private, domestic sphere, calling them “an instrument of mine own” as well as of “mine own family.”⁴¹ Friendship and family provided the affective registers in which social relations among state agents could be imagined. As noted earlier, Foucault describes this process of “governmentality” as a method that transposes the “meticulous attention of the father towards his family” and introduces it “into the management of the state.”⁴² However, the social framework of Wotton’s own ³⁵ Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, 80. ³⁶ The title page of Wotton’s posthumous works Reliquiae Wottonianae similarly describes his works as having originated from Wotton’s “curious Pensil” [sic]. For an extended discussion of writing practices, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, esp. 233–78. ³⁷ British Library, Stowe MS 169 f. 3 (March 30, 1607). ³⁸ Stowe MS 169 f. 185 (November 1, 1607); Stowe MS 170 ff. 61–62v (June 13, 1608). ³⁹ Stowe MS 169 f. 245v (December 12, 1607). ⁴⁰ Stowe MS 170 ff. 155–6 (ca. 1608). This collaborative document is omitted from Smith’s otherwise comprehensive edition of Wotton’s correspondence (Life and Letters, 2:417–54). ⁴¹ Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:325, 1:326: to Salisbury, from Venice (May 1605). ⁴² Foucault, “Governmentality,” 92.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

175

household disrupted the conventional analogy of family and state. Whereas the extraterritorial status of the embassy was often contingent on efforts to replicate a private, markedly English space abroad, the homosocial dynamics of a household populated by Wotton and his boys attest to the blurred social roles created within the embassy, the codes of sociability and forms of affect that drew on overlapping languages of family, pedagogy, and sexuality. An embassy is distinguished, of course, by its extraterritoriality: its unique legal position as a protected space lying outside the boundaries of the nation yet possessing a sovereign authority of its own.⁴³ But the early modern embassy was above all a household, a domestic space of both business and residence, and its social context complicated conventional divisions of public and private spheres.⁴⁴ This professional, bureaucratic space was also a domain of friendship and intimacy, one that was marked by the kind of “audience-oriented subjectivity” that Habermas confines solely to the private realm of the family.⁴⁵ The embassy’s distance from national culture and its models of domesticity facilitated the creation of alternative affective communities, forms of association that are perhaps recognizable now only in terms of their disruption of traditional categories. As Harold Nicolson tellingly observed in his early twentieth-century survey of diplomatic practice, “Even in this country a professional diplomatist is regarded as rather un-English; as a queer cosmopolitan; and so he is.”⁴⁶ Reflecting the historical ascendancy of the family as the paradigmatic model for the private realm and center of emotional life, Nicolson can only represent the intimacies of a public, professional sphere—and its characteristic non-familial and non-reproductive relations of adoption, surrogacy, and mentorship—as a distinctly queer aesthetic.⁴⁷ In his treatise on education, written during his later tenure as Provost at Eton, Wotton defended the authority that he held on the subject, as someone “old and childlesse,” by hearkening back to a classical tradition that “did commit this care more to the Magistrate then to the Parent” and located the place of the pedagogical in the public rather than the private sphere, “in their Politicks” not “their Oeconomicks.”⁴⁸

⁴³ On the evolving idea of extraterritoriality in the early modern period, see the Introduction, above; Adair, The Extraterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; Margolies et al., ed., The Extraterritoriality of Law. ⁴⁴ Catherine Fletcher discusses the households of Italian diplomats in Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 96–7. As she notes in a related article, in studying the ambassadorial household, “any attempt to differentiate too sharply between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomatic occasions quickly breaks down” (“ ‘Furnished with Gentlemen’: the Ambassador’s House in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies 24 [2009]: 535). ⁴⁵ Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 28, 43–51. ⁴⁶ Harold Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 35. ⁴⁷ For a related discussion, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 146. ⁴⁸ Wotton, “A Philosophicall Surveigh of Education, or Morall Architecture” (ca. 1630), in Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), 312, 316.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

176

   

William Leete, Wotton’s steward during his second term, described the embassy in the homosocial terms of the literary coterie or domestic college, idealizing it as a space safely removed from the dangers of political life. Writing to Wotton’s former chaplain Isaac Bargrave, who had returned to England, he remarked, “wee liue happily merrily and honestly, lett state businesses goe as they will, wee followe our studies harde, and loue one another.”⁴⁹ Leete’s comment was perhaps intended to evoke sentiments of nostalgia in Bargrave, not only for the life he had left behind in Venice but also, it is implied, for the social relations that were no longer available after his return to England. The sociable, studious environment of the embassy was contingent on its extraterritorial distance from English culture and its models of domesticity. The distinctive, liminal position of the embassy allowed it to function as a space enabling the creation of alliances and intimacies across conventional social, national, and confessional boundaries. The embassy was a haven for English travelers, including Thomas Coryat, who stayed with Wotton during his six-week residence in Venice.⁵⁰ It was also a space of meeting and entertainment with other foreign ambassadors, such as the French ambassador, the Huguenot Philippe de Canaye, Seigneur de Fresnes; although a recent convert to Catholicism, Canaye shared with Wotton a support of Venetian resistance to Papal interference during the Interdict crisis of 1606–07.⁵¹ The central figure in the Interdict, the theologian Paolo Sarpi, forged a surreptitious social connection to the embassy as well, particularly through Wotton’s chaplain William Beddell, who concealed meetings with the cover story of instructing Sarpi in English.⁵² The embassy’s unique character as a space cut off from its host culture yet open to sociable alliances was a result of its political status in early modern Venice. Venetian law barred the English ambassador and his staff from private meetings ⁴⁹ Leete to Bargrave, August 8, 1617, in Letters and Dispatches from Sir Henry Wotton to James I and his Ministers, in the Years [1617–20] (Roxburghe Club) (London: William Nicol, 1850), 48. Extending this analogy, Wotton described his embassy as “my domestic college” in a letter to Sir Francis Bacon (Life and Letters, 2:204), and later referred to “the College of Travellers, wherein . . . I might run for a Deacon at least” (Life and Letters, 2:365). An episode from the following year contradicts Leete’s idealization of the embassy as a private space removed from political activities: returning to the embassy at night, Leete was attacked and imprisoned by members of the Venetian watch who accused the English of collaborating with Spain in the 1618 plot against Venice (CSP, Venice, 1617–1619, 229–30). ⁵⁰ Coryat praises Wotton as “a notable guide” who graciously takes him sightseeing (Crudities, 332), and later even rescues him from an altercation after he infuriates a group of Venetian Jews with his offensive questions (376). Ever impolitic, Coryat also boasts how Wotton was holding open Protestant services in his embassy (380), an issue of ongoing controversy that Wotton had tried to conceal. On Wotton’s sponsorship (and surveillance) of English travelers, see Melanie Ord, “Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604-1610,” The Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 3–8. ⁵¹ Similar to the posthumous publication of Wotton’s own writings in Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), Canaye’s diplomatic correspondence and political writings were published shortly after his death, reflecting the increasing entrance of diplomacy into the public sphere: see Lettres et ambassades de messire Philippe Canaye, seigneur de Fresne (Paris, 1644). ⁵² Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat, 153.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

177

with Venetian citizens, thereby relegating them to the seemingly cloistered environment that Leete prized so highly.⁵³ In theory, the Venetian Senate had to vote to approve any request from a citizen or official to visit the English embassy.⁵⁴ In practice, Wotton nonetheless managed to circumvent these restrictions and maintain a remarkably public presence in Venice. When Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, a Venetian scribe and former envoy to England, was summoned to a private meeting with Wotton, he was directed to the Church of San Gerolamo near the embassy, “as the ambassador goes there privately every time the nuns sing.”⁵⁵ When a Jesuit polemicist requested to meet Wotton in his capacity as a papal agent, Wotton politely declined to meet in the embassy, “much as I loved and esteemed him personally I could not, for various reasons, admit him, a Jesuit, to my house.” “But,” Wotton added, “I was not such a boor as to refuse to listen to him,” and so he met with him incognito, in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo under the pretense “to study certain pictures,” where they had an hour-long conversation.⁵⁶ The most notable example of these clandestine, quasi-public meetings occurred with Sarpi, whom Wotton met at a counting house owned by Flemish merchants in the Merceria, a commercial street near the Rialto noted for its mingling of foreigners with Venetian intellectuals and dissidents.⁵⁷ When the Doge responded to a complaint from the Papal Nuncio about Venetians visiting Wotton in his home, he concluded that “If any persons did frequent the Embassy it might be that they went there not to hear sermons but to discuss literature; the Ambassador being a man of letters.”⁵⁸ The Doge appropriately emphasized the distinctively literary character of Wotton’s role as ambassador, as we see in these examples that his political activities and ability to intermingle with Venetian publics were made possible through the sociable pursuit of seemingly private aesthetic and intellectual pleasures: language instruction, listening to music,

⁵³ De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, 70. ⁵⁴ Among examples, see CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 336 and 420. ⁵⁵ CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 334. Wotton’s sociable diplomacy was decidedly at odds with Venetian protocols against private discussion and deliberation among officials, and Scaramelli subsequently composed a full written account of his conversation. On the parallel careers of Wotton and Scaramelli, see Rutter, “Hear the Ambassadors,” 272–86. ⁵⁶ CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 443–4. ⁵⁷ Wotton reveals having met with Sarpi in a June 1609 letter to Salisbury (Life and Letters, 1:455). Intelligence on Wotton’s meetings with Sarpi came from the Papal Nuncio (Life and Letters, 1:87; Daniel McReynolds, “Lying Abroad for the Good of his Country: Sir Henry Wotton and Venice in the Age of the Interdict,” in The Image of Venice: Fialetti’s View and Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Deborah Howard et al. [London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014], 121). The Merceria was also the location of a bookstore where Wotton met with Nicholas Regnault, a French secretary implicated in the Spanish plot of 1618. Wotton was forced to give an account of his conversation with Regnault before the Collegio (CSP, Venice, 1617–1619, 264). In another instance showing the concern about social interaction with ambassadors, the Countess of Arundel was rumored to have met with the Papal Nuncio and the Imperial ambassador at her home in Venice in 1622 (Smith, Life and Letters, 2: 233). After Wotton made public these accusations, he was forced to apologize to the Countess before the Doge (Smith, 2:32–5). ⁵⁸ CSP, Venice, 1607–1610, 112.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

178

   

visiting art collections, discussing literature, having conversations in spaces of commercial and intellectual exchange. Countering the Nuncio’s anxiety over what went on within Wotton’s household, we see that his sociable interactions traversed a variety of public spaces, demonstrating the important role of what Roberta Anderson has described as “non-official” and “non-residential” spaces of diplomatic activity.⁵⁹ In addition, because restrictions on communication and interaction with Venetian citizens applied solely to English members of his embassy, Wotton recruited Venetians into his service, and his embassy was notable for its multinational and multilingual personnel. One of Wotton’s Italian secretaries, Gregorio de’Monti (or di Monti), additionally served as the de facto English ambassador in Venice over the two-year gap between Wotton’s second and third terms.⁶⁰ In his final interview with the Doge and Senate, Wotton presented his successor as a sign of his “sincerity when we employ your own subjects without a shadow of suspicion.”⁶¹ The statutes that were intended to ensure the national integrity of the embassy and keep it at a safe distance from Venetian culture thereby provided the means for creating, instead, a cosmopolitan social space. One of Wotton’s chief political aims had an intrinsic social component, as he fostered a project of mentoring Italian Protestant converts with the hope of creating a community who could enter political life and forge ties with England and its allies.⁶² His employment of Venetians such as de’Monti therefore served to legitimate his interactions with other citizens. In presenting his Venetian successor, Wotton emphasized the transparency and intrinsically Venetian character of his household, as well as that the porousness of the embassy’s interactions with its host culture did not extend to the circulation of forbidden books or dissidents: “I have lived circumspectly, admitting nothing contraband to my house, and refusing to receive exiles, though I have had opportunity more than once.”⁶³ ⁵⁹ Roberta Anderson, “Marginal Diplomatic Spaces during the Jacobean Era, 1603–25,” in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace, ed. Nathalie Rivère de Carles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 165. ⁶⁰ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:473–4. De’Monti similarly ran the English embassy during Carleton’s term while the latter was sent on a mission to Turin. Support of de’Monti was one of the few points of agreement between Wotton and Carleton: both lobbied the English court for a pension on his behalf in 1616 (Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:474). ⁶¹ CSP, Venice, 1617–1619, 540. ⁶² Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:76. Wotton pursued this program on his own initiative and without the support of James I (Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:84, 89). For further discussion, see Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat, esp. 150–2. ⁶³ CSP, Venice, 1617–1619, 540. Wotton’s politics of sociability extended to English Catholics as well as sundry intelligencers and “irregular travelers.” Noting that his “position compels me to allow my house to stand open to all compatriots” (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 426), one guest, an English soldier in Venetian service named Captain William Turner, later attempted to sell intelligence gathered during his stay in the embassy to the Imperial ambassador (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 420), and was arrested at Wotton’s insistence (428). In another instance, Wotton revealed that his household included “a young Englishman who has been a pupil of the Jesuits in Rome” and passes along intelligence from that city (CSP, Venice, 1610–1613, 38). Wotton also appealed to the Cabinet on behalf of a Venetian,

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

179

Since the laws regulating the social contacts of foreign ambassadors applied solely within the city, Wotton also eluded restrictions by relocating his embassy outside Venice for periods of time. While he toured the countryside, stayed at locales such as Lake Garda and the spa at Battaglia, or settled in a villa at Noventa outside Padua,⁶⁴ he would leave a secretary, such as de’Monti, in charge of the embassy. The peripatetic nature of Wotton’s embassy confounded his diplomatic colleagues, who were frustrated by their inability to track him down in their correspondence and alarmed that he had seemingly abandoned his post.⁶⁵ Contradicting Leete’s image of a settled domestic space, Wotton’s embassy depended on travel and circulation.⁶⁶ During his extended stays outside of Venice, Wotton concealed his activities by assuming the role of a fashionable traveler, and he made frequent pronouncements in which he seemingly gave priority to personal leisure over professional duties.⁶⁷ These statements, taken at face value by his colleagues, only fueled the gossip swirling about him. As Chamberlain snidely insinuated to Carleton, “Fabritio,” enjoying himself in Venice, “geves himself buon tempo, and followes goode companie, and plays, as

Augustin Carpan, convicted of (heterosexual) sodomy and rape, who took shelter in the embassy prior to his sentence: “the gentleness of his nature made me love him in a way, and he me. . . . it seemed only natural that he should seek refuge in the house of a friend” (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 483–4). ⁶⁴ Curzon, Wotton and his Worlds, 111. ⁶⁵ They were also correct in suspecting that Wotton’s time away from Venice conveniently coincided with the summer vacation months, something that Wotton himself confirmed in a letter to Edmondes in which he admitted that his most recent intelligence update was sent from his villa, where he had gone to escape the heat in Venice (Wotton to Edmondes, August 3, 1607; Stowe MS 169, f. 97v). At other times, Wotton attempted to give the impression that he remained in Venice: two years later, he was caught in this lie, and had to confess to Edmondes that he was not in residence as his previous letters had claimed; as he attempted to attribute this to an “error committed in the superscription of one of my letters,” he nonetheless also pressed for his colleague’s silence, “but I am glad it chanced into so friendly and so faythfull an hand” (Wotton to Edmondes, May 23, 1609; Stowe MS 171, f. 63). Venetian officials were similarly suspicious of Wotton’s long absences (CSP, Venice, 1607–1610, 21). ⁶⁶ Sent on an extraordinary embassy to Bavaria in 1624, Wotton lobbied for additional money to cover the costs “for transportation of himself and familie” (SP 99/25/161). Chamberlain had commented on the large retinue of “more than twenty younge gentlemen” that accompanied Wotton on his journeys, and also insinuated that the ambassador used this group—who traveled “upon theyre owne charge”—to defray his own expenses (Life and Letters, 2:308). George Chapman’s play Monsieur D’Olive (1605) includes a comic scene with its title character, newly credentialed for a diplomatic mission, assailed with hangers-on hoping to join his embassy, a joke referring to the size of some ambassadorial retinues in the early Jacobean period, including Wotton’s own: see The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, volume I, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 3.2. I analyze the play in “Public Diplomacy and the Comedy of State: Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive,” in Authority and Diplomacy From Dante to Shakespeare, ed. Jason Powell and Will Rossiter (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 185–97. ⁶⁷ Writing to Edmondes, Wotton explained that he hadn’t written by the last post because he was traveling to Priuli (September 29, 1607; Stowe MS 169, f. 139). Two years later, he told his colleague that he was unable to offer more than a cursory intelligence update because he was soon leaving for the spa at Abbanoa (Wotton to Edmondes,May 1, 1609; Stowe MS 171, f. 43). In 1606, he requested an expedited response from the Venetian Senate, “as he was leaving Venice on a pleasure journey on Saturday” (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 397).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

180

   

familiarly and ordinarilie as yf he had nothing els to do.”⁶⁸ But Wotton’s sociability, which enabled him to move freely through Italy and mingle with different publics, was instrumental in gathering intelligence as part of his official duties.⁶⁹ He maintained a network of agents throughout Italy, a group he was able to contact more easily when traveling outside of Venice. As Gary M. Bell notes, the largest expense in the ambassadorial household consisted of payments to informants, which often exceeded the embassy’s allotted budget and forced the ambassador to fund these operations himself.⁷⁰ Sociability was a key component in recruiting informants and maintaining intelligence networks, for agents were linked solely to the ambassador who employed them rather than to the English embassy or state more generally. When Carleton took over from Wotton in 1610, he did not inherit Wotton’s contacts, and was forced to create his own network for intelligence gathering.⁷¹ The central role of these Italian agents in the domestic business of the embassy reflects the extent to which the embassy blurred not only national boundaries but also demarcations of public and private spheres. In modern diplomacy, the extraterritorial privileges of the embassy are contingent on its permanence and universally recognized presence as a physical structure, a secure compound possessing a fictional status as national territory on foreign soil. The early modern period was instrumental in giving shape to the extraterritorial rights of the embassy. Indeed, the protections allotted to ambassadorial households was often a point of contention, as with the role of the Spanish embassy in London, which served as a site of sanctuary and religious observance for English Catholics.⁷² The extraterritorial status of an embassy inherently defines it as a space that uniquely traverses public and private spheres. But an additional material factor that shaped Wotton’s embassies stemmed from the fact that his household was situated in a series of rented private homes. The household accounts of Wotton’s embassy reveal the extent to which it was utterly dependent on its Venetian hosts: not only for the ambassadorial residence itself, ⁶⁸ Chamberlain, Letters, 1:382. ⁶⁹ At other times, particularly during short-term extraordinary embassies, Wotton prolonged his travel or extended his mission as a way of ensuring that he continued to be paid until he acquired another post (Chamberlain, Letters, 1:379, 1:565, 1:569, and 1:617). He similarly extended his journey to Venice for his second term. The Venetian ambassador in London noted that those at court “think it strange here, . . . that Wotton travels so slowly and does not hurry on more quickly, since he knows how important it is” (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 212). ⁷⁰ Bell, “Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation”: 7. When Secretary Calvert authorized ₤500 for Wotton’s extraordinary expenses over the following year, he earmarked the sum for intelligence gathering and letter writing (SP 99/23/127; January 31, 1621). The account books kept by members of Carleton’s embassy are largely comprised of records for payments to informants: see SP 99/20/225, 232 (ca. 1615). Since Wotton was allotted a per diem salary of ₤4 during his embassies, expenses for intelligence gathering comprised more than one-third of the overall budget for the household; for other estimates, see Curzon, Wotton and his Worlds, 102. ⁷¹ For examples of intelligence letters from Carleton’s Italian agents, see some of the documents anthologized in SP 99/20 and 99/24. Catherine Fletcher similarly notes the “role of sociability in gathering information” in her analysis of Tudor diplomacy in Italy (“Furnished with Gentlemen”: 518). ⁷² Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955; London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 280.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

181

but also for household furnishings, transportation, food, and domestic labor, material links that undercut the imputed separateness of the embassy as a markedly English space.⁷³ When Wotton had his secretary Isaac Wake compile an inventory of the embassy’s household goods at the end of his first term in 1610, he did so in order to calculate the debts that he owed to the embassy’s landlord, a Venetian Jew named Isaac Luzzati. The Jewish background of the embassy’s landlord likely stemmed from the restrictions that applied to English interactions with Venetian citizens, which necessarily aligned the English with their resident alien counterparts, as well as the fact that dealing in second-hand clothing and furniture was among the few occupations legally allowed for the residents of the nearby Jewish ghetto. The residences of foreign ambassadors in Venice were located in close proximity to the ghetto in the Cannaregio district and notably distant from sites of commerce and governance in San Marco.⁷⁴ Although Luzzati may have taken advantage of the embassy’s material dependence on him and overcharged for supplies, Wotton in turn exploited Luzzati’s vulnerable social position and left Venice without paying his debts in full: at the end of his term, he still owed Luzzati 1220 ducats, a considerable sum that his successor Carleton also declined to pay, forcing Luzzati to raise the embassy’s rent in a final, desperate effort to recoup some of his losses.⁷⁵ In her work on the economics of early modern domesticity, Natasha Korda has argued that a recognizably modern subject began to emerge in the early modern period through a separation of the individual from the world of objects—or “household stuff”—associated with domestic spaces.⁷⁶ Wake’s inventory, by contrast, illustrates the extent to which the ambassador—the subject of diplomacy— occupied a relatively marginal role in the embassy household. Most of the ⁷³ In relying solely on local providers, Wotton avoided dealing with the sizeable community of resident English merchants in Venice (Maria Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 149–50). But the embassy’s dependence on local labor for its staff could also create potential security risks: in 1610, Wotton reported that the embassy’s cook was fired after having been discovered rifling through his papers (SP 78/56/257; September 12, 1610). Because this episode occurred at the end of Wotton’s first mission, it is likely that the domestic servant, aware of soon being out of a job, was searching for some intelligence that could help secure a position, or ready cash, from a rival diplomat. In his diplomatic handbook, Jean Hotman advised that an ambassador should “not receive into his familie, and amongst his household seruants, those of the country where he is resident,” noting that all except a trusted few are among “so many spies” (The Ambassador, D5). ⁷⁴ De Vivo, Information and Communication, 75. ⁷⁵ Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:501n.; Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, 149. At the beginning of his third embassy, Wotton complained that his household furnishings had yet to arrive from England, and “till then I must live at the mercy of the Jews” (Life and Letters, 2:207: to Sir George Calvert, from Venice, March 2/12, 1621). As Wotton continued Calvert’s efforts to reinforce the domestic foundations of the embassy in his final term, he tried to minimize his household’s association with Venice’s resident alien communities. ⁷⁶ Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), esp. 1–14. On ambassadorial households in the later Stuart period, see Helen Jacobsen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

182

   

embassy’s fifteen rooms were reserved for staff and domestic laborers, with relatively little space set apart for the ambassador himself, including his study and a “Chamber of Entertainment.”⁷⁷ Wake’s inventory does make note of some luxury items, including “Hangings of damask & guilded leather,” an indication of the role of hospitality and conspicuous display as part of the ambassadorial household. Aside from these noted expensive domestic commodities, the household was otherwise comprised of relatively austere rooms occupied by the embassy’s staff of young men, averaging twelve in number, which contributed to a material sense of the embassy as resembling a college residence more than an aristocratic home or state office.⁷⁸ In a letter to Carleton, Wotton singled out a coverlet as one of the few domestic furnishings that he had purchased himself, an object that he insisted was “none of the Jews accompt” and that he intended to leave behind for Carleton’s wife.⁷⁹ We therefore see a division of public and private within the household itself: the outward-facing spaces of reception and entertainment but also the numerous areas consigned for the ambassadorial “family,” which are characterized more by their orderly arrangement and effective household management.⁸⁰ When Wotton turned to the topic of furnishing the home in his Elements of Architecture (1624), written after his return to England following his third and final embassy, he drew on the rhetorical term of distributio to describe “that usefull Casting of all Roomes for Office, Entertainment, or Pleasure,” an acknowledgement of the distinct spaces and respective forms of social labor within the ambassadorial household.⁸¹ During his own tenure in Venice from 1610–1616, Carleton attempted to secure a more permanent domestic arrangement for the embassy. His household accounts detail his shopping spree, listing ₤1200 spent on “new furnishing my house” alongside separate expenses for his wife amounting to ₤326.⁸² Carleton’s ⁷⁷ The members of the household would be comprised of a chief secretary, like de’Monti, who could preside in the ambassador’s absence; assistant secretaries, including his nephew Albertus Morton along with Anthony Parkhurst (as noted below, a mole working for Robert Cecil), who were responsible for writing and translating dispatches; a secretary from the host country to handle protocol, or “language and compliments,” a role occupied by Giovanni Francesco Biondi, discussed below; a steward, like Wake and later Leete, who handled the embassy’s accounts; a chaplain, such as Beddell and Bargrave, a controversial position during Wotton’s first term; along with remaining members employed as messengers (Life and Letters, 1:47). ⁷⁸ SP 99/6/215. See the following documents, ca. December 1610: “note of reckoning of Wotton with the Jew” (SP 99/6/209); “Mr. Wake’s note with the Jew” (SP 99/6/211); “mem. of money due to Jew by Wotton” (SP 99/6/213); and Wake’s inventory of the embassy household (SP 99/6/215). ⁷⁹ SP 99/6/159. Correlating the domestic business of the embassy with its primary political task of gathering intelligence, Wotton apologized to Carleton when the death of his landlord in 1617 forced him to move, noting that “I haue bin of late soe diuersely distracted, partlie with ye publique busines, but more in truth with domestique,” which has resulted in “a slighter returne of intelligence” (SP 84/79/ 43: September 12/22, 1617). ⁸⁰ Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome, 97. ⁸¹ Sir Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture (1624); passage reprinted in Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), 305. ⁸² SP 99/20/132–132v (October 1, 1615). Given the fact that the embassy’s per diem expenses were ₤3, 6 s., 8 p., a sum that Carleton never exceeded by more than ₤3 in any quarter, the amount spent on

