Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester
Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester (10 March 1573 – 15 February 1632) was an English art collector, diplomat and Secretary of State.
[2] In 1598 he attended Francis Norreys, nephew of Sir Edward, on a diplomatic mission to Paris led by Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham.
[3] In 1603 he became secretary to Thomas Parry, ambassador in Paris, but left the position shortly, for one in the household of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland.
[8] Cecil in fact knew well enough that Carleton had been held up in Paris from September, from letters detailing the treatment of Norreys who was a political ally.
[12] Carleton as a diplomat had a wide general correspondence, as well as letters from George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, concerned with English apostates and possible conversions of Catholics.
[15] Encouraged by Walter Cope, he began also to look for works of art for Charles, Duke of York and the Earl of Salisbury;[16] Carleton, like his predecessor in Venice Sir Henry Wotton, effectively promoted Italian aesthetics and the Grand Tour to the Stuart upper crust and looked for Venetian works of art that might be acquired by Charles I (then Duke of York) and other members of the Whitehall Group.
Anglo-Dutch relations were central to foreign policy and Carleton succeeded in improving these, through the Amboyna massacre, commercial disputes between the two countries, and the tendency of James I to seek alliance with Spain.
[18] Maurice of Nassau supported the Contra-Remonstrants and Calvinist orthodoxy, and was vying for dominance in all seven provinces, resisted by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt who backed the Remonstrants.
His public intervention in the affair of the Balance (a Remonstrant pamphlet criticizing Carleton) represented a crucial escalation of the religious conflict, which strengthened the Contra-Remonstrant cause.
Frederick did as Maurice wished in claiming the crown of Bohemia, was heavily defeated in the Battle of White Mountain and set off the Thirty Years' War, and lost the Palatinate.
He worked with the efficient bureaucrat Sir John Coke, a master of the paperwork but deliberately excluded from the more arcane foreign negotiations.
Buckingham would have the last word, and the Spanish match interfered; Carleton played the princess card of the favour of Elizabeth of Bohemia, but the nomination had become a free-for-all.
In the end the post went to Wotton in 1624 who had reversions of legal offices that could be manipulated to satisfy William Becher, another diplomat with his hat in the ring, and with a definite promise from Buckingham.
