AMBASSADOR

AMBASSADOR, a word of disputed origin, but probably adopted into the English language from the French, means, in its general sense, a minister authorised by any state to represent it in some other. In its distinctive sense, as indicating a particular kind of minister so appointed, it means the highest class; and by authority as well as practice, there are states which may be represented at others, yet are understood not to be entitled to appoint so high a representative as an ambassador. Messages require to be interchanged by all moderately civilised nations, unless those which, like the Chinese or the Japanese, peculiarly isolate themselves. Hence such messages, and the manner in which they were sent and received, are familiar occurrences in all histories. Some understanding that the persons who undertook such a function should enjoy freedom and safety in the state to which they were sent was absolutely necessary for its performance. The Romans adopted strict rules for the safety of ambassadors; but the less definite provisions of other nations were liable to be affected by momentary impulses, and many incidents of ancient warfare arose out of insults or injuries committed on ambassadors.

It was on the ground of an insult offered to his ambassadors that Alexander destroyed Tyre. The Persian invasions of Greece were stimulated by the slaughter of the ambassadors of Darius—who, however, demanding earth and water as tokens of dependence, were rather messengers of hostility than ambassadors, in anything like the modern sense of the term. Ambassadors now communicate privately with sovereigns or official persons, not with legislative bodies. In Greece, however, ambassadors sometimes pleaded the cause of their state in the public assemblies, and in Rome they were formally received by the senate. The legatus of the Romans answered pretty nearly to our Ambassador Extraordinary; but the term was also used to mean another and totally different officer who accompanied the proconsul or governor of a province, and was more like a colonial secretary. It became the practice to give honorary legations of this kind on account of the privileges which they conferred on the holder in the province to which he was accredited. There is, however, a distinction of a generic and very characteristic kind between the ambassador of modern diplomacy and any ancient representatives of states. The ambassador of old was chosen for a particular message or negotiation, and a permanent resident representative of one state within another was unknown, at least as a system. It is not yet intelligible to nations beyond the circle of European diplomacy. The Turks had the inveterate practice, on going to war with a state, of committing its representative to the seven towers; and though the reason assigned for the practice was the safety of the person of the ambassador from outrage, even this, if it were sincere, showed that the feelings of hatred indulged against a member of a hostile state would break out too strongly to be controlled even by that despotic government. The Chinese, and their neighbours nearer Hindustan, can look on an ambassador or diplomatic agent as merely a dignified spy, to whose presence nothing but necessity compels them to submit. Nor are they entirely wrong, since the European embassies may be counted a mutually tolerated system of espionage. Even Wickefort calls the ambassador an honourable spy, protected by the law of nations; and La Bruyere says epigrammatically, that the ambassador's function is to cheat without being cheated. The understanding that an ambassador was a person ever ready to do whatever he could with safety to the advantage of his own country, and the injury of that to which he was accredited, became a standing object of sarcasm with the wits of the seventeenth century. Sir Henry Wotton, himself an ambassador, when asked to write something in an album at Augsburg, could not resist a sarcasm on the same subject, and spoke of an ambassador as a person sent abroad to lie for the good of his country. In its English form, his apophthegm generally involves a pun or equivocation in the words "lie abroad," of which the original Latin is, however, not susceptible. Scioppius published it as a declaration of the morality of English diplomacy, and brought Wotton under temporary disgrace with King James; to whom the jest seemed the more dangerous that it announced that false and treacherous system of diplomacy on which he with most of the sovereigns of the age acted when it was safe to do so.

Permanent embassies, with the eminent personal privileges conceded to ambassadors, have existed in feudal Europe from an early time. To find the origin of an institution seemingly so much at variance with the selfish and ravenous national habits amidst which it arose, we must look to the peculiar sacredness claimed for their persons by the great community of European monarchs. The privileges of the ambassador did not arise from principles of jurisprudence founded on general public utility, but from the practice of the sovereign investing his representative with his own sacredness, and the acknowledgment on the part of the brother sovereign of the

Ambas-
dor. sufficiency of the investiture. Thus in ages when international law was rude and little respected, ambassadors claimed privileges which would in the present day be deemed preposterous; such total exemption from liability to the laws, civil or criminal, of the country to which they were accredited, and the right to have their official places of residence respected, as sanctuaries for criminals fleeing from justice. Ambassadors of old, in fact, thus received concessions which, though claimed by them as belonging properly to their masters as sovereign princes, and descending to themselves only as substitutes, would not practically have been enjoyed by sovereign princes though theoretically conceded to them. The advantage obtained over a state by seizing the person of the sovereign, would have rendered it unsafe for the principal to trust to privileges which, in the less available person of his representative, were scrupulously respected.

