A BRITISH ambassador to Venice in the 17th century observed that
“a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his
country.” But for centuries, diplomats did more than lie. They
bribed, they stole, they intercepted dispatches. Perhaps this
will come as some consolation to the many American diplomats
whose faces have been reddened by the trove of diplomatic cables
released this week by WikiLeaks: whatever they’ve done cannot
compare in underhandedness with what ambassadors did in the
past. In 16th-century London, for instance, a French ambassador
paid another diplomat’s secretary 60 crowns a month to read the
dispatches to which the secretary had access. By the 1700s, a
large part of the British Foreign Office’s annual expenses of
£67,000 was allocated for bribery. But as a scene of diplomatic
misbehavior, London could hardly measure up to Vienna. Prince
Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, an 18th-century Austrian foreign
minister, took no monetary bribes, but he accepted expensive
presents like horses, paintings