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UNDER THE TURK
IN CONSTANTINOPLE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISC

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

SIR JOHN FINCH.
From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.

UNDER THE TURK IN

CONSTANTINOPLE

A RECORD OF
SIR JOHN FINCH’S EMBASSY

1674-1681

BY

G. F. ABBOTT

AUTHOR OF
“TURKEY IN TRANSITION,” “TURKEY, GREECE AND THE GREAT POWERS,” ETC.

WITH A FOREWORD BY

VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT

FOREWORD

By LORD BRYCE

Whoever discovers a dark bypath of history and opens it up by careful research renders a service to scholars. If he has also the gift of presenting the results of his investigation in a form agreeable to the general reader who has a taste for novelties in other books as well as in novels, he earns a double meed of thanks. Mr. Abbott has not only had the good fortune to find such a bypath and the acuteness to note its interest, but is also the possessor of a talent enabling him to make the best use of his materials. To most Europeans and Americans, even among the class which reads for instruction as well as for pleasure, the annals of the Turkish Empire had remained almost a blank from the triumphant days of Solyman the Magnificent through the long process of decay down to the time when Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria and thereafter the Greek War of Independence had drawn attention to the long-forgotten Near Eastern countries. Just in the middle of this period of two and a half centuries several intelligent observers from England and France visited Constantinople and described the singular phenomena of a semi-civilised Empire which, despite its internal corruption and weakness, was still strong enough to threaten its neighbours, maintain a long sea war against Venice and besiege Vienna. One of these observers was Sir John Finch, a man of learning and ability, who had begun his career by studying medicine at the University of Padua, had held the chair of anatomy in the University of Pisa, and had for five years been King Charles II.’s Minister at Florence. In 1672 he was named ambassador at Constantinople, and accepted, somewhat reluctantly, the post, yielding to the counsels of the influential friends who had procured it for him. There he remained till 1681, and his experiences in the discharge of his functions there are recorded in this volume. The letters on which it is based, and from which many extracts are given, present a vivid picture of what Turkish administration was, and of the way in which the long-suffering representatives and merchants of civilised countries had to adjust themselves to it. Mr. Abbott’s book is not only a contribution to history, but a narrative lively enough and dramatic enough to be worth reading as a study in human nature, and more particularly of that Oriental human nature in which guile and folly, inconstancy and obstinacy are so strangely combined.

PREFACE

The history of Anglo-Turkish relations as a whole still remains to be written—a strange and not very creditable fact, considering the part which the Ottoman Empire has played in our commercial and political career since the age of Queen Elizabeth. This monograph deals only with a fraction of a vast subject—the English Embassy to Turkey from 1674 to 1681, though for the sake of intelligibility it glances at the years which preceded and followed that septennium.

Critics, I hope, will not do my work the injustice of thinking that it is not serious because, perhaps, it is not very dull. A piece of historical narrative is a sort of superior novel: it has its heroes and its villains, its vicissitudes, its catastrophes: all of which are eminently capable of administering amusement even to the most seriously minded. Only the amusement must be founded in truth; and the discovery of truth requires painstaking industry. This condition I have endeavoured to fulfil to the utmost of my ability. Every bit of the story here related is the result of careful research among original and, for the most part, hitherto unexploited documents—chiefly the Manuscripts preserved at the Public Record Office (Foreign Archives, Turkey and Levant Company) and the Coventry Papers in the possession of the Marquis of Bath, by whose courtesy I was able to make use of them.

It is impossible to convey the impression given by seventeenth-century despatches in any words but their own: nothing can be more striking to modern eyes and ears than their language, their spelling, their grammar and punctuation, or want of it. The handwriting itself betrays not only the writer’s normal character, but often the particular emotions which swayed him at the moment of writing: as we peruse those ancient sheets of paper—extraordinarily fresh most of them, with sometimes the sand still clinging to the dry ink—we see the person who penned those lines, the very way in which he held his quill. The same facts, extracted, paraphrased, and printed, no longer arouse the same sense of reality, nor grip the imagination in the same way as they do when presented in their native garb. I have attempted to reproduce something of this effect by transcribing as frequently and fully as it is convenient the original utterances in all the individuality and quaintness which belong to them.

In addition to this mass of manuscript, there exists for the period a surprising amount of printed material, some of which, though available for centuries, has not yet been exhausted, and the rest was but recently made public. It so happened that, besides our Ambassador, there resided at the time in Turkey three other Englishmen who left behind them records of current events. They were our Consul at Smyrna, Paul Rycaut; our Treasurer at Constantinople, Dudley North; and the Chaplain, John Covel: all three men of leading and light in their day. Their letters, memoirs, and journals, written independently and from different angles of vision, go a long way towards supplementing, confirming, or correcting the Ambassador’s reports, as well as the information handed down by several foreign contemporaries.[1] For, by another rare coincidence, the representative of France, Nointel, whose history blends with that of Finch, also had round him a number of Frenchmen busy writing. Joseph von Hammer had access to some of these sources and drew in some small measure upon them; but it was left for a modern French writer to turn them to full account in a book which I have consulted with much pleasure and some profit.[2] Lastly, reference should be made to two new works bearing on the subject. Although both publications deal with matters mostly outside the scope of this book, they have furnished me with a number of suggestive details.[3]

I may take this opportunity of mentioning that, in my dates, unless otherwise stated, I follow the Old Style, which still was the style of England, and, in the seventeenth century, lagged behind the New by ten days; but I reckon the year from the first of January. All lengthy notes are relegated to an Appendix, so that matters calculated to benefit the seeker after solid instruction may not bore the reader who seeks only entertainment.

G. F. A.

Chelsea, March 1920.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] My references are to the following editions:—

The Memoirs of Paul Rycaut, Esq., London, 1679; The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, by Sir Paul Ricaut, Sixth Edition, London, 1686; The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North, Knt., by the Honourable Roger North, Esq., London, 1744; Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670-1679 (in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant), edited by J. Theodore Bent, The Hakluyt Society, London, 1893; Some Account of the Present Greek Church, by John Covel, D.D., Cambridge, 1722.

[2] Les Voyages du Marquis de Nointel (1670-1680), par Albert Vandal de l’Académie Française, Paris, 1900.

[3] Report on the Manuscripts of Allen George Finch, Esq., of Burley-on-the-Hill, edited by Mrs. Lomas for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. i., London, 1913; Finch and Baines, by Archibald Malloch, Cambridge, 1917.

CONTENTS

The portraits of Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines are
supplied by the Cambridge University Press by permission
of Dr. Malloch and Mr. Wilfred Finch.

“Under the Turk in Constantinople.”