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

183

embassy acquired a sense of permanence as it accrued the conventional markers of domesticity: not only luxury items and domestic property, but also the recognizable propriety of the familial unit inhabiting this social space.⁸³ Carleton took a great deal of pride in his efforts to improve the embassy and, when Wotton succeeded him as ambassador, was insistent that his colleague remain on in the new home, despite their personal differences: “I am very loath this where I now dwell (the fairest, most convenient and cheapest of any of the ambassadors’) should go to any but the English.”⁸⁴ Domestic concerns dominate the correspondence relating to the transition from Carleton’s embassy to Wotton’s second term in Venice. Two years prior to his departure, Carleton complained to Chamberlain that Wotton “doth somewhat confound me here in that he writes nothing about his house,” that is, his domestic arrangements and needs.⁸⁵ Indeed, the priority given to domestic issues is reflected in the fact that Wotton’s first letter to the Chief Secretary, Sir Ralph Winwood, after returning to Venice was devoted entirely to explaining why he had chosen his own residence instead, “the house which Sir Dudly [sic] Carleton left me was not fit for me in many respects, and therefore I have spent these few days in preparing and furnishing of another.”⁸⁶ Wotton neglected to inform Carleton of his decision until several months later, however, when he casually explained that he rejected the house “not so much for the greatness of the rent . . . as for the farness from the piazze.”⁸⁷ Even years later, this episode would remain a point of contention between them. After Wotton resumed his post in Venice for a third and final term, he took particular delight in informing Carleton of the expensive renovations that he was making to another new residence, efforts that claimed precedence over relaying intelligence to his colleague: “These silent days have been spent in the trimming of my house, wherein the rooms of receipt are so vast that I had rather have rigged one of the King’s ships.”⁸⁸ With a glancing reference to the contentious issue of household accounts, Wotton concluded his perfunctory letter by icily assuring

furnishings surpassed the embassy’s annual budget (f. 131). The annual budget for resident embassies in the Elizabethan period was ₤1216 11s 8d (Bell, “Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation,” 3.) ⁸³ Significantly, Jean Hotman conferred responsibility for ensuring the domestic management of the ambassadorial household to the ambassador’s wife, “whose eie wil stoppe infinite abuses amongst his people, and disorders in his house” (The Ambassador, D6). ⁸⁴ Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 168. ⁸⁵ Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 168. ⁸⁶ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:96: to Sir Ralph Winwood, from Venice (June 7, 1616). ⁸⁷ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:101: to Carleton, from Venice (September 2, 1616). His rented home during his first embassy was located near to Chiesa di San Girolamo in Cannaregio. In his visit, Coryat mentions that the embassy was located on the same street as the ghetto (Crudities, 1:379). Its proximity to the Jewish ghetto reflects the material dependence on local providers like Luzatti (Smith, Life and Letters, 1:57; Fusaro, Political Economies, 149–50). ⁸⁸ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:208–9: to Carleton, from Venice (March 16/26, 1621). Contrary to this image of domestic prosperity, Wotton was frustrated by his poor reception on arriving in Venice and in April left to spend the next several months in Padua (Smith, Life and Letters, 1:178).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

184

   

him that it “was but to give your Lordship an accompt of my movings and of my rest . . . wherein after this there shall be silence between us.”⁸⁹ Just as Wotton had earlier declared his autonomy by refusing the recently and expensively furnished home that Carleton had left for him, in this parting shot he extended their rivalry into the domestic sphere, emphasizing the extent to which he surpassed Carleton’s earlier accomplishments in furnishing the ambassadorial household. Wotton’s image of his domestic prosperity serves to offset the increasing precariousness of his position in Venice during his latter two terms, however. His return to England following his second embassy was delayed so that the English state would not have to pay his salary in arrears, and the Italian Protestant financiers who handled payments to his embassy had discontinued the practice out of concern for his credibility.⁹⁰ The physical location of his household was similarly disrupted during his second term. After he had to relocate from his initial residence following the death of his landlord in October 1616, he had the fortune to lease one of the Gussoni palaces on the Grand Canal, now known as the Grimani della Vida Palace. But after only several weeks, a fire forced him to shift his residence once more, and he relied on personal connections to find a house owned by the patrician Valier family of Venetian diplomats.⁹¹ In his analysis of commodity culture, Arjun Appadurai refers to the “social life of things” to describe the paths in which objects travel and accrue social value.⁹² Diplomatic correspondence provided a medium for the exchange of a variety of commodities: not only a traffic in news and intelligence, but also a circulation of material goods, a network of exchange that encompassed the human subjects responsible for these objects’ transmission. In analyzing Wotton’s correspondence, it is essential to foreground the intersubjective contexts which transmitted— and also transformed—the content of these documents. As Alan Stewart has argued in his discussion of early modern letters, “[t]hese objects contain text, certainly, but the message they convey is not primarily about that text, but about from whom they come, to whom they go, and how they make that journey.”⁹³ Affect, sociability, and intimacy were key factors dictating what could enter the

⁸⁹ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:209. ⁹⁰ On the arrears in his salary during his third embassy, see CSP, Venice, 1621–1623, 329. Philip Burlamachi may have cut off Wotton based on the insistence of Secretary Calvert, who like his predecessor Winwood was increasingly hostile to Wotton (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 576). Throughout his tenure, economic transactions between the secretary of state’s office and the embassy in Venice were handled through the mediation of the Burlamachi and Calandrini financiers in London, another instance showing the links between Wotton’s household and networks of Italian Protestants (Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, 151). Wotton’s letters were also carried to England by Burlamachi’s agents, whom Wotton praised as “very safe respondents, and none of his packets have ever failed” (Life and Letters, 1:454: to Salisbury, from Venice, May 23, 1609). ⁹¹ Life and Letters, 2: 125–7; CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 321; CSP, Venice, 1617–1619, 57, 109, 139. ⁹² See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ⁹³ Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, 23.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

185

text of the diplomatic letter itself. In a letter to Secretary Calvert, for instance, Wotton opted to leave out any details concerning his recent journey to Venice, and instead had his servant James Vary deliver both the letter along with the omitted narration.⁹⁴ In other examples, the object of the letter and the person of its bearer became interchangeable in the process of circulation. In a letter to Sir Ralph Winwood, Wotton offered him not only news from The Hague but also his agent Giovanni Francesco Biondi: “I will now deliver him unto your honourable hands.”⁹⁵ Biondi, a former secretary to the Venetian ambassador in Paris and convert to Protestantism, attests to the prominent role of a multinational group of diplomatic agents in Wotton’s extensive network of intelligence gathering.⁹⁶ In another instance, Wotton referred to another agent, Carleton’s secretary Isaac Wake, as “a living gazzetta of this Court.”⁹⁷ Wake, who would go on to have a distinguished diplomatic career, began his professional training by entering circuits of patronage in his role as a messenger. In the process, he forged a professional identity by assimilating himself to the workings of intelligence, even to the point of personifying the transmission of information. The extent to which the diplomatic letter was shaped by its social meanings and material qualities is reflected in a packet that Wotton sent to King James, Prince Henry, and Secretary Cecil in June 1609. The referential content of the letters, updates of news from Venice, is perhaps the least significant aspect of these documents. Instead, the texts drew attention to the importance of their bearer, Wotton’s nephew Albertus Morton, and each served as a letter of introduction on his behalf. The letters also functioned as components in a circuit of gift exchange, with Wotton conferring presents with coded meanings that appealed to each of his addressees. For Cecil, he offered a mosaic portrait of the Secretary, a gift intended to be transmitted from his protégé, Morton, to Salisbury’s son, thereby ceremoniously extending bonds of patronage and alliance to the next generation.⁹⁸ For James, Wotton sent what on the surface seems like a gag gift, or a “strange relic,” as he jokingly described it: the Earl of Gowrie’s coat of arms, taken from a dancing school in Padua where Gowrie had stayed years earlier.⁹⁹ As with the Italian

⁹⁴ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:207: to Calvert, from Venice (March 2/12, 1621). In 1610, Wotton similarly omitted from writing a set of instructions for Carleton as his successor, instead delegating the responsibility for an advance briefing to his secretary de’Monti, who traveled to Padua to confer with Carleton about his reception in Venice (SP 99/6/110). ⁹⁵ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:80: to Winwood, from The Hague (June 1, 1615). ⁹⁶ On Biondi, see Carlo M. Bajetta’s entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, volume 5, 781–2. ⁹⁷ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:14: to Carleton, from London (February 25, 1613). ⁹⁸ Wotton, Life and Letters, to James I, from Venice (June 22, 1609) (1:457); to Prince Henry, from Venice (June 22, 1609) (1:459); to Salisbury, from Venice (June 22, 1609) (1:460). Robert Cecil had an informant in Wotton’s staff, the assistant secretary Anthony Parkhurst, who kept tabs on the ambassador, proof of the strained relations between Wotton and Cecil (Peter Redford, “Intercepting the Burley Letters,” Lives and Letters 2 [2010]: 9). ⁹⁹ Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:458.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

186

   

mosaic, the gift advertised the reach of Wotton’s material access and political influence across Italy.¹⁰⁰ But more significantly, it also offered a coded reference to a specific personal context. The two had first met in 1601, when Wotton was sent to Scotland by Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany in order to warn James of a possible assassination attempt. Wotton had disguised himself as an Italian named Ottavio Baldi during his journey, and he famously revealed his identity and mission only once he had gained a private audience with the King. Throughout their correspondence, Wotton would often sign his letters “Ottavio Baldi,” not only reminding his monarch of his loyal history of service but also accentuating the intimacies of political alliance, the forging and preserving of bonds through secrecy and concealment.¹⁰¹ The coat of arms of Gowrie, the thwarted assassin, along with the signature of his alias Baldi, thus invoked a shared history of dangers averted, one that implicitly extended to the most recent of foiled conspiracies, the Gunpowder Plot. Through these gifts, Wotton stressed the continued relevance of a diplomatic identity grounded on a politics of friendship, an ethos that was becoming increasingly strained in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The extent to which this event had transformed the diplomatic culture of early modern England is illustrated most clearly by an episode detailed in the following section, in which the English state circumvented diplomatic protocol and the law of nations in pressing for the arrest and extradition of a group of Catholic exiles despite a lack of evidence of their connection to any conspiracy. In a program spearheaded by the Earl of Salisbury, and implemented by ambassadors Cornwallis in Madrid and Edmondes in Brussels, this state of emergency provided the pretext for a chilling innovation: a defense of the English state’s authority to unilaterally assert its sovereignty beyond its territorial boundaries and juridically enforce its authority over its expatriated subjects, regardless of legal precedent. Significantly, Wotton was left out of the loop in these efforts.¹⁰² ¹⁰⁰ For an extended discussion of Wotton’s role as a collector as well as his later career at Eton, see Melanie Ord, “Returning from Venice to England: Sir Henry Wotton as Diplomat, Pedagogue and Italian Cultural Connoisseur,” in Thomas Betteridge, ed., Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 147–67 and Robert Hill, “Art and Patronage: Sir Henry Wotton and the Venetian Embassy 1604–1624,” in Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Vera Noldus, eds., Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 27–58. ¹⁰¹ See, for example, the letters to James in Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:383 and 2:53. In the indexes of some volumes of the State Papers, Wotton’s letters to James are, in fact, still attributed to “Ottavio Baldi”: see, for example, SP 99/4/224–28. As evidence of James’s intense memory of the episode, the Venetian ambassador reported in 1610 of the monarch “telling me with great emotion that he had known him [Wotton] in Scotland for a man of spirit and had loved him ever since” (CSP, Venice, 1610–1613, 41). ¹⁰² In the only direct comment Wotton made on the case, he added a postscript to a letter to Edmondes assuring his colleague of the success of his “sute” against Hugh Owen, the Jesuit Mission’s liaison to the Spanish viceregal court in Brussels. Although nominally offering his support, he also viewed the effort as a legal proceeding constrained by precedent and international law (Stowe MS 170, f. 237; November 14, 1608).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

187

One could draw on his marginal role at this critical moment so as to reinforce the view of Wotton as more of a literary figure than a statesman. I want to argue things differently. It is very easy to see Wotton, along with his diplomatic style, as being pushed aside out of political necessity. On the contrary, however, he took an active role in the English state’s response to the Gunpowder Plot.¹⁰³ But for him, the event demanded a legal and intellectual program, and it was Wotton who was responsible for arguing England’s case to a European constituency. Alone among his colleagues, he presented copies of James’s defense of the Oath of Allegiance to European states.¹⁰⁴ Previous discussions of Wotton’s first embassy have highlighted his response to the schism between Venice and the Papacy during the Interdict of 1606–07, which he saw as an opening for Venice to ally itself with England and other Protestant states.¹⁰⁵ His response to the Interdict offered a diplomatic solution to what was perceived as an unprecedented crisis of political violence with the Gunpowder Plot. Wotton countered the imputed threat of an alliance of English Catholic exiles with European states by engaging in a battle of ideas: disseminating polemical literature, mentoring Italian converts to Protestantism, even proposing to establish Protestant seminaries on the Continent. These efforts did not produce much in the way of policy or material results, and, as a consequence, the latter stages of Wotton’s career were marked by a growing sense of frustration and failure. As he complained during his inconclusive 1615 mission to Cleves, an initial flashpoint for the Thirty Years’ War, “for what sin, in the name of Christ, was I sent hither among soldiers, being by my profession academical, and by my charge pacifical?”¹⁰⁶

¹⁰³ When Wotton gave a report of the Gunpowder Plot to the Doge and Senate on January 30, 1606, he emphasized that it was not part of any international conspiracy since foreign ambassadors were to be present at the opening of Parliament and that the conspirators “might also have betrayed foreign Princes” (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 316.) ¹⁰⁴ Wotton submitted a copy of James’s Apologia to the Venetian Senate in March 1608 (Life and Letters, 1:416), and later presented James’s A Premonition to all most Mightie Monarches to the Doge in July of the following year. Despite Wotton’s report of the enthusiastic response to these texts, protests from the Papacy led to their prohibition, and the unread presentation copies were quickly dispatched to the Venetian archives (Ord, “Venice and Rome”: 11–12). Other presentation copies fared even worse: the Duke of Florence ordered his copy burned, while the Duke of Savoy and Archduke Albert each refused to accept the text (Wotton, Life and Letters, 1:467, 1:468n.) Wotton never acknowledged the failure of his efforts in his correspondence, instead claiming that unnamed Venetians asked for copies even after the texts had been prohibited (1:465), and that an illegal market was preserved among Venetian booksellers (1:469). On Wotton’s household as a site for the dissemination of Protestant texts and other prohibited books, see Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat, 150. ¹⁰⁵ Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat, 143–66; McReynolds, “Lying Abroad,” 115–23. ¹⁰⁶ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:81–2: to Sir Edmund Bacon, from The Hague (June 7, 1615). During his second and third terms, Wotton was increasingly suspected to be a Spanish agent. The Venetians speculated that his financial straits, as well as resentment about not having been treated as generously as his fellow ambassadors by his Venetian hosts, led him to enter service to Spain (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 575). Venetian authorities also investigated Wotton’s ties to the Spanish ambassador, Alonso de la Cueva, marqués de Bedmar, after reports of a private meeting held between the two (CSP, Venice, 1615–1617, 536–7). Bedmar was later implicated in the Spanish plot against Venice in 1618.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

188

   

Yet even in a political climate increasingly hostile to the politics of friendship he endorsed, Wotton nonetheless stubbornly adhered to his alternative model of diplomatic relations, and refused to subscribe to a view of diplomacy that primarily saw itself as war by other, political means. Wotton had famously defined the role of the ambassador as that of “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” His career demonstrates that this degree of agency could be exercised not only on behalf of the state, but also against it: “All States are ungrateful,” he confided to members of his embassy, but then too “so [are] their ministers.”¹⁰⁷ The terms of his dissent were not direct, but instead expressed by contesting the characteristically abstracted terms in which sovereignty is defined at those moments when the authority of governance is abused. As Wotton remarked in the final year of his final embassy, “as to his Majesty doth belong the sovereignty of judgement, so to his poor honest creatures abroad, the liberty of relation, and a franker discharge of our zeal and duties.”¹⁰⁸

3.2 Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot In December 1605, in the immediate wake of the Gunpowder Plot, Sir Charles Cornwallis, the English ambassador to Spain, met with the Spanish chief minister, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, the Duke of Lerma, to discuss the implications of recent events in England. For Lerma, the Gunpowder Plot posed a dilemma: if it constituted an unprecedented attack against the state, then on what basis could the English government decide to act? “Reason of state,” he remarked, did demand that England take some course to reassert its sovereignty. But how could the English respond, he queried, to something “soe farr beyond the Practizes of other States”?¹⁰⁹ In emphasizing that the Plot was beyond the boundaries of acceptable statecraft, Lerma was, of course, speaking as a politician and protesting his own government’s lack of foreknowledge or complicity. But his inability to comprehend the Plot and its possible causes also stemmed from the fact that this action was not tied to any sovereign body. Meeting only three months after the Treaty of London had officially ended the decades-long undeclared war between their nations, Cornwallis and Lerma, architects of the recently forged Anglo-Spanish

¹⁰⁷ From Wotton’s “Table Talk,” which derived from a commonplace book compiled by Wotton’s secretary William Parkhurst (Life and Letters, 2:492). ¹⁰⁸ Wotton, Life and Letters, 2:226: to Calvert, from Venice (February 11/21, 1622). As Wotton famously queried in his poem “The Character of a Happy Life,” “How happy is he born and taught, / That serveth not an others will?” (Reliquiae Wottonianae, 522). ¹⁰⁹ Sir Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I (1725; New York AMS Press, 1972), 2:190.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

189

alliance, were brought together through an unexpected challenge to the diplomatic system that united them. Having assumed their own monopoly over political agency, these state representatives were confronted with an unprecedented situation in which nonstate agents were able to impact the conditions of interstate negotiation. The Gunpowder Plot had made clear that political agency could stem from transcultural networks as well as sovereign bodies. These nonstate actors challenged the interstate diplomatic system by appropriating one of the conventional foundations of state authority: its monopoly over the use of political violence. Cornwallis and Lerma were therefore confronted with a dilemma: how could states respond within the terms of diplomacy to agents and networks that had rejected the interstate diplomatic system itself? For Cornwallis, it was precisely the unprecedented nature of the Plot that made possible a new, unexpected opportunity: as the Ambassador concluded, “this Plott having no Example in former Ages, might afford a new President [sic] in the Punishment of the Offenders; thereby to leave to Posterity a sufficient Testimony, how odious such Attempts ought to be in the Hearts of all Men.”¹¹⁰ If antecedents could not be found after “a diligent Inquisition” into histories, the state could arrogate the authority to create its own precedent, within or outside legal constraints. The antecedents of case law, along with the models provided by historical sources, were consequently deemed no longer relevant. Freed from these constraints, the English state could use the Gunpowder Plot to write its own narrative of events. The state’s response would create a precedent—or “sufficient Testimony”—establishing its own legal as well as interpretive framework through which the event would be remembered. Such measures would also provide the means to quell further inquiry into the implications of the attack: it would make visible and indisputably clear, as Cornwallis remarked, “how odious such Attempts ought to be in the Hearts of all Men.”¹¹¹ A revealing aspect of Cornwallis’s phrasing was that it conceded the possibility that there could be differing interpretive responses to the Gunpowder Plot. Lerma’s reaction, after all, reflected his own conceptual impasse, which had led him to pose a series of questions regarding the implications of the event. Cornwallis intended, by contrast, to ensure that the Plot would become an indisputable fact, that it would elicit a response of odium and nothing else. Yet in acknowledging that this was merely how it “ought to be in the Hearts of all Men,” he also recognized the tenuousness of his project. To help him overcome this hermeneutical dilemma, Cornwallis was in desperate need of an enemy. He ¹¹⁰ Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 2:190. As Peter C. Herman notes, many responses to the Gunpowder Plot similarly emphasized the unprecedented and therefore unthinkable nature of this act of political violence (“ ‘A Deed Without a Name’: Macbeth, The Gunpowder Plot, and Terrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research 18 [2014]: 121). ¹¹¹ Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 2:190.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

190

   

consequently outlined to Lerma an international conspiracy behind the Plot, one spearheaded by the most notorious of English Catholic exiles: Hugh Owen, an intelligence agent based in Brussels; Father William Baldwin, the Jesuit liaison for the English Mission at the court of the Archdukes Isabella and Albert; and Sir William Stanley, the English captain who had switched allegiance and offered his garrison at Deventer in the Low Countries to Spanish control in 1587. If the Plot was an unprecedented problem, Cornwallis proposed an unprecedented solution, and requested that Lerma authorize the extradition of these three exiles based in the Spanish Netherlands. Lerma balked at this suggestion, and withheld his support on several grounds. First, as I will discuss later, he questioned what kind of sovereign authority England retained over its expatriated subjects, particularly those whose loyalties were to other states or institutional bodies. Secondly, he objected on the grounds of precedent, not only due to the lack of prior models for such policies of extradition but also out of concern for the precedent such actions could set. And, lastly, he simply demanded proof of the exiles’ involvement. Cornwallis responded by citing precedent, emphasizing the frequency with which their states had assisted each other in apprehending and extraditing offenders. Drawing on a commercial language of trade and traffic, he noted the common practice of states exchanging less valuable targets, or suspects “of inferior Qualitie,” “Which Example might be a sufficient Instance to the Archdukes, not to stand so precisely upon those Points.”¹¹² In the course of the ensuing negotiations, as Philip III and the Spanish council debated whether or not to hand over Owen and the others to English authorities, the Spanish king similarly invoked this commercial model, and even proposed a possible exchange: if Spain allowed the extradition of the Catholic exiles, England could make a reciprocal gesture and recall home those English merchants in the Low Countries who were aiding Dutch rebels. Ambassador Cornwallis, writing to the Earl of Salisbury, was exasperated by what he described as the Spaniards’ “own Stupiditie” in making such an analogy between treason and the lawful commerce of war, declaring that it was “too absurd an Allegation, to compare the King’s Commerce with them, to so vile and detestable Traytors as Owen and the rest.”¹¹³ Contradicting the emphasis that Cornwallis and Lerma had placed on the unprecedented aspects of the Gunpowder Plot, the English state’s response attested to a continuity of state policy both prior to and following this event. ¹¹² Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 2:190. Although Stanley was still included among the list of conspirators on a plaque commemorating the Gunpowder Plot (see note 138 below), the English government had established his innocence early in their investigation. The state’s reluctance to implicate Stanley may have additionally stemmed from the fact that he had begun negotiations to allow his return to England. Nothing ever resulted from these talks, however, and Stanley died years later, still a pensioner to Spain (Hugh Ross Williamson, The Gunpowder Plot [London: Faber and Faber, 1951], 83–5). ¹¹³ Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 2:190.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

191

The discovery of the Gunpowder plot did not prompt a break from past policy but rather offered an unexpected means for intensifying existing state objectives. One key issue with which the state was given a new mandate related to its longstanding efforts to extend surveillance and authority over English soldiers and mariners serving abroad. The status of extraterritorial laborers is a pervasive concern in the diplomatic correspondence of this period. In many instances, the problematic status of this group was linked with that of Catholic exiles and seminary priests. Through their characteristic circulation beyond national boundaries, these figures revealed the state’s attenuated hold over its extraterritorial subjects. They also represented a challenge to James’s aspirations for pan-European peace. In order to establish the conditions for interstate diplomacy, James had to limit the number of agents able to impinge on the actions of sovereign state bodies. Peace, for England’s new monarch, solely entailed peace between states, and his project therefore required that each state assumed control over its extraterritorial subjects.¹¹⁴ Some of James’s efforts preceded the Gunpowder Plot. A Royal Proclamation from March 1605 had prohibited English mariners from serving in foreign navies. It was only the second occasion and the first instance in fifty years in which the English state had banned its subjects from selling their labor power to foreign states.¹¹⁵ But the ineffectiveness of this measure led to a subsequent proclamation in July 1605 that specifically prohibited acts of piracy against Spanish vessels. Whereas the former proclamation was prompted by the perceived threat of Englishmen seeking employment from national enemies, the latter document was concerned more with the economic power of English subjects able to buy and sell their labor power on a global market.¹¹⁶ Due to the transnational mobility of maritime laborers, the Royal Navy was finding it difficult to staff its ships, particularly when foreign service offered mariners better wages and working conditions.¹¹⁷ Peace with Spain had exacted an economic toll on this population. James’s prohibition of privateering had put an end to a thriving—and often sanctioned—economy of piracy, a factor that only further induced maritime laborers to seek better opportunities abroad. There is another, more fundamental reason why Catholic exiles were associated with English pirates in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Early modern ¹¹⁴ Ken MacMillan has shown how Spain similarly pressed England to assert control over its subjects in the Atlantic world, as seen most famously by the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh: in Europe as well as the Atlantic, “when it came to affairs with other foreign powers, the Crown retained ultimate authority and exercised its prerogative and sovereign rights, particularly when reason of state so demanded” (The Atlantic Imperial Constitution: Center and Periphery in the English Atlantic World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 56–7). ¹¹⁵ James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume I: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 108–11. For the proclamation of 1575, see Hughes and Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2:395. ¹¹⁶ Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1:114–17. ¹¹⁷ See Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies, 54.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

192

   

formulations of the law of nations followed classical precedent in defining the pirate as the prototypical hostis humani generis, the enemy of the human race exempted from the benefits and protections of the law of nations. Such a figure had no legal status in international law: states were obliged not only to deny such figures the right of refuge but also to actively contribute to their judicial prosecution.¹¹⁸ As discussed further in the Introduction as well as in the next section, it is generally recognized that international law did not approximate a consistent and universally agreed upon set of standards and protocols in the early modern period. Yet despite a lack of consensus regarding the rules operating within the interstate system, definitions of the law of nations nonetheless consistently depended on a category of a universal enemy lying outside of it and opposed to its values. The codification of the status of the universal enemy in the law of nations was interconnected with a process of state formation in which sovereign state institutions asserted a monopoly over the use of force within their territories. What made the enemy a universal enemy was the fact that he was a defined as an outlaw in his native state. The legal penalty of treason therefore reconstituted the subject as a stateless person. Denied a status as subject of any national body, this figure could, by extension, be deemed “the enemy of every State.” And, conversely, in violating the general tenets of the law of nations, the outlaw additionally lost the protections of membership under a specific state body. As noted in the following section, jurists such as Alberico Gentili barred rebels from gaining a status under international law, even if they were able to gain sovereignty as a result.¹¹⁹ Rebellion against the state led to a loss of citizenship, and, without this status, the outlaw was relegated to a position outside the protections of international law as well. By redefining the rebel as stateless person, this legal tradition codified the monopoly of sovereign bodies over the political use of force, not only within their territories, as in the classic Weberian formulation, but also throughout the often anarchic space of extraterritorial commerce and negotiation.¹²⁰ For the state system to function, agency had to be confined to sovereign bodies. In defiance of this legal paradigm, the Spanish government rebuffed English demands for the extradition of Owen and Baldwin by arguing that the exiles were not stateless persons at all but rather members of other corporate or political bodies, a status that protected them from such forced repatriation. Father William

¹¹⁸ Among recent discussions of this topic, see Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All; Christopher Harding, “‘Hostis Humani Generis’: The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20–38; Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). ¹¹⁹ Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.vii.78. ¹²⁰ For further discussion of Weber’s model of the state, see the Introduction. As Thomson points out, Weber analyzed the workings of sovereignty solely within the state’s own borders, and his model did not consider the complications resulting from the extension of state power beyond territorial boundaries (Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, 10).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

193

Baldwin’s membership in the Society of Jesus, they asserted, demanded that any punishment be determined by his superiors, not by a foreign state. For Hugh Owen, it was emphasized that he had become naturalized as a Spanish subject over the course of his thirty years in exile.¹²¹ What is noteworthy about Cornwallis’s response was his insistent refusal to recognize the possibility of changing state citizenship. He also rejected the idea that exile effected any change to national identity, which, in his opinion, remained intrinsic to the character of the subject, regardless of migration or exile. As Cornwallis concluded, “for naturallized he [Owen] might be in some of the Dominions of Spaine, but how disnaturallized with such Construction, as to become exempte from his naturall Allegiance to the Prince and Country from whence he had received his Being and Breeding, I for my part understand not, having ever conceaved that to be Character indelebilis.”¹²² Cornwallis, in keeping with the tenor of the law of nations, refused to recognize the possibility of subjects changing their citizenship. As noted in the Introduction, Gentili reached a similar conclusion in De Legationibus libri tres (1585), and countered the argument that “a man’s native country can not against his will resume its rights over him”; the state’s extraterritorial power, Gentili added, applied to exiles as well as those like Owen who had become naturalized in an enemy nation.¹²³ Like Gentili, Cornwallis posits that national identity and legal status remain intrinsic and unaltered, despite exile, migration, or political allegiance. But ironically, in order to justify England’s legal claim over these exiles, Cornwallis was forced to acknowledge their rights as English subjects. Contradicting the equation of domestic treason with a loss of status under international law, what he asserts as the impossibility of becoming “disnaturalized” in fact argues against the premise that the exiles were stateless persons lacking any rights and protections. Cornwallis grants the exiles a status under English law only while they remain in exile. In a sense, he demands that the exiles be returned home so that they may be denied their rights. A number of draconian measures were opportunistically pushed through Parliament by early 1606, statutes that increased fines against recusancy, and also banned Catholics from holding political office, practicing professions such as law and medicine, or living within ten miles of the city of London. These efforts culminated with the Oath of Allegiance, which demanded

