Chapter 1 introduces the people involved in diplomacy and information gathering abroad in order to explore and define terms used throughout the book. Through case studies it demonstrates the fluidity of people and practice, revealing diplomats as holders of other offices – as merchants, clerks, councillors, and self-fashioned political ‘experts’ – and diplomatic activity as something which engaged people under different labels, statuses, and degrees of officialdom. The second half of the chapter explores the more permanent resident ambassadorship in France, focusing primarily on Amias Paulet’s tenure (1576–9), and presents embassy as household as well as commission. It then presents the figure of George Gilpin as a less uniform case; a figure difficult to define or account for despite being a respected expert on the Low Countries for >40 years, labelled variously merchant adventurer, secretary, interpreter, and – eventually – accredited English representative. It argues that such figures are best accommodated in a diplomatic model that takes the gathering and transmission of politically relevant information as a central, constitutive activity. Traditional scholarship has often considered ambassadors as a distinct category from agents and spies, which has helped propagate unhelpful stereotypes of the official, respected ambassador versus the insecure, immoral intelligencer. When these assumptions are broken down, we can see that the work of ambassadors and agents abroad parallels the work of clerks and councillors in the domestic realm, even to the point that the same people can occupy both roles, under the capacious métier of state actor.