and Venice to Rome, and in 1593 spent some time at Geneva in the house of Isaac Casaubon, to whom he contracted a considerable debt. He returned to England in 1594, and in the next year was admitted to the Middle Temple. While abroad he had from time to time provided Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, with information, and he now definitely entered his service as one of his agents or secretaries. It was his duty to supply intelligence of affairs in Transylvania, Poland, Italy and Germany. Wotton was not, like his unfortunate fellow-secretary, Henry Cuffe, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1601, actually involved in Essex's downfall, but he thought it prudent to leave England, and within sixteen hours of his patron's apprehension he was safe in France, whence he travelled to Venice and Rome. In 1602 he was resident at Florence, and a plot to murder James VI. of Scotland having come to the ears of the grand-duke of Tuscany, Wotton was entrusted with letters to warn him of the danger, and with Italian antidotes against poison. As “Ottavio Baldi” he travelled to Scotland by way of Norway. He was well received by James, and remained three months at the Scottish court, retaining his Italian incognito. He then returned to Florence, but on receiving the news of James's accession hurried to England. James knighted him, and offered him the embassy at Madrid or Paris; but Wotton, knowing that both these offices involved ruinous expense, desired rather to represent James at Venice. He left London in 1604 accompanied by Sir Albertus Morton, his half-nephew, as secretary, and William Bedell, the author of an Irish translation of the Bible, as chaplain. Wotton spent most of the next twenty years, with two breaks (1612-1616 and 1619-1621), at Venice. He helped the Doge in his resistance to ecclesiastical aggression, and was closely associated with Paolo Sarpi, whose history of the Council of Trent was sent to King James as fast as it was written. Wotton had offended the scholar Caspar Schoppe, who had been a fellow student at Altdorf. In 1611 Schoppe wrote a scurrilous book against James entitled Ecclesiasticus, in which he fastened on Wotton a saying which he had incautiously written in a friend's album years before. It was the famous definition of an ambassador as an “honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” It should be noticed that the original Latin form of the epigram did not admit of the double meaning. This was adduced as an example of the morals of James and his servants, and brought Wotton into temporary disgrace. Wotton was at the time on leave in England, and made two formal defences of himself, one a personal attack on his accuser addressed to Marcus Welser of Strassburg, and the other privately to the king. He failed to secure further diplomatic employment for some time, and seems to have finally won back the royal favour by obsequious support in parliament of James's claim to impose arbitrary taxes on merchandise. In 1614 he was sent to the Hague and in 1616 he returned to Venice. In 1620 he was sent on a special embassy to Ferdinand II. at Vienna, to do what he could on behalf of James's daughter Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia. Wotton's devotion to this princess, expressed in his exquisite verses beginning “You meaner beauties of the night,” was sincere and unchanging. At his departure the emperor presented him with a jewel of great value, which Wotton received with due respect, but before leaving the city he gave it to his hostess, because, he said, he would accept no gifts from the enemy of the Bohemian queen. After a third term of service in Venice he returned to London early in 1624 and in July he was installed as provost of Eton College. This office did not relieve him from his pecuniary embarrassments, and he was even on one occasion arrested for debt, but he received in 1627 a pension of £200, and in 1630 this was raised to £500 on the understanding that he should write a history of England. He did not neglect the duties of his provostship, and was happy in being able to entertain his friends lavishly. His most constant associates were Izaak Walton and John Hales. A bend in the Thames below the Playing Fields, known as “Black Potts,” is still pointed out as the spot where Wotton and Izaak Walton fished in company. He died at the beginning of December 1639 and was buried in the chapel of Eton College.
Sir Henry Wotton was not an industrious author, and his writings are very small in bulk. Of the twenty-five poems printed in Reliquiae Wottonianae only fifteen are Wotton's. But of those fifteen two have obtained a place among the best known poems in the language, the lines already mentioned “On his Mistris, the Queen of Bohemia,” and “The Character of a Happy Life.”
During his lifetime he published only The Elements of Architecture (1624), which is a paraphrase from Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, and a Latin prose address to the king on his return from Scotland (1633). In 1651 appeared the Reliquiae Wottonianiae, with Izaak Walton's Life. An admirable Life and Letters, representing much new material, by Logan Pearsall Smith, was published in 1907. See also A. W. Ward, Sir Henry Wotton, a Biographical Sketch (1898).
WOTTON, NICHOLAS (c. 1497-1567), English diplomatist, was a son of Sir Robert Wotton of Boughton Malherbe, Kent, and a descendant of Nicholas Wotton, lord mayor of London in 1415 and 1430, and member of parliament for the city from 1406 to 1429. He early became vicar of Boughton Malherbe and of Sutton Valence, and later of Ivychurch, Kent; but, desiring a more worldly career, he entered the service of Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London. Having helped to draw up the Institution of a Christian Man, Wotton in 1539 went to arrange the marriage between Henry VIII. and Anne of Cleves and the union of Protestant princes which was to be the complement of this union. He crossed over to England with the royal bride, but, unlike Thomas Cromwell, he did not lose the royal favour when the king repudiated Anne, and in 1541, having already refused the bishopric of Hereford, he became dean of Canterbury and in 1544 dean of York. In 1543 he went on diplomatic business to the Netherlands, and for the next year or two he had much intercourse with the emperor Charles V. He helped to conclude the treaty of peace between England and France in 1346, and was resident ambassador in France from 1546 to 1549. Henry VIII. made Wotton an executor of his will and left him £300, and in 1549, under Edward VI., he became a secretary of state, but he only held this post for about a year. In 1550 he was again sent as envoy to Charles V., and he was ambassador to France during the reign of Mary, doing valuable work in that capacity. He left France in 1557, but in 1558 he was again in that country, helping to arrange the preliminaries of the treaty of Cateau Cambrésis. In 1560 he signed the treaty of Edinburgh on behalf of Elizabeth, and he had again visited the Netherlands before his death in London on the 26th of January 1567.
His brother, Sir Edward Wotton (1489-1551), was made treasurer of Calais in 1540, and was one of those who took part in the overthrow of the protector Somerset. His son, Thomas Wotton (1521-1587) was the father of Sir Henry Wotton (q.v.)
WOTTON, WILLIAM (1666-1727), English scholar, son of the Rev. Henry Wotton, was born in his father's parish of Wrentham, Suffolk, on the 13th of August 1666. He was not yet ten years old when he was sent to Catherine Hall, Cambridge, having by this time a good knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He obtained a fellowship at St John's College, and was elected an F.R.S. in 1687. Wotton is chiefly remembered for his share in the controversy about the respective merits of ancient and modern learning. In his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694, and again 1697) he took the part of the moderns, although in a fair and judicial spirit, and was attacked by Swift in the Battle of the Books. During some of his later years Wotton resided in Wales and gave himself to the study of Celtic, making a translation of the laws of Howel Dda, which was published after his death (1730). Having taken holy orders, he was a prebend of Salisbury from 1705 until his death at Busted, Essex, on the 13th of February 1727.
Wotton wrote a History of Rome (1701) and Miscellaneous Discoveries relating to the Traditions and Usages of the Scribes and Pharisees (1718).
WOUND (O.Eng. wund, connected with a Teutonic verb, meaning to strive, fight, suffer, seen in O. Eng. winnan, whence Eng. “win”), a solution in the continuity of the soft parts of the body. Contused wounds, or bruises, are injuries to the cellular tissues in which the skin is not broken. In parts where the tissues are lax the signs of swelling and discoloration are more noticeable than