¹²¹ On exile and English Catholics in Europe, see especially Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, as well as the discussion of William Cardinal Allen in the Introduction, above. ¹²² Winwood, Memorials, 2:187. In alluding to “character indelebilis,” Cornwallis drew on a term with a long theological history: Paul had used the term to refer to the intrinsic qualities of grace that remained as an integral core of the subject regardless of outward conversion or apostasy. Augustine, by contrast, saw it as an external manifestation of self that was produced through an adherence to sacramental ritual. Cornwallis transposes the terms of this theological debate—grace versus liturgy— to the context of national allegiance. The Oath of Allegiance had similarly hinged on the question of whether English identity was intrinsic (following Paul’s model) or merely a product of outward conformity (pace Augustine). ¹²³ Gentili, De Legationibus libri tres, II.x.86.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

194

   

that all adult subjects profess their obedience to James as their lawful sovereign.¹²⁴ A key component of the Oath called on subjects not only to forswear assisting any foreign power or conspiring against the nation but also to renounce the principle that subjects could depose their monarch. Historians have previously noted the instrumental role of the Oath in enabling James to create a legal apparatus to back up his ideology of absolutism. But as Michael Questier has noted, the Oath bracketed off matters of conscience and limited its pledge to civic matters alone.¹²⁵ More recently, Rebecca Lemon has argued that the Oath was part of a conciliatory program, offering a way for loyalist recusants to return to the national fold following the Gunpowder Plot. It also functioned, she adds, to separate these moderates from an extremist fringe in the Catholic community.¹²⁶ Essentially, those who did not agree to the Oath could be more effectively identified and targeted by the state. As Andrew Hadfield concludes, “it ensured that a specifically Protestant public sphere would emerge,” one that was defined by an opposition to “the enemy within” the realm, which could now be identified through institutional means.¹²⁷ Through their passive resistance, their character, to borrow Cornwallis’s phrasing, would be “indelebilis.” In its effort to drive a wedge between moderates and extremists, the Oath intended to reintegrate loyalist Catholics by separating them from the activist branches of the Catholic exile community. It therefore attempted to curtail the various personal, textual, and institutional networks that linked Catholics at home with their counterparts on the Continent. As a result, the English state assumed for the first time a centralized control over the travel of subjects passing beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation.¹²⁸ A 1606 proclamation increased the authority of the commissioners of English ports, who, two years later, were also given responsibility for administering the Oath of Allegiance to returning travelers. These new procedures were part of a broader effort to “shutt up all the portes,” as it was described in Parliament, “that the passage of the Thames was in the Eye

¹²⁴ For the text of James’s defense of the Oath of Allegiance, see Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus. Or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, in James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. J.P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–131. For the fullest analysis of the Oath and its contexts, see Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture, 69–112 and W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75–123. ¹²⁵ Michael C. Questier, “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” Historical Journal 40 (1996): 311–29. Also see Chris R. Kyle, “Early Modern Terrorism: The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and its Aftermath,” in Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis, eds., Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 42–55. ¹²⁶ Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 107–23. ¹²⁷ Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture, 92. ¹²⁸ The beginning of the English Mission had prompted an earlier spate of travel regulations in the 1580s, proclamations that similarly targeted Catholic travelers: for discussion, see the Introduction, above.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

195

of the state, and therefore could be better obserued what persons passed there.”¹²⁹ Although these statutes imagined blocking off access to the national body, they also conceded the futility of such efforts. It was due to the state’s failure to impose legal restrictions on the illicit travel of Catholics, after all, that it resorted to instituting extra-legal procedures for the surveillance and possible apprehension of returning Catholic subjects. Although the English state’s pursuit of Hugh Owen and Father William Baldwin intensified in the period immediately following the Gunpowder Plot, this was a project that had been initiated much earlier. Led by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury and Secretary of State, the English government had attempted to implicate the exiles in a number of conspiracies over a period of several years. Salisbury’s protracted vendetta, which often specially targeted Owen, had the effect of creating an intelligence environment that exaggerated the importance of these Catholic exiles. A report sent to Salisbury in October 1601, perhaps pandering to its audience, had listed Owen and Baldwin among the “most dangerous” of the English expatriates.¹³⁰ Writing from London in early 1605, the Spanish ambassador had similarly taken note of Salisbury’s antipathy, remarking that Owen’s name was “more hateful here than that of the devil.”¹³¹ And just four months prior to the Gunpowder Plot, an English spy named William Turner would name Owen as the instigator of an invasion plot, one that, of course, never materialized.¹³² In the narrative constructed in the English state’s intelligence reports, the path of all conspiracies led back to Hugh Owen in Brussels. Yet in drawing these conclusions, English officials conveniently overlooked information that countered this presumed role. For instance, contradicting the way that Owen’s prior meeting with Robert Catesby would be used as evidence of his participation in the Plot, in the course of this exchange Owen had actually discouraged Catesby from plotting against England or hoping to install Isabella and Albert, the Spanish viceroys in the Netherlands, as English monarchs, since “all these parts were so desirous of peace with England.”¹³³ The state’s obsessive

¹²⁹ Stowe MS 168, f. 380. On February 27, 1606, Salisbury refused to grant travel licenses for English Catholics to serve overseas. But even as he tried to curb the mobility of Catholics following the Plot, Salisbury nonetheless acknowledged that European wars depended on a constant stream of English and Irish subjects recruited for Dutch as well as Spanish armies (Stowe MS 168, f. 347). ¹³⁰ SP 15/34/106; CSP, Domestic, Addenda, 1580–1625, 415. ¹³¹ Qtd. in Loomie, The Spanish Elizabethans, 83. ¹³² Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 124. On Turner’s intelligence work for Salisbury, see Francis Edwards, “The Earl of Salisbury’s Pursuit of Hugh Owen,” Recusant History 26 (2002): 2–38. As noted above, he later tried to sell intelligence he had gathered while staying in Wotton’s embassy in Venice in November 1606 (CSP, Venice, 1603–1607, 420–1, 426). ¹³³ Owen’s statement derives from Thomas Wintour’s account of his meeting with him; this document is printed in Samuel Rawson Gardiner, What Gunpowder Plot Was (London: Longmans, 1897), 61.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

196

   

efforts to locate a foreign conspiracy and its willful desire to prove its own bad intelligence served as mutually supporting fantasies. The English state’s determination to create a link between Catholic exiles and the Gunpowder Plot is reflected in a letter of March 28, 1606, in which Salisbury instructed Attorney General Sir Edward Coke “to make Owen, the Jesuit, as foul as possible.”¹³⁴ As he ordered the most noted legal mind of his generation to embellish the dossier against Owen, one gets the impression that even Salisbury might not have fully believed the evidence. However, as seen in Cornwallis’s exchange with Lerma, lack of precedent or material record did not impinge on this process of misinterpretation. Instead, Salisbury spearheaded an effort to create his own archive of evidence against Owen and the other exiles. Owen’s name was first mentioned, for instance, in the midst of the notorious torture sessions inflicted on Guy Fawkes. In his signed confession dated November 9, Fawkes claimed to have communicated the plot to Owen earlier that year.¹³⁵ This document is more often remembered for the nearly indecipherable form of Fawkes’s signature, a graphic trace of the torture used to induce this admission. Among the multiple copies of the confessions signed by conspirators, including those of Fawkes and Thomas Wintour, Owen’s name appeared only in some versions of the documents, an indication that his name was a detail inserted at a later date.¹³⁶ In order to have a case against Owen, Salisbury and his officials needed to fabricate one. By repeating the accusation enough times, as Salisbury advised Sir Thomas Edmondes, his envoy in Brussels, Owen’s guilt would “appeare as evident, as the Sunn in the clearest day.”¹³⁷ In replacing the archive of evidence with one of its own construction, the state succeeded in conjecturing a narrative of Owen’s history of plots against England, inventing a precedent that could then justify their attempts to prosecute him. To return to Ambassador Cornwallis’s phrasing, these efforts all served to render Owen’s treason as indelibly marked on his character. As a material record of such attributed guilt, Owen, Baldwin, and Stanley were even listed among the Gunpowder conspirators on a plaque erected to commemorate the Plot in October 1608.¹³⁸ Even though their participation was never established, the inclusion of their names stood as proof of the Plot’s international dimension.

¹³⁴ SP 14/19/170v; CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 306. ¹³⁵ SP 14/216/90; CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 247. ¹³⁶ As mentioned earlier, Thomas Wintour’s signed confession exculpated Owen of any role in the Plot, while Owen’s name was inserted in Fawkes’s signed confession of January 20, 1606 (Williamson, The Gunpowder Plot, 88, 190; Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991], 31n). ¹³⁷ Stowe MS 168, f. 263. Following his instructions from Salisbury, Coke’s report at the arraignment of the conspirators on January 27, 1606 concluded that Owen’s “finger hath beene in euery Treason which hath been of late yeres detected” (A trve and perfect relation of the whole proceedings against the late most barbarous Traitors [1606], E3v). ¹³⁸ Fraser, Faith and Treason, 201n.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

197

The monument served, in a sense, to indict Owen in absentia, and it represented a final, desperate effort on the part of the English state to make some charges stick against him. As Francis Edwards has shown, the English state had intensified its efforts to capture Owen immediately prior to the creation of the plaque in 1608.¹³⁹ After the failure of their earlier attempts to have Owen extradited, the English state took matters into its own hands and tried to have him kidnapped. Edwards has detailed the extraordinary lengths that Salisbury pursued in his efforts to capture Owen in the Spanish Netherlands, as well as the inept failure of his hired agents. What makes this odd little anecdote pertinent is the kind of precedent that it attempted to set. Whereas James’s peace with Spain had aspired to establish diplomacy as the dominant mode of interstate exchange, the schemes of his chief minister instead opted out of the diplomatic system altogether. In its efforts to abduct Owen, the English state asserted its unilateral right to extend its sovereignty outside its territory. Moreover, it also assumed the prerogative to step outside the law of nations to achieve its objectives. The basis of this extraterritorial power was the claim of jurisdiction over its own expatriated subjects. As Cornwallis had noted, Catholic exiles could not be “disnaturalized.” Through this claim over them, the English state also denied the possibility that subjects could acquire any other competing bonds of political association or identity. Even if exempted from the benefits of citizenship and relegated to a position of exile, the state asserted its power over them, a sovereignty that could be extended in order to reclaim them, even by force. In 1610, the English state did manage to apprehend and extradite one of the unindicted co-conspirators, Father William Baldwin. Captured while traveling near Düsseldorf, he was transferred to England and remained imprisoned in London for eight years, until his release was secured through the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador, Count Gondomar. It is unclear why Baldwin had the misfortune to have been passing through the Protestant territories of the Elector Palatine just at the moment when an English expeditionary force was in the area that could extradite him to England. Past references to this event have assumed that Baldwin, disguised as an Italian merchant, was merely en route to Rome when he was stopped by border guards and discovered with incriminating documents in his possession. But Baldwin’s capture also coincided with the fall of the nearby city of Juliers, which a contingent of English and Dutch forces had captured in order to prevent the succession of a Catholic heir in the region. Fleeing in advance of a Protestant army, Baldwin was forced to emerge from hiding and attempt a dangerously conspicuous border crossing.

¹³⁹ Francis Edwards, “The Attempt in 1608 on Hugh Owen, Intelligencer for the Archdukes in Flanders,” Recusant History 17 (1984): 140–57 and “The Earl of Salisbury’s Pursuit of Hugh Owen”: 2–38. For an expanded narrative, see Edwards’s The Enigma of the Gunpowder Plot (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

198

   

The fact that his capture followed hard upon the Protestant victory at Juliers also explains the strangely formal process of his extradition. Once handed over to an English force—one led, ironically enough, by Sir Edward Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury’s nephew—Baldwin was paraded from Düsseldorf in the midst of what was described in understated terms as a “strong convoy”: a procession comprised of forty-five harquebusiers on horseback, Cecil’s entire company of horse, and thirty musketeers in wagons. Adding to this total, there was also a contingent of 500 horse- and footmen who trailed the convoy. The chief duty of this latter group, though, was to protect the funds intended for the troops.¹⁴⁰ Baldwin himself was “bound with a heavy chain from the neck to the breast, where it was turned and wound round his entire body, being twice as long as would have been required to secure an African lion.”¹⁴¹ The initial enthusiasm of this triumphal procession began to wane over the course of several days, however, as Cecil’s forces eventually realized that they had been given the wrong directions and were forced to remain in place, with several hundred soldiers guarding a lone, chained Jesuit.¹⁴² Eventually, responsibility for transferring Baldwin to England was delegated to two English soldiers.¹⁴³ Instead of serving to display the prowess of England’s military strength and espionage networks, it is perhaps only appropriate that Baldwin’s extradition quickly descended into farce. Because of the accidental, contingent nature of his capture, any effort to attribute it to the directed power of the state assumed comic proportions. This episode illustrates the attenuated and mediated character of the extraterritorial workings of state power. The military contingent that seized Baldwin was, after all, a force that had only the tacit and general approval of the English state. Similar to Elizabethan interventions in the Low Countries, as discussed in the previous chapter, the English state could maintain a policy of plausible deniability, refusing to acknowledge that their forces had state backing, particularly if the missions failed or led to protests from other nations.¹⁴⁴ When events went well—even if by sheer chance—then the state could quickly claim credit, which may explain the ludicrous degree of ceremony used in Baldwin’s arrest. The English state had resorted to its policy of plausible deniability following the botched efforts to kidnap and extradite Owen two years earlier. After Salisbury’s agent, one Thomas Wilfourd, had been captured in the Low Countries and revealed his mission, Salisbury denied any knowledge of the plot. As he protested, ¹⁴⁰ Winwood, Memorials, 3:210. ¹⁴¹ Qtd. in Francis Edwards, Guy Fawkes: The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), 194. ¹⁴² Winwood, Memorials, 3:212. ¹⁴³ Winwood, Memorials, 3:210. Sir John Burlacy and Captain Barnaby Dewhurst were the soldiers paid to transfer Baldwin from Düsseldorf to London (SP 14/57/64; CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 637). ¹⁴⁴ On the early modern state’s use of policies of “plausible deniability,” see Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, 21, 43 and Chapter 2, above.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

199

“what were Owens death to the state? . . . I am not without daylie offers to have my choice of them cutt off, if I were so blooddilye disposed.”¹⁴⁵ Two months later, Salisbury would write to his envoy, Sir Thomas Edmondes, thanking him for his help in covering up the scandal.¹⁴⁶ As this episode reveals, a key function shared by the state’s various agents—from ambassadors to assassins—was to cover the tracks of state authority: not only to carry out the covert, and often illegal, business of the state, but also to ensure that the workings of sovereignty remained untraceable. But the latitude conferred to these extraterritorial agents also reflected the tenuousness with which state authority was extended abroad as well as the extent to which it was necessarily dispersed along networks of mediated authority. In extraditing Baldwin, for instance, authority had to be delegated to two English captains. Offsetting an abstracted sense of the English state as an entity supported through an organized bureaucracy and established diplomatic channels, these examples attest to how the extraterritorial extension of state power depended on agents and networks that operated outside the state’s rules and protocols. At the beginning of his reign, James I had aspired to inaugurate a new diplomatic mode for interstate exchange. Part of his efforts intended to repudiate any illicit activities on the part of the state, such as the sponsorship of privateering or the quasi-official raids that had continued throughout the late Elizabethan period. Moreover, early Jacobean diplomatic practice attempted to limit the kinds of delegated agency that subjects could claim for themselves in an extraterritorial context, as seen with the Jacobean regulations regarding foreign service, privateering, and travel. Contradicting these stated goals, the imperative to locate some kind of international conspiracy behind the Gunpowder Plot quickly led the Jacobean state to violate its own tenets. The state of emergency prompted by the discovery of the plot excused the state in exempting itself from its own principles.¹⁴⁷ Throughout the eight-year period of his imprisonment, Baldwin was at the center of extra-diplomatic efforts by England and Catholic European states that represented a kind of traffic in subjects, with various sovereign authorities initiating schemes to kidnap and exchange subjects from opposing sides of the confessional divide. Within a month of Baldwin’s capture, Salisbury’s informants reported that the Papal Nuncio was arranging to have members of Cecil’s own family abducted while they toured the Continent.¹⁴⁸ Although nothing came of these plans, a lower-ranking member of the Cecil traveling party—John Mole, tutor to Cecil’s grandson Lord Roos—was later imprisoned by the Inquisition and ¹⁴⁵ Stowe MS 170, f. 127v. As evidence of the pervasive suspicion regarding his motives, Cecil was forced to compose a pamphlet in which he countered charges that he himself had orchestrated the Gunpowder conspiracy (Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 20). ¹⁴⁶ Stowe MS 170, f. 203. ¹⁴⁷ For further discussion of the concept of the state of exception, see the Introduction, above. ¹⁴⁸ Captain William Turner to Salisbury, September 22, 1610 (SP 14/57/88; CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 634).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

200

   

unsuccessfully put forward as a bargaining chip in a possible exchange for Baldwin.¹⁴⁹ Hugh Owen was similarly at the center of some of these schemes: the Spanish ambassador, for instance, reportedly opted not to intercede on behalf of Father Henry Garnet and prevent his execution “lest the King should insist on the delivery of Owen.”¹⁵⁰ In Jacobean diplomacy, one of the preconditions for interstate peace was a suppression of the various illegal economies flourishing beyond the reach of state authorities, from privateering and mercenary service to the circulation of Catholic priests and their texts. However, in stepping outside the law of nations and legal precedent in its obsessive pursuit of the Catholic exiles, the English state began to resemble these rogue groups and their illicit economies.¹⁵¹ As Gentili had concluded a generation earlier, when counseling the English state on its legal response to a Catholic plot implicating the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza: “We commit a grave offense against international law, if in our efforts to repell violence we go beyond the proper limit.”¹⁵² In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, the English state refused to recognize the possibility of groups whose interests and identities were not coterminous with sovereign state institutions. What resulted was a confused legal—as well as extra-legal—categorization that left no conceptual place for the exile, extraterritorial subject, or nonstate agent.¹⁵³ Instead, a contradictory and opportunistic logic was applied that cast these groups alternately as outlaws, existing outside of and therefore unprotected by the law of nations, or as traitors, rebels who must be forcibly brought back into the national fold and punished for their actions. But in this state of emergency, the English state acquired the attributes of illegality and extraterritoriality attributed to its enemies.

3.3 Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas One of the abiding fictions underwriting the history of international law is the idea of lines of amity. According to many traditional accounts, the European states

¹⁴⁹ In a letter to Carleton dated October 22, 1612, Chamberlain noted that Sir Henry Wotton was trying to arrange the exchange of Baldwin for Mole (SP 14/71/34–34v; CSP, Domestic, 1611–1618, 153). ¹⁵⁰ Sir Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, May 2, 1606 (CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 315); this letter is also included in Lee, ed., Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 81. ¹⁵¹ This point is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the classification of “rogue nations” in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (2003; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). ¹⁵² Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, II.xxviii.112. Gentili advocated a moderate response, the expulsion rather than execution of Mendoza for complicity in the Throckmorton Plot. ¹⁵³ The circumstances of Baldwin’s arrest reflect the inability to categorize the position of the expatriated Catholic subject. Upon his capture, Baldwin is reported to have “acknowledged himself a subject of his Majesty of Gr. Brittayne” (Winwood to Salisbury, September 8, 1610: SP 14/57/64; CSP, Domestic, 1603–1610, 631). In this instance, Baldwin resumed an identity as a “British” citizen only as an effect of the state’s claim of juridical authority over him.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

201

system was able to take shape and retain a coherent form over the course of the early modern period by bracketing off the conflicts that took place between states in regions outside Europe. Territorial conflicts, acts of piracy, and other forms of extraterritorial violence that took place “beyond the line,” that is, west of the Canaries and south of the Tropic of Cancer, did not infringe on European interstate treaties or otherwise affect the amity among European states. Although the origin of the amity lines is typically attributed to the FrancoHabsburg treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559, this document, whose predominant concern was a division of French and Spanish control over Italy, does not include any discussion of the rival states’ competition in the Americas within the text of the treaty.¹⁵⁴ The textual form of the treaty effectively replicates the elision of colonial contexts from the purview of European politics. Nonetheless, CateauCambrésis attained a central position as unstated policy through its citation as precedent in subsequent treaties, such as the Franco-Spanish Peace of Vervins (1598) and the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of London (1604). In diplomatic practice as well, the justification of amity lines by Cateau-Cambrésis held a status as established fact: Marie de Medici, Regent of France, defended the right to seize the vessels of rival European nations in a 1611 document by arguing that “as is evidenced by all treaties since the time of King Francis, beyond the line and on the American coast there is no peace.”¹⁵⁵ The intrinsically fictive character of the amity lines is even more apparent when analyzed in practical terms that expose the uncertainty of their supposed location. The line separating Europe from other regions was, to begin with, double rather than single: a western division keyed to the Canary Islands or Azores in addition to a southern boundary running along the Tropic of Cancer. The southern line, situated immediately north of the Caribbean and the entirety of Southeast Asia, conveniently subsumed the profitable sites of West and East Indies within the lawless realm of licensed piracy. The western meridian was also far from selfevident and remained an unsettled point of contention among European states throughout the period. As many as fourteen rival candidates were offered as to what line marked being beyond the line in the first place.¹⁵⁶ In practice, as illustrated by examples such as Drake’s raid on Cadiz or the Spanish Sack of Antwerp discussed in Chapter 2, the state of war nominally confined to spaces beyond Europe was integral to the informal and quasi-sanctioned violence that permeated European interstate relations as well.

¹⁵⁴ Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington DC: Carnegie Institution, 1917), 1:219–21. ¹⁵⁵ Wilhelm G. Grewe, Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 156. ¹⁵⁶ Bertrand Westphal, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place and Maps (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 141.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

202

   

The amity lines held an imaginative currency because they served as a moving horizon that could maintain a conceptual boundary separating Europe from its messy entanglements across the globe. In fact, as Garrett Mattingly noted, there is a surprising paucity of references to lines of amity in early modern diplomatic correspondence, evidence of a lack of distinction between European and nonEuropean spheres of interstate relations.¹⁵⁷ Wilhelm G. Grewe therefore clarifies that the importance of the concept of the lines of amity is that it “gave each nation a formless and geographically restricted right” to take actions that would not impinge on interstate treaties, constitute acts of war, or demand reprisals from other nations.¹⁵⁸ However, contradicting the ways in which the lines of amity attempted to bracket off the extra-European world from the law of nations, European and global contexts were mutually constituted and in dialogue with one another throughout the period. As Antony Anghie has argued, instead of thinking of the Westphalian model of sovereignty extending around the globe, “sovereignty was improvised out of the colonial encounter, and adopted unique forms which differed from and destabilized given notions of European sovereignty.”¹⁵⁹ As I will discuss further in reference to how responses to rebellion in the Americas placed these events alongside the contemporary Dutch Revolt, colonial relations had a transformative effect on the imagination of a European political system. Any global structure, such as early modern formulations of the law of nations, is therefore more productively seen, to use Lauren Benton’s phrasing, as an “institutional matrix constructed out of practice and shaped by conflict.”¹⁶⁰ Lines of amity can be viewed within another framework, one that better recognizes the impact of global relations on the European interstate system. Competition among European powers over spheres of influence and commercial advantage in other regions across the globe also enabled unexpected alliances, forms of amity that traversed lines of nation, confessional identity, and race. The initial portion of this section will examine a historical incident that is perhaps better known through its reworking in dramatic form and popular culture: Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons in Panama in 1572. This incident raises questions regarding Drake’s own status as a diplomatic agent and the extent to which he could wield authority in forging such informal alliances. As Benton has noted, a “reliance on structures of delegated authority” was essential for the extension of European legal authority “into supposedly lawless parts of the ¹⁵⁷ Garrett Mattingly, “No Peace Beyond What Line?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 13 (1962): 145–62. ¹⁵⁸ Grewe, Epochs of International Law, 162. ¹⁵⁹ Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. Also see China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 169–83. ¹⁶⁰ Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

203

Atlantic.”¹⁶¹ In addition, this example challenges the exclusion of the Cimarrons from the law of nations. Rather than being categorized as escaped slaves and thereby dispossessed of political rights, the Cimarrons’ alliance with Drake marks their position as political agents. Even if not recognized as a nation in the states system, they can nonetheless take on the attributes of sovereign authority: making alliances, negotiating with foreign powers, including their former Spanish overlords, and exercising agency through the strategic use of violence.¹⁶² The alliance of a privateer and escaped slaves thereby transforms the premises of the lines of amity, creating new connections that not only traverse colony and metropole but additionally complicate the extent to which nonstate agents, stateless persons, and a range of colonial subjects wield political agency in the unstable domain of the Americas. Countering the implications of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons, the latter half of this section will examine the means by which the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination throughout the early modern period. In his study of the emergence of a globalized European legal system, Carl Schmitt argues that the “spatial order of states” and balance of power in Europe required the separation of extra-European regions from the framework of the law of nations, as a result of which these spaces were relegated to a status as “incidental and peripheral.”¹⁶³ With the increasingly territorial definition of states, jus gentium was restricted to jus inter gentes [law among nations] if not inter gentes Europaeas [among nations of Europe].¹⁶⁴ In this scenario, “[w]hoever lacked the capacity to become a ‘state’ was left behind.”¹⁶⁵ Echoing Alberico Gentili’s refusal to recognize the legal status of rebels and other nonstate actors, Schmitt concludes that “ ‘Statehood’ is not a universal concept, valid for all times and all peoples.”¹⁶⁶ The European definition of the law of nations reasserted itself by reconstituting an imagination of the lines of amity that denied the political and historical contemporaneity of regions beyond Europe. Offsetting the examples of crosscultural amicitia seen in the first half of this section, from Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons to the comparison of rebellion in Panama and the Netherlands, the ¹⁶¹ Lauren Benton, “Atlantic Law: Transformations of a Regional Legal Regime,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World c.1450–c.1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 402. ¹⁶² Relevant to this point are Cynthia J. Van Zandt’s analysis of intercultural alliances in Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Jeffrey’s Glover’s study of European-American treaties in Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). ¹⁶³ Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 126, 184, 136. ¹⁶⁴ Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 129. ¹⁶⁵ Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 130. ¹⁶⁶ Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 127. André J. Krischer and Hillard von Thiessen similarly conclude that it was only after 1800 when diplomacy “whether in Europe or the rest of the world, became the exclusive sphere of sovereigns and sovereign states” (“Diplomacy in a Global Early Modernity: The Ambiguity of Sovereignty,” The International History Review 20 [2018]: 6).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