From this fictitious royalty came many of the practical peculiarities of the embassies of the present day. The qualification of "Excellency" applied to ambassadors is a communication from the titles of sovereign princes. They have the right of appearing covered before sovereigns in their formal audiences—a right not actually exercised, but still symbolically acknowledged. The ambassador's immunities extend to the persons brought in his train, not as participating in his fictitious sovereignty, but as his subjects who are exempt from the authority of the state to which he is accredited, and responsible solely to him as their local and temporary sovereign. Thus, by the "extritoriality," as it has been termed, of an embassy, the persons of the ambassador and his suite, his dwelling-house and his carriages were all deemed a part of his own nation, as inviolable by diplomatic understanding as the court of his sovereign was by distance and armed protection. The most prominent relic at the present day of this fictitious royalty, is the splendour and costliness of the embassies of the great powers—qualifications in which the United States of America, not having the same traditional dignity to support, have had the good sense not to compete with them.

As the theory, indeed, of the ambassador's rank and privileges were that he represented, not the state or people from whom he came, but the king, a disposition has often been shown to deny at least the higher privileges of embassy to republics. Until Cromwell's power commanded respect, the representatives of the English Commonwealth were treated with much indignity, and two of them were slain by royalist refugees—Dorislaus in Holland, and Ascham in Spain. In 1663 the court of Louis XIV. haughtily refused to concede the usual honours to the representatives of the Swiss cantons. It is not the practice of the United States to profess to accredit ambassadors of the highest diplomatic grade, nor does their condition in European diplomacy fortunately tempt them to transgress this prudent rule. On the other hand, it is not usual to accredit the highest class of ambassadors to that frugal government; though, for the adjustment of the late difficulties about the Oregon boundary, Lord Ashburton was commissioned with high and peculiar power to negotiate with the States. It is curious to find in the article Ambassadeur in the Encyclopédie Moderne, written between the fall of Louis Philippe and the re-establishment of the empire by Louis Napoleon, complaints of the still extant humiliations to which republican ambassadors are liable.

The privileges conceded to the fictitious sovereignty of the ambassador, like many other institutions of a like barbarous origin, have been directed in the progress of civilization to serviceable ends. That the representative should be able to keep himself from being in any way involved in the social or political movements of the state to which he is

accredited, is an unquestionable advantage. The extritoriality has been found serviceable in adjusting many difficulties in international law; that which is done under the auspices of the ambassador, as a marriage in his chapel, being deemed the same in law as if it had taken place in his country. Thus in very intolerant countries an embassy has often acted as a little centre of toleration, which governments, prevented by high priestly influences from avowedly acting on liberal principles, have been glad rather to cherish than discourage.

Ambas-
dor. It has always been difficult in countries not despotic to preserve the sacredness of embassies when circumstances have made them offensive to the people. Thus it was difficult to keep Gondomar the celebrated Spanish ambassador in James the First's reign from violence by the London mob for introducing sedan-chairs, which they called a device for enslaving Englishmen and making them do the work of beasts. In the anti-Papery riots of 1780 the chapels of the Bavarian and Sardinian embassies were burned. It has ever been usual to exact high satisfaction for injuries offered to ambassadors, and despotic courts have had no difficulty in conceding the demand where this was rendered prudent by the power of the offended party. Diplomatic difficulties of a serious kind have often occurred, however, in constitutional countries where the asserted privileges of the foreign ambassador were found to clash with the undoubted rights of the home citizen. In 1668 the Portuguese minister was imprisoned for debt in Holland, and in 1708 a similar event produced a serious diplomatic difficulty in England. The Russian ambassador, having had his audience of leave, was arrested for debt by some tradesmen in the open streets of London. Deeming that he was attacked by bravos, he defended himself, and was not secured without suffering much violence and indignity. The Czar immediately demanded the infliction of capital punishment on those who had been guilty of the outrage. Much parade was made about instituting prosecutions against all the parties concerned in the affair; but it was impossible for the government ultimately to treat it otherwise than as a matter for which unfortunately the law made no provision. All that could be done was to pass an act to remedy the defect; and to soothe the Czar's preamble denounced in very angry terms the unparalleled wickedness of those turbulent and disorderly persons who had outrageously insulted the person of his excellency the ambassador-extraordinary of his Czarish majesty, emperor of Great Russia, to whom a copy of the act was sent with distinguished pomp. The diplomatic body in general, discontented with the haughty tone of the English court, took up the question. When the bill was passing they objected to some parts of it, and particularly to a condition of the protection of ambassadors' retinues, that their names should be recorded with the Secretary of State and the sheriffs of London; but parliament, then exulting in the continental triumphs of Marlborough, received their demands with haughty silence.

