This is a big deal:īring him again: this Jack of Caesar’s shallĪs we know, things don’t end well for Antony or Cleopatra. In Antony and Cleopatra, spectators saw what happens to the perfidious ambassador Caesar sends to Cleopatra sensationally, Antony ignores diplomatic immunity and has him flogged. In his fictions of embassy, Shakespeare picked up the historic examples Gentili and Hotman cited and the topics they debated. And it was on public stage, in plays from Henry V to Hamlet, Coriolanus to Troilus and Cressida, that William Shakespeare put the practice of diplomacy squarely in the popular imagination. What did ordinary Englishmen know about the business of diplomacy at the time? They weren’t likely to be reading Gentili or Hotman. Thus, some call ambassadors “honourable spies”. But in practice, “there is not almost any publike charge, wherein there is more lying”. Theoretically, since “the whole grace” of diplomacy “hath no other end than Honour”, a dishonourable embassy is an oxymoron. They argued that the ambassador is a stand-in for the sovereign, someone “invested with the personality of his Prince” who “makes the Prince to speake”, but who never speaks in his own voice, is never permitted to “think beyond his instructions”.Īny person who “does violence to an ambassador” commits “an attack on the state”. Later, Gentili and Hotman published books emerging directly out of the Mendoza case that established the terms of reference for England’s international diplomacy. When Mendoza ignored the order, he was transported to Calais. The Privy Council’s only recourse, they said, was to order Mendoza recalled. “The right of embassy” was “defended by a rampart of human and divine authority”, “the person” of the ambassador being “adjudged holy, sacred, and inviolable”. Ambassadors, even criminal ambassadors, were protected by diplomatic immunity “infallibly within the sanctuarie of the Lawe of Nations”. They solicited the advice of two of Europe’s most prestigious experts in international law, Alberico Gentili and Jean Hotman. Elizabeth’s Privy Council wanted Mendoza tried for treason, but they weren’t sure of the legality of this move. By replacing Elizabeth on the throne with her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots, the plan was to restore Protestant England to Catholicism. Elizabeth I faced just such situation in 1584, when the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, was implicated in the Throckmorton Plot to assassinate her.
Sometimes these hostile foreign agents are under diplomatic cover. These are questions the UK government has asked time and time again when dealing with hostile foreign agents operating on British soil – most recently following the attempted murder of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter. In its aftermath, Her Majesty’s government asks her expert advisers what is the appropriate level of response and what action should be taken against murderous foreign agents and state-sponsored terrorism.
A foreign state sponsors a political assassination on English soil.