l appointment of resident ambassadors
was made a condition of the treaty between Henry VIII. and Charles V. In
1517 Thomas Spinelly, who had for some years represented England at the
court of the Netherlands, was appointed "resident ambassador to the
court of Spain," where he remained till his death on the 22nd of August
1522. These are the most important early instances of the new system.
Alone of the great powers, the emperor remained permanently
unrepresented at foreign courts. In theory this was the result of his
unique dignity, which made him superior to all other potentates;
actually it was because, as emperor, he could not speak for the
practically independent princes nominally his vassals. It served all
practical purposes if he were represented abroad by his agents as king
of Spain or archduke of Austria.

All the evidence now available goes to prove that the establishment of
permanent diplomatic agencies was not an unconscious and accidental
development of previous conditions, but deliberately adopted as an
obvious convenience. But, while all the powers were agreed as to the
convenience of maintaining such agencies abroad, all were equally agreed
in viewing the representatives accredited to them by foreign states with
extreme suspicion. This attitude was abundantly justified by the
peculiar ethics of the new diplomacy. The old "orators" of the
Summer-shall-be-green type could not long hold their own against the new
men who had studied in the school of Italian statecraft, for whom the
end justified the means. Machiavelli had gathered in _The Prince_ and
_The Discourses on Livy_ the principles which underlay the practice of
his day in Italy; Francis I., the first monarch to establish a
completely organized diplomatic machinery, did most to give these
principles a European extension. By the close of the 16th century
diplomacy had become frankly "Machiavellian," and the ordinary rules of
morality were held not to apply to the intercourse between nations. This
was admitted in theory as well as in practice. Germonius, after a
vigorous denunciation of lying in general, argues that it is permissible
for the safety or convenience (_commodo_) of princes, since _salus
populi suprema lex_, and _quod non permittit naturalis ratio, admittit
civilis_; and he adduces in support of this principle the answer given
by Ulysses to Neoptolemus, in the _Ajax_ of Sophocles, and the examples
of Abraham, Jacob and David. Paschalius, whi