My dissertation will demonstrate that once a formal
ambassador was dispatched by England and the Italian powers, he became
responsible for obtaining intelligence and dispatching that information back to
the Secretariat and Court. The Crown, not rivals within the Privy Council,
financed ambassadors’ missions. While ambassadors were now directly tied to the
state bureaucracy, the initial years of exchange retained some characteristics
of previous embassies, where diplomats often received foreign pensions that
supplemented their official disbursements. Close control of ambassadors during
the early years of James’ rule facilitated the flow of information and plans
during the Venetian Interdict. It also encouraged coordinated efforts to combat
Mediterranean corsairs, both through direct force and by tighter bureaucratic
controls over trade and travel. Issues of protocol established formal processes
surrounding diplomatic missions. Diplomats also became engaged in tightening
control over their fellow nationals who came to Italy as travelers, exiles, and
merchants.
By the 1620s, England’s Italian ambassadors terminated their
ties to foreign states and constituted a diplomatic corps, mirroring reforms
that had already increased bureaucratic control over the diplomatic networks of
Italian States. I will chart the formation of diplomatic procedures through:
established protocols for precedent; focused information streams and powers of
negotiation; increased use of permanent embassies rather than special
ambassadors; and employment by the court writ large. This new corps of
representatives tightened lines of communication between delegates in other
capitals and began to negotiate a vision for coordinated engagement in the
growing conflict in Central Europe. Using Venice as their base, the English
ambassador increasingly traveled throughout the Italian peninsula coordinating
those plans in the other ducal capitals. The independent Italian States of
Venice, Tuscany, and Savoy maintained various levels of embassage in London
–maintaining a permanent resident, vacillating between ambassadorial
secretaries and residents, and dispatching special envoys as circumstances
required respectively. In the early seventeenth century, these increasingly
peripheral states tested cross-confessional diplomacy as division increasingly
drew the primary powers of Europe toward war over religious differences.
Adopting a semi-microhistorical approach, I will
divide my dissertation into chapters examining: the dangers of embassy, the
nature of diplomatic service and communication, efforts to curb corsairing in
the Mediterranean, censure of diplomats who spurred controversy, cultural
spaces and effects of