204

   

societas of a European states system was able to reassert itself through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register. As John Watkins has recently argued, narratives of the law of nations such as Gentili’s (discussed further in this section) are structured around the pathos of tragic reversal, descending from the premise of universality to an enumeration of failures.¹⁶⁷ As a counterpart to Valerie Forman’s linking of tragicomedy with global trade, wherein this generic model offers a comforting framework for reconstituting forms of order unsettled by global commerce, the examples analyzed below impose an irredeemably tragic template for imagining colonial encounters.¹⁶⁸ The catastrophe in the tragic narrative of colonialism comes in the form of native resistance and colonial rebellion, which are transformed into violations of the terms of sociability and amicitia underwriting the law of nations. While colonial history is rendered as tragic in terms of its plot, colonial subjects are nonetheless excluded from the law of nations as nonstate agents and stateless persons, and are therefore deprived of a tragic status that could be achieved through being endowed with a legal personality and thereby represented as sovereign, rightsbearing subjects.¹⁶⁹ The latter portions of my discussion will analyze the tragic reversals found in two texts: Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis (1532) and William Davenant’s The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). Canonized as the founder of international law in the twentieth century, and seen as a prototypically modern forerunner of later versions of international thought, Vitoria is integral to any discussion of the early modern law of nations.¹⁷⁰ However, these modern readings often neglect to acknowledge how his critique of Spanish dominion in the New World suddenly pivots at the end of his text in order to justify a legal order he has already proven to be illegitimate. Vitoria accomplishes this reversal through a redefinition of amity: no longer serving as a model of similitude and alliance, the term instead offers an insidious way of defending Spanish colonialism under the guise of diplomacy, free trade, and the defense of the innocent. Davenant’s dramatic entertainment The History of Sir Francis Drake rewrites the episode of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons in order to provide a spectacular precedent for representing England’s nascent imperial identity, ensured ¹⁶⁷ See John Watkins, “Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fiction and the Troubled Origins of International Law,” in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Sowerby and Craigwood, 81. ¹⁶⁸ Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). ¹⁶⁹ My point draws on Christopher Warren’s illuminating analysis of the connections between definitions of humanity and tragic character in Literature and the Law of Nations, 167. ¹⁷⁰ See James Brown Scott, The Catholic Conception of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934). On Vitoria’s role in the history of international law, see especially Georg Cavallar, “Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel: Accomplices of European Colonialism and Exploitation or True Cosmopolitans?,” Journal of the History of International Law 10 (2008): 181–92 and Martti Koskenniemi, “Vitoria and Us,” Rechtgeschichte 22 (2014): 119–38.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

205

through entrance into the Spanish Caribbean. Davenant’s text ultimately contains the implications of an English alliance with the Cimarrons by ending the entertainment with a threatened act of sexual violence that relegates the Cimarrons to a position outside of civil society and the law of nations. Although Cromwell’s Western Design for wresting the Caribbean from Spanish control was unsuccessful, it did provide England with a foothold in Jamaica.¹⁷¹ The Jamaican Maroons, like the Panamanian Cimarrons before them, were important diplomatic agents in their ability to negotiate with competing European forces, and their complex political status reveals the generally unrecognized position of such nonstate agents and stateless persons in the global workings of early modern diplomacy. *

*

*

In 1572, Sir Francis Drake set out on a mission to intercept the annual Spanish shipment traveling from the silver mines of Peru, a convoy that was transported overland at the Isthmus of Panama and shipped from the Caribbean.¹⁷² The geography of this conflict supports Lauren Benton’s argument that it is more accurate to see the lines of amity and enmity structuring global relations as following the paths of trade routes rather than demarcating a strict boundary separating Europe from a sphere beyond the line.¹⁷³ Drake’s encounter with the Cimarrons was made possible by an accident of geography: one Cimarron settlement (palenque) was strategically located about thirty miles west of Nombre de Dios, a route closely approximating the location of what is now the path of the Panama Canal. Accounts of Drake’s voyage often elide the contributions of the Cimarrons, emphasizing the incidental nature of the alliance in order to limit their role. Harry Kelsey’s biography of Drake, for instance, sees him as an unwilling ally of the Cimarrons, arguing that he “had little choice” but to accept their assistance.¹⁷⁴ Drake did not stumble upon a helpless community in need of his intervention, however. The Cimarrons were in the midst of a decades-long struggle against their erstwhile Spanish masters, a rebellion that overlapped with the Dutch Revolt. After initial revolts in 1525, 1530, and 1533, the Cimarron settlements were in a nearly constant state of war with Spanish colonial forces from 1549 to 1582. Despite political settlements reached in 1553 and 1556, this conflict was at its most intense phase when Drake arrived in the 1570s. Even Drake, the experienced ¹⁷¹ On the Western Design, see David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 531–55. ¹⁷² The original narrative of Drake’s voyage was published in Philip Nichols, Sir Francis Drake Reuiued (1626). For recent discussions of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons, see Cassander L. Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 58–83 and Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017), 56–89. ¹⁷³ Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 106. ¹⁷⁴ Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 61. For similar comments, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Drake’s Voyages: A Re-Assessment of their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1967), 37.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

206

   

slave trader, was impressed by the Cimarrons, a population of around 3000 that had maintained its political independence for decades.¹⁷⁵ Whereas accounts of Drake’s mission relegate the Cimarrons to an instrumental role as guides and informants, the raid is more accurately seen as a Cimarron effort that drew on limited English support, one spearheaded by Pedro Mandinga, leader of the palenque of Puerto Bello near Nombre de Dios.¹⁷⁶ The overland expedition included thirty Cimarrons along with eighteen English in the party, and it was the former group who “did most of the real work.”¹⁷⁷ Throughout his voyage, Drake was dependent on Cimarron intelligence, including integral information regarding the path of the Spanish convoy.¹⁷⁸ Reflecting the importance of such informants, a guide named Diego accompanied Drake on his return to England and later served as a crewmember on the circumnavigation voyage.¹⁷⁹ Drake’s indebtedness to the Cimarrons is revealed most vividly in the bestknown episode of this two-week overland journey. Nearing their destination on the Pacific coast, the party stopped at another prosperous Cimarron palenque. Following the instructions of his Cimarron guides, Drake and his men climbed a series of steps cut into trees to reach a summit enabling them to gain their first glimpse of the Pacific.¹⁸⁰ In later retellings, including Davenant’s History of Sir Francis Drake, this moment is portrayed as a point of origin marking English entrance into a trans-Pacific world, not only anticipating Drake’s circumnavigation but also promising later English imperial dominance.¹⁸¹ The perennial popularity of mythic retellings of this incident conveniently overlooks how Drake’s sublime view of the Pacific is achieved only as a result of the labor of his Cimarron allies. Ultimately, the attempted raid on the Spanish convoy was a debacle. In the first instance, the Spanish, alerted to an ambush, were able to repel the attack, which forced Drake and his allies to lay siege to Venta Cruces, a nearby Spanish settlement. Much of what was seized in this raid could not be carried and had to be discarded or destroyed. A subsequent raid, near Nombre de Dios, was more successful, but even in this instance much of the seized treasure was left behind ¹⁷⁵ Ruth Pike, “Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth Century Panama,” The Americas 64 (2007): 243–66. ¹⁷⁶ Irene A. Wright, ed., Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–80 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932), xl–xli. On Pedro Mandinga, see Smith, Black Africans, 72–4 and Kaufmann, Black Tudors, 66. ¹⁷⁷ Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 61. ¹⁷⁸ On Drake’s use of Cimarron and other African-born guides, see Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 97–103. ¹⁷⁹ Wright, ed., Documents, xxxiii; Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen, 98, 99, 103. On the life and career of Diego, a former slave who was paid wages as a member of Drake’s crew, see Kaufmann, Black Tudors, 56–89. ¹⁸⁰ Wright, ed., Documents, 300. ¹⁸¹ William Davenant, The History of Sir Francis Drake, in Drama of the English Republic, 1649–60, ed. Janet Clare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 4.61–75. All further references will be cited in-text.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

207

and recovered by the Spanish. Despite their ultimate futility, the raids represented an anomalous innovation in that Drake and his allies extended the maritime rules of plunder and seizure of prize to Spanish territories; they were, in David Shields’s terms, “an unprecedented colonial adventure, an impromptu war without state sanction.”¹⁸² The Anglo-Cimarron alliance was more successful in a maritime context. Drake and his Cimarron allies joined forces with the French Huguenot privateer Guillaume Le Testu and continued to mount sporadic attacks on Spanish vessels throughout the region. After Le Testu’s death and Drake’s departure, John Oxenham, one of Drake’s lieutenants, returned to Panama in 1575 and joined with the Cimarrons for several more years, until he was captured by Spanish forces and executed in Lima.¹⁸³ As Edmund Morgan notes, this history unfolded “on a scale that transforms crime into politics.”¹⁸⁴ This historical alliance also transformed the perceived religio-political identity of the Cimarrons themselves: colonial Spanish documents from this period refer to the Cimarrons as “Lutherans” and describe instances of Cimarrons leading their European allies in the desecration of Spanish Catholic churches.¹⁸⁵ Although these accounts are shaped by confessional prejudice, they nonetheless reflect how the Cimarrons’ colonial struggle became inflected by the internecine religious conflicts of early modern Europe. Contemporary documents viewed the Cimarrons’ history of political struggle and negotiation not as beyond the line but rather part of European interstate conflicts. Spanish officials in Panama, for example, did not distinguish between European privateers and local Cimarrons as political threats, referring collectively to the depredations of “both French and cimarrones.”¹⁸⁶ As Marcus Rediker has shown, alliances between pirates and Maroon communities intensified in the eighteenth century, and nonstate piratical groups often identified themselves as “marooners” in this period.¹⁸⁷ Visitors to Cimarron palenques were surprised by their overwhelming resemblance to Spanish colonial settlements, a similitude extending to the Spanish clothing worn by residents.¹⁸⁸

¹⁸² David S. Shields, “Sons of the Dragon: or, The English Hero Revived,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, ed. Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 110. ¹⁸³ Pike, “Black Rebels”: 259–61. Oxenham had released Spanish prisoners, who then relayed information on the location of Cimarron palenques. As a result, his Cimarron allies withdrew their support, which led to his defeat and capture (Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination, 82). ¹⁸⁴ Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 9. ¹⁸⁵ Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 13. ¹⁸⁶ Wright, ed., Documents, xix. ¹⁸⁷ Marcus Rediker, Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 56. Also see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). ¹⁸⁸ Wright, ed., Documents, xli. Drake similarly praised the social organization of a Cimarron settlement he visited (Sir Francis Drake Reuiued, 56).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

208

   

In one of the earliest English texts in the genre of colonial promotional literature, Richard Hakluyt proposed Panama as the location of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, and envisaged a colony whose population of Cimarrons would be joined by English convicts and other migrants who would support themselves through attacks on Spanish shipping.¹⁸⁹ Spanish colonial authorities feared the prospect of such long-term alliances: during Drake’s final voyage of 1585, Spanish officials speculated that the slaves whom Drake had seized in the Spanish Caribbean would be resettled in Roanoke, granted their freedom, and used to defend the fledgling English colony.¹⁹⁰ However, Hakluyt’s vision of a pirate utopia was quickly forgotten, in part because the possibility of future English alliances with the Cimarrons had already passed when Hakluyt published his text in 1584. The three major palenques of Panamanian Cimarrons all negotiated settlements with the Spanish from 1579 to 1582, putting an end to their decades-long revolt. In exchange for being resettled in self-governing towns, the Cimarrons agreed to suspend any further alliances with the English and return fugitive slaves who arrived in their communities.¹⁹¹ These treaties reflect the status of the Cimarrons as political agents to whom the terms of diplomatic negotiation and recognition were extended. For their part, the Cimarrons abided by the terms of their agreements. When Drake returned to the region in 1596, the Cimarrons remained loyal to the Spanish crown and refused to join forces with him.¹⁹² As recounted in Lope de Vega’s poem on Drake, “Dragontea,” which drew on archival accounts of the episode, the Cimarron settlement of Santiago del Principe was instrumental in warding off Drake’s later incursion in the region.¹⁹³ Despite winning a short-term battle through the relative degree of autonomy they achieved, the Cimarrons lost the longer war of their struggle as a community defined by an escape from slavery. Their treaties with Spain coincided with a dramatic escalation of the transatlantic slave economy: whereas 36,300 slaves arrived in Spanish America from 1550–95, the period of the Cimarron revolt against Spain, that number skyrocketed to 268,600 from 1595 to 1640.¹⁹⁴ For Spanish colonial authorities, diplomatic settlement with the Cimarrons not only put an end to a futile military campaign but also channeled Cimarron power to the defense of the colony. Moreover, without the threat of slaves escaping to the palenques, the slave trade could expand unchallenged in the region. ¹⁸⁹ Richard Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E.G.R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 142–3. ¹⁹⁰ Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583–1594 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1951), 189; cf. 204, 206. ¹⁹¹ Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 140. ¹⁹² Pike, “Black Rebels”: 262–5. ¹⁹³ John Cummins, “ ‘La religion Christiana vitoriosa’: Lope de Vega’s Account of Francis Drake’s Last Expedition,” in “Never Ending Adventure”: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature in Honor of Peter N. Dunn (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002), 405–20. ¹⁹⁴ Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 140.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

209

Lines of amity provided a necessary conceptual framework for an initial formulation of international law in the early modern period. However, as Carl Schmitt noted in The Nomos of the Earth, the imputed universality of the law of nations began to decline as a result of challenges to Habsburg Spain’s dominance in the Americas.¹⁹⁵ Supporting Schmitt’s argument, one can see that the alliance of disparate groups of escaped slaves, English privateers, and French Huguenot exiles was forged through their shared opposition to Spanish imperial hegemony in the Americas. The long struggle of the Cimarrons against their former masters was therefore part of a context that extended to the contemporary European settings of the Dutch Revolt and French Wars of Religion. As Benjamin Schmidt has shown, the Dutch were able to imagine the prospect of rebellion against Habsburg authority by seeing an analogy between Spanish colonialism in the Low Countries and America.¹⁹⁶ The juxtaposition of rebellion in old and new worlds brought about a reassessment of the political status of nonstate agents who were traditionally barred from recognition in the law of nations. As noted in the Introduction, the Huguenot political theorist François Hotman broke from tradition and offered a model of resistance theory that extended political rights and diplomatic recognition to rebels as well as other nonstate actors such as brigands and runaway slaves.¹⁹⁷ Hotman’s position quickly prompted a response from Alberico Gentili, who argued that rebels and exiles could not sever their bonds of obligation to their home nations. Even if these groups lost the protections of citizenship, they were not to be granted any compensatory status under the law of nations: “a subject does not by rebellion free himself from subjection to the law.”¹⁹⁸ Gentili associated rebels with other nonstate groups, often placed under the encompassing term “brigands,” who were excluded from legal protection: “malefactors do not enjoy the privileges of a law to which they are foes.”¹⁹⁹ In his codification of the diplomatic relations undergirding the states system, Gentili—in principle— disallowed the entry of new political actors, even those groups like the rebellious Dutch provinces who might eventually gain sovereign authority through a

¹⁹⁵ Schmitt, Nomos, 92–9. ¹⁹⁶ Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68–122. For a related discussion, see J.N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 309–27. In another example of this connection, Spanish diplomats saw the Virginia Colony as an extension of an Anglo-Dutch alliance against Habsburg rule begun in the Low Countries (Glover, Paper Sovereigns, 62). ¹⁹⁷ François Hotman, Quaestionem illustrium liber (Paris, 1573), VII (46–54). ¹⁹⁸ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, I.iv.22. ¹⁹⁹ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, 22. As discussed in the Introduction, Gentili makes similar comments in De Legationibus Libri Tres: “Subject peoples, however, cannot acquire it [rights of embassy] by revolt, because rights are not acquired by offenses” (II.viii.78; see 77–78, 84–6).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

210

   

successful rebellion.²⁰⁰ However, while Gentili barred subjects from rebellion, he nonetheless granted sovereign authorities the ability to break their bonds of obligation to their subjects, and concluded that they still “retain the rights of war and the other privileges of the law of nations” even if they “have proved false to friendship, to a treaty, or even to voluntary dependence.”²⁰¹ As discussed in the previous section, states consequently begin to resemble the rogue groups they are opposing. Aware of this implication, Gentili responds angrily to George Buchanan’s likening of Cosimo de’ Medici to a robber, and similarly dismisses the joke from Plautus that justifies stealing fish from the market since the sea is “common property.”²⁰² Gentili’s representation of the states system as unitary, stable, and impervious to historical change depends upon the creation of stateless persons excluded from the law of nations. Gentili additionally imposes a division between theory and practice, between the seemingly universal framework of jus gentium and the exceptions to these rules provided in examples drawn from contemporary political alliances and conflicts. Gentili draws a distinction between “societas” and “amicitia,” the universal laws and principles organizing international society on the one hand and the messy entanglements of actual alliances, negotiations, and conflicts on the other. Whereas “friendship” undergirds Gentili’s model of international society— “something of no slight importance” he adds—it is ultimately based on a contractual model.²⁰³ Even though Gentili transforms the lines of amity in some fundamentally radical ways—disallowing the legitimacy of religious warfare and including non-European and non-Christian peoples within his purview—he significantly limits these transcultural links to amicitia, alliances based on commercial interests that do not fundamentally shift the international order of the (European) states system. In this framework, commercial agreements “with infidels” are sanctioned, but not aid or any more formalized diplomatic treaty.²⁰⁴ The lines of amity can be redrawn, but only with short-term alliances, ones that are good for business and, more importantly, do not affect the inherent boundaries of the European societas of states. The contradictions built into Gentili’s models of societas and amicitia are similarly inherent in his Ciceronian source material. In De Officiis, when Cicero outlined a model of societas as voluntary association, and generalized this civic framework to imagine the possibility of a “common

²⁰⁰ As Alexandra Gajda points out, Gentili’s De Jure Belli was revised in the midst of negotiations for a truce between the Dutch and Spain in 1598; its position was additionally shaped by Gentili’s connection to the Earl of Essex, who was opposed to a negotiated settlement (The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture, 98). ²⁰¹ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, I.iv.23. ²⁰² Gentili, De Legationibus libri tres, II.vii.77; De Jure Belli Libri Tres, I.iv.24. For analysis of this Plautine joke in the context of early modern debates on maritime commerce, see Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 70, 78. ²⁰³ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, III.xviii.387. ²⁰⁴ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, III.xix.401–2.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

211

fellowship of the human race,” his cosmopolitical position was a speculative and hypothetical argument articulated in response to the exclusion of foreigners from “common benefit.”²⁰⁵ When Cicero turned to the topic of friendship more fully in De Amicitia, grounding his analysis on the practices of sociability, he conceded that affective ties often stem from proximity and show a natural inclination for fellow countrymen over foreigners: transcultural amicitia is possible, “but it is one that is lacking in constancy.”²⁰⁶ But whereas a tradition from Cicero to Gentili characterized cross-cultural alliances in terms of their expediency and cynical commercial motivations, the implications of New World alliances returned to transform the application of jus gentium to specific Old World conflicts. Contradicting Gentili’s exclusion of rebels from the law of nations, his framework leaves open the possibility for the Dutch to acquire a status, not as sovereigns but trading partners: “a relation of friendship,” such as the customary economic ties between England and Antwerp that shaped the English interventions discussed in the last chapter, as well as through a promise of future alliances that offset the current status of the Dutch as subjects of Habsburg authority.²⁰⁷ The effects of political change on the imagination of interstate relations are more clearly evident when one juxtaposes Gentili with a text from the end of the period: Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758). In his discussion of rebellion, Vattel moves from an initial prohibition of subjects resorting to violence to a recognition that the outbreak of rebellion ultimately stems from the failure of authorities to redress “causes of complaint,” which prompts “unfortunate persons . . . to do themselves justice.”²⁰⁸ A truly popular rebellion with general support cannot be contained through counterviolence but instead necessitates a negotiated settlement so as “to give the people satisfaction.”²⁰⁹ Writing nearly two centuries later, we see a remarkable shift in Vattel’s argument in that he extends the law of nations to consider the implications of popular rebellion. As noted in the Introduction, even the most radical statements of Huguenot resistance theory had disallowed rebellion among private persons and limited this agency to magistrates and constitutional bodies. Vattel makes this transition by turning to competing early modern precedents to support his argument, an illustration of the comparative, cosmopolitical mode of analysis that will be discussed further in the Afterword. Looking back at early modern case studies, he favors Henri de

²⁰⁵ Cicero, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), III.28.100. ²⁰⁶ Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), V.19.129. Richard Tuck discusses these passages from Cicero in Rights of War and Peace, 36–7. ²⁰⁷ Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, III.xviii.390. ²⁰⁸ Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations [1758], trans. Joseph Chitty (Philadelphia: T. & J.W. Johnson, 1883), 422. For analysis of Vattel, see Beulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law, esp. 156–83. ²⁰⁹ Vattel, The Law of Nations, 423.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

212

   

Navarre’s incorporation of his Catholic opponents within a French polity over the Duke of Alba’s futile attempt to punish a large section of the populace of the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt.²¹⁰ As was seen with the example of the Sack of Antwerp discussed in Chapter 2, the Spanish suppression of the Dutch Revolt ultimately served to legitimate the cause of Dutch subjects and transform their struggle from a rebellion to a civil war. Vattel presents civil war as a scenario that invalidates the claims of all overriding sovereign authority and, as a result, produces the revolutionary conditions for a reconstitution of political foundations. Histories of international law are often structured around an abiding division of periodization keyed to a specific date: 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia.²¹¹ But as Vattel’s example shows, the legacies of Westphalia stem not only from the end of the Thirty Years’ War but also from the Treaty of Münster marking the ultimate success of the Dutch Revolt.²¹² In other words, rather than seeing a postWestphalian age as one that enshrines the sovereign authority of equal nationstates, we can see another, overlooked legacy in terms of a framework that allows for the entrance of new political actors to the stage of international politics and legitimates the revolutionary conditions enabling the transformation of rebels into sovereigns. This more radical tradition culminating with Vattel provides an alternative framework in which to imagine the implications of the lines of amity. Rather than positing the legal and political character of the colonies as shaped solely by the intervention of European powers, one sees that the influence also worked in the opposite direction. The models of political thought and formulations of the law of nations produced out of the colonial encounter served as an impetus in the development of the character of the European states system itself.²¹³ The porous boundaries and unsettled definition of the lines of amity attest to how this fiction underwriting interstate relations ultimately calls into question any absolute demarcation of European states from their extra-European interests. The colonial encounter is always already part of Europe’s definition of itself, despite longstanding efforts to isolate colonial history to unrepresented events transpiring “beyond the line.” *

*

*

²¹⁰ Vattel, The Law of Nations, 422. ²¹¹ Among critiques of the legacies of Westphalia, see the sources listed in Introduction n. 120, above. ²¹² The Dutch had gained de facto recognition from the Spanish and Archduke Albert following the truce of 1609, and began sending diplomatic embassies after this point (Laura Manzano Baena, “Negotiating Sovereignty: The Peace Treaty of Munster, 1648,” History of Political Thought 28 [2007]: 617–41 and Conflicting Worlds: The Peace Treaty of Munster (1648) and the Political Culture of the Dutch Republic and Spanish Monarchy (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2011). ²¹³ Alexander B. Haskell makes an important related claim in pointing to the need to move past “the vocabulary and preconceptions of state sovereignty to see English colonization in America on its own terms”: see For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 23.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

213

Vitoria’s De Indis (1532) has remained a central text in discussions of the role of colonial subjects in formulations of the law of nations. The canonical version of Vitoria constructed in the twentieth century focused largely on the first half of his text, which surveys and critiques the “irrelevant and illegitimate titles” used to justify Spanish dominion in the New World.²¹⁴ In this section, Vitoria countered prevailing justifications for Spanish imperialism: the universal claims of the Spanish monarch as Emperor of the world; Papal dispensation; the right of discovery; the allowed conversion of Amerindians, even by force; the justification of conquest based on the imputed sins of the natives; the establishment of dominion on the basis of native consent; and the conquest as a gift of God.²¹⁵ As Vitoria pronounced at the end of this section, “the barbarians undoubtedly possessed as true dominion, both public and private, as any Christians.”²¹⁶ Anthony Pagden has noted that Vitoria based his argument on natural law rather than the imperial or Papal claims of positive law.²¹⁷ And, for Vitoria, one of the central tenets underwriting natural law was the right to property. He counters the view of natural slavery, dating back to Aristotle, which was employed by some of his contemporaries.²¹⁸ For Vitoria, the rights of Amerindians as rational subjects under natural law are enshrined through their property rights and ability to order their affairs.²¹⁹ In a stunning reversal of his argument, the second half of Vitoria’s text engages in a recuperation of the claims of Spanish dominion through an offsetting survey of the “just and legitimate” defenses of Spanish imperialism.²²⁰ Rather than contradicting himself, Vitoria ultimately legitimated Spanish dominion through the very terms of natural law and defense of property that were central to his critique of Spanish imperialism. Vitoria’s recuperation of Spanish sovereignty was accomplished through a recasting of imperialism as a form of diplomacy. The keystone of international diplomacy is the law of nature’s view of the inherent sociability of humans and their necessary obligations of friendship and hospitality to one another: “amity (amicitia) between men is part of natural law.”²²¹ The law of nations, Vitoria asserted, dictates unconditional rights of hospitality and refuge, and therefore sanctions Spain’s presence in the Americas as an exercise of their rights to travel and trade. The representation of colonial conquest under the guise of commercial enterprises lacking in territorial ²¹⁴ Francisco De Vitoria, De Indis [“On the American Indians”], in Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 252. ²¹⁵ Vitoria, De Indis, 252–76. ²¹⁶ Vitoria, De Indis, 250. ²¹⁷ Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 80. On Vitoria and natural law, also see Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11–15. ²¹⁸ Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian,” 88; Vitoria, De Indis, 239 and ff. ²¹⁹ Vitoria, De Indis, 244, 250. ²²⁰ Vitoria, De Indis, 252. ²²¹ Vitoria, De Indis, 279. For a related discussion, see Randall Lesaffer, “Amicitia in Renaissance Peace and Alliance Treaties (1450–1530),” Journal of the History of International Law 4 (2002): 77–99.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

