Letters of a Spy: the Correspondence of Henry Wotton and Edward Lord Zouche

This paper will briefly contextualize Henry Wotton’s letters to Edward Lord Zouche; review their 1907 re-editing and republication by Logan Pearsall Smith; and reinterpret their significance. In the early 1590s the English government, under the leadership of Lord Treasurer Burghley, advanced its intelligence interests through new initiatives, one of which was the espionage of Zouche and Wotton in Germany, Austria, and Italy during 1591 and 1592. The thirty-three letters that Wotton wrote to Zouche about their then ongoing work were published without comment in 1685; they were re-edited by Smith for his Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907). These letters can reveal much that has hitherto gone unnoticed by Wotton scholars, not only about his early career, but also about English policy in central Europe and early modern practice of diplomacy and espionage.