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
A DIPLOMAT IN SPITE OF HIMSELF

It was apparently an invincible fatality that compelled Sir John Finch to accept, in the month of November 1672, the appointment of English Ambassador to the Porte, in place of Sir Daniel Harvey who had died at his post some weeks before.

Finch sprang from a family which, under the Stuarts, had attained to great eminence in the law and in politics. His father, Sir Heneage Finch, had been Recorder of the City of London and Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Charles I. During the same reign his father’s first cousin, Sir John (afterwards Baron) Finch, had been Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, as well as Speaker of the House of Commons: in all these capacities he had shown himself so ardent a Royalist that, in 1640, he was impeached together with Lord Strafford and Archbishop Laud, and barely saved his head by flying to Holland. His elder brother, the eloquent Sir Heneage Finch, whose pleadings, in the years that immediately followed the Restoration, were the delight of the Council Chamber and of Westminster Hall,[4] after serving the Crown as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, was about to become Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and in due time Lord High Chancellor of England and Earl of Nottingham. His nephew (another Heneage Finch), “a celebrated orator in Chancery practice,”[5] was Solicitor-General in 1679, and crowned a long and distinguished Parliamentary career under Charles II. and James II. with a Barony from Queen Anne and an Earldom from George I.

Notwithstanding this remarkable family record, Sir John had evinced no inclination for a public career. After a brief residence at Balliol, he was obliged, when Oxford became the headquarters of the Royalist troops, to migrate to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and thence, in 1651, he pursued his studies at Padua, where he took a medical degree. From that University, of which he was made Pro-Rector and Syndic, he went, in 1659, to Pisa, to occupy the Chair of Anatomy, having refused the post of English Consul at Padua, ostensibly because it meant getting drunk “at least forty times in the year,” more probably because he did not wish to compromise himself by accepting office under the Usurper. Thus, while Cromwell ruled in England, Finch led a severely private life in Italy, and at the Restoration, like other Cavaliers, he came home to reap the reward of his loyalty. Unlike most of them, he was not disappointed. Honours of all kinds awaited him. In 1661 he was elected an Extraordinary Fellow of the College of Physicians of London, was created M.D. by the University of Cambridge, and was knighted by the King.[6]

Such was the position in which, at the age of thirty-five, when one might think enough of a man’s zest and freshness are left to give an edge to ambition, Finch found himself. The embarrassments which had overcast his earlier prospects were lifting; royal favour seemed assured; the path to fortune lay open before his feet; and there were his brother Heneage and Lord Conway, the husband of his theosophical sister,[7] who wished for nothing better than to smooth it for him. But Finch was a singularly unenterprising man. With a natural propensity to solitude, increased by exile, and with a desultory inclination to poetry and philosophy, he found the boisterous Court of Charles little to his taste. After a very short stay in England, he went back to Tuscany and Anatomy (1663). His friends, amused rather than annoyed at such perversity, did not cease to conspire for his good, and, next year, they prevailed on him to return and let them make his fortune.

Not long afterwards (March 1665) Lord Arlington, then Secretary of State, fulfilled a promise they had extracted from him by appointing Sir John His Majesty’s Minister at Florence. If there was any foreign country which Finch liked, it was Italy: he had, since he came to manhood, resided principally there, had learned its language, and had made himself thoroughly familiar with its manners and customs. If there was any Italian State for which he felt a preference, it was that of Tuscany, where he was highly esteemed and beloved by the Great Duke, his brother Prince Leopold, and every one whose love and esteem were worth having. Yet Finch was not happy. He complained that the dignity of his employment far exceeded the emolument: he would gladly have exchanged it for something better paid at home. His friends agreed; but that ideal something could not be found. The only alternative to Florence was Constantinople. To that post the Finch family, since the Restoration, seemed to have established a sort of prescriptive right: Charles II.’s first representative at the Porte, the Earl of Winchilsea (yet another Heneage Finch), was Sir John’s first cousin, and the second, Sir Daniel Harvey, his elder brother’s near relative by marriage. Sir John could have Constantinople for the asking. But Sir John cherished a profound and, in the light of subsequent events, one might well say, a prophetic aversion to Constantinople: “Nay, though to be sent to Constantinople were a charge of great gaine, yet I would not buy that charge with the affliction so long a separation would create mee,” he wrote to Lord Conway in 1667; and again, a little later: “I doe perfectly abhorr the thoughts of goeing to Constantinople.” He would rather “undertake anything then to be banished any longer from seeing your Lordship and my sister.” But at the same time he admitted, “any thing is better then my present condition, in which I neither enjoy myselfe nor any thing else.”[8] His friends sympathised and continued their efforts on his behalf with indefatigable pertinacity.

There is still extant a letter in which Lord Conway describes how, in 1668, he lingered in London after the adjournment of Parliament on purpose to get an opportunity of speaking to Lord Arlington about him. The Secretary of State hesitated: to attach to himself, partly by services and partly by hopes, the greatest possible number of adherents was Arlington’s constant aim; but what if Mr. Solicitor-General should enlist his brother in the hostile camp of the fallen Chancellor Clarendon? Conway overcame these apprehensions by bringing about a personal interview between the Secretary and the Solicitor, who assured his Lordship that Sir John would be his Lordship’s faithful retainer. Arlington, satisfied, promised to recall Sir John from Florence and to recommend him to the King for preferment in connexion with foreign affairs. This arrangement Conway thought much better than bargaining for a reversion of some lucrative Court office—a boon perhaps more tempting, but less certain. As to fitness, he assured his brother-in-law that he would have no competition to fear: “You will have the advantage of coming into a Court where there is not one man of ability.” The King, “destitute of counsel, is jealous of all men that speak to him of business.” All that was really needed was a good word from Lord Arlington, “for though Lord Arlington labours with all art imaginable not to be thought a Premier Minister, yet he is either so, or a favourite, for he is the sole guide that the King relies upon.”[9]

And so, after five years of eminently undistinguished and discontented sojourn at Florence, Sir John returned home, in August 1670, served for two years on the “Councell for matters relating to Our Forreigne Colonies and Plantations,” and then, the ideal office still failing to present itself, he had, after all, to accept the Embassy he abhorred.

