The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age. Tom Fletcher

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      Not every historical leader appreciated the new customs either. When Anthony Jenkinson, a sixteenth-century trader, traveller and envoy of Elizabeth I, tried to present credentials to the cosmopolitan Persian emperor Shah Tahmasp, he failed to wear the slippers offered to cover his infidel feet, was thrown out of Isfahan and his footprints back to the port covered in sand. He was Photoshopped out of Persian history.

      As the number of diplomats attached to royal courts grew, they inevitably began to compete for attention and influence. With their masters jostling for power and prestige, diplomats in European capitals were ranked on the basis of the power of their monarchs, a fiendishly complex and contested process. This rivalry consumed much of their energies, and would strike terror in the heart of the modern diplomat less used to having to compete so overtly for attention and influence.

      According to Samuel Pepys, the Spanish and French embassies in London frequently came to blows in the 1660s over breaches of such protocol and ranking. Asked where he would like to sit at a dinner with the English king, Charles II, the French ambassador answered: ‘Discover where the Spaniard desires to sit, then toss him out and put me in his place.’ I admit that I have attended many diplomatic dinners where such dark thoughts have crossed my mind. But fortunately for less adversarial modern diplomats, ranking is now based on your date of arrival in post.

      Another account describes how, during the 1661 arrival of a new Swedish ambassador to London, the French coach (with 150 men, forty of them armed) clashed with that of the Spanish ambassador, similarly tooled up. The Spaniards killed a Frenchman and took down two French horses, forcing the French to reluctantly cede the second position in the procession. Louis XIV of France was so incensed that he told his Spanish counterpart that he would declare war if there were ever to be another such breach of protocol.

      But such clashes continued – in 1768, the Russian and French ambassadors to London duelled following a dispute over who should sit where in the diplomatic box at the opera. The modern equivalent is the competition to be seated next to the US president at international summits. Alphabetical orderings can often be the most diplomatic solution. At these moments, British diplomats tend to favour the use of ‘United Kingdom’ over ‘Great Britain’. It gets the leader closer to their American counterpart, and safely clear of the difficult group of countries whose names begin with ‘I’.

      Diplomacy can both thrive and suffer in times of intrigue and change. The cold war that followed the Reformation set back the process of statecraft, with Catholic or Protestant ambassadors frequently seen, with some justification, as the centres of intrigue and espionage in rival courts. Yet it forced those envoys still allowed to lurk behind the curtains of those courts to make their communication with their capitals more cunning, and increased their value to their masters.4 In the 1630s, Cardinal Richelieu, one of Louis XIII’s most infamous and effective ministers, wrote of the need for ceaseless negotiation, even when – in fact especially when – no fruits are reaped. After 1626, he established a Ministry of External Affairs to centralise the management of foreign relations under a single roof, and – perhaps most importantly to him – to control the information reaching his king. The practice was soon followed all over Europe. A picture of the ‘Red Eminence’ should be on the wall of every modern ministry of foreign affairs.

      Maritime expansion by the early European empires created the need for further rules and negotiation, not least because failure to observe increasingly complex protocol could trigger conflict. Elizabeth I was clearly a sharp and perceptive observer of diplomatic vanity, and banned her ambassadors from accepting awards or insignia from other nations – ‘I would not have my sheep branded by any mark but my own.’ The tradition continues to this day, though it is explained to sensitive diplomats in gentler terms.

      Diplomacy was increasingly the arena in which to play out wider competition for respect, with failure to observe basic courtesies taken as great insults to a monarch’s dignity. When the Spanish ambassador to the English court of James I refused to dip his colours СКАЧАТЬ