Sir Ralph Spencer Paget KCMG CVO PC (26 November 1864 – 11 May 1940) was a British diplomat in the Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to Brazil in 1918, a position he held until 1920.

[1] His German mother Walburga, née Countess von Hohenthal (1839–1929) was a diarist, writer and an intimate friend of Queen Victoria.

[4] After finishing school he studied abroad, becoming an "Arabic and Turkish scholar"[5] before being nominated in April, 1888 attaché in the Foreign Service and sent to Vienna to serve with his father, the Ambassador to Austria-Hungary.

[3] He was dispatched in 1891 to Zanzibar, recently exchanged with Heligoland, and worked with Gerald Portal (the colonial commissioner) to promote "the first beginnings of European civilisation in the East of Africa".

[6]At the beginning of his service in Tokyo the First Secretary was Gerard Lowther, later one of the architects of the Entente Cordiale, was considered to be acceptable neither to the Chinese or Japanese lobbies at the time of the Sino-Japanese War and there relied heavily on his subordinates, Paget included.

[7] In Siam he was quickly put in de facto charge of the legation due to the recall of the Minister, Sir Reginald Tower.

Eventually, it was decided that after a period as First Secretary to the Legation from March, 1904 Paget would become Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in November at the age of forty.

[11] Despite being popular in his new position, Paget managed to alienate the Permanent Under-Secretary back in Whitehall, Sir Charles Hardinge with his "mild" reports.

[13] In July 1910 Paget was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Serbia,[14] being succeeded in Munich by Sir Vincent Corbett.

[18][7] In August 1913 Paget was called back to England and appointed an Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in succession to Sir Louis Mallet.

[19] He was placed in charge of the FO American Department, where during the first two years of the Great War he worked on establishing and improving the British economic blockade of the Central Powers.

This work put him firmly on track for promotion to an ambassadorship when the British Government sought to improve its blockading efforts in the European neutrals in 1916.

[21] On 26 September 1918 it was announced that the Legation in Rio de Janeiro was being upgraded to an Embassy and that Paget had been approved by the King to be the first Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Brazil.

Before he had been appointed to the post, he had written to a friend; "What I really long for in my innermost heart is an old cotton shirt, an old pair of pants, a good horse and open prairie or desert."