He set out in May 1673. His frame of mind on leaving England can be seen from the note by which he bade Lord Conway farewell: “This is the third time I have left my Native Soyl,” he wrote. “If God Almighty make me so happy as to return once more to your Lordship, I shall then thinke it is time to fix at home and leave of (sic) all thoughts of further wandering. But [if] my life by its period abroad putts one to my Travell I beseech your Lordship to believe that you have lost the most faythfull and zealous servant the World yet was ever possessed of....”[10]

This letter brings into relief the writer’s characteristic attachment to home and dislike of separation from dear relatives, heightened by a vague anxiety not unnatural in the circumstances. A man who had fretted for five years in Italy could not look forward to an exile of at least six years in Turkey without some alarm. Turkey was not then the accessible, comparatively debarbarised country of our time: the Grand Signor’s dominions were two and a half centuries ago regarded as an obscure and distant region of disease and death. Sir John, in leaving England, felt like one stepping into the unknown: melancholy filled his heart, and pious prayer seemed the only refuge from despondency. Indeed, if he could have foreseen what lay before him, it is a question whether any earthly consideration could have induced him to quit his “native soyl.” One of the many dubious blessings granted by the gods to men is the inability to see into the future.

Meanwhile Sir John knew that, short as it fell of his aspirations, the Constantinople post had not a few advantages. It was the only English mission abroad that, under a King who had little money to spare from his personal pleasures, rejoiced in the rank of Embassy; it carried with it a salary of 10,000 dollars, or about £2500, a year, not to mention perquisites of various kinds; and, be it noted, this salary, not coming out of the reluctant purse of a capricious and impecunious prince, but out of the Treasury of a wealthy business corporation—the Company of “Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas”—entailed no heart-breaking delays, no wearisome solicitations of friends at Court, but could be depended upon with as much certainty and regularity as any dividend from a sound investment: all the more, because Finch’s kinsmen, the Harveys, were leading members of that Company. Distinctly, a diplomat might go farther and fare worse. As to the duties of the post, Sir John was well equipped. Apart from ceremonial functions, his time at Florence had been taken up by questions arising out of the English trade in the Mediterranean; and both his correspondence from that place and a report on commerce with Egypt which he had drawn up lately[11] prove that he could do that sort of work easily enough. Now, that was the sort of work he would be called upon to do at Constantinople.

Owing its origin to the enterprise of merchants and maintained entirely at their expense, the English Embassy on the Bosphorus existed chiefly for their benefit; the principal part of the Ambassador’s mission being to promote trade and to protect those engaged therein both against the Turks and against each other. Politics, it is true, were not altogether lost sight of. The Ottoman Empire, though past its meridian, still weighed heavily in the “Balance of Europe,” and the Grand Signor’s attitude was an object of no small concern to the rival groups into which Europe was divided. In the abstract, political writers continued to echo, with unction, the admonitions which the celebrated Imperial Ambassador Busbequius had addressed to Christendom a hundred years before. But since no means had yet been devised “to unite our Interests and compose our Dissensions,”[12] what were we to do? Obviously, what everybody was doing. When occasion arose, it was part, if only a subsidiary part, of an English envoy’s business to intrigue for the good of his country and try to defeat the intrigues of those wicked foreign diplomats who intrigued for the good of theirs. Thus, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, her representatives had exploited Turkey’s hatred of Spain to some purpose; and again during the Thirty Years’ War the representative of Charles I. made strenuous efforts, not of course to set on the “common enemy of Christendom” against the Emperor directly—that, as he recognised, would have been too great a “scandal”—but to procure the Sultan’s indirect support for the Prince of Transylvania who was fighting the Emperor. During the earlier period of Charles II.’s reign, too, Lord Winchilsea had exerted himself to prevent the establishment of friendly relations between Stambul and Madrid, and both he and his successor Harvey had endeavoured to bring about a cessation of hostilities between Stambul and Venice. The former of these ambassadors, in fact, was very eager to play a great political rôle, urging that, as, with the acquisition of Tangier, English sea-power and possessions were expanding Eastwards, the English envoy should no longer confine himself exclusively to mercantile affairs.[13] But Charles had neither funds nor thoughts for such ambitious schemes. So his representative at the Porte had nothing more to do, as regards State affairs, than “to be truly informed of all negotiations and practices in that Court which may disturbe the peace of Christendom in any part of it,”[14] and to transmit his information to London: a passive rôle which suited Sir John’s temperament admirably. As his alter ego wrote to Lord Conway: “Your Lordship will say your Brother here will have little to doe in State Affayrs, which my Lord is very true and so much the more is his quiett.”[15]

This was only one of several happy auspices under which Sir John Finch entered upon his new employment. As a rule, the diplomatic seat on the Bosphorus bristled with thorny peculiarities—peculiarities that had proved trying to most of his predecessors and to some even fatal.

To begin with, our representatives at Constantinople, unlike their colleagues at other capitals, had not one master, but two: the Court from which they held their commission and the Company from which they drew their pay. It is proverbially difficult to serve two masters to the satisfaction of both, and in this case the difficulties of the servant were often accentuated by differences between his employers. With characteristic repugnance to clear definition, our ancestors had left the question of appointment open. There was neither fixed rule nor consistent precedent to show with which of the two masters lay the choice of servant. Hence a periodical feud between the Court and the Company, each claiming a right which the other was loth to concede. Under James I. and Charles I. the Court had more than once forced upon the Company its own nominees, with disastrous results to all concerned. Sir John Eyre, appointed in 1619 under pressure from the Duke of Buckingham, after barely two years, which he spent making himself obnoxious to the English residents and contemptible to the Turkish Ministers, had to be recalled in disgrace. Sir Sackville Crow, similarly appointed in 1638, rivalled Eyre in incompetence, surpassed him in iniquity, and was at last brought home by force and cast into the Tower (1648). At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Company, having thrown in its lot with the Rebels, obtained from Parliament a recognition of its claim to elect and remove the Ambassador, and, much as Cromwell would have liked to follow the example of the Stuarts, he had found it expedient to acquiesce. When the Commonwealth collapsed, the Levant Merchants, who had joined in acclaiming the Restoration as heartily as they had acclaimed the Rebellion, got Charles II. to renew their Charter (April 2, 1661). But submission to the Crown had become so much the fashion that this Charter again left the question of the Ambassador’s election open, thereby affording zealots for the royal prerogative a chance of stirring up discord.[16]

In practice, however, a new spirit seemed to animate the rival authorities now. Both sides had learned by suffering the wisdom of compromise. Now the Merchants begged from the King, as an act of grace proceeding solely from his goodness, leave to offer for his Majesty’s approval such a person as they esteemed most competent to manage their affairs at Constantinople, thus loyally acknowledging the King’s right; while the King, on his part, graciously granted their request, thus waiving the exercise of it. In this way the dignity of the Crown was saved, and the interests of the Company did not suffer. This sweet reasonableness breathes through the petition by which, on Sir Daniel Harvey’s death, the Levant Merchants approached the King for a successor: “They have,” so runs the document, “at a General Meeting of their Company, presumed to fix upon the Hon. Sir John Finch, as one they humbly desire may undertake that affaire, if your Majestie will be graciously pleased to afford your Royal assent; which they humbly beg, wholly submitting the same to your Majestie’s pleasure.”[17] The King, as was expected, readily assented; and thus Sir John set out with the goodwill of both his employers. He travelled across France and North Italy to Leghorn, and there met the Centurion, a frigate of 52 guns, which was to carry him to Turkey.

