Wotton, SIR HENRY, traveller, diplomatist, scholar, and poet, was born of ancient family at
Boughton Malherbe in Kent in 1568. He had his education at Winchester, and first at New College, then Queen's College, Oxford, and in his twentieth year proceeded master of arts. He stayed two years at Oxford adding to his great wit the ballast of learning and knowledge of the arts, then set out for a nine years' sojourn in France, Germany, Rome, Venice, and Florence. At Oxford he had begun a life-long friendship with Donne; at Geneva he made the familiar acquaintance of Beza and Isaac Casanbon; and on his return Essex admitted him to his intimacy. On his friend's downfall he betook himself to France, next to Italy, and was sent by Ferdinand, Duke of Florence, on a secret mission to King James VI. of Scotland with intelligence of a plot against him, and the Italian antidotes against poison. James on his succession to the throne of England summoned him from abroad, knighted him, and sent him ambassador to Venice (1604). Here he lived throughout the struggle with the court of Rome, and it was through his hands that Sarpi's famous history of the Council of Trent was communicated sheet by sheet to King James. After eight years he almost lost the king's favour owing to the publication by the scurrilous controversialist Scioppius, to the discredit of Protestant princes, of an epigram he had once written carelessly in a friend's album in Germany: Legatus est vir bonus peregrè missus ad mentendum Recipublicæ causa, which Walton says Sir Henry Wotton could have been content should have been thus Englished: 'An Ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his Country.' But unfortunately the Latin did not leave a means of escape by the loophole of ambiguity. The king, however, was satisfied with Wotton's apology, saying that he 'had commuted sufficiently for a greater offence.' He was employed continuously for nearly twenty years, chiefly at Venice, next sent to several of the German princes and the Emperor Ferdinand II., returning to England a poor man in 1624, the year before the death of King James. He was made Provost of Eton, and entered into holy orders with all convenient speed. Here for fifteen years he lived, his days gliding past in quiet study and meditation, in encouraging the studies of the more hopeful youth, in cheerful conversation with his friends, and in angling, which he called his 'idle time not idly spent.' He meant to write the Life of Luther, but at the request of Charles I. applied himself to the history of England, and had indeed begun his task when he died 'in great tranquillity of mind and in perfect peace with God and man,' December 1639. He was buried at Eton under a plain gravestone, whereon was written by his own desire this prudent pious sentence to discover his disposition and preserve his memory: 'Here lies the first author of this sentence, "The Itch of Disputation is the scab of the Churches"' (Disputandi pruritus ecclesiæ scabies). Another of his sayings, and one more original than this, was his advice to a young diplomatist, 'that, to be in safety himself, and serviceable to his country, he should always, and upon all occasions speak the truth (it seems a State-Paradox), for, says Sir Henry Wotton, you shall never be believed; and by this means, your truth will secure yourself, if you shall ever be called to any account; and 'twill also put your Adversaries (who will still hunt counter) to a loss in all their disquisitions and undertakings.'
Wotton's tracts (including a treatise on Architecture and a Life of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham), letters, &c. were collected as Reliquiæ Wottonianæ (1651), prefaced by Izaak Walton's exquisite biography in miniature. The poem on a happy life is known to all lovers of good English. See Sir Henry Wotton, by A. W. Ward (1897).