James Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell, was born on November 9, 1858, in London, England.

He was a British diplomat, poet, and politician. He was educated at Haileybury College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize for English verse in 1880 with a poem on Sir Walter Raleigh. He entered the British Diplomatic Service in 1883 and served at embassies in Berlin, Athens (1888-1891), Rome (1891), Paris (1892), Zanzibar (1893), Cairo (1894-1891), Rome (1902-1904), and Stockholm (1905-1908). He played an important part in negotiating the Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1897 with Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia and played an active and neutral part in the Dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden, for which he was rewarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star by King Oscar II. In 1908, he was appointed ambassador to Italy, a post he held until he retired in 1919. He left the Diplomatic Service in 1919 but served on the mission to Egypt in 1920 with Viscount Milner. Rodd was the British delegate to the League of Nations (1921-1923), and he sat as Unionist Member of Parliament for the constituency of St. Marylebone (1928-1932). Apart from his diplomatic services, Rodd was also a published poet and scholar of ancient Greece and Rome. Between 1881 and 1940, he published some twenty volumes, including several collections of poems, e.g., “Ballads of the Fleet” (1897), “Love, Worship and Death” (1916), “Social and Diplomatic Memories” (3 vols., 1922–1925), and “Rome of the Renaissance and of Today” (1932). Rodd was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (1897), Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (1899), Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (1905), Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (1915), and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (1920). He was appointed to the Privy Council in 1908, and, in 1933, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Rennell, of Rodd in the County of Hereford.

In 1894, he married Lilias Georgina Guthrie (1870–1951). He died on July 26, 1941, in Ardath, Shamley Green, Surrey, England.