If we turn from those who sent the Ambassador to those to whom he was sent, we shall see here also Finch greatly favoured by circumstances. Most of his predecessors had found themselves engaged in a Sisyphean labour. For the wrongs to which the English, like other Frank dwellers in the Grand Signor’s dominions, were constantly exposed at the hands of insolent and rapacious officials they could only procure redress, if at all, by purchasing the friendship of the Grand Vizir and of the two or three other grandees who between them ruled the Empire. But, such had long been the stability of the Ottoman Government, none of those personages remained in power for more than a few months—a military mutiny, a popular upheaval, or a palace intrigue was sure to hurl them down the moment after they had reached the top; and our Ambassador was obliged to seek new friends. This state of things had come to an end. In 1656 Mohammed Kuprili assumed the Grand Vizirate with a free hand to purge the body politic of its corruptions, and he performed the task by cutting off all the parts that he could not cure: a dreadful remedy, but not more dreadful than the condition of the patient demanded. Turkey was so split up by factions that it could not have survived, unless all rebellious spirits were implacably extinguished. This great practitioner, who alone had preserved the Empire from falling into as many fragments as there were Pashaliks, died in 1661 of old age, and was succeeded by his son Ahmed—a fact which, being utterly unprecedented in a country where the hereditary principle, except in the royal family, was unknown, amazed the Turks even more than the miracle of a Grand Vizir maintaining himself in office for five whole years and then dying peaceably in his bed.[18]

Ahmed Kuprili at first seemed to have inherited, together with his father’s power, his father’s recipe. The late Vizir’s dictatorship had raised up a multitude of malcontents who imagined that his successor’s youth offered them an opportunity for revenge: “every hour he has a new game to play for his life,” wrote our Ambassador.[19] But once rid of his enemies, the son presented a pleasing antithesis to his father. Mohammed had been an uncouth and illiterate warrior who cared for no laws that stood between him and his will, who valued no arguments that conflicted with his preconceived notions, who even in his dealings with foreign envoys employed methods only one degree less savage than those he applied to the treatment of domestic problems. Ahmed, on the other hand, was the first Grand Vizir with a political, instead of a martial, mind. He had been bred to the study of the Law and had actually practised as a judge in civil causes. By temperament and education alike he was averse to violence. It is true that he had already carried out two successful campaigns and was now engaged in a third. But to this he was impelled by necessity: the Ottoman Empire, having arisen out of war and being constituted for war, would perish in peace. Its rulers could only avoid rebellion at home by providing their turbulent subjects with constant and congenial occupation abroad—a bleeding operation intended to relieve the body politic of its “malignant humours”—and it was particularly necessary for Ahmed, in order to keep his place, to show that he could graft the soldier on the lawyer. But he never became a general. His successes were won in spite of his strategy. In his war against the Emperor he was defeated at St. Gothard (Aug. 1, N.S. 1664), yet immediately after, profiting by the Emperor’s difficulties, he secured a treaty (Peace of Vasvar, Aug. 10, 1664) as advantageous as if it had been the fruit of victory. In Crete his military operations against the Venetians (1666-69) were so clumsy that at one moment he seriously meditated abandoning the siege of Candia, “his ill success having given his enemies hopes of supplanting him.”[20] Yet he obtained by negotiation the surrender of a fortress which until then had been deemed impregnable, and brought a twenty-five years’ struggle to a glorious conclusion. The Polish war which he was now conducting was likewise a matter of diplomatic as much as of military manœuvring. There can be no doubt that, if he had the choice, Ahmed would never have striven to get by force what might be got by subtler means.

To these traits, common among lawyers, he added a genuine love of justice and a scrupulous integrity rare among lawyers everywhere, and nowhere rarer than in the East. Endowed with such qualities, Ahmed proved himself one of the most moderate, and, at the same time, one of the least pliant Ministers that Turkey ever knew. Under his firm and equitable administration the Ottoman Empire recovered some of its prosperity, and, what is more pertinent to note here, the Frank residents enjoyed a Sabbath of rest. Tyranny, of course, could not be altogether avoided. But, on the whole, the privileges conferred upon them by their Capitulations were respected, extortions (avanias) were seldom indulged in with impunity, and the foreign merchants were treated with unexampled forbearance.[21] Towards the English the Grand Vizir was particularly well disposed, and with good reason.

The main principle of Charles II.’s policy in foreign as in domestic affairs was to avoid friction. Indolent, unambitious, and a hater of everything likely to disturb the even flow of his voluptuous existence, the Merry Monarch would sooner have surrendered his rights than have taken the trouble to defend them. No prince ever stood less upon his dignity; perhaps because no prince ever had less dignity to stand upon. In the course of their protracted struggle for the conquest of Candia, the Turks repeatedly pressed English ships into their service. Cromwell had opposed vigorously all encroachments of the sort; but the representatives of Charles, after some feeble and ineffectual protests, not only acquiesced tamely, but bitterly blamed those captains who ventured to resist; and, while the Grand Signor violated the neutrality of England, the English Secretary of State overwhelmed him with assurances that his Majesty “does inviolably observe his peace with the Grand Signior.”[22] Nor were these empty assurances. Individual Englishmen might assist the Venetians in what contemporary Christendom regarded as a holy war, but, unlike the French, whose volunteers passed on in a steady stream from Paris itself to reinforce the garrison of Candia, they did so at their own risk and peril without the least countenance from their Government. Indeed, such crusaders were so few and far between that Ahmed Kuprili commented on the fact that he did not find “soe much as an English seaman amongst his enemies att Candia.”[23]

To these general conditions which at the time rendered our Embassy unusually comfortable for any tenant of average tact, must be added an event that secured for Sir John Finch’s person special consideration.