It happened almost at the same time that the British government had shown a memorable instance of the sternness with which it insisted on preserving the inviolability of its own ambassadors. When the Earl of Manchester was ambassador at Venice in 1708, some persons had managed, under the protection of his diplomatic privileges, to attempt smuggling operations, and in the efforts to detect them, the Earl's gondola was seized with smuggled goods in it. In such matters the British government has generally acted on the knowledge that in despotic states the government can prevent or cause all such incidents. In this instance, there were high state-reasons for demanding satisfaction, since there was reason to suppose that the Senate was secretly in league with France, then projecting an invasion of

Ambassa- Britain; and Lord Manchester would not be appeased until
dor. three official persons were sent to the galleys and others
pilloried. In 1716, Britain again excited the indignation of
the diplomatic circle by the seizure of the Swedish repre-
sentative and his correspondence. His residence was sud-
denly surrounded by a party of soldiers, and his confidential
papers—some of which his wife was concealing—were ap-
propriated. The question whether such an act was consis-
tent with the law of nations, was pretty effectually answered
in the particular occasion, by an exposure of the resident's
flagitious breach of this law, in employing his opportunities
as ambassador to foster treason and make arrangements for
an invasion of the country to which he was accredited.

The rank of ambassadors is regulated by a double gra-
dation—the importance of the object of the mission, and the
rank of the court they represent. It has always been the
object of governments rising in power, like that of Prussia
under the great Frederic, to obtain some step in diplomatic
rank, while old states have resisted the demand and en-
deavoured in other ways to hold their previous relative po-
sition. Ambassadors have, from incidental circumstances,
been admitted to a representative rank in some courts, which
has been denied to them in others. Thus the representa-
tives of the knights of Malta were in the middle of the
eighteenth century received as ambassadors of the highest
order at the courts of Rome and Vienna.

The various sources of distinction, founded on the title
given to the ambassador, the rank of the state sending, that
of the state receiving, and sometimes the social rank of the
ambassador himself, make an almost insoluble complexity
of positions, which have exercised the ingenuity of the writ-
ers on diplomacy. But the complexity has this advantage,
that when there is an earnest wish to transact business,
means are found for evading questions of etiquette. The
great resource of those states whose right to send a minis-
ter of the highest order is disputed, is to transact their busi-
ness through a minister of a secondary class; for as the class
may depend as much on the rank of the court sent to as that
of the court accrediting, direct assumptions or humiliations
are thus avoided.

It has been usual since the Congress of Vienna to divide
representatives into three great classes—ambassadors, en-
voys, and residents or charges des affaires. The first and
second are accredited from the head of the government, and
communicate with the head; the third class have instruc-
tions from the foreign department of their own government,
and communicate with that of the state they are sent to.
The term Ambassador-Extraordinary having been applied to
those sent on temporary missions of high importance, the
term extraordinary came to be extended to the permanent
ambassadors at the courts of the great powers, as it was
deemed desirable that no diplomatic rank should be deemed
higher than theirs. There are at present (1853) accredited
from Britain, ambassadors-plenipotentiary at the courts of
France and Turkey. To Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain,
Denmark, Sweden, Hanover, Sicily, the Netherlands, Bel-
gium, Sardinia, the United States, and Brazil, there are en-
voys extraordinary. In smaller states our representatives
are called ministers plenipotentiary, or charges des affaires;
and in some states, many of them important in trade, though
not in diplomacy, as China, a consulate is deemed sufficient.
The ceremonial system connected with embassies has natu-
rally ceased to retain its old importance of late years, a por-
tion of it only being preserved by routine, but it is still
usual to gratify oriental courts by receiving their represen-
tatives with noisy pomp. The manner in which an ambas-
sador's conduct must be regulated by the relative condition
to each other of the states between which he acts, belongs
to the subject of diplomacy. The ambassador has occupied

a large place in the treatises on diplomacy and international
law from Grotius downwards, and Wictefort devoted two
considerable quarto volumes to L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonc-
tions. See DIPLOMACY, INTERNATIONAL LAW.

We subjoin the official return of the allowances of the
ambassadors, envoys, ministers, chargés d'affaires, secretaries
of legation, or secretaries of embassy, and paid attachés, in
the diplomatic service of Britain.