Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power by William T. Rossiter (review)

Historians once narrated diplomatic history in triumphal terms. According to the conventional story, resident embassies and better credentialization standards during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries overcame the haphazard diplomacy of the Middle Ages. The 1648 Treaties of Westphalia established state sovereignty and nonintervention as principles of international law, and the erratic statesman-ship of monarchs gradually yielded to stabilizing bureaucracies. Political historians, literary scholars, art historians, and historians of gender have overturned this Whig interpretation in recent years. Instead of depicting premodern statecraft as primitive, they hold it up as a mirror to our own world of religious and ethnic conflicts that cannot be resolved through formal diplomatic channels. Rossiter’s book on the sixteenth-century poet and diplomat Sir Thomas Wyatt is an excellent example of this revisionism. Rossiter captures the pathos and confusion of diplomatic service in an era dominated by three of the strongest monarchs in history: Emperor Charles V and Kings Francis I and Henry VIII. Henry VIII’s foreign policy was inconsistent and unpredictable. He formed alliances with the empire against France only to break them and form new alliances with France against the empire. That some of Henry’s six marriages factored into this dance set the stage for Wyatt’s translations of it into some of the sixteenth century’s most moving poetry of erotic longing and despair. One of this book’s many virtues is its challenge to conventional literary and historical periodizations. Rossiter demonstrates how rich a medieval aesthetic persisted in Wyatt’s poetry and how a medieval understanding of statecraft shaped his work as a “Renaissance” diplomat.