Soon after his appointment, an English ship, the Mediterranean, on her passage from Tunis to Tripoli, had been met by the redoubtable corsair Domenico Franceschi—a Genoese by birth, but then domiciled at Leghorn and holding a privateering commission from the Great Duke of Tuscany. Normally an English vessel had nothing to fear from a Tuscan man-of-war; but the Mediterranean happened to carry the retiring Pasha of Tunis, homeward bound with his family and the spoils of his province, and, as the Duke was at perpetual war with the Sultan, Domenico could not well forgo such a chance of serving his sovereign and enriching himself. The Mediterranean managed, before the corsair could come up with her, to set the Pasha with some of his belongings ashore at Tripoli, but she was captured, taken to Malta, and pillaged of the bulk of the Pasha’s treasure, including his women. The incident was serious: it was one of those incidents which often strained Turkey’s relations with Western Powers in those days; and with no Western Power more often than with England. Not to dwell on remoter instances,[24] only a year before some other Turkish passengers on another English ship, the Lyon, whilst sailing from Tunis to Smyrna, had been carried off with their goods by the same pirate. At that time Sir Daniel Harvey addressed to the home Government an energetic protest against “the insolence and piracy” of a person in the service of a friendly prince, pointing out that his exploit endangered the safety of the English colonies in Turkey, and, if not taken notice of, might be an encouragement to him and others to do likewise.[25] But nothing was done, and the late Ambassador’s prediction had now come true even beyond his anticipation. For in that case the victims were Turks of very humble rank (a cap-maker with his two servants, and two old men who had just been redeemed at Malta, one after 48, the other after 50 years’ captivity), and the booty a trifle—3 chests of caps, 3 bales of blankets, and 3 boxes of botargoes.[26] This time the victim was a high functionary of the Porte, and the loot enormous. The Turks’ wrath was proportionate. They threatened that, if the property was not restored, the loss should be made good by the English residents; the Porte’s position always being that a Frank nation was collectively responsible for any Turkish passengers or goods that fell into the hands of pirates whilst travelling under that nation’s flag. Matters were not improved by the fact that the Mediterranean had offered no resistance, but was seen sailing away in the corsair’s company with every appearance of being a willing captive.

The directors of the Levant Company in London were not slow to realise the gravity of the situation. As soon as official reports from the Consuls at Leghorn and Tripoli reached them, they petitioned the King to write to the Great Duke and to demand complete restitution of the Pasha’s property and reparation for damages, with due punishment of “so notorious an offender.”[27] The King hastened to indite an epistle in that sense to the Duke,[28] and, at the same time, instructed Sir John Finch, then on his way out, to repair to Florence and make the necessary representations to his Highness by word of mouth. These instructions found Finch at Genoa; and he applied himself to the task with energy, anxiety for his own future in Turkey lending a spur to his concern for the public good.

In order to simplify matters, he procured, before leaving Genoa, the banishment of the corsair from that State, and then proceeded to Leghorn. There he found an Aga whom the Pasha of Tunis was sending to England as his Procurator on that very business. When he heard of Finch’s arrival, the Aga thought to save himself the journey to London by laying his case before him. Finch made the most of this lucky encounter. Concealing from the Aga his instructions, he gave the affair a totally different turn. The Mediterranean, he argued, was not an English ship. It is true that her Master, Captain Chaplyn, was an Englishman; but he had changed his religion, renounced his country, and, having for ten years lived at Leghorn and married there, had become a Tuscan subject, so that his Majesty of England was no longer concerned in him. With these “and other motives” (a delicate euphemism for the motive vulgarly known as bribery), the Ambassador prevailed on the Aga to give him a declaration in writing, attested by public notaries, that he had no claim upon Captain Chaplyn or any other Englishman; only, as Finch was accredited to the Porte, it would be taken very kindly of him if he would assist a Pasha in distress, the more as he lay under no obligation to do so. Having had this document signed and sealed, the resourceful diplomat approached the Duke in another way—the way dictated by the facts of the case and his instructions.

In that quarter also, Sir John’s efforts, thanks to his long connection with the Tuscan Court, met with success. At Florence itself he recovered 5000 dollars in ready money and a portion of the stolen goods. Then, armed with letters from the Duke, and accompanied by the Aga and Captain Chaplyn, he went on to Malta, where he managed, though not without great difficulty, to obtain the restitution of 75 more bales of goods and the redemption of seven captives, among them the Pasha’s sister-in-law, whom the Pasha afterwards made his wife. At Smyrna, where the Ambassador, still accompanied by the Turkish Aga and the English Captain, landed on the 1st of January 1674, he caused the former to give him before the Cadi of that place an official receipt for all the recovered goods—30,000 dollars—and a full discharge to Captain Chaplyn.[29]

We are told that the Turks expressed boundless admiration at this action—an action without a parallel in the annals of piracy: who had ever heard of a corsair being made to disgorge? They applauded the Ambassador’s skill and regarded his success as a manifest proof of his sovereign’s influence over foreign Governments. They were also impressed by his luck—no small recommendation to a superstitious people in an astrologically-minded age. Had not his landing on Turkish soil synchronised with the celebration of the holiest of Moslem feasts—the Feast of the Bairam?[30] As to the English Factory, its sixty members (merry young blades most of them) manifested their joy at the sight of their long-expected Ambassador after a fashion which must have made it a little difficult for his Excellency to maintain the reserve and gravity proper to his exalted station.

From Smyrna Sir John continued his journey to Constantinople, arriving there about the end of March; and some two months after, in the absence of the Grand Vizir, he had audience of the Vizir’s Kaimakam, or Deputy. On this occasion the new Ambassador gave the first evidence of that meticulous devotion to forms which made up then an enormous, and still makes up a very considerable, part of the complete diplomat’s mentality. Before going to audience he took care to find out how many kaftans, or robes of honour, the Kaimakam meant to present him and his suite with. “I was offerd’,” he says, “But 15: no English Ambassadour ever having had more from the Chimacam: But understanding the Venetian Bailo had 17, I would abate nothing of what he had had.” After a tug of several weeks, he wrested the two extra vests from the Turk.

One or two other features of that ceremony remain on record.

“I am,” said the envoy to the Kaimakam, “I am come Ambassadour from Charles the Second, King of England, Scottland, France and Ireland; sole and Soveraigne Lord of all the seas that environ His Kingdome: Lord and Soveraigne of Vast Territory’s and Possessions in the East and West Indy’s: Defender of the Christian Faith against all those that Worship Idolls and Images, To the Most High and Mighty Emperour Sultan Mahomet Ham, Cheif Lord and Commander of the Mussulman Kingdome, Sole and Supream Monarch of the Eastern Empire, To maintain that Peace which has bin so usefull and that Commerce which has bin so profitable to this Empire; For the continuance and encrease whereof I promise you in my station to contribute what I can; And I promise to myselfe that you in yours will doe the like.”

Sir John had written this speech in Italian and given it to his two chief Interpreters, with orders to study it carefully beforehand, so that they might not omit one word in interpreting what he should say. The Interpreters having fulfilled their function, some conversation ensued, in the middle of which the Kaimakam, abruptly, “as if he had much reflected on what his Lordship said,” asked whether the King of England had any fortresses in the Indies. Finch answered: “He had very many and not a few of those Inexpugnable.” The Kaimakam did not carry his cross-questioning any further. Presumably he understood that the English were imbued, like other nations, with a very sincere opinion of their own greatness.

Sir John reported this his début on the official stage of Turkey to his patron with evident self-satisfaction.[31] He had every reason to feel proud of the past and confident of the future. He had shown himself possessed of energy, finesse, firmness, and, though innocent of any acquaintance with the habits and prejudices of the Turks, he was already persona gratissima with them. The flattering way in which he had been received on his arrival in the Grand Signor’s dominions gave him not only the hope, but the certainty of a residence agreeable to himself and profitable to his country. Clearly, the Turks had been much maligned by common report. These feelings are faithfully reflected in a letter which Sir John’s alter ego penned to Lord Conway, while Sir John himself was penning his report to Lord Arlington:

“Give me leave to turne to ... your Brother my Lord Ambassadour’s condition under this Embassy: He hath dealt with the crafty close Genevese; with the wise and stayd Florentine; with the untameable and rugged Maltese; with the faythlesse Greek and false Jew; and lastly with the sober and stubborne Turk,”—then, leaving the others to rejoice in their respective epithets, the writer fixes his penetrating eye upon the Turks: “Under correction and with modesty I will say that I find them a sober and ingenious people; sober they are because they never drink wine, ingenious I call them from the Bassa who came to visit my Lord at the galley, so soon as he arrived at the port, for I seldom heard in Europe a more dextrous, short, and courtly reply then what the Bassa made to my Lord. I, over and above, find an Ambassadour here to have, according to their customes, as much respect as they have in most places in Europe. Certainly there is a mutuall and reciprocall jealousy betwixt the Court and foreign publick Ministers, between which there is neither religion nor custome of life, nor laws that beget any confidence or publick tie, and to the captious it gives many exceptions. But, setting these things apart, as yett I can call nothing strange.” Thus wrote this acute judge of national characters, after seeing only one Turk for a few moments; thus he wrote, no doubt with my Lord Ambassador’s concurrence, and thus he thought. Yet even in the midst of his rosy illusions, he had some dim, subconscious perception of realities. For he adds: “But, my most noble Lord, these are my first sentiments, perhaps when I have stayed here longer, I may have as much reason to reclaime against them as other men....”[32]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Evelyn’s Diary, Oct. 27, 1664; Pepys’s Diary, May 3, 1664, April 21, 1669.

[5] Roger North’s Life of Guilford, p. 226.

[6] Dictionary of National Biography; Malloch’s Finch and Baines.

[7] Anne, Viscountess Conway—a very learned lady and a very odd. There is a notice of her in the Dict. of Nat. Biog., where her father’s name is given wrongly as “Henry.”

[8] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 54.

[9] Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1667-68, pp. 258-9.

[10] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 59.

[11] Finch to Arlington, Dec. 23, 1672, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[12] Rycaut’s Present State, p. 404.

[13] Winchilsea to Secretary Nicholas, March 18-28, 1660-61, June 12, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 17.

[14] Instructions for Sir John Finch, Cl. 6. See [Appendix I].

[15] Sir Thomas Baines, May 25, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[16] See [Appendix III].

[17] Register, 1668-1710, p. 22; S.P. Levant Company, 145.

[18] Winchilsea to Nicholas, March 4, 1660-61, Nov. 11-21, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 17; Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 68; J. von Hammer’s Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, vol. xi. p. 111. Winchilsea mentions only the “six thousand Bashaws and great men,” whom Mohammed put to death “partly by his own hands and by his commands.” Rycaut gives the total of the Vizir’s victims as “thirty-six thousand persons.” Hammer, though he does not consider this statement excessive, is content with an estimate of “trente mille personnes,” or an average of 500 executions a month—figures which, even if reduced by a nought, would still appear respectable.

[19] Winchilsea to Nicholas, May 20, 1662, S.P. Turkey, 17.

[20] Harvey to Arlington, Jan. 31, 1669 [-70], S.P. Turkey, 19.

[21] See [Appendix IV].

[22] For illustrations of this timorous attitude see Winchilsea to Nicholas, March 4, 1660-61, Feb. 11, 1661-62; the Same to Arlington, March 26, 1668; Rycaut to Arlington, July 18, 1668; Letters from Messrs. Thomas Dethick & Co., Smyrna, Feb. 7, March 1, 1667-68; Harvey to Arlington, June 19, 1669, S.P. Turkey, 17 and 19.

[23] Harvey to Arlington, Aug. 18, 1669, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[24] See [Appendix V].

[25] Harvey to Arlington, Jan. 24, March 15, 1671-72, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[26] “A Relation of the Damage rec. by me, Thomas Parker, Master of the Lyon pinke from a Corsair near the Island of Delos. Smyrna, 9 Dec. 1671,” ibid.

[27] Register, p. 39, S.P. Levant Company, 145.

[28] Ibid. pp. 40-41. This letter, written in Latin, is dated “ex pallatio nostro Westmonasteriensi, Quarto die Augusti, Anno Doñi 1673, Regni nostri 25^o.”

[29] Sir John Finch’s own Narrative, Sept. 24, 1680, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[30] Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 312.

[31] Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674 (with Inclosure), Coventry Papers.

[32] Sir Thomas Baines to Conway, May 25, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19. The letter, though unsigned and unaddressed, carries within it conclusive proof of its authorship and destination.

CHAPTER II
SIR JOHN’S PROGRAMME

Sir John regarded his audience with the Kaimakam as nothing more than a prologue: the real action had yet to begin. His first business was “to make my selfe an Ambassadour by delivering His Majesty’s Credentials to the Gran Signor and His Letter to the Gran Visir.”[33] But that could not be done at Constantinople. For over a dozen years the seat of the Ottoman Empire had been at Adrianople.

Mohammed IV. nourished an unconquerable detestation of Constantinople. It was said that when any of his Ministers ventured to urge upon him the advisability of showing himself there, he used to answer: “What shall I do in Stambul? Did not Stambul cost my father his life? My predecessors, were they not always the prisoners of rebels? Rather than go back to Stambul, I would set fire to it with my own hands.” True or apocryphal, these words describe the position accurately. Constantinople under the Sultans, like Rome under the Caesars, was the home of an insolent militia and a turbulent mob. The maladies which infected the Empire had their breeding-ground in it. It supplied a centre for all the intrigues and seditions which time and again had brought Turkey within an inch of disruption. Its revolutionary habits made it insecure. So the reigning monarch, except for occasional visits reluctantly undertaken and speedily terminated, kept away from the ill-omened city. Love of sport conspired with fear of death to drive the Grand Signor from his capital. For never had Turkey known so great a Nimrod. With other Sultans the chase had been a recreation; with Mohammed IV. it was an obsession—a monomania. “When He cannot range to Hunt,” says Finch, “He is never well.”[34] Hence his nickname of Avji, or the Hunter. The fatigues he underwent in the indulgence of this consuming passion are almost fabulous: in the height of summer as well as in the depth of winter, he sallied forth two or three hours before sunrise and spent the whole day dashing up hill and down dale like one possessed by a thousand restless demons. The courtiers whose privilege it was to ride in the Sultan’s train looked back with unfeigned regret to the soft vices of his father: what were the amorous whims of Ibrahim compared with the strenuous vagaries of Mohammed? But if he spared his courtiers as little as he spared himself, this sportsman spared his humbler subjects even less. Wherever he hunted, the inhabitants of the district were obliged either to provide beaters—sometimes as many as 30,000—or to beat the woods themselves. In the summer, they had, in addition, their crops ruined. In the winter, numbers of these wretched peasants, exposed to cold and hunger during several days and nights, paid for their master’s pleasure with their lives. So it came to pass that, while the titular capital of the Empire, in the absence of the Grand Signor’s luxurious Court, drooped like a flower in the shade, the Imperial sun shone upon Adrianople: the environs of that town affording exceptional facilities for the pursuit of game—of all pursuits the one this degenerate son of Osman loved the most and understood the best.[35]

To Adrianople, therefore, Sir John would have to betake himself. The journey was expensive, and the Levant Company extremely close-fisted. But in this juncture our Merchants could not stint the piper, seeing that they called the tune. For the presentation of his Credentials, though the first, was the least of the motives that impelled Finch to the Sublime Threshold.

It had been the ambition of every English Ambassador up to that date to renew the Capitulations originally granted to the English by Sultan Murad III. in 1580,[36] with a view to obtaining a confirmation and elucidation of old and the addition of new privileges. During the reign of the present Sultan the Capitulations had already been renewed twice, by Sir Thomas Bendyshe and by Lord Winchilsea; and Sir Daniel Harvey would have renewed them for the third time, if death had not prevented him. Sir John Finch was anxious to tread the path of his predecessors and to go farther than they.

There were, in the first place, tariffs to be revised and Customs-duties to be reduced, or defined to our advantage. For instance, by a Hattisherif, or Imperial decree, granted to Sir Sackville Crow, the Merchants of Aleppo had to pay 3 per cent ad valorem on the goods they imported—cloths, kerseys, cony skins, tin, lead—as well as on the goods they exported—raw linen, cotton yarn, galls, silk, rhubarb and other drugs. This decree determined what was to be called 3 per cent in terms of Turkish weights, measures, and money, leaving no loop-hole for extortion. But, resting as it did solely upon the Sultan’s word, it was regarded as reversible at his pleasure. Therefore, Sir John’s predecessors had laboured to have it inserted in the Capitulations, but without success, and the Hattisherif had gradually become so antiquated that not only the local Customs authorities refused to obey its provisions, but the Grand Vizir himself refused to enforce them. Finch wished to embody this decree in the Charter, so that the English should henceforth have not only the Grand Signor’s signature but also his oath, and convert what was a mere concession to merchants into a covenant between prince and prince.

Another Article coveted by the Ambassador aimed at securing a similar definition for duties levied upon our Factors at Smyrna and Constantinople. By the Capitulations they were obliged to pay 3 per cent on imports and exports. But differences had lately arisen between them and the Customs authorities concerning English cloth. The duty had been fixed when the English imported only a kind of coarse cloth called “Londras,” for which they were content to pay ad valorem; but since they had begun to import finer cloths they demurred, insisting that the Customs authorities were not entitled to more than the amount of duty established of old. The authorities, on their part, to avoid what they considered an attempt to cheat the Grand Signor, insisted that the duty should be paid in kind. Sir John had so far let the merchants compound with the authorities underhand, in order that our case might not be prejudiced by the judgment of inferior Courts; but it was his intention to have the matter settled at Adrianople: success on this point, he reckoned, meant some 60,000 dollars a year saved; and besides, it would enable the English to trade in cloth of equal fineness with that of their Dutch competitors on infinitely more advantageous terms—paying only two where the Dutch paid six dollars per piece.

Next, there was in our Capitulations a clause by which Englishmen engaged in litigation with natives for a sum above 4000 aspers were entitled to bring their case before the Divan. But this clause, being limited to private individuals, did not protect the English against the Grand Signor’s officials, whose arbitrariness grew in proportion to their distance from the “Fountain of Justice”; for they had it in their power to squeeze the defendants by detaining them and sequestering their ships and goods. The Ambassador wished to deprive the local tyrants of every temptation by introducing into the Capitulations an Article which authorised the English Consul on the spot to become surety for his countrymen.

Another abuse Finch sought to remedy was of a converse nature. Native defendants used to evade prosecution by putting in a claim not to be sued except before the Divan, where the practice was for the successful litigant to pay 10 per cent on the debt recovered, instead of the 2 per cent with which the provincial Cadis were nominally content. This frightened Englishmen from suing in the best Court of Justice, and gave the Cadis a chance of extorting from them 6 or 8 per cent. It was the Ambassador’s object to render such evasions and extortions impossible by obtaining an Article which made the fees uniform.

Further, Sir John wished to establish uniformity in the anchorage charges imposed upon English shipping, and to remove a chronic grievance by exempting a ship which had paid anchorage at one Turkish port from a like liability in another she might call at in the course of her voyage.

Such were the most important innovations Sir John contemplated. But the most piquant of all referred to the contingency of English factors in Turkey robbing their principals in England and shielding themselves from English justice by becoming Mohammedans—“turning Turks,” as the phrase went. This interesting problem had arisen out of a recent incident at Smyrna. In September 1673 a young gentleman of good family and rigid religious upbringing, one, too, who had a fair fortune of his own, was tempted by the Evil One to commit a deed that covered the English “Nation” in the Levant with shame. Availing himself of his partner’s absence, he appropriated a large quantity of goods and gold belonging to several merchants at home. Then he went before the Cadi and made a solemn profession of Islam, so that he might shelter himself under the Moslem Law, which admitted no Infidel’s evidence against a True Believer. We possess a full account of this scandalous affair from the pen of our Consul at Smyrna, who tells how, after seven months’ unremitting pursuit, he managed to recover the best part of the property and to reduce the culprit to such distress that at last the wretch humbly begged him to contrive his return to Christendom and Christianity in the frigate which had brought Sir John out.[37] As a safeguard against similar accidents, the Ambassador proposed that the Porte should be asked to allow in future Christian witnesses in such cases.[38]

Over and above all these matters of business, there was a point of honour to be struggled for—a point by which Sir John set immense store. The French enjoyed a privilege which the English had for generations craved in vain: the King of France, alone among Christian monarchs, was honoured by the Turks with the title of Padishah, or Emperor; the King of England was styled simply Kral, or King. The representatives of Queen Elizabeth, it seems, not caring much for titles, had acquiesced in that modest designation, and the precedent once established, all the efforts of later envoys had failed:[39] “So hard a thing it is to unrivitt what Time has fixd’,” moralised Sir John; but the hardness of the thing, instead of damping, fanned his ardour. If he could only get that high-sounding title for his sovereign, what a feather would it be in his cap! He had already, at his audience with the Kaimakam, taken the first step towards that goal. He had commanded his Interpreters most particularly not to forget, in translating his speech, to render the word “King” by “Padishah,” not “Kral”; and as they, aware of the tenacity with which the Turks clung to established customs, evinced some reluctance to attempt an innovation, Sir John had agreed, when he uttered the word “King,” to add “or Padishah,” thus securing the Interpreters by his authority. That was done accordingly, and “taken without any exception.” But it was only the thin end of the wedge. Sir John was resolved to prosecute “with my utmost Vigour” the insertion of the title into the new Capitulations;[40] and so to score off all the ambassadors who went before and bequeath a legacy of imperishable lustre to all those who should come after him.

A comprehensive programme, excellent in conception; but for its execution Sir John had to wait.

While the Grand Signor hunted, his Grand Vizir was busy conducting hostilities with Poland and, simultaneously, negotiations for peace. Sir John was kept informed of these proceedings by the Dutch Resident, who, with his wife, his children and his Secretaries, followed the Ottoman camp, having orders from his Government to watch the march of events in concert with the Emperor’s Resident. Holland and Germany were then at war with France, which endeavoured to bring about an agreement between Poland and Turkey and to induce the latter Power to turn her arms against the Emperor. England, on the other hand, had recently made peace with Holland, and the Dutch Resident, before his departure from Constantinople, had recommended his “Nation” to Sir John’s protection. He now wrote to him about the prospects of peace.

An envoy from the new King of Poland, John Sobieski, was expected in the Grand Vizir’s camp every moment; and in case of an agreement, it was said that the Ottoman Army would join the Polish in a common campaign against the Muscovite. What inclined the Turks to an accommodation, besides Sobieski’s conciliatory attitude, was the fear of an attack from Persia. So Sir John’s informant reported. “But, My Lord,” said Sir John, “notwithstanding these fayr Intimations of Peace there can be no certainty of it, For the Publique Prayers have bin made these ten dayes over the Empire for the Gran Signor, which begin not till He is out of His own Territory’s, and must continue till victory or Peace.... In the Interim it seems by the vast Quantity of Slaves that dayly from the Black Sea are sent hither, that the Turke meets with little opposition.”[41]

In the interim, we, for our part, cannot do better than take a look round at the place in which Sir John lived, the people among whom he moved, and the things that occupied his enforced leisure. Such a description will make the subsequent narrative more intelligible and instructive, without unduly delaying the action; for, truth to tell, many months had to elapse before there was any action worth mention.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Finch to Coventry, Sept. 9, 1675, Coventry Papers.

[34] Finch to Coventry, Jan. 11-21, 1674-75, Coventry Papers.

[35] See Winchilsea’s despatches, passim, S.P. Turkey, 17, 18, 19; Finch Report; Rycaut’s Memoirs; Covel’s Diaries, p. 207.

[36] The Latin version of that Charter is preserved at the Public Record Office, S.P. Turkey, 1. A copy of it, with an English rendering, will be found in Hakluyt’s Navigations (Glasgow, 1904), vol. v. pp. 178-89.

[37] Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 311. For an amusing example of the young man’s Puritan scrupulosity see Covel’s Diaries, pp. 107-8.

[38] See “New Articles added to the Capitulations,” together with “The Grounds and Advantages” thereof, by Sir John Finch, in the Coventry Papers.

[39] E.g. Sir Thomas Glover to Salisbury, March 3, 1606-7; Winchilsea to Nicholas, Nov. 11-21, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 5 and 17.

[40] Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674; the Same to Coventry, Sept. 9, 1675, Coventry Papers.

[41] Finch to Arlington, July 27, S.N., 1674, Coventry Papers.

CHAPTER III
LIFE IN CONSTANTINOPLE

To a man who had passed the better part of his life in the elegant cities of Italy—cities like Florence, famous for its neat streets and palaces of sculptured stone—Constantinople assuredly was no paradise. Its streets were narrow, crooked, and dirty. The houses, built of timber and sun-dried brick, soon fell into decay. Nor was there the least attempt to make up in style what these ephemeral habitations wanted in solidity. In the whole of the Ottoman capital you would not have found one stately house. Western visitors, impressed by this phenomenon, endeavoured to account for it, each according to his lights. Some saw in it a manifestation of Turkish other-worldliness; making the Turk say to himself: “’Tis a sign of a proud, lofty and aspiring mind, to covet sumptuous houses, as if so frail a creature as man did promise a kind of immortality and an everlasting habitation to himself in this life, when alas! we are but as pilgrims here. Therefore we ought to use our dwellings as travellers do their inns, wherein if they are secured from thieves, from cold, from heat, and from rain, they seek not for any other conveniences.”[42] But this pretty theory was refuted by the fact that not only the Turks, but the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians manifested the same studious avoidance of any approach to architectural display. The true explanation was much more prosaic: a fine dwelling would have been a proof of wealth, and wealth, in a country where all men were slaves except one, was a dangerous thing. A trumped-up charge, on the sworn testimony of two incredible witnesses, was enough to bring about the ruin of the man who had the misfortune to be rich. So, while the interior of an Eastern home might teem with all the luxury that vanity could prompt and money procure, outwardly it presented to the onlooker a picture of abject meanness.[43] The picture had its charm; but it was a charm too subtle for ordinary seventeenth-century eyes. Judged by contemporary aesthetic standards, the metropolis of the Ottoman Empire was, as a predecessor of Sir John’s had described it, “a sink of men and sluttishness.”[44] Sir John must have often wondered what his cousin Winchilsea could have meant when in years gone by he had written to him: “This city I hold much better worth seeing then all Italy.”[45]

On the other hand, there were the magnificent relics of Greco-Roman antiquity, brought into strong