214

   

aspirations is a perennial rhetorical strategy. As Timothy Hampton has shown, Camões’s epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), for example, depicts Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India as “basically little more than a sequence of diplomatic encounters.”²²² Similarly casting the Spanish as diplomats, Vitoria concludes that his argument “is confirmed by the fact that ambassadors are inviolable in the law of nations (jus gentium). The Spaniards are the ambassadors of Christendom, and hence the barbarians are obliged at least to give them a fair hearing and not expel them.”²²³ But Vitoria’s model of diplomacy was ultimately predicated by a state of war. Juxtaposed with his emphasis on the inherent sociability underwriting the law of nations is the proviso that resistance to trade and hospitality provokes a state of enmity, which reconstitutes the position of Amerindians, “no longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes against whom all rights of war can be exercised, including plunder, enslavement, deposition of their former masters, and the institution of new ones.”²²⁴ The rules of colonial war remain beyond the line of civil society and the law of nations, as seen with the prerogatives allotted to the victor. Despite the fact that Vitoria turns to Roman law (including the writings of Justinian and Gratian) in order to justify his conclusion that “everything captured in war belongs to the victor,”²²⁵ his model does not hearken back to tradition as much as it innovates models of jus gentium and jus naturale in response to the exigencies of native resistance. European law is not applied to the colonies; rather, its modern incarnation is produced as an effect of colonialism. Whereas the freedoms of travel, trade, and religion all assume the implied consent of Amerindians, the threat of native resistance transforms the model of war itself. The lines of amity ensure that interstate European wars remain battles between public enemies (hostes), antagonists whose conflict may be diplomatically resolved in order to renew interstate friendship with the end of hostilities. Colonial war beyond the line, by contrast, creates the category of the unlawful enemy (inimicus), subjects excluded from the rules of war and rights of the law of nations.²²⁶ As Schmitt notes in The Concept of Political, “The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.”²²⁷ In a tragic irony, as Amerindian cultures take on the attributes of modern sovereignty—rights of self-defense, a monopoly over the exercise of violence within their territories—they are excluded from diplomatic recognition and rendered as a new category of dangerously stateless subjects. As ²²² Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 102. ²²³ Vitoria, De Indis, 283. For an extended analysis of this point, see Georg Cavallar’s reading of Vitoria in The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community and Political Justice Since Vitoria (2002; New York: Routledge, 2016). ²²⁴ Vitoria, De Indis, 283. ²²⁵ Vitoria, De Indis, 283. ²²⁶ Ian Baucom, “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War,” in States of Emergency: the Object of American Studies, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 124–42. ²²⁷ Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 79.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

215

will be discussed in reference to Davenant’s representation of the Cimarrons, the resistance of colonial subjects transforms them into racialized subjects. As Étienne Balibar has argued, the historical construction of race emerged as an effect of subjects claiming rights for themselves.²²⁸ Further showing the interconnected histories of European and colonial conflicts, Foucault traced the construction of race as an outgrowth of discourses of “social war” that were previously forged in reference to class conflicts within European states.²²⁹ Schmitt inaugurated an important critical tradition in his study of early modern international law, The Nomos of the Earth, in distinguishing between the rules of war that applied to European sovereign states and those that involved nonstate subjects and stateless populations. Whereas sanctioned war between sovereigns involves a “mutual relation,” an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the enemy and therefore an underlying premise of a membership in a societas of states in which war serves to resolve disputes and ultimately reinstate amicitia, a just or public war is not possible against groups who do not possess sovereignty and therefore recognition in the law of nations; in these instances, “[w]ar is abolished, but only because enemies no longer recognize each other as equals, morally and juridically.”²³⁰ The exigencies of colonial war and the resistance of native populations transform a juridical category of the just enemy (justus hostis) to that of the adversary or inimicus.²³¹ Rebellious Amerindians, Cimarrons, and escaped slave populations, as well as pirates, brigands, and other stateless groups, are rendered as criminal classes excluded from the law of nations. This theoretical model imposes an opposition between a system of sovereign states and stateless or nonstate groups, a distinction that is aligned geographically in terms of a European sphere of interstate relations distinguished from anarchic spaces beyond the line. However, Vitoria himself complicates this framework in a later text that was intended to elaborate the argument of De Indis, his deliberation on the laws of war in De Indis Relectio Posterior, sive de iure belli (1539). Whereas De Indis struggles to find precedents for explaining how to apply the jus gentium to the New World, in de iure belli Vitoria makes sense of colonial war by thinking of it in reference to a domestic analogy. In response to the question of whether sovereign authorities can step outside the law to restore peace, Vitoria justifies all “necessary” measures based on the state’s coercive powers against its own subjects: since “against internal enemies, that is bad members of the commonwealth, it is lawful to do all these things, and therefore it is lawful against external enemies.”²³²

²²⁸ Étienne Balibar, “Class Racism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 210. ²²⁹ Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” ²³⁰ Schmitt, Nomos, 124. ²³¹ Schmitt, Nomos, 124. ²³² Vitoria, On the Law of War [De Indis Relectio Posterior, sive de iure belli] (1539), in Political Writings, 305, 305n. The latter statement is one of several additions to the text made after Vitoria’s death (293).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

216

   

Significantly, the actions of the enemy that disturb civil peace are described as “plundering.” Vitoria invokes the figure of the brigand, an encompassing term that brings together rebels, pirates, and other nonstate groups and categorizes them alongside colonial subjects and other stateless persons. What unites them as plunderers is that they threaten not only the societas of states and the amicitia of the civil peace but more specifically the commercial foundations of society. Colonial conflicts are therefore not beyond the line of the law of nations; rather, the same rules apply as against domestic rebels. Regarding the need to punish an enemy even after the end of conflict, Vitoria reasons that “if the commonwealth has these powers against its own members, there can be no doubt that the whole world has the same powers against any harmful and evil men.”²³³ The violent suppression of domestic revolt sets the precedent for responses to colonial rebellion, and these encounters are not beyond the line but rather follow the wellestablished guidelines of the law of nations as well as the practices of European sovereign states. Indeed, it is this suppression of rebellion—internal as well as external—that creates the state system itself, and thereby enables a grouping of sovereigns to be generalized as “the whole world.” Ironically, as Martin Wight observed, in this framework the only subjects “emancipated” from the collective authority of the states system “are pirates, by virtue of being hostes humani generis.”²³⁴ The etymology of brigand refers to an “irregular soldier,” the mercenaries who were the subjects of the previous chapter.²³⁵ In applying this term to the casestudy of Drake and the Cimarrons, the problematic figure, the unlawful enemy excluded from the law of nations, is not the Cimarrons: it is Drake. Elsewhere in de iure belli, Vitoria admits that the rules guiding the interstate system begin to unravel precisely around the blurred boundaries of licensed privateering and unlawful piracy, and that while letters of marque and reprisal are not unlawful themselves, they are “nevertheless dangerous, as they give an excuse for mere piracy,”²³⁶ and allow a state of exception to become the rule. However, Vitoria excludes those cases when “the state of war is permanent,” which therefore makes “it lawful to plunder the enemy indiscriminately, both innocent and guilty,” recognizing that such perpetual conflicts are driven by a battle over economic resources.²³⁷ To return to Schmitt’s influential model of the adversary (inimicus), we see the underlying economic conditions that necessitate the creation of an unlawful enemy in a permanent state of war. After all, the imputed state of war arises in response to threats to the conditions of free trade, and is thereby able to ²³³ Vitoria, On the Law of War, 305–6. ²³⁴ Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 21. ²³⁵ “Brigand,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989). ²³⁶ Vitoria, On the Law of War, 318. ²³⁷ Vitoria, On the Law of War, 317.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

217

transform imperial dominion to self-defense and reimagine licensed privateering as a defense of the freedom of the seas. The colonial state of war is therefore never recognized as lawful war, not only because the adversary is classified as an unlawful enemy but also through the refusal to acknowledge European involvement as acts of war. Vitoria inaugurates a tradition of innocent imperialism, a rhetorical strategy that insidiously denies the motives of European states in the colonies. Spain’s intent is cast as merely exercising its inherent rights of travel, trade, and negotiation under the law of nations: “Since these travels of the Spaniards are (as we may for the moment assume) neither harmful nor detrimental to the barbarians, they are lawful.”²³⁸ This assumed innocence is not momentary but rather foundational to Vitoria’s argument. Through his representation of Spain as engaging in free trade, he is able to recast native resistance as a violation of the law of nature, a denial of Spain’s freedoms of trade, travel, and refuge. This point is an important link with Vitoria’s later discussion in de iure belli, where he limits just war to defensive actions.²³⁹ Significantly, in this latter text, he extends the rights of self-defense to private individuals as well as sovereign bodies, anticipating Grotius’s later defense of the rights of the Dutch East India Company to wage war to defend their access to the lucrative markets of the region. In De Indis, Vitoria justifies Spanish violence by recasting it as self-defense exercised in response to native recalcitrance and refusal to engage in commercial relations: “if war is necessary to obtain their rights [of unimpeded trade access], they may lawfully go to war.”²⁴⁰ Free trade, ensured through permanent war, is able “to secure peace and safety.”²⁴¹ In order to sustain European economic interests in the colonies, a tragic register must be imposed on colonial relations. Lines of amity demand lines of enmity, and it is the prospect of resistance to the commercial foundations of empire that enshrines colonial war and reconstitutes Amerindian populations as irredeemable subjects excluded from the law of nations. As Vitoria concedes in the conclusion to his text, even after offering arguments to recuperate Spanish dominion, “if all these titles were inapplicable, that is to say if the barbarians gave no just cause for war and did not wish to have the Spaniards as princes and so on, the whole Indian expedition and trade would cease, to the great loss of the Spaniards. And this in turn would mean a huge loss to the royal exchequer, which would be intolerable.”²⁴² Tellingly, what registers the potential loss of Spanish America as tragic is its economic toll. It is the exchequer—not the crown or church—which, in becoming the subject of a hypothetical tragic ending, reveals itself as the true foundation of Spanish imperialism. Vitoria’s analysis of the claims of Spanish dominion offered a template for English texts reflecting on the repercussions of England’s belated arrival in the ²³⁸ Vitoria, De Indis, 278; emphasis mine. ²³⁹ Vitoria, On the Law of War, 299. ²⁴⁰ Vitoria, De Indis, 282. ²⁴¹ Vitoria, De Indis, 283. ²⁴² Vitoria, De Indis, 291.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

218

   

Caribbean and consequent rivalry with Spain. His critique of Spanish imperialism inaugurated the longstanding representational tradition of the “black legend” emphasizing Spanish abuses in the Americas extended by such figures as the Spanish theologian Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, and the Flemish engraver Theodor De Bry, as well as subsequent English texts and translations.²⁴³ He also provided a framework of innocent imperialism that was even more influential for later English texts, particularly those such as Davenant’s entertainment that followed England’s full entrance into American imperial conflicts with the Cromwellian Western Design.²⁴⁴ Vitoria’s justification of Spanish imperialism as the defense of innocent Amerindians from their tyrannical native rulers was later transposed to an English liberation of Amerindians from their Spanish conquerors.²⁴⁵ The English imitation of Spanish precedents, even if marked by competition and ambivalence, demonstrates the mobile character of identities in imperial contexts. There is a similar cultural and geographic imprecision in Davenant’s representation of the Cimarrons. Distinctions are collapsed among the identities of colonial subjects: the Cimarrons blur together with Amerindians and are situated in Peru, the setting of one of Davenant’s previous dramatic spectacles, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658).²⁴⁶ More significantly, American and Mediterranean contexts are juxtaposed in the reference to the Cimarrons as “a Moorish people, brought formerly to Peru by the Spaniards as their slaves, to dig in mines; and, having lately revolted from them, did live under the government of a king of their own election” (2.3–6 SD). The axis linking Incans, Cimarrons, and Moors is their shared resistance to Spanish hegemony, and while these coeval rebellions forge the way for lines of amity to emerge with the English, the prospect of colonial rebellion also links these peoples as potential threats to England’s tenuous imperial authority. The stage direction describing the Cimarrons’ Moorish origins additionally situates colonial slave rebellions in reference to a European context of resistance theory and elective rule. In shaking off Spanish authority, the Cimarrons fashion their own mode of government. As noted earlier, this connection was evoked in the comparison of Cimarrons to “Lutherans” in Spanish colonial documents. Similarly, Vitoria’s defense of the power of Amerindian populations to choose their own rulers creates a framework that, in a European context, dangerously resembles Protestant resistance theory.²⁴⁷

²⁴³ See, most recently, Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). ²⁴⁴ For a related discussion of Dutch contexts, see Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. ²⁴⁵ See Vitoria, De Indis, 288. ²⁴⁶ For discussion of Davenant’s texts, see Richard Frohock, Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004), 35–44. ²⁴⁷ Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian,” 83. See Vitoria, De Indis, 288–9.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

219

In the final scene of Davenant’s spectacle, the lines of amity are redrawn, reconstituting the Cimarrons as violating the law of nature and consequently lying beyond the scope and protections of the jus gentium. The scene is appropriately described as “suddenly changed”: added to the earlier scenic backdrop depicting the Cimarrons’ “rocky country,” symbol of their autonomy and resilience, is the spectacle of an abducted Spanish bride, forcibly taken from her wedding feast, “tied to a tree,” and represented in terms implying sexual violence (5.85–90 SD). “The worst of licence does best laws invade,” the English lieutenant Rouse reports to Drake, undermining English “renown” and threatening to “devour all civil peace” (5.67, 77). When this crisis is ultimately dispelled, it is significantly through the Cimarrons’ own imposition of control over their unruly members. Pedro, Drake’s Cimarron guide, takes action, thereby reasserting the bonds of friendship between Drake and the Cimarron King (5.135) and reinstituting an underlying cultural similitude through his emulation of an English “pattern” of mercy and justice (5.137): “She is as free and as unblemished too / As if she had a prisoner been to you” (5.142–43).²⁴⁸ Pedro insists on the innocence of English imperial claims, perversely recasting Drake the experienced slave trader as the champion of liberty from bondage. He also explains Cimarron depredations as an imitative act of revenge against the Spanish, “Who, midst the triumphs of our nuptial feasts, / Have forced our brides and slaughtered all our guests” (5.154–55). The conclusion of Davenant’s text transforms the Cimarrons from objects of pity to rebellious colonial subjects. In Aristotelian terms, the primary affective mode of colonial tragedy is not pity but fear. The prospect of slave revolt haunts the colonial project from its inception, and challenges the premise of a uniform and universal sociability that is foundational to definitions of tragedy as well as the law of nations. For Aristotle, dramatic imitation was predicated not only by the assumption of cultural similitude, that “men enjoy seeing a likeness,” but also on a limitation of dramatic character “relative to each class.”²⁴⁹ Vitoria had similarly imposed boundaries on transcultural amicitia: although “amity (amicitia) between men is part of natural law,” human sociability is grounded on similitude. Citing scripture—“Every living creature loveth his like”—Vitoria acknowledges the extent to which the recognition of cultural difference fractures the imputed universality of the law of nations.²⁵⁰ In Davenant’s text, these models of amicitia are unable to account for the complexities of diplomatic relations in the colonies. After all, the Cimarrons explain their violation of the law of nations by presenting

²⁴⁸ In the narrative of Drake’s raid on the Spanish settlement of Venta Cruces, by contrast, it is Drake who gives the Cimarrons “strait charge” not to harm any women or civilians (Sir Francis Drake Reuiued, 69–70). As Kaufmann discusses, this image of Drake’s restraint of sexuality is offset with the historical record of the pregnant African captive Maria, taken on the circumnavigation voyage and abandoned on an island in Indonesia (Black Tudors, 86). ²⁴⁹ Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), IV.5.55, XV.1.81. ²⁵⁰ Vitoria, De Indis, 279.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

220

   

it as an act of reprisal that follows Spanish precedent. The underlying similitude of the Cimarrons with their European counterparts is also evident with their reimposition of sovereign authority over their own subjects. The complexities and ambiguities inherent in Davenant’s representation of the Cimarrons are indicative of the unsettled status of escaped slaves and other colonial subjects in the law of nations. Whereas a comic resolution holds the promise of negotiating colonial conflict through intercultural amicitia, situating the text as tragedy offers a more radical alternative. As David Scott argues in his analysis of a slave revolt of a later era—the Haitian Revolution—tragedy serves as a generic template for representing the unresolved legacies of colonial history.²⁵¹ The ever-present prospect of colonial rebellion not only speaks to the failures of the colonial project; the slave revolt also embodies an imagination of social transformation, providing a framework that is later transposed back to European politics. Nonetheless, in order for the tragic legacies of the slave revolt to be narrativized and commemorated, in literary representation as well as in the law of nations, this history has to be deemed tragic. To return to the categories originally outlined by Aristotle, there is an alternative way of reading the tragedy of colonial rebellion. At one level, the enslaved subjects who are the agents of revolt are denied the potential of tragic character; their tragedy, in other words, is not recognized as tragic. In Aristotelian terms, there is no recognition, or “change from ignorance to knowledge,” that acknowledges the agency of the Cimarrons.²⁵² This form of dramatic recognition is analogous to the diplomatic recognition necessary for the Cimarrons to become subjects in the law of nations. To draw on the insights of Christopher Warren, the Cimarrons are denied the ability to represent themselves as sovereign and assume a legal personality,²⁵³ as the nation of Cimarrons able to officially negotiate with other sovereigns. Nonetheless, even in this context, they can still take action. This kind of unrecognized agency is a possibility contained within the Aristotelian definition of tragedy itself: “without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.”²⁵⁴ The Cimarrons, like rebels, brigands, pirates, exiles, and other stateless persons and nonstate agents, are represented in terms of the effects their actions register on the law of nations and states system. Even if not recognized as subjects in the law of nations, the agency that the Cimarrons exercise through the practices of negotiation and alliance still leaves an imprint, what Gayatri Spivak described as a “subject-effect,” in the documentation of the colonial archive.²⁵⁵ Offsetting this

²⁵¹ David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 21, 135. ²⁵² Aristotle, Poetics, XI.2.72. ²⁵³ Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 178. ²⁵⁴ Aristotle, Poetics, VI.11.63. ²⁵⁵ Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 212–13.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

        

221

recognition of presence, the improvised fiction of the law of nations reimposes the lines of amity as a moving conceptual horizon that functions to keep these historical practices of alliance and agency always beyond their scope and excluded from their protections. The multiple, contradictory positions that the Cimarrons occupy in Davenant’s entertainment reflect their unsettled place in the imagination of a states system. At various points in the entertainment they serve as a scenic backdrop to the spectacle and shorthand image for an undifferentiated exoticism; at others, especially with Pedro, as mimic men and sidekicks, a stark contrast to the historical record of their alliance with Drake; and finally and most crucially, as figures in the text’s antimasque, rebels whose actions confirm their status as unlawful adversaries. The immediate historical context of the entertainment is crucial for understanding the terms of their representation: although Davenant’s entertainment offered a literary response to the Cromwellian Western Design and its aspirations for English dominion in the Caribbean, this project had largely failed by the time of the text’s performance. The role of colonial subjects in successfully warding off English entry into the region provides a historical explanation for Davenant’s transformation of the Cimarrons into rebels and enemies excluded from the law of nations. The English siege of Santa Domingo, the central target of the project, was ultimately thwarted due to the resistance of the city’s militia of freed Africans and mixed-race citizens.²⁵⁶ As was the case throughout Spanish America, free citizens of African descent formed a military class integral to the defense of colonial settlements.²⁵⁷ As noted earlier, Spanish colonial authorities had similarly negotiated with the palenques of escaped slaves in order to draw on their resources for the defense of vulnerable colonial outposts such as Panama. In his final voyage of 1596, Drake had encountered the opposition of the Cimarrons of Santiago del Principe and Portobelo, now loyal to the Spanish crown following their diplomatic negotiation with colonial authorities and settlement in autonomous towns.²⁵⁸ The consolation prize of the Western Design was the English conquest of Jamaica. Here, too, the English met local resistance in the form of the Jamaican Maroons, who engaged in a five-year guerilla war until they reached a diplomatic settlement allying themselves with the English against their former Spanish allies.²⁵⁹ Ironically, the ostensibly English force responsible for the conquest of Jamaica

²⁵⁶ Irene A. Wright, ed., Spanish Narratives of the English Attack on Santo Domingo, 1655 (London: Camden Miscellany, 1926), 47–8. Drake had met the opposition of the local militia in his siege of the city in 1585 (Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen, 110). ²⁵⁷ Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for his Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9, 16. ²⁵⁸ Pike, “Black Rebels”: 262–5. ²⁵⁹ Irene A. Wright, “The Spanish Resistance to the English Occupation of Jamaica, 1655–1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1930): 117–47.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

222

   

included 4000 African slaves along with English servants and nonconformists, all impressed into service from the plantations of Barbados.²⁶⁰ English authorities in Jamaica continued to negotiate with the Maroons over the course of the eighteenth century, with a treaty recognizing the autonomy of Maroon communities that was drafted in 1739 and remained in effect for the next century.²⁶¹ Even though nonstate groups such as the Cimarrons and Maroons remained largely absent in theoretical formulations of the law of nations, in practice they did achieve a status as diplomatic agents to whom the rights of diplomatic negotiation and recognition were extended. This Africanist presence in the history of diplomacy, generally unacknowledged, offers a compelling example of the complex intercultural histories that are rendered invisible through a persistent imagination of the colonies as remaining beyond the line of diplomacy and the early modern states system.²⁶² Their role as intercultural agents demonstrates the ways that the theoretical codification of the law of nations was interconnected with political and diplomatic practices of sociability and alliance that extended beyond sovereign entities to encompass a range of nonstate and stateless subjects. As seen in this chapter’s respective case studies, the global workings of an early modern states system were shaped and transformed by its margins: the messengers and informants within the ambassadorial household, whose labor was instrumental to diplomacy; the exiles, religio-political dissidents, and military and maritime laborers at the center of debates around the extraterritorial extension of state authority; and the colonial subjects, often transformed into hostes humani generis, whose complex position shows that the local and the global, like definitions of friendship and enmity, were interconnected in the distinctive political and diplomatic practices that characterized this period.

²⁶⁰ Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 126. ²⁶¹ Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, “Jamaican Maroon Political Organization: The Effects of the Treaties,” Social and Economic Studies 25 (1976): 87–105. For a broader history of Maroon communities throughout the Americas, see Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slaves Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). ²⁶² Among valuable recent works addressing this history, see Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations, 137–65; William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination; Kaufmann, Black Tudors.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Afterword The Cosmopolitical Bureau

As seen in the last chapter, although many influential models of the political sphere hinge on the friend–enemy distinction, the interplay of amity and enmity is much more complex, particularly in the unsettled extraterritorial domain of early modern diplomacy and the law of nations.¹ One of the concerns running through this book has been the importance of friendship, sociability, amity, and affect. Instead of viewing political contexts primarily in relation to theoretical models of sovereignty, my effort has been, in a sense, to humanize the state, and to examine the intersubjective contexts in which political relations are forged. This approach underlies many of my case studies: the familial and mentoring function of travel advice literature; the calculatingly asocial travel of Fynes Moryson; Thomas Coryat and the social contexts of travel and the literary coterie; the Sidney and Norris households affected by overseas military service; the homosocial dynamics of the ambassadorial household; and the models of amicitia supporting crosscultural alliances as well as imperial dominion. I felt that it was imperative to ground this book in the narratives of state agents themselves, and I chose from the outset to write exclusively on the writings of these figures rather than taking a more conventional literary approach and discussing the representation of travelers, military agents, or diplomats in canonical texts. As Stephen Greenblatt famously defined the historicist project a generation ago: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”² It was incumbent to tell their stories. In order to know the state, as I have been arguing, one must learn about those who represent it, and my cultural biographies have attempted to flesh out what is often analyzed solely in terms of abstractions. But in addition, I wanted to uncover a history that is far too often elided. Past criticism did not fully account for the complex itineraries of these agents. In early modern travel compilations as well, English travel, service, and migration in Europe slipped between the cracks of national and global contexts: Hakluyt and Purchas, for instance, surveyed English ¹ Schmitt, Concept of the Political. Among many other examples, the late work of Derrida has been especially illuminating in its engagement with Schmitt: see Philosophy in a Time of Terror and Rogues. For a fascinating discussion of political violence and the genealogy of terrorism in the early modern period, see Robert Appelbaum, Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland, and France 1559–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ² Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1. Agents Beyond the State:The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Mark Netzloff, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Netzloff. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857952.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

224

   

travel to the extra-European world, taking the longstanding connections between England and the Continent for granted.³ What was overlooked was the history of English communities who lived in Europe and often continued to reside there for generations. The Catholic exile community is the most prominent of these groups, one whose presence runs throughout this study. But even less attention has been devoted to those who came to the Continent for professional reasons and in the context of state service. Although I could not have anticipated these implications when I began this book, the study has added resonance in the wake of the Brexit referendum.⁴ The resurgence of insular and nativist articulations of nationalism makes it all the more pressing to reorient our attention back to England’s longstanding and pervasive transcultural links to the Continent. As Jonathan Scott reminds us, in the early modern period the English were preoccupied above all with transnational connections to the Continent, particularly in periods of crisis throughout the seventeenth century.⁵ To draw on the language of Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” “No Man”—or nation, for that matter—“is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.”⁶ As the Brexit analogy shows, the fissures between state policy and national sentiment can be expansive, and this study has attempted to dislodge a genealogy of the state from its correlation with the history of the nation, severing the hyphen in the formulation nation-state, so to speak. In some of my work preceding this book, I was interested in exploring early modern versions of what David Lloyd has described as “nationalisms against the state.”⁷ A prime example is the diasporic nationalism that emerged in the political writings of the English Catholic exile community.⁸ Similarly, a populist nostalgia for Elizabethan-era privateers and military agents was employed in the Jacobean and Caroline periods as a means to express support for foreign intervention and opposition to European Catholic powers, a position at odds with Stuart state policy that gained further currency during the Thirty Years’ War.⁹

³ Hakluyt does include narratives and documents relating to trade with Hanseatic ports, but only prior to the fifteenth century; instead, he focuses on ventures further afield in Russia and Persia in volume 1 of The Principal Navigations (The principal nauigations, voiages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation [1598]). Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) similarly includes voyages to Russia but not to Europe. ⁴ Showing that the early modern is alive and well, Hobbes was invoked by both sides of the Brexit debate: for leave, see Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Weird Hobbesianism of the Brexiphobes,” Foundation for Economic Education, June 28, 2016; for remain, see Joshua Gaskell, “What the 17th Century Philosopher Thomas Hobbes Can Teach the Brexiteers,” New Statesman, October 25, 2016. ⁵ Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9, 15. ⁶ John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87. ⁷ David Lloyd, “Nationalisms Against the State,” in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 173–97. ⁸ Netzloff, “The English Colleges and the English Nation,” 236–60. ⁹ Netzloff, “Sir Francis Drake’s Ghost,” 137–50.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

225

I began this book assuming that issues of national identity would figure prominently but discovered instead that these concerns were either relatively absent or represented in unexpected terms. When English identity is evoked, it is more often expressed in registers of loss, mourning, yearning, and nostalgia. Jonson’s depiction of Penshurst, as discussed in Chapter 2, takes on a different meaning in light of Sir Robert Sidney’s extended periods of service on the Continent. Foreign travel and service are often framed as experiences of displacement, as sometimes desperate efforts to recoup fortunes—as with the travel wagers from Chapter 1—or acquire an elusive social position back in England, as seen with George Gascoigne and Sir Henry Wotton. The first citation of the term cosmopolitan in English came from James Howell, whose own experience of travel and service took place just beyond the chronological boundaries of this study.¹⁰ In Howell’s formulation, the “cosmopolite” (as he terms it) is a knowledge produced out of economic and professional loss as well as geographic displacement. Howell’s own political career came to an abrupt end at the onset of the English Revolution, which occurred just as he was about to achieve the professional preferment he had long sought, with a promised appointment as Secretary of the Privy Council. Deprived of position, he compiled his texts as a prisoner in the Fleet, turning to travel writing from his position as a kind of internal exile. Howell’s major work was his collection of familiar letters, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ, published in four successive volumes from 1645–55, and comprising his correspondence, often from periods of travel on the Continent, over the span from 1618 to 1655.¹¹ Howell also published Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), a text that returned to the Elizabethan travel advice tradition discussed in Chapter 1 and became one of the most popular guidebooks of the later seventeenth century. Howell’s desire for textual compendiousness serves as a strategy to compensate for loss. He must turn to the print market due to his inability to carve out a permanent position within networks of patronage. His retrospective letters, sometimes fabricated, place him within networks of political intelligence as a central actor in events on the Continent, offsetting his position as someone internally displaced as a prisoner in the Fleet. However, even though Howell emphasizes that “Letters, like Gordian Knots, do Nations tie,” he distances ¹⁰ “Cosmopolitan,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2017). Among recent studies, Alison Games discusses the cosmopolitanism of English travelers in The Web of Empire, while Daniel Riches focuses on cosmopolitan Protestant diplomats in the employ of the Prussian and Swedish states in Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture. Brian Lockey analyzes cosmopolitanism in terms of engagement with supranational models of a Christian Commonwealth in Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans, and Margaret C. Jacob locates the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century: see Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). ¹¹ A valuable introduction to Howell is offered in Daniel Woolf, “Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell,” in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds., Private Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 243–78.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

226

   

his text from the information economy of travel writing discussed in the first chapter: his letters, which show clear signs of revision if not invention at a later time, are presented more as literary documents and stylistic templates rather than as historical documents of political events and diplomatic communication.¹² In presenting his letters as “familiar,” he transposes letter-writing from its central role as the medium of intelligence gathering and interstate negotiation to a private sphere of reflection and personal correspondence. As seen with Howell, extraterritorial agents articulated what James Clifford has termed “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”:¹³ this concept recuperates the idea of cosmopolitanism from its association with an elite and privileged position, as a mobility unencumbered by material constraints or parochial affiliations, and instead describes a knowledge produced out of the necessity of political and economic displacement that facilitates a comparative, analytical approach to cultures. Howell’s term for the cosmopolitan—cosmopolite—characterizes travelers in terms of the political knowledge they acquire.¹⁴ His Instructions for Forreine Travell significantly returned to the Elizabethan-era travel advice tradition in order to foreground the role of travel in acquiring and circulating a comparative knowledge of other states.¹⁵ As he comments in a 1645 letter from the Fleet: “I came tumbling out into the World a pure Cadet, a true Cosmopolite; not born to Land, Lease, House, or Office.”¹⁶ With “cadet,” Howell borrows from French a term for younger brothers and others deprived of land, title, and inheritance in a patrilineal social structure.¹⁷ When Howell used the term elsewhere in his writings, he did so in the context of younger brothers in Venice, and likened their social position to that of non-citizens hired as mercenaries.¹⁸ One of the abiding representational frameworks for the nation is an analogy with the family. As discussed in this book, particularly with the Norris family entertainment in Chapter 2 and Wotton’s ambassadorial household in Chapter 3, the history of foreign war and service serves to destabilize any equation of nation and family. Moreover, service abroad offered a professional route for those who did not have a place within the domestic economy and patrilineal family. This study

¹² James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, Historiographer Royal to Charles II, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David Nutt, 1890), 15. ¹³ James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 36. ¹⁴ Although Howell was the first to use the term cosmopolitan in English, it is significant that he drew on a variant—cosmopolite—that had appeared earlier. The first instance appeared in John Dee’s General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of nauigation (published 1577), G3v: for discussion, see Lockey, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans, 8, 53, 168. In another earlier example, Nicolas Barnaud’s radical statement of resistance theory, Le Réveille-matin des françois, et de leurs voisins, listed as its author Eusebius Philadelphus, “cosmopolite.” Printed surreptitiously in Geneva, but listing its place of location as Edinburgh, the text’s circumstances of publication reflect its comparativist politics of alliance. ¹⁵ James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869). ¹⁶ Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ, 372–3. ¹⁷ “Cadet,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989). ¹⁸ James Howell, A survay of the signorie of Venice (1651), 7.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

227

is populated with these younger brothers—including Moryson and Wotton—as well as those such as Coryat, Gascoigne, or Howell whose travel resulted from an inability to gain promotion at court or positions in other domestic professional settings. Denied a place at “home,” in both the professional and familial senses, these figures forged alternative affective networks through overseas service: as a result, the languages of sociability, of friendship and mentorship, pervade the contexts discussed in this study, from travel advice literature to the ambassadorial household. But unlike nations or families, these modes of association do not create their own historical traditions or carry across generations. In one of his final letters, Wotton offered a poignant reflection on the transitory and ephemeral qualities of his identity, marked not only by the passing of his professional role but most especially through the deaths of his friends. As he mourned the death of his nephew and protégé Sir Albertus Morton, he yields to “the sovereignty of time over us,” represented by the end of his career as well as family line, “being the sole masculine branch” of his family, whose name and reputation “must expire and vanish in my unworthiness.”¹⁹ Figures discussed earlier, from Moryson and Coryat to Gascoigne, similarly reflected on the ephemerality of their experiences of travel and service, and turned to writing for narrative frameworks to give form to their identities: a narrative accounting shaped through the specific, embodied, and intersubjective nature of their experience. Howell represents travel as a “huge Inn,” likewise emphasizing the inherent sociability of cross-cultural exchanges, which are constituted above all through encounters with others. In his prefatory poem to Epistolae Ho-Elianæ, it is the specific sociable contexts of travel that enable a more general cosmopolitan knowledge and sense of transcultural connections and universalities: And by these various Wanderings true I found, Earth is our common Mother, ev’ry Ground May be one’s Country: For by Birth each Man Is in this World a Cosmopolitan, A free-born Burgess, and receives thereby His Denization from Nativity: Nor is this lower World but a huge Inn, And Men the rambling Passengers, wherein Some do warm Lodgings find . . . ... . . . but some Must for their Commons trot, and trudge, for Room.²⁰

¹⁹ Wotton, letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, ca. April 1639, “touching the loss of friends, and final resignation of ourselves,” in Wotton, Life and Letters, 2: 405–6; British Library Add. 34727 ff. 67–67v. ²⁰ Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ, 8–9.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

228

   

Offsetting the aspiration for a universal cosmopolitan knowledge is the discrepant experience of those who occupy the position of the cosmopolite. Howell becomes Hobbesian, recasting this sociable space as one of competition and diffidence, which forces some to travel and service out of necessity. The space (or “room”) used to represent social position is cast as an effort to lay claim to the “commons.” His reference gestures towards more radical modes of critique, invoking a term charged with meaning and associated with a defense of customary rights and the res publica against the encroachments of political absolutism.²¹ What unites the disparate groups of extraterritorial agents discussed in this book is that they engaged with the commons in entering a marketplace of print, publishing accounts of their travel and service in order to address a reading public and reflect on a shared project of governance. In doing so, they revealed the ways that definitions of national culture are inextricably bound up with extraterritorial contexts. Moreover, they also redefined the art of government, no longer as the ars arcana, the secrets of state, but instead the practices of statecraft constituted, circulated, and analyzed through the writing hands of its agents. An important component of their role was the use of their expertise to offer political critique. The political knowledge of the cosmopolite returned home to produce a critical analysis of the workings of the state. As Howell outlines in “To the knowing Reader touching Familiar Letters”: “They can the Cabinets of Kings unscrue, / And hardest Intricacies of State unclue.”²² It is telling that Howell imagines a mode of critique, of revealing mysteries of state through print, as the opening of the sovereign’s writing desk. After all, this cabinet of documents would have been maintained through the writing hands of the state’s secretariat, including Howell himself in the position of Secretary for the Privy Council that political crisis prevented him from obtaining. This cabinet would additionally have consisted of the textual documentation attesting to the state’s predominant concern with foreign affairs, and have been comprised of the writings of its agents corresponding from abroad. As outlined by Robert Beale in his treatise on the office of the Principal Secretary, this state officer “must have a special Cabinett, whereof he is himselfe to keepe the Keye, for his signetts, Ciphers and secret Intelligence, distinguishing the boxes or tills rather by letters than by the names of the Countryes or places, keeping that only unto himselfe, for the names may inflame a desire to come by such things.”²³ As noted in the Introduction, the term “bureaucracy” was first coined in the mid-eighteenth century, and only began to enter wider circulation over the ensuing decades.²⁴ The historical origins of the term, however, refer to the bureau, the physical space ²¹ E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993). ²² Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ, 13. ²³ Beale, “A Treatise on the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to her Ma[jes]tie,” in Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 1:428. ²⁴ “Bureaucracy,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2013).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

:   

229

of writing in which practices of governance take place.²⁵ As the term became generalized, it also referred to a process of increasing specialization, the creation of bureaus representing distinct fields of governance as well as geographicallyarranged spheres of political knowledge and administration. In restoring this original sense of bureaucracy, we return to the social spaces and embodied processes of writing that constitute state power. As a result, in Howell’s phrasing, the workings of the state are “unclued.” In its early modern usages, unclued is often linked to a movement through a labyrinth or another secret space, an appropriate way of figuring the unraveling of the mysteries of state.²⁶ State power is not merely labyrinthine in the complexity of its archive of documentation; more significantly, its textual foundations derive from the travel knowledge of its agents and the networks of information they disseminate. In its original Shakespearean citation, the term additionally possesses the sense of “ruin.”²⁷ In Oz-like fashion, to unclue the state is to pull back the curtain of sovereignty and discover a dwarfish scribe, hunched over his desk. Or, as Shakespeare similarly describes himself, a “bending author” with “rough and all-unable pen” concluding his story.²⁸ In returning to this bureaucratic scene of writing, we restore a sense of the constituent processes through which sovereignty is constructed. Sovereignty is thereby not a pregiven, the point of origin and decisionist center for figuring political life. It is, instead, what is constituted through the writing practices of the agents who perform the functions of governance, and who can be generalized as a state only through an abstraction from practice. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, there is a political imperative to unclue the state. At a moment when the overreach of executive authority bears an uncanny resemblance to the abuses of early modern political absolutism, the contexts analyzed in this study offer us precedents for how a critique of sovereignty can be formulated from within the governing structures of the state. As Gayatri Spivak memorably advises, “The state is a minimal abstract structure which we must protect because it is our ally.”²⁹ As I hope has been evident, the concerns of this book are not unique to the early modern period. The models of sovereignty initially elaborated in this era continue to shape our imagination of power as well as limit our ability to fashion alternative frameworks for representing the practices of governance. As emphasized through this study’s focus on the writing of the state, the interconnected social practices of literary production and political service reveal the affective, intersubjective compositional processes that not only constitute political communities but also make possible their continued transformation.

²⁵ “Bureau,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2013). ²⁶ “Unclue,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2017). ²⁷ Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1.1.168. ²⁸ Shakespeare, Henry V, Epilogue 1–2. ²⁹ Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), 98.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Bibliography 1. Primary Sources (i) Manuscript British Library Add. 34727 Landsdowne 65 Stowe 168 Stowe 169 Stowe 170 Stowe 171

The National Archives SP 12/86 SP 12/243 SP 12/261 SP 12/262 SP 12/265 SP 14/19 SP 14/57 SP 14/71 SP 14/216 SP 15/34 SP 70/139 SP 70/140 SP 70/144 SP 78/56 SP 84/79 SP 99/4 SP 99/6 SP 99/20 SP 99/23 SP 99/24 SP 99/25

(ii) Printed [Unless noted otherwise, the place of publication for pre-1800 texts is London.] Allen, William Cardinal, An admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland concerninge the present vvarres made for the execution of his Holines sentence, by the highe and mightie Kinge Catholike of Spaine. By the Cardinal of Englande (Antwerp, 1588). Allen, William Cardinal, An apologie and trve declaration of the institution and endeuours of the two English Colleges (Mounts [Rheims], 1581).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

232



Allen, William Cardinal, The copie of a letter vvritten by M. Doctor Allen: concerning the yeelding vp of the citie of Dauentrie vnto his Catholike Maiestie, by Sir VVilliam Stanley knight (Antwerp, 1587). Allen, William Cardinal, The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen, ed. Thomas Francis Knox (1882; Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1965). Allen, William Cardinal, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965). Althusius, Johannes, Politica (1603), ed. Frederick S. Carney (1964; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995). Anon., Aduertisements from Britany, and from the Lovv Countries. In September and October (1591). Anon., A Larum for London (1602) (Oxford: Malone Society, 1913). Anon., An historicall discourse, or rather a tragicall historie of the citie of Antwerpe (1586). Anon., Newes from Brest. A diurnal of al that Sir Iohn Norreis hath doone since his last ariuall in Britaine (1594). Anon., Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse, at the Right Honorable the Lady Russels, at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lord Norris, at Ricorte [sic] (Oxford, 1592). Anon., A trve and perfect relation of the whole proceedings against the late most barbarous Traitors (1606). Anon., A true report of the yeelding vp of the cittie of Antwarpe, vnto the Prince of Parma, which was on the seauenteenth day of August last past. 1585 (Amsterdam, 1585). Anon., A warning to London by the fall of Antwerp (1577). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). Ascham, Roger, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). Aubrey, John, Aubrey on Education, ed. J.E. Stephens (1972; New York: Routledge, 2012). Bacon, Sir Francis, Essays, ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: J.M. Dent, 1972). Bacon, Sir Francis, The Oxford Francis Bacon, Volume I: Early Writings 1584–1596, ed. Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). Barnaud, Nicolas, Le Réveille-matin des françois, et de leurs voisins (Geneva, 1574). Barret, Robert, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres (1598). Barwick, Humphrey, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of all Manuall Weapons of Fire (1591). Beale, Robert, “A Treatise on the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to her Ma [jes]tie,” in Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, volume 1, 423–43. Beare, Philip O’Sullivan, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae (1621), in Ireland Under Elizabeth, trans. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1903). Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Beza, Theodore, The Right of Magistrates, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay, ed. Julian H. Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 97–135. Bodin, Jean, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Bodin, Jean, Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (1606). Bodin, Jean, Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. M.J. Tooley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



233

Botero, Giovanni, The Reason of State (1589), ed. Robert Bireley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Brome, Richard, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). [Browne, John], The Merchants Avizo. Uerie Necessarie For their Sons and Seruants, when they first send them beyond the Seas, as to Spaine and Portingale, or other Countries (1607). Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I, 12 vols. (1856–1872; Nendeln: Kraus, 1967). Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1575–77 (1880; Nendeln: Kraus, 1966). Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, vols. 10–18 [1603–1625] (1900–1912; Nendeln: Kraus, 1970). Camden, William, Annales, or, The History of the Most Renowned and Virtuous Princesse Elizabeth (1635). Canaye, Philippe de, Seigneur de Fresnes, Lettres et ambassades de messire Philippe Canaye, seigneur de Fresne (Paris, 1644). Carleton, Dudley, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624, ed. Maurice Lee, Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972). Cecil, Robert, Foreign Intelligence and Information in Elizabethan England: Two English Treatises on the State of France, 1580–1584, ed. David Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Chamberlain, John, The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols., ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939). Chapman, George, The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, volume I, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961). Churchyard, Thomas, A general rehearsal of warres (1579). Churchyard, Thomas, A lamentable, and pitifull description, of the wofull warres in Flaunders (1578). Churchyard, Thomas, A true discourse historicall, of the succeeding gouernours in the Netherlands, and the ciuill warres there (1602). Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923). Cicero, Marcus Tullius, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cleland, James, Hero-paideia, or the institution of a young noble man (Oxford, 1607). Coryat, Thomas, Coryats Crambe, or his colwort twise sodden, And Now serued in with other Macoronicke dishes, as the second course to his Crudities (1611). Coryat, Thomas, Coryat’s Crudities, 2 vols. (1611; Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905). Coryat, Thomas, Thomas Coriate Traueller for the English Wits (1616). Cotta, John, A Short Discouerie of the Vnobserved Dangers of seuerall sorts of ignorant and vnconsiderate Practicers of Physike in England (1612). Cruso, John, Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie (1632). Dallington, Sir Robert, A Method For Travel. Shewed by Taking the view of France (1605). Dallington, Sir Robert, A Suruey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany (1605). Davenant, William, The History of Sir Francis Drake, in Drama of the English Republic, 1649–60, ed. Janet Clare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

234



Davenport, Frances Gardiner, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington DC: Carnegie Institution, 1917). Davison, William, ed., Profitable Instructions: Describing what special Obseruations are to be taken by Trauellers in all Nations, States and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable (1633). Day, Angel, The English Secretary (1599). Dee, John, General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of nauigation (1577). Deloney, Thomas, Jack of Newbury, ed. Peter C. Herman (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015). Digges, Thomas [and Dudley Digges], Foure Paradoxes, or Politique Discourses (1604). Donne, John, The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971). Donne, John, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, Lavves and ordinances set downe by Robert Earle of Leycester, the Queenes Maiesties Lieutenant and Captaine General of her armie and forces in the Lowe Countries (1586). Elizabeth I, A declaration of the causes mooving the Qveene of England to giue aide to the Defence of the people afflicted and oppressed in the lowe Countries (1585). Elizabeth I, The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. G.B. Harrison (London: Cassell, 1968). Farnese, Alessandro, Duke of Parma, A letter sent from the Prince of Parma vnto the borrowmaisters, sherifes, and magistrate of the towne of Anwerpe (1586). Fuller, Thomas, The Worthies of England (1662). Garrard, William, The Arte of Warre (1591). Gascoigne, George, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573). Gascoigne, George, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G.W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). Gascoigne, George, The Glasse of Governement . . . and other poems and prose works, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). Gascoigne, George, The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575). Gascoigne, George, The Posies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907). Gascoigne, George, The Steele Glas . . . with The Complainte of Phylomene (1576). Gates, Geoffrey, The Defence of Militarie Profession (1579). Gentili, Alberico, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, trans. John C. Rolfe (New York: Oceana Publications, 1964). Gentili, Alberico, De Legationibus Libri Tres (1585), trans. Gordon J. Laing (New York: Oceana Publications, 1964). Goldring, Elizabeth, et al., eds., John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013–14). Goodall, Baptist, The Tryall of Travell (1630). Grotius, Hugo, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), trans. as The Rights of War and Peace, 3 vols., ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Grotius, Hugo, Mare Liberum (1609), trans. as The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004). Hakluyt, Richard, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E.G.R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935). Hakluyt, Richard, The principal nauigations, voiages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation (1598). Hall, Joseph, Epistles, The First Volume (1608). Hall, Joseph, The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall D.D., ed. Philip Wynter (New York: AMS Press, 1969).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



235

Harvey, Gabriel, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G.C. Moore Smith (Stratford-uponAvon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913). Harward, Simon, Solace for the Souldier and Saylour (1592). Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Part IV (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hoby, Sir Thomas, The travels and life of Sir Thomas Hoby, kt. of Bisham abbey, written by himself, 1547–1564, ed. Edgar Powell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1902). Hoskins, John, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns, ed. Louise Brown Osborne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937). Hotman, François, Quaestionem illustrium liber (Paris, 1573). Hotman, Jean, The Ambassador (1603). Hotman, Jean, A casket full of rich iewels For the ornament, and adorning, both of the minde and habite, of the most absolutest ambassador (1609). Howell, James, Epistolae Ho-Elianæ: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, Historiographer Royal to Charles II, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David Nutt, 1890). Howell, James, Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869). Howell, James, A survay of the signorie of Venice (1651). Hughes, Charles, “Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate, &c. 1592,” The English Historical Review 20 (1905): 499–508. Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969). Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume III: The Later Tudors (1588–1603) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969). James I, James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. J.P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Johnson, Robert, Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers (1601). Jonson, Ben, Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin, 1988). Jonson, Ben, Every Man Out of his Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Jonson, Ben, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). Jonson, Ben, Volpone, ed. Philip Brockbank (New York: Norton, 1988). La Boétie, Étienne de, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (London: Black Rose Books, 1997). Larkin, James F. and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume I: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). Lipsius, Justus, trans. Sir John Stradling, A Direction for Trauailers. Taken out of Iustvs Lipsius, and enlarged for the behoofe of the right honorable Lord, the yong Earle of Bedford, being now ready to trauell (1592). Lithgow, William, A most delectable and true discourse (1614). Lithgow, William, The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Paineful Peregrinations of the long nineteen Yeares Travayles (1632). Loyseleur, Pierre, A treatise against the proclamation published by the King of Spayne, by which he proscribed the late Prince of Orange (1584). Lupton, Thomas, A persuasion from papistrie vvrytten chiefely to the obstinate, determined, and dysobedient English papists (1581).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

236



Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Arte of warre (1560). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discourses on Livy, ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, ed. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1958). More, Sir Thomas, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York and London: Norton, 1992). Mornay, Philippe du Plessis, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland (1617; 3 vols. Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–08). Moryson, Fynes, Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century. Being Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617), ed. Charles Hughes (1903; New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967). Nashe, Thomas, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (London and New York: Penguin, 1985). Neale, Thomas, A Treatise of Direction, how to travell safely, and profitably into Forraigne Countries (1643). Nichols, Philip, Sir Francis Drake Reuiued (1626). Palmer, Thomas, An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (1606). Paulet, Sir Amias, Copy -Book of Sir Amias Poulet’s [sic] Letters written during his Embassy to France, A.D. 1577, ed. Octavius Ogle (London: J.B. Nichols, 1866). Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905). Riche, Barnabe, Allarme to England foreshewing what perilles are procured, where the people liue without regarde of martiall lawe (1578). Riche, Barnabe, A martial conference pleasantly discoursed betweene two souldiers, the one Captaine Skil, trained vp in the French and Low Country seruices, the other Captaine Pill, only practised in Finsburie fields in the modern warres of the renowmed Duke of Shordich and the mightie Prince Arthur (1598). Riche, Barnabe, A Path-way to Military Practise (1587). Riche, Barnabe, A souldiers vvishe to Britons welfare (1604). Riche, Barnabe, Faultes Faults and nothing else but Faultes (1606). Segar, William, Honor Military and Ciuill (1602). Serres, Jean De, A General Inventorie of the History of France (1607). Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Shirley, James, The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, vol. III, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: John Murray, 1833). Sidney, Sir Robert, Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



237

Smith, Adam, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Smythe, Sir John, Certain Discourses Military by Sir John Smythe, ed. J.R. Hale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). Smythe, Sir John, Instructions, Obseruations, and Orders Mylitarie (1595). Somerset, Sir Charles, The Travel Diary (1611–1612) of an English Catholic, Sir Charles Somerset, ed. Michael G. Brennan (Leeds: The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1993). Stow, John, The Annales of England (1600). Sutcliffe, Matthew, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes (1593). Taylor, John, All the Workes of Iohn Taylor The Water Poet (1630). Trussell, Thomas, The Souldier Pleading His Owne Cause (1619). Turler, Jerome, The Traveiler (1576). Van Meteren, Emmanuel [and Thomas Churchyard, trans.], A true discourse historicall, of the succeeding gouernours in the Netherlands, and the ciuill warres there (1602). Vattel, Emer de, The Law of Nations (1758), trans. Joseph Chitty (Philadelphia: T. & J.W. Johnson, 1883). Vitoria, Francisco De, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Walton, Izaak, Izaak Walton’s Lives (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1926). William I, Prince of Orange, The apologie or defence of the most noble Prince William, by the grace of God, Prince of Orange . . . against the proclamation and edict, published by the King of Spaine, by which he proscribeth the saide lorde prince . . . presented to my lords the Estates Generall of the Lowe Countrie (Delft, 1581). Williams, Sir Roger, The Works of Sir Roger Williams, ed. John X. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). Wilson, Jean, ed., Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980). Winwood, Sir Ralph, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I (1725; New York AMS Press, 1972). Wotton, Sir Henry, Elements of Architecture (1624). Wotton, Sir Henry, Letters and Dispatches from Sir Henry Wotton to James I and his Ministers, in the Years [1617–20] (Roxburghe Club) (London: William Nicol, 1850). Wotton, Sir Henry, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907). Wotton, Sir Henry, A Philosophical Survey of Education or Moral Architecture and the Aphorisms of Education, ed. H.S. Kermode (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1938). Wotton, Sir Henry, Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651). Wotton, Sir Henry [Anthony Bacon], The state of Christendom, or, A most exact and curious discovery of many secret passages and hidden mysteries of the times (1657). Wright, Irene A., ed., Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–80 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932). Wright, Irene A., ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583–1594 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1951). Wright, Irene A., ed., Spanish Narratives of the English Attack on Santo Domingo, 1655 (London: Camden Miscellany, 1926). Wright, Louis B., ed., Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

238



2. Secondary Sources Abrams, Philip, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1989): 58–89. Adair, E.R., The Extraterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Longmans, 1929). Adams, Julia, “Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State-Formation,” in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 98–122. Adams, Percy G., Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983). Adams, Robyn, “A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence,” in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 63–81. Adams, Simon, “A Patriot for Whom?: Stanley, York and Elizabeth’s Catholics,” History Today 37, 7 (July 1987): 46–50. Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (2003; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Ahnert, Ruth, “Maps Versus Networks,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 2016, 130–57. Alford, Stephen, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Alford, Stephen, “Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham,” in Adams and Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, 2011, 46–62. Alford, Stephen, The Watchers: The Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Althusser, Louis, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 2006). Anderson, M.S., The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–1919 (London and New York: Longman, 1993). Anderson, Roberta, “Marginal Diplomatic Spaces during the Jacobean Era, 1603–25,” in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace, ed. Nathalie Rivère de Carles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 163–82. Andrews, Kenneth R., Drake’s Voyages: A Re-Assessment of their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1967). Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Appelbaum, Robert, Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland, and France 1559–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Aravamudan, Srinivas, “ ‘The Unity of the Representer’: Reading Leviathan Against the Grain,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (2005): 631–53.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



239

Archer, John Michael, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). Armitage, David, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 531–55. Armitage, David, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Arnade, Peter, Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Austen, Gillian, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008). Aveling, J.C.H., The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976). Baena, Laura Manzano, Conflicting Worlds: The Peace Treaty of Munster (1648) and the Political Culture of the Dutch Republic and Spanish Monarchy (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2011). Baena, Laura Manzano, “Negotiating Sovereignty: The Peace Treaty of Munster, 1648,” History of Political Thought 28 (2007): 617–41. Baker, David J., “ ‘My Liquid Journey’: The Frontispiece to Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 118–36. Bakhtin, M.M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981). Balibar, Étienne, “Class Racism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 204–16. Balibar, Étienne, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Barber, Giles, “The English-Language Guide Book to Europe Up To 1870,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Journeys Through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 93–106. Barbour, Richmond, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Barker, Simon, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Bartelson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bartelson, Jens, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Baucom, Ian, “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War,” in States of Emergency: the Object of American Studies, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 124–42. Beier, A.L., Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). Bell, Gary M., “Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation: Its Nature and Variety,” Journal of British Studies 20 (1981): 1–25. Bell, Gary M., A Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives 1509–1688 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990). Bennington, Geoffrey, “Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 97–113.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

240



Benton, Lauren, “Atlantic Law: Transformations of a Regional Legal Regime,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World c.1450-c.1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 400–16. Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Bertram, Benjamin, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). Beulac, Stéphane, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2004). Biow, Douglas, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Black, Jeremy, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). Bodleian Libraries, “Rediscovering Rycote: The History of a Lost Tudor Mansion” (2013), http://rycote.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu, Pierre, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53–75. Boys, Jayne E.E., London’s News Press and the Thirty Years’ War (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011). Bozzay, Anne Hecox, The Dutch Muses: The Dutch Revolt in the Elizabethan Imagination (unpublished PhD dissertation, Washington University, 2000). Braddick, Michael, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Brayshay, Mark, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). Brayshay, Mark, et al., “Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: the Speed of the Royal Post in Early Modern England,” Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998): 265–88. Breight, Curtis C., Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). Brennan, Michael, ed. and intro., The Origins of the Grand Tour (London: Hakluyt Society, 2004). Brett, Annabel S., Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Brett, Annabel S., “Scholastic political thought and the modern concept of the state,” in Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130–48. Bull, Hedley, An Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Bull, Hedley, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



241

Burgess, Glenn, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (2000; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007). Cahill, Patricia, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Capp, Bernard, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578–1653 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Carey, Daniel, “Hakluyt’s Instructions: The Principal Navigations and Sixteenth-Century Travel Advice,” Studies in Travel Writing 13 (2009): 167–85. Carter, Charles, “The Ambassadors of Early Modern Europe: Patterns of Diplomatic Representation in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Charles Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), 269–95. Cavallar, Georg, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community and Political Justice Since Vitoria (2002; New York: Routledge, 2016). Cavallar, Georg, “Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel: Accomplices of European Colonialism and Exploitation or True Cosmopolitans?,” Journal of the History of International Law 10 (2008): 181–209. Centerwall, Brandon S. “ ‘Lo here’s a Man, worthy indeede to travell’: Donne’s Panegyric upon Coryats Crudities,” John Donne Journal 22 (2003): 77–94. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chaney, Edward, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998). Chaney, Edward, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and “The Voyage of Italy” in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985). Chard, Chloe and Helen Langdon, eds., Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Cheyney, Edward P., A History of England (New York: Peter Smith, 1948). Clark, Steve, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999). Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Cockle, Maurice, A Bibliography of Military Books up to 1642 (London: Holland Press, 1957). Collinson, Patrick, Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994). Condren, Conal, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Conklin, James, “The Theory of Sovereign Debt and Spain under Philip II,” Journal of Political Economy 106 (1998): 483–513. Constantinou, Costas M., On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Cormack, Bradin, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

242



Craik, Katharine, “Reading Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” SEL 44 (2004): 77–96. Craik, Katharine, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Crane, Mary Thomas, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Cruickshank, C.G., Elizabeth’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). Cummins, John, “ ‘La religion Christiana vitoriosa’: Lope de Vega’s Account of Francis Drake’s Last Expedition,” in “Never Ending Adventure”: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature in Honor of Peter N. Dunn (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002), 405–20. Curzon, Gerald, Wotton and his Worlds: Spying, Science and Venetian Intrigues (London: Xlibris, 2003). Cust, Richard, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 60–90. Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Daybell, James and Andrew Gordon, eds., Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). DeCaroli, Steven, “Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty,” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43–69. De Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Deng, Stephen, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Der Derian, James, “Mediating Estrangement: A Theory for Diplomacy,” Review of International Studies 13 (1987): 91–110. Der Derian, James, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987). Derrida, Jacques, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Derrida, Jacques, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (2003; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Derrida, Jacques and Jürgen Habermas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanni Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). De Somogyi, Nick, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998). Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (1974; Atlantic Heights, NJ: Harvester, 1978). De Vivo, Filippo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12, ed. Sidney Lee (New York: Macmillan, 1909).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



243

Donaldson, Ian, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Dooley, Brendan, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Dooley, Brendan and Sabrina A. Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001). Doran, Susan, “The Politics of Renaissance Europe,” in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, eds., Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (London: Thomson, 2005), 21–52. Dover, Paul M., ed., Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Dover, Paul M. and Hamish Scott, “The Emergence of Diplomacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750: Volume II: Cultures and Power, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 663–96. Drelichman, Mauricio and Hans-Joachim Voth, Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Duffy, Eamon, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Duffy, Eamon, “William, Cardinal Allen (1532–1594),” Recusant History 22 (1995): 265–90. Dunthorne, Hugh, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Dutton, Richard, Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Edelstein, Dan, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Edwards, Francis, “The Attempt in 1608 on Hugh Owen, Intelligencer for the Archdukes in Flanders,” Recusant History 17 (1984): 140–57. Edwards, Francis, “The Earl of Salisbury’s Pursuit of Hugh Owen,” Recusant History 26 (2002): 2–38. Edwards, Francis, The Enigma of the Gunpowder Plot (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008). Edwards, Francis, Guy Fawkes: The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969). Elden, Stuart, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Elden, Stuart, Shakespearean Territories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Eldred, Jason, “ ‘The Just Will Pay for the Sinners’: English Merchants, the Trade with Spain, and Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1563-1585,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 5–28. Ellinghausen, Laurie, Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). Ellison, James, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002). Eltis, David, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998). Elton, Geoffrey, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Ertman, Thomas, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Fagel, Raymond, “Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe as an Anglo-Dutch Text,” Dutch Crossing 41 (2017): 101–10. Fletcher, Catherine, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

244



Fletcher, Catherine, “ ‘Furnished with Gentlemen’: the Ambassador’s House in SixteenthCentury Italy,” Renaissance Studies 24 (2009): 518–35. Forman, Valerie, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. Foucault, Michel, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 298–325. Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003). Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Franklin, Julian H., Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Fraser, Antonia, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Anchor Books, 1997). Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–32. Frigo, Daniela, “Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 15–34. Frigo, Daniela, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Frohock, Richard, Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004). Frontain, Raymond Jean, “Donne, Coryate, and the Sesqui-Superlative,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29 (2003): 211–24. Frye, Susan, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Fumerton, Patricia, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Fusaro, Maria, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Gajda, Alexandra, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Gajda, Alexandra, “The State of Christendom: History, Political Thought and the Essex Circle,” Historical Research 81 (2008): 423–46. Games, Alison, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, What Gunpowder Plot Was (London: Longmans, 1897). Gaskell, Joshua, “What the 17th Century Philosopher Thomas Hobbes Can Teach the Brexiteers,” New Statesman, October 25, 2016.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



245

Gelderblom, Oscar, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Oxford: Polity, 1984. Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Glete, Jan, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Glete, Jan, Warfare at Sea, 1550–1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: Routledge, 2000). Glover, Jeffrey, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Goldberg, Jonathan, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Goldie, Mark, “The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 153–94. González de León, Fernando, The Road to Rocroi: Class, Culture, and Command in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567–1659 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Grewe, Wilhelm G., Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000). Guasco, Michael, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Guillén, Claudio, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Barbara K. Lewalski, ed., Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 70–101. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Hadfield, Andrew, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hadfield, Andrew, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Hadfield, Andrew, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Haile, Martin, An Elizabethan Cardinal: William Allen (London: Pitman, 1914). Halasz, Alexandra, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

246



Halasz, Alexandra, “Pamphlet Surplus: John Taylor and Subscription Publication,” in Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, eds., Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 90–102. Hale, J.R., Renaissance War Studies (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983). Halpern, Richard, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Hamilton, Keith and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Hammer, Paul E.J., “The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville, and the Employment of Scholars,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 167–80. Hammer, Paul E.J., Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Hammer, Paul E.J., “Essex and Europe: Evidence from Confidential Instructions by the Earl of Essex, 1595–6,” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 357–81. Hammer, Paul E.J., The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hammer, Paul E.J., “The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 26–51. Hammill, Graham, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Hampton, Timothy, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Hanley, Thomas O., “A Note on Cardinal Allen’s Political Thought,” Catholic Historical Review 45 (1959): 327–34. Hannay, Margaret P., Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Hanson, Elizabeth, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Harari, Yuval Noah, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). Harding, Christopher, “‘Hostis Humani Generis’: The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20–38. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000). Harris, Jonathan Gil, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Haskell, Alexander B., For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Hay, Millicent V., The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester (1563–1626) (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984). Haynes, Alan, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services, 1570–1603 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992). Helgerson, Richard, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Helgerson, Richard, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Heller-Roazen, Daniel, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



247

Hentschell, Roze, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). Herman, Peter C., “ ‘A Deed Without a Name’: Macbeth, The Gunpowder Plot, and Terrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research 18 (2014): 114–31. Highley, Christopher, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hill, Mike and Walter Montag, eds., Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (London and New York: Verso, 2000). Hill, Robert, “Art and Patronage: Sir Henry Wotton and the Venetian Embassy 1604–1624,” in Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Vera Noldus, eds., Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 27–58. Hillgarth, J.N., The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (2000; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Hinsley, F.H., Sovereignty (1966; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Hirschfeld, Heather Anne, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Hoffman, John, Beyond the State: An Introductory Critique (London: Polity, 1995). Hollinger, Douglas Lloyd, The Literature of Travel Advice in England, 1560–1700 (unpublished PhD dissertation, Texas Christian University, 1996). Holmes, Peter, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Holsinger, Bruce, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Holt, Mack P., The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Houliston, Victor, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Howard, Clare, English Travellers of the Renaissance (1914; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968). Howard, Michael, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Israel, Jonathan, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Jacob, Margaret C., Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Jacobsen, Helen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Jardine, Lisa, The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Handgun (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Jardine, Lisa, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied For Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78. Jardine, Lisa and William Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,” in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds., Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102–21.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

248



Jed, Stephanie, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jessop, Bob, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Jones, Norman, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Jorgensen, Paul A., Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). Kahn, Victoria, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Kahn, Victoria, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Kaplan, Benjamin J., “Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 6 (2002): 341–61. Kaufmann, Miranda, Black Tudors (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017). Keene, Edward, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Kelley, Donald R., The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Kelsey, Harry, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Kiernan, V.G., “Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560–1660 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 117–40. Kingdon, Robert M., “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. Burns and Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193–218. Kingsbury, Benedict and Benjamin Straumann, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Kinney, Arthur, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). Kiséry, András, “Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere,” in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Sowerby and Craigwood, 2019, 136–49. Kiséry, András, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Knapp, Jeffrey, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Koenigsberger, H.G., Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman, The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Kopytoff, Barbara Klamon, “Jamaican Maroon Political Organization: The Effects of the Treaties,” Social and Economic Studies 25 (1976): 87–105. Korda, Natasha, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Koskenniemi, Martti, “Vitoria and Us,” Rechtgeschichte 22 (2014): 119–38. Krischer, André J. and Hillard von Thiessen, “Diplomacy in a Global Early Modernity: The Ambiguity of Sovereignty,” The International History Review 20 (2018): 1–8.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



249

Kyle, Chris R., “Early Modern Terrorism: The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and its Aftermath,” in Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis, eds., Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 42–55. Lake, Peter and Steve Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Lake, Peter and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 270–92. Lake, Peter and Michael Questier, “Puritans, Papists, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 587–627. Langsam, G. Geoffrey, Martial Books and Tudor Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951). Laski, Harold, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919). Laski, Harold, The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1921). Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Lawrence, David R., The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Lazzarini, Isabella, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Leahy, William, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). Lemon, Rebecca, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). Lesaffer, Randall, “Amicitia in Renaissance Peace and Alliance Treaties (1450–1530),” Journal of the History of International Law 4 (2002): 77–99. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Lingelbach, William E., The Internal Organisation of the Merchant Adventurers of England (Philadelphia, 1903). Lingelbach, William E., ed., The Merchant Adventurers of England: Their Laws and Ordinances with Other Documents (Philadelphia: Longman, Green, & Co., 1902). Lloyd, David, “Nationalisms Against the State,” in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 173–97. Lockey, Brian, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016). Lockey, Brian, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Loomie, Albert J., The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963). Lorenz, Philip, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Loxley, James, “ ‘Not sure of safety’: Hobbes and Exile,” in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 133–51.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

250



Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). MacMillan, Ken, The Atlantic Imperial Constitution: Center and Periphery in the English Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). MacMillan, Ken, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Macpherson, C.B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Magnusson, Lynne, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Mancke, Elizabeth, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 193–213. Manning, Roger B., Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Marotti, Arthur F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). Martines, Lauro, Furies: War in Europe, 1450–1700 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Penguin, 2002). Maslen, R.W., Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Masten, Jeffrey, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Masten, Jeffrey, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers, ed., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). Matar, Nabil, “English Renaissance Soldiers in the Armies of Islam,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 21 (1995): 81–94. Mattelart, Armand and Michèle Mattelart, Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction, trans. Susan Gruenheck Taponier and James A. Cohen (London: Sage Publications, 1998). Mattingly, Garrett, “No Peace Beyond What Line?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 13 (1962): 145–62. Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955; London: Jonathan Cape, 1962). McCoog, Thomas S., S.J., “ ‘Playing the Champion’: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission,” in McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 119–39. McCoy, Richard, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). McDiarmid, John F., ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). McKeown, Adam, English Mercuries: Soldier-Poets in the Age of Shakespeare (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). McReynolds, Daniel, “Lying Abroad for the Good of his Country: Sir Henry Wotton and Venice in the Age of the Interdict,” in The Image of Venice: Fialetti’s View and Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Deborah Howard et al. (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014), 115–23.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



251

Miéville, China, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Miliband, Ralph, The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western System of Power (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond State Theories and their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77–96. Monta, Susannah Brietz, “Rendering Unto Caesar: The Rhetorics of Divided Loyalties in Tudor England,” in Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59–86. Moore, Tim, Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist (London: Abacus, 2001). Moretti, Franco, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 2005), 42–82. Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). Mouffe, Chantal, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005). Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Muldrew, Craig, “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England,” Social History 18 (1993): 163–83. Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963). Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Netzloff, Mark, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003). Netzloff, Mark, “The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 236–60. Netzloff, Mark, “Jonson’s Volpone and the Information Economy of Anglo-Venetian Travel and Intelligence,” in Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Islands, Entrepôts, Empires, ed. John Watkins and Kathryn Reyerson (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 73–89. Netzloff, Mark, “Public Diplomacy and the Comedy of State: Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive,” in Authority and Diplomacy From Dante to Shakespeare, ed. Jason Powell and Will Rossiter (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 185–97. Netzloff, Mark, “Sir Francis Drake’s Ghost: Piracy, Cultural Memory, and Spectral Nationhood,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates: The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650 (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–50. Nicholls, Mark, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991). Nicolson, Harold, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (New York: Macmillan, 1954). Nolan, John S., “The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,” Journal of Military History 58 (1994): 391–420. Nolan, John S., Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

252



O’Callaghan, Michelle, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). O’Callaghan, Michelle, “Tavern Societies, Inns of Court, and the Culture of Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century London,” in Adam Smyth, ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 37–51. Ong, Walter J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). Ord, Melanie, “Provincial Identification and the Struggle over Representation in Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611),” in Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, eds., Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 131–40. Ord, Melanie, “Returning from Venice to England: Sir Henry Wotton as Diplomat, Pedagogue and Italian Cultural Connoisseur,” in Thomas Betteridge, ed., Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 147–67. Ord, Melanie, “Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604–1610,” The Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 1–23. Osborne, Toby and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Introduction: Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 313–30. Osiander, Andreas, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Osiander, Andreas, “Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55 (2001): 251–87. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pagden, Anthony, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79–98. Pal, Maïa, “Early Modern Extraterritoriality, Diplomacy, and the Transition to Capitalism,” in The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics, ed. Daniel S. Margolies et al. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 69–86. Palmer, Daryl, “William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder and the Transmission of Performance Culture,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5 (1991): 33–47. Parker, Geoffrey, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Parker, Geoffrey, The Dutch Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1977). Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (1988; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Parker, Geoffrey, Spain and the Netherlands: Ten Studies (London: Collins, 1979). Parker, Patricia, Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Parks, George B., “Travel as Education,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, ed. Richard Foster Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 264–91. Parmelee, Lisa Ferraro, Good News from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



253

Parr, Anthony, Renaissance Mad Voyages: Experiments in Early Modern English Travel (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). Parr, Anthony, “Thomas Coryat and the Discovery of Europe,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 578–602. Parrott, David, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Patterson, W.B., King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Peacey, Jason, “ ‘My Friend the Gazetier’: Diplomacy and News in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 2016, 420–42. Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Pettegree, Andrew, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Pettigrew, William A., Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Pettigrew, William A. and David Veevers, eds., The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Pfannebecker, Mareile, “ ‘Lying by Authority’: Travel Dissimulations in Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary,” Renaissance Studies 31 (2017): 569–85. Philips, Gervase, “To Cry ‘Home! Home’: Mutiny, Morale, and Indiscipline in Tudor Armies,” Journal of Military History 65 (2001): 313–32. Pike, Ruth, “Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth Century Panama,” The Americas 64 (2007): 243–66. Pirillo, Diego, The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). Platt, F. Jeffrey, “The Elizabethan ‘Foreign Office,’ ” The Historian 56 (1994): 725–40. Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Poovey, Mary, “Accommodating Merchants: Accounting, Civility, and the Natural Laws of Gender,” differences 8, 3 (1996): 1–20. Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978). Powell, Jason and Will Rossiter, eds., Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Pratt, Mary Louise, “Travel Narrative and Imperialist Vision,” in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds., Understanding Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 199–221. Price, Richard, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slaves Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Pritchard, Arnold, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Prouty, C.T., “Gascoigne in the Low Countries and the Publication of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres,” The Review of English Studies 12 (1936): 139–46.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

254



Prouty, C.T., George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Quadflieg, Helga, “Approved Civilities and the Fruits of Peregrination: Elizabethan and Jacobean Travellers and the Making of Englishness,” in Hartmut Berghoff, et al., eds., The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 21–45. Questier, Michael C., “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” Historical Journal 40 (1996): 311–29. Rambuss, Richard, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Ramsey, G.D., The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975). Rapple, Rory, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Raymond, Joad and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Read, Conyers, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). Redford, Peter, “Intercepting the Burley Letters,” Lives and Letters 2 (2010): 1–12. Rediker, Marcus, Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Richards, Jennifer, “Assumed Simplicity and the Critique of Nobility: Or, How Castiglione Read Cicero,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 460–86. Riches, Daniel, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Riggs, David, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Rosenberg, Justin, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London and New York: Verso, 1994). Rothman, E. Natalie, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). Rowse, A.L., The England of Elizabeth (1950; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Rubiés, Joan-Pau, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Rubright, Marjorie, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses (New York: Vintage, 1997). Rutter, Carol Chillington, “ ‘Hear the Ambassadors!’: Marking Shakespeare’s Venice Connection,” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 265–86. Salamon, Linda Bradley, “Gascoigne’s Globe: The Spoyle of Antwerpe and the Black Legend of Spain,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14, 1 (May 2008): 37 paragraphs. Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Schlueter, June and Markus Dubischar, “Traces of Henry Wotton in Continental Alba Amicorum,” Renaissance Studies 30 (2016): 666–83. Schmidt, Benjamin, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



255

Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political, ed. George Schwab (1932; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schmitt, Carl, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003). Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (1922; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). Schneider, Gary, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). Schobesberger, Nikolaus, et al., “European Postal Networks,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern England, 2016, 19–63. Schoenfeldt, Michael C., Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Scott, James Brown, The Catholic Conception of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934). Scott, Jonathan, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Scully, Robert E., SJ, Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Shahani, Gitanjali and Brinda Charry, eds., Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Shannon, Laurie, “Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s ‘Friendly Verse,’ ” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2004): 453–83. Shannon, Laurie, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shepard, Alan, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002). Sherman, William H., “Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720),” in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17–36. Shields, David S., “Sons of the Dragon: or, The English Hero Revived,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, ed. Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 101–14. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Smith, Cassander L., Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Soll, Jacob, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Solomon, Julie Robin, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

256



Sommerville, J.P., “Absolutism and Royalism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. James Henderson Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 347–73. Sowerby, Tracey A., “Early Modern Diplomatic History,” History Compass 149, 9 (2016): 441–56. Sowerby, Tracey A., “Elizabethan Diplomatic Networks and the Spread of News,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 2016, 305–27. Sowerby, Tracey A. and Joanna Craigwood, eds., Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Sowerby, Tracey A. and Jan Hennings, eds., Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2017). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 203–35. Spruyt, Hendrik, The Sovereign State and its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Stagl, Justin, “Ars Apodemica and Socio-Cultural Research,” in Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern Travel Culture, 1550–1700, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Jan L. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 17–27. Stagl, Justin, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995). Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419. Stern, Philip J., The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Stewart, Alan, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Stewart, Alan, “Instigating Treason: the Life and Death of Henry Cuffe, Secretary,” in Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds., Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–70. Stewart, Alan, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Pimlico, 2001). Stewart, Alan, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Stewart, Alan and Heather Wolfe, ed., Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Seattle: Folger Shakespeare Library and University of Washington Press, 2004). Stone, Lawrence, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). Strachan, Michael, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). Tang, Chenxi, Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). Taunton, Nina, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). Taylor, Kathryn, “Making Statesmen, Writing Culture: Ethnography, Observation, and Diplomatic Travel in Early Modern Venice,” Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018): 279–98. Teschke, Benno, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of International Relations (London: Verso, 2003). Thomas, Max W, “Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market,” PMLA 107 (1992): 511–23.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



257

Thompson, Edward H., “Elizabethan Economic Analysis: Fynes Moryson’s Account of the Economies of Europe,” History of Economic Ideas 3 (1995): 1–25. Thompson, Edward H., “Shakespeare’s Europe Revisited – Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary,” in Studii de Limbi si Literaturi Moderne,” ed. H. Parlog (Romania: Timisoara University Press, 1993), 72–86. Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993). Thompson, E.P., “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97. Thomson, Janice E., Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Trim, David J.B., ed., The Chivalric Ethos and the Military Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Trim, David J.B., “Ideology, Greed, and Social Discontent in Early Modern Europe: Mercenaries and Mutinies in the Rebellious Netherlands, 1568–1609,” in Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jane Hathaway (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2001), 47–61. Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Tucker, Jeffrey A., “The Weird Hobbesianism of the Brexiphobes,” Foundation for Economic Education, June 28, 2016. Turner, Henry S., The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Unwin, George, “The Merchant Adventurers’ Company in the Reign of Elizabeth,” Economic History Review 1 (1927): 35–64. Van Creveld, Martin, Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Van der Stock, Jan, Antwerp, Story of a Metropolis: 16th–17th Century (Ghent: SnoeckDucaju & Zoon, 1993). Van Gelderen, Martin, “The State and its Rivals in Early-Modern Europe,” in Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath, eds., States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79–96. Van Zandt, Cynthia J., Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Verhoeven, Gerrit, Europe Within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585–1750) (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Vinson, Ben, Bearing Arms for his Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Virilio, Paul, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Viroli, Maurizio, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Vitkus, Daniel, “Labor and Travel on the Early Modern Stage: Representing the Travail of Travel in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare’s Pericles,” in Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 225–42. Vollerthun, Ursula, The Idea of International Society: Erasmus, Vitoria, Gentili and Grotius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 106–44.

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

258



Voss, Paul J., Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001). Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Walsham, Alexandra, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Walter, John, “A Rising of the People? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 90–143. Warneke, Sara, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (New York: Brill, 1995). Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Warren, Christopher, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Watkins, John, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). Watkins, John, “Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fiction and the Troubled Origins of International Law,” in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Sowerby and Craigwood, 2019, 69–83. Watkins, John, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 1 (2008): 1–14. Wayne, Don E., Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Webb, Henry J., Elizabethan Military Science: the Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Weber, Max, Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Wernham, R.B., Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485–1588 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972). Westphal, Bertrand, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place and Maps (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Wight, Martin, “Why Is There No International Theory?,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 17–34. Williams, M.E., “William Allen: The Sixteenth-Century Spanish Connection,” Recusant History 22 (1994): 123–40. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Williamson, Elizabeth, “ ‘Fishing After News’ and the Ars Apodemica: The Intelligencing Role of the Educational Traveller in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe, 2016, 542–62. Williamson, Elizabeth, “A Letter of Travel Advice: Literary Rhetoric, Scholarly Counsel and Practical Instruction in the Ars Apodemica,” Lives and Letters 3 (2011): 1–22. Williamson, Hugh Ross, The Gunpowder Plot (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). Wilson, Brownen and Paul Yachnin, eds., Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2009).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



259

Wilson, Charles, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (London: Macmillan, 1970). Wilson, Richard, “ ‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 1–19. Wolfe, Jessica, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London and New York: Verso, 1991). Woodbridge, Linda, “The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, and Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England,” in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, eds., Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 64–87. Woodcock, Matthew, Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, Ego (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Wooden, William, “The Peculiar Peregrinations of John Taylor the Water-Poet: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Travel Literature,” Prose Studies 6 (1983): 3–20. Woolf, Daniel, “Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell,” in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds., Private Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 243–78. Wright, Irene A., “The Spanish Resistance to the English Occupation of Jamaica, 1655–1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1930): 117–47. Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Yates, Julian, “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, A Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597,” parallax 8 (2002): 47–58. Younger, Neil, “The Practice and Politics of Troop-Raising: Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, and the Elizabethan Regime,” English Historical Review 127 (2012): 566–91. Zagorin, Perez, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Zucker, Adam, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abrams, Philip 4 Actor-network-theory 10 Adams, Julia 21–2 Adams, Robyn 110 Advice; see travel advice Affect 21–2, 44–5, 61–3, 69n.110, 81, 133–4, 137–8, 147, 149, 166–70, 174–5, 184–5, 210–11, 219–20, 223, 226–7, 229 Agamben, Giorgio 9–12, 16–18 A Larum for London 110–11 Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of 112n.62, 120–1, 132–3, 211–12 Allen, William Cardinal 29–33, 35–6, 66, 92–3 Althusser, Louis 17 Althusius, Johannes 15–16 Amity lines; see lines of amity Anderson, Roberta 176–8 Anghie, Antony 202 Antwerp, Sack of (1576) 103–4, 110–23 Appadurai, Arjun 184–5 Aravamudan, Srinivas 16–17 Archer, John Michael 41–2 Arendt, Hannah 11–12, 31–2 Aristotle 14–15, 213, 219–21 Army of Flanders (Spanish) 118–24, 127–9, 138n.181, 145–6 Ascham, Roger 43–5, 56–7 Aston, Sir Walter 168–9, 170n.22 Aubrey, John 42–3, 89n.177 Austen, Gillian 110–11 Bacon, Anthony 32n.158 Bacon, Sir Francis 46n.25, 49n.36, 51–2, 57–8, 64, 67n.108, 176n.49 Bakhtin, Mikhail 78, 82 Baldwin, Father William 23–4, 189–90, 192–3, 195–200 Balibar, Étienne 13–14, 214–15 Barbour, Richmond 49–50, 75–6, 86n.163, 89n.174 Bargrave, Isaac 176, 182n.77 Barnaud, Nicolas 226n.14

Bartelson, Jens 2, 8–9, 25–6 Barwick, Humphrey 123–4, 138–9, 160 Beale, Robert 111n.60, 228–9 Beare, Philip O’Sullivan 152–3 Beddell, William 176, 182n.77 Bedmar, Alonso de la Cueva, marqués de 187n.106 Bell, Gary M. 168n.15, 179–80 Bellarmine, Robert Cardinal 65–6 Bennington, Geoffrey 8 Benton, Lauren 202–3, 205 Beza, Theodore 15–16, 28, 67 Biondi, Giovanni Francesco 182n.77, 184–5 Bodin, Jean 3–4, 7–8, 13–16, 27–8, 33–6, 116, 164–5 Botero, Giovanni 127 Bourdieu, Pierre 10–11 Braddick, Michael 5–6 Breight, Curtis C. 94–5, 160n.268 Brett, Annabel 26n.122 Brexit referendum 224 Brigands 209–10, 215–17, 220–1 Brill (Brielle) 97, 103–4, 107–8, 110 Browne, John 49–51, 69n.109 Buchanan, George 209–10 Bull, Hedley 2–3, 25–6 Bureaucracy 2–3, 5–6, 10–11, 18–23, 41–2, 51–2, 63–4, 96, 134–5, 167–71, 173–5, 199, 228–9 Burgess, Glenn 7–8 Burke, Peter 4n.15 Burlamachi, Philip 184n.90 Camden, William 147 Campion, Edmund 29n.141, 33, 82n.152 Cadiz, Drake’s raid on (1596) 129, 201 Canaye, Philippe de, Seigneur de Fresnes 176 Carey, Daniel 50n.40 Carleton, Dudley 169–72, 178n.60, 179–85, 200nn.149–50 Casimir, John, Count Palatine 128–9 Cateau–Cambrésis, Treaty of (1559) 200–1

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

262



Catesby, Robert 195–6 Catholics, English 3–4, 23–4, 29–34, 38, 43, 56, 59–60, 65–8, 74, 81, 92–3, 103, 110, 116n.80, 128–9, 145–6, 152, 165–6, 178n.63, 180–1, 186–200, 223–4 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury 50–1, 111n.60, 135, 140n.198, 170–1, 182n.77, 185–6, 190, 195–200, 199n.145 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 30n.144, 42–7, 48n.33, 49–52, 56, 63–4, 94–5, 110–11, 116, 132–3, 135, 148n.224, 157–8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 11–12 Chamberlain, John 170–2, 179–80, 182–3, 200nn.149–50 Chapman, George 179n.66 Chard, Chloe 78n.137, 92 Chester, riot of English soldiers in (1596) 149, 158–60 Churchyard, Thomas 112n.64, 115n.78, 121n.102, 140–1, 145n.213, 152n.240 Cicero 34–5, 44–5, 61–2, 210–11 Cimarrons 38, 107–8, 165–6, 202–9, 214–22 Clark, Steve 72–3 Clifford, James 226 Coke, Sir Edward 196 Collinson, Patrick 5–6 Colonialism 11–12, 23, 36, 38, 50n.40, 107–8, 144–5, 161n.274, 165–6, 200–22 Conscription 96, 99, 137–40, 148n.224, 149, 155–62 Constantinou, Costas M. 173–4 Constitutionalism 12–13, 15–16, 211–12 Cormack, Bradin 5–6, 18 Cornwallis, Sir Charles 168–9, 170n.22, 186, 188–94, 196–7 Corporations 12n.58, 27, 49–50, 114–15, 161n.274, 217 Coryat, Thomas 36–7, 53, 57n.76, 58–61, 74–92, 84f, 105, 176, 183n.87, 223, 226–7 Cosmopolitanism 32–3, 39, 175, 178, 210–12, 225–8 Coteries, literary 20–1, 36–7, 75–6, 79–81, 86–92, 101, 103, 169, 171–2, 176, 223 Craik, Katharine 76 Crane, Mary Thomas 45–6, 50n.43 Dallington, Sir Robert 46n.25, 49n.36, 67n.108, 71n.117 Davenant, William 38, 204–6, 214–15, 217–22 Davis, Kathleen 11–13 Davison, William 47–9, 51n.47, 56–7, 63n.98 Day, Angel 69–70 DeCaroli, Steven 14–15 Dee, John 226n.14

Deloney, Thomas 150n.230 De Man, Paul 8 De’Monti, Gregorio 178–80, 182n.77, 185n.94 Der Derian, James 164–7 Derrida, Jacques 8, 11–12, 16, 32n.156, 56–7, 200n.151, 223n.1 De Somogyi, Nick 96n.12, 139n.189, 155nn.246,249, 159n.263 De Vega, Lope 208 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 32n.158, 49n.36, 50–2, 55n.67, 57n.76, 72–3, 95–6, 126–7, 129–30, 135, 160n.268, 210n.200 Digges, Dudley 127–8, 128n.127, 161 Digges, Thomas 123–4, 128n.127, 133–4, 134n.162, 136–9, 148n.225, 156n.252, 160, 162n.278 Diplomacy 2–12, 20–1, 24–5, 28, 33–6, 38, 40–3, 51–2, 90–1, 97–8, 120–1, 141, 164–223, 225–6 Dissimulation 36–7, 56–62, 64–71, 73–4, 108–9 Donne, John 9–10, 78, 89n.177, 224 Dooley, Brendan 41n.4, 42n.8 Doran, Susan 113n.69, 151n.238 Drake, Sir Francis 36, 38, 107–8, 129, 140n.193, 158, 160, 165–6, 201–22 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 6n.25, 33, 95–6, 96n.9, 99, 107–10, 116, 121, 125–6, 125n.113, 127n.121, 129–30, 133, 134n.162, 135, 145n.214, 148n.225, 156n.254, 160 Dudley, Robert 142 Duffy, Eamon 30, 31n.149 Dutch Revolt 4–7, 15–16, 23–4, 37, 90–1, 95–7, 99, 107–8, 111–25, 131–3, 155n.249, 202, 205–6, 209, 211–12 East India Company, Dutch (VOC) 27 East India Company (English) 49–50 Edmondes, Sir Thomas 168–71, 169n.16, 174, 179nn.65,67, 186, 186n.102, 196, 198–9 Edwards, Francis 195n.132, 197, 198n.141 Elden, Stuart 6n.27, 13n.59, 24–7 Elizabeth I 30–1, 37–8, 42–4, 50–1, 50n.45, 94–6, 99, 103–4, 108–9, 116, 116n.80, 124–5nn.112–13, 124, 127n.121, 131–3, 137–8, 140–1, 143–51, 154, 162–3, 167 Elton, Geoffrey 2n.8, 168n.14 Elyot, Sir Thomas 42–4 Essex, Earl of; see Robert Devereux Exiles 3–4, 23–4, 27–36, 38–9, 47–9, 56, 59–60, 65–8, 71–2, 82, 82n.152, 92–3, 103, 108, 122n.105, 142, 152–3, 165–6, 178, 178n.63, 186–200, 209–10, 220–6

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi



263

Extraterritoriality 23–8, 36–8, 97–9, 114, 116, 123–5, 127–9, 141, 151, 155–6, 160–1, 165–9, 172–3, 175, 180–1, 190–3, 197–201, 222, 228

Guasco, Michael 206nn.178–9, 221n.256 Guillén, Claudio 69–70 Gunpowder Plot 23–4, 33–4, 38, 56, 165–6, 185–200

Fagel, Raymond 110–11, 111n.58, 113–14 Fawkes, Guy 196, 196n.136 Fletcher, Catherine 175n.44, 180n.71, 182n.80 Flushing (Vlissingen) 97, 105–8, 121, 141–3, 143n.207 Forman, Valerie 203–4 Foucault, Michel 11–12, 16–17, 22–3, 44–5, 63–4, 174–5, 214–15 France 15–16, 28, 34–5, 37, 44–6, 49n.36, 50–1, 52n.56, 60–1, 71–2, 82, 82n.152, 94–6, 110–11, 113n.69, 123–4, 127, 129–30, 137–8, 140–1, 143n.209, 144–5, 147–52, 149n.227, 155n.251, 156n.254, 158–9, 160n.268, 167n.8, 169, 200–1 Franklin, Julian H. 13n.59, 14nn.63,65, 15n.72 Fraser, Nancy 21n.101 Frigo, Daniela 164–5, 167–8 Fuller, Thomas 88–9, 89n.177 Fusaro, Maria 181nn.73,75, 183n.87, 184n.90

Habermas, Jürgen 4–5, 11–12, 16, 18–21, 31, 90–2, 171–2, 175 Hadfield, Andrew 14–15, 30n.142, 58n.84, 62–3, 65n.104, 74–6, 113n.69, 121–2, 131n.144, 147 Hakluyt, Richard 50n.40, 208, 223–4, 224n.3 Halasz, Alexandra 50n.42, 72n.119, 90n.179, 92 Hale, J.R. 94–5, 98n.18, 125n.113, 138n.185, 156–7nn.253–7, 158n.260, 160nn.268,270 Hall, Joseph 52n.56, 56–7, 57n.76 Halpern, Richard 46n.23 Hammer, Paul E.J. 51nn.46,48, 52n.53, 94, 94n.1, 96, 125n.115, 129n.137, 130nn.139,142, 137n.178, 138n.181, 155nn.247,250–1, 160nn.268–9 Hammill, Graham 18 Hampton, Timothy 8n.38, 164–5, 170–1, 213–14 Hanson, Elizabeth 41–2 Harris, Jonathan Gil 56–8 Harvey, David 85n.158 Harvey, Gabriel 44n.14, 108–9 Harward, Simon 123–6 Helgerson, Richard 105n.34, 130n.140, 154 Herle, William 110 Highley, Christopher 29, 29nn.136–7 Hindle, Steve 5–6 Hobbes, Thomas 16–17, 17n.83, 27–8, 28n.135, 35n.177, 164–5, 224n.4, 228 Hoby, Thomas 58–9 Hollinger, Douglas 51–2 Holsinger, Bruce 164n.3 Hoskins, John 89, 89n.177 Hostis humani generis 122–3, 191–2, 192n.118, 215 Hotman, François 15n.72, 33–5, 209–10 Hotman, Jean 28, 33–5, 167, 181n.73, 183n.83 Households 21, 33, 37–8, 44–5, 99, 117, 141–3, 149–50, 154, 165–7, 168n.14, 174–84, 187n.104, 222–3, 226–7 Howard, Michael 117n.83, 128–9 Howell, James 39, 225–9

Gajda, Alexandra 32n.158, 126n.119, 210n.200 Games, Alison 71n.117, 225n.10 Garnet, Father Henry 199–200 Gascoigne, George 4–5, 37–8, 95–6, 99–124, 100f, 125nn.113–14, 131n.148, 138–9, 141n.199, 145–6, 225–7 The fruites of Warre 102–9, 112–13, 118–19, 131n.148, 138–9 Gascoignes councell given to master Bartholomew Withipoll 103–4 Gascoignes last voyage into Holland in Marche 102–3, 110, 145–6 Gascoigne’s Woodmanship 102, 114–15 The Spoyle of Antwerpe 37–8, 99–101, 110–23, 141n.199 Gates, Geoffrey 140–1, 162–3 Gentili, Alberico 2–3, 8–9, 27–9, 33–6, 126n.119, 192–3, 200, 203–4, 209–12 Giddens, Anthony 1, 10–11, 13n.60, 23, 25–6, 31, 94–5, 123–4, 129n.135, 139–40 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 101, 105–6, 110, 124–5 Goldberg, Jonathan 51n.50, 69n.111, 174n.36 Goldie, Mark 5–6, 8n.32, 15n.73 Governmentality 16–17, 21, 44–5, 63, 174–5 Grafton, Anthony 43–4, 109n.53 Greenblatt, Stephen 96, 223–4 Grewe, Wilhelm G. 201n.155, 202 Grotius, Hugo 2–3, 8–9, 24–5, 27–8, 34–6, 164–5, 217

Informants 10, 24–5, 36, 40–3, 51–5, 58–9, 63n.98, 72–5, 81–3, 117, 179–80, 180n.70, 185n.98, 199–200, 205–6, 222 Information 4–5, 21, 36–7, 40–7, 49–55, 58–60, 62–3, 68, 72–3, 75–7, 79–86, 90–3, 110–11, 113, 169–72, 169n.18, 174–5, 180n.71, 184–5, 195–6, 205–6, 225–6, 229

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

264



Intelligence gathering 4–5, 7–8, 20–1, 26–7, 32n.158, 36, 40–4, 46–7, 49–63, 65, 68, 72–6, 79–84, 90–2, 101, 103–5, 110–11, 113–16, 115n.78, 122–3, 166–7, 169–72, 177n.57, 178n.63, 179–80nn.65,67,70–1, 181n.73, 182n.79, 183–5, 195–6, 205–6, 207n.183, 225–6, 228–9 International law; see law of nations Ireland 37, 60n.88, 74–5, 95–6, 96n.9, 123–4, 140–1, 144–5, 147–9, 152–3, 155n.247, 158–9 James I 31–2, 58–9, 95–8, 167, 169–73, 173n.34, 178n.62, 185–7, 186n.101, 187n.104, 190–1, 193–4, 194n.124, 197, 199 Jardine, Lisa 43–4, 55n.65, 97n.15, 109n.53, 132n.151 Jed, Stephanie 50n.41 Jessop, Bob 10–11 John of Austria, Don 119–20, 122–3 Jonson, Ben 37–8, 79–80, 88–9, 141–3, 143n.208, 148–9, 199n.145, 225 Every Man Out of his Humour 74n.122 The Staple of News 91n.184 “To Penshurst” 37–8, 141–3, 148–9, 225 Volpone 79–80, 80n.144, 199n.145 Kahn, Victoria 11n.54, 34–5, 130n.141 Kaufmann, Miranda 205n.172, 206nn.176,179, 219n.248, 222n.262 Kemp, Will 89–90, 90nn.179–80 Kiernan, V.G. 127, 128n.130 Kinney, Arthur 113n.71 Kiséry, András 18nn.92–3, 43n.12, 141n.199, 167n.9, 170n.22 Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman 146nn.217–18 Korda, Natasha 85n.161, 181–2 La Boétie, Étienne de 8 Lake, Peter 22–3, 29n.141 Laski, Harold 8, 12–13 Lassels, Richard 92–3, 92n.191 Latour, Bruno 10, 18n.91 Law of nations 3–4, 11–12, 25–9, 26n.119, 31–6, 38, 98–9, 122n.105, 126n.119, 165–6, 186, 191–3, 197, 200, 202–5, 209–17, 219–22 Leete, William 176–8, 176n.49, 179–80, 182n.77 Leicester, Earl of; see Robert Dudley 6n.25, 28, 95–6, 96n.9, 99, 107–10, 116, 121, 125–6, 125n.113, 127n.121, 129–30, 133, 134n.162, 135, 145n.214, 148n.225, 156n.254, 160

Lemon, Rebecca 193–4 Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, Duke of 188–91, 196 Letters, letterwriting 4–5, 9–10, 43–5, 47–53, 49n.38, 57n.76, 62n.95, 67nn.107,108, 68–70, 69n.111, 80, 90–1, 91n.186, 101, 103, 114–16, 141n.201, 143–4, 151, 166–8, 170–2, 174–8, 179n.65, 180n.70, 184–6, 184n.90, 186n.101, 196, 225–9 Le Testu, Guillaume 206–7 Lipsius, Justus 56–7, 67n.108 Linebaugh, Peter 207n.187, 222n.260 Lines of amity 11–12, 23, 38, 166, 200–5, 209–12, 214–15, 218–21 Lithgow, William 59n.86 Lloyd, David 224 Lockey, Brian 3n.9, 30n.146, 225n.10, 226n.14 Lord Lieutenants 143–4, 149–51, 154–5, 155n.251 Mac Domhnaill, Somhairle Buidhe 144–5 Machiavelli, Niccolò 7–8, 13–14, 17–18, 17n.87, 27–8, 140–1, 140n.197 MacMillan, Ken 23, 191n.114 Macpherson, C.B. 35n.176 Magnusson, Lynne 166–7 Mancke, Elizabeth 5–6 Mandinga, Pedro 205–6, 206n.176 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus 152–3 Maroons 204–5, 207, 221–2, 222n.261 Marx, Karl 84–5 Maslen, R.W 106–7 Mattingly, Garrett 180n.72, 202 McCoy, Richard 127n.121, 135nn.164–5 McLuhan, Marshall 80–1 Mendoza, Bernardino de 200, 200n.152 Mercenaries 4–8, 26–7, 36–7, 97–101, 103–10, 112, 115–40, 125n.114, 140n.197, 144, 150, 155–8, 160–3, 200, 216–17, 226 Merchant Adventurers Company, The 114–15, 131 mētis 58, 58n.83, 64–5, 74 Miéville, China 202n.159 Miliband, Ralph 10–11 Militias, county 96, 133–4, 136, 140n.197, 149–50, 154–7, 155n.251, 159–60, 221–2 Mitchell, Timothy 4 Montaigne, Michel de 52 More, Sir Thomas 40 Moretti, Franco 7–8 Morgan, Edmund S. 206–7 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis 15–16 Morton, Albertus 182n.77, 185–6, 226–7

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

 Moryson, Fynes 5–6, 23–4, 36–7, 53, 58–78, 81, 86, 103, 108–9, 140n.198, 223, 226–7 Mountjoy, Charles Blount, Baron 60n.88, 74–5, 140–1 Muldrew, Craig 71–2 Münster, Sebastian 62–3, 62n.97 Mutinies 37–8, 101, 114–17, 120–3, 125, 127, 134–5, 138n.181, 145–6, 160 Nashe, Thomas 66n.106, 160–1 Naunton, Sir Robert 135 Navarre, Henri de 95–7, 137–8, 150–1, 211–12 Negri, Antonio 11–12, 17n.87, 168n.12 Netzloff, Mark 29n.137, 140n.193, 161n.274, 191n.117, 224 News 4–5, 22–3, 31, 40–2, 52n.56, 72–5, 79–80, 84–6, 89–92, 91n.184, 92n.188, 102–3, 113, 119n.90, 149, 166–7, 169–72, 171n.30, 184–6 Nicolson, Harold 175 Nolan, John S. 95n.7, 96, 128n.129, 129n.136, 137n.178, 139nn.190,192, 143n.209, 145nn.212–13, 146n.216, 147–8, 148n.225, 149nn.228–9, 151n.238, 155n.248, 160n.268 Nonstate agents 3–4, 6–7, 26–7, 36, 38, 126–9, 165–6, 189, 200, 202–5, 207, 209–10, 215–16, 220–2 Norris, Catherine (Paulet) 148–9, 151 Norris, Sir Edward 145–6, 148n.225, 151 Norris, Sir Francis 151 Norris, Sir Henry 143–4, 146–51, 149n.227, 150n.229, 154–5, 158–9, 167n.8 Norris, Sir John 95–6, 129–30, 137–8, 144–5, 147–8, 148nn.224–5, 150–3, 158, 160 Norris, Lady Margery 146–9, 146n.217, 151 Norris, Maximilian 147–8, 150–1 Norris, Sir Thomas 149, 152, 158–60 Oath of Allegiance (1606) 97–8, 187, 193–5, 193n.122 O’Callaghan, Michelle 82–3, 89n.177, 90 O’Neill, Sir Brian MacPhelim 144–5 Owen, Hugh 186n.102, 189–90, 192–3, 195–200 Oxenham, John 207n.183 Oxfordshire Rising (1596) 149–50, 150nn.229–34, 155–6 Pacification of Ghent (1576) 121–3 Pagden, Anthony 213, 213nn.217–18, 218n.247 Palmer, Thomas 10, 53–7, 54f, 60–1, 66, 72–6, 82 Parker, Geoffrey 94–5, 94n.1, 98nn.19–20, 111n.61, 117n.81, 117–8nn.85–7, 119n.91, 120–1, 120nn.92–4, 120–1nn.96–7, 121nn.98–9, 122nn.103–4, 124n.112, 125n.115, 128n.131, 132n.153, 138n.181

265

Parker, Patricia 97n.15 Parkhurst, Anthony 182n.77, 185n.98, 188n.107 Parma, Farnese, Alessandro, Duke of 119n.90, 122n.104, 125n.113, 132–3 Parr, Anthony 73n.121, 83–4, 90n.180, 91n.184 Parrott, David 98–9, 128n.128 Penshurst, Sidney estate at 37–8, 141–3, 148–9, 225 Pincus, Steve 22–3, 23n.106 Piracy 33–4, 36, 103–4, 107–8, 125–7, 140n.193, 191–2, 200–2, 207–8, 215–17, 220–1 Pirillo, Diego 11n.53, 28n.135, 176n.52, 178n.62, 187nn.104–105 Plausible deniability 124–5, 198, 198n.144 Pocock, J.G.A. 18 Poovey, Mary 47 Poulantzas, Nicos 10–11 Pratt, Mary Louise 53, 53nn.57–58, 63–4 Privateering 6–7, 24–7, 36, 103–4, 107–8, 123–5, 129–30, 152, 191, 199–200, 202–3, 206–7, 209, 216–17, 224 Profitable Instructions (1633) 47–9, 48f, 51–2, 51n.47, 57n.76, 67nn.107,108 Prouty, C.T. 100n.24, 102–3, 106–7, 106nn.38,43–4, 107n.46, 115n.77, 124n.112, 125n.114 Public sphere 3–5, 18–23, 31, 41–2, 90–2, 98–9, 171–2, 175, 176n.51, 193–4 Purchas, Samuel 77, 223–4 Questier, Michael C. 29n.141, 193–4 Rambuss, Richard 49n.38, 51n.50, 70n.112 Ramism 47–9, 49n.36, 53–5, 57–8, 70–1, 76–7 Rediker, Marcus 207, 222n.260 Regnault, Nicholas 177n.57 Requesens y Zuñiga, Don Luis de 117n.85, 132–3 Resistance theory 15–16, 28, 30–1, 33–4, 209–12, 218 Riche, Barnabe 112n.64, 123–4, 130–1, 130n.143, 135–9, 160–1, 162n.278 Riches, Daniel 11n.53, 225n.10 Rosenberg, Justin 22n.105, 23 Rushdie, Salman 154 Rutter, Carol Chillington 167n.10, 177n.55 Rycote entertainment 37–8, 137–8, 143–51 Sarpi, Paolo 176–8, 177n.57 Sassen, Saskia 23 Scaramelli, Giovanni Carlo 176–8, 177n.55 Schmidt, Benjamin 209, 218n.244 Schmitt, Carl 7–8, 10–14, 203, 209, 214–17, 223n.1 Scott, David 220–1

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

266



Scott, Jonathan 224 Secretaries 32n.158, 42–4, 49n.38, 50–2, 51n.50, 52n.53, 55nn.67,69, 60n.88, 70n.112, 72–5, 111n.60, 120–1, 135, 166–7, 169n.18, 170–1, 171n.28, 172n.31, 174, 177n.57, 178–86, 180n.70, 182n.77, 184n.90, 185nn.94,98, 188n.107, 195–6, 225–6, 228–9 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 69n.110, 175n.47 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 45–6 Henry IV, Part Two 127–8, 136n.171 Henry V 135, 136n.171, 229 Sonnets 46n.21, 74 The Tempest 74n.122 Timon of Athens 229 Shannon, Laurie 106–7, 169 Shapin, Steven 53n.59, 61–2 Shepard, Alan 96n.12, 139–40, 155n.247 Sherman, William H. 55n.65, 75–6 Shields, David S. 206–7 Sidney, Sir Philip 51n.47, 67n.107, 95–6, 107–8, 116, 121, 142 Sidney, Sir Robert 21, 37–8, 51n.47, 67n.107, 141–3, 148–9, 223, 225 Skinner, Quentin 2–4, 15–16 Smith, Adam 133–4 Smith, Cassander L. 205n.172, 206n.176, 222n.262 Smythe, Sir John 20–1, 37–8, 123–4, 125n.113, 130–3, 135–7, 138n.185, 156–62, 156n.254, 163n.279 Sociability 4–5, 8, 35–38, 35n.175, 59–63, 66, 68–72, 75–6, 81–2, 86–8, 165–6, 168–70, 174–80, 177n.55, 178n.63, 180n.71, 184–5, 203–4, 210–11, 213–14, 219–20, 222–3, 226–8 Sovereignty, theories of 1–4, 3n.10, 5–18, 23–7, 41–2, 44–5, 97, 114, 116, 120–1, 123–4, 126–7, 131–5, 137–8, 144, 164–5, 169, 173–4, 188, 192, 197–9, 202, 212, 214–15, 223, 229 Sowerby, Tracey A. 164nn.1–2, 164–5, 169n.18, 171n.30 Spies; see informants Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 220–1, 229 Spruyt, Hendrik 23 Stagl, Justin 47nn.28,30, 48–9nn.35–6, 49, 62n.97, 71–2, 71n.115, 76–7, 79n.141 Stanley, William 31n.148, 145–6, 145n.214, 189–90, 190n.112, 196 State, theories of the 1–28, 35–6 State of exception 7–8, 13–14, 172–3, 200, 216–17

Stateless persons 3–4, 26–8, 31–6, 38, 165–6, 192–3, 202–5, 209–10, 214–16, 220–2 States General (Netherlands) 23–4, 97, 128–33, 137–8, 140–1 Steere, Bartholomew 149–50 Stewart, Alan 49n.36, 50n.44, 51–2, 51n.50, 52nn.53–54, 55n.69, 69n.111, 91n.186, 108n.50, 121n.101, 184–5 Sutcliffe, Matthew 123–7, 134n.162, 135n.166, 137–9, 161n.273, 162n.278 Taylor, John 72n.119, 74n.122, 87–8, 88nn.170,171, 90n.179 Teschke, Benno 26–7 Thompson, E.P. 85n.157, 228n.21 Thomson, Janice E. 6–7, 26–7, 27n.124, 97–8, 117–18, 124–7, 192n.120, 198n.144 Tilly, Charles 128–9, 159–60 Tragedy 7–8, 38, 99–101, 152–3, 166, 203–4, 214–15, 217, 219–21 Travel advice texts 21, 36–7, 43–60, 62–4, 66–9, 72–3, 75–6, 80–2, 80n.144, 91n.185, 103, 223, 225–7 Travel licenses 23–4, 43, 56, 60–1, 195n.129 Travel wagers 73–4, 86, 225 Treaty of Nonsuch (1585) 23–4, 97–9, 107–8, 132–3, 150–1, 167n.8 Trim, David J.B. 120n.93, 121n.100, 134–5, 135n.165, 151n.238 Trussell, Thomas 134–5 Tuck, Richard 8n.38, 27n.126, 35n.175, 211n.206 Turner, Captain William 178n.63, 195–6, 199n.148 Turner, Henry S. 12n.58, 27n.127 Van Gelderen, Martin 12n.57, 16n.76 Vattel, Emer de 211–12 Venice 9, 38, 80, 80n.144, 82n.152, 165–7, 169–88, 195n.132, 226 Virilio, Paul 84–5 Vitoria, Francisco de 2–3, 38, 204, 213–20 Wake, Isaac 180–2, 182nn.77–8, 184–5 Wallenstein, Albrecht von 128–9 Walsingham, Sir Francis 43–5, 50–2, 56, 63, 110–11, 111n.60, 116, 121, 135 Walton, Izaak 173n.34 Warner, Michael 19n.93 Warren, Christopher 7–8, 27n.128, 35n.178, 204n.169, 210n.202, 220–1 Watkins, John 164–5, 164nn.1–2, 203–4 Weber, Max 1–2, 6–7, 11–12, 21–2, 85n.157, 128–9, 167–8, 168n.12, 192, 192n.120 Western Design 204–5, 217–18, 221–2

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/10/2020, SPi

 Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 26–7, 26nn.120,122, 202, 212 Wight, Colin 10–11 Wight, Martin 215–16 William I, Prince of Orange 101–3, 106–8, 112n.62, 131–3, 131n.148, 132nn.150,152, 142–3 Williams, Sir Roger 120n.94, 123–4, 127, 135–6, 138–9, 160 Winwood, Sir Ralph 169, 169n.16, 171n.28, 182–5, 184n.90, 200n.153

267

Wolfe, Jessica 58n.83, 64, 79 Wotton, Sir Henry 4–5, 9–10, 21–2, 32n.158, 36, 38, 49n.36, 52n.53, 55n.67, 62n.95, 64–5, 82–3, 165–88, 195n.132, 200n.149, 225–7 Wroth, Lady Mary 142–3, 143n.207 Yorke, Rowland 110, 145–6, 145n.214 Zagorin, Perez 65