in which England and Spain, France and Scotland should be included. Mary died while the conference was sitting at Cercamp, and Elizabeth immediately ordered Wotton to Brussels to renew with Philip the treaties existing between England and Spain. The peace negotiations were continued there, and subsequently at the congress of Cambray. The chief difficulty was the English demand for the restitution of Calais, and Wotton advocated a continuance of the war rather than acquiescence in its loss. Philip, however, was bent on peace, and eventually on 6 May 1559 Wotton was commissioned to receive the French king's ratification of the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. He was then to return to England, leaving Sir Nicholas Throckmorton as resident ambassador in France.
Four days after Queen Mary's death the Spanish ambassador, De Feria, had urged Philip to offer Wotton a pension, as he would be one of Elizabeth's most influential councillors and possibly archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishopric seems to have been offered him, but even this temptation failed to move Wotton from his attitude of nolo episcopari. De Feria implies that there was some difficulty in persuading Wotton to take the oath of allegiance, ‘etcetera,’ but while Canterbury was vacant Wotton performed, as he had done in 1553–5, some of the archiepiscopal functions. His religious opinions were catholic in tendency, and he absented himself from convocation in 1562.
Meanwhile in April 1560 he laid before the queen his views on the policy to be adopted with regard to Scotland, and on 25 May he and Cecil were commissioned ambassadors to Scotland to arrange terms with the French envoys for the evacuation of Scotland by the French, and other questions raised by the establishment of the Reformation in Scotland and return of Mary Queen of Scots. On 5 June conferences were held at Newcastle, and subsequently at Berwick and Edinburgh. Cecil complained of having all the work to do, ‘for Mr. Wotton, though very wise, loves quietness.’ On 6 July the treaty of Edinburgh was signed, and Wotton and Cecil returned to London. Wotton remained in attendance upon the privy council until March 1564–5, when he was sent with Montagu and Haddon to Bruges to represent the grievances of English merchants to the Netherlands government, and to negotiate a commercial treaty. The negotiations dragged on for eighteen months, and it was not till October 1566 that Wotton returned to London. He died there on 26 Jan. 1566–7, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral; a magnificent tomb, erected by his nephew Thomas [see under Wotton, Sir Edward], is engraved in Dart's ‘Canterbury Cathedral’ and in Hasted's ‘Kent’ (8vo edit. vol. xii. p. i); the inscription on it, composed by his nephew, has been frequently printed, lastly, and most accurately, in Mr. J. M. Cowper's ‘Inscriptions in Canterbury Cathedral,’ 1897. Wotton's books and papers were presented by his nephew and heir to Cecil in 1583.
Wotton was one of the ablest and most experienced of Tudor diplomatists; his dexterity, wariness, and wisdom, constantly referred to in the diplomatic correspondence of the time, were combined with a perfect self-control, and with a tenacity and courage in maintaining his country's interests that secured him the confidence of four successive sovereigns. He was no more inconsistent than modern diplomatists in serving governments of opposite political and religious views. He made no pretence to theological learning; his clerical profession was almost a necessity for younger sons ambitious of political service, and his resolute refusal of the episcopacy on the ground of personal unfitness is testimony to his honesty. His simultaneous tenure of the deaneries of Canterbury and York is unique, but his ecclesiastical preferments were for the age comparatively scanty. A master of Latin, French, Italian, and German, he humorously protested against his appointment as secretary, on the ground that he could neither write nor speak English. A scholar himself, he was a patron of learning in others, and figures as one of the chief interlocutors in the ‘De Rebus Albionicis’ (London, 1590, 8vo) of John Twyne [q. v.], the Canterbury schoolmaster. Verses on him are extant in the Bodleian Library (Rawlinson MS. 840, ff. 293, 297, 299). He was small and slight in stature, and his effigy in Canterbury Cathedral represents him with a handsome bearded face.
[There is a sketch of Wotton's life in Todd's Deans of Canterbury, 1793, pp. 1–29, which is supplemented in a collection of notes about him in Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 20770, but these are quite superseded by the mass of information about him contained in the various calendars of state papers. For his early life and embassy to Germany, 1540–1, see Brewer and Gairdner's Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vols. iv–xvi.; for his embassies, 1543–5, see State Papers, Henry VIII, vols. viii–x., and Spanish Calendar, vols. vi. and vii.; for his embassies in France, 1546–9, 1553–7, and 1558–9, see State Papers Henry VIII, vol. xi., Correspond. Politique de Odet de Selve, Foreign Calendar 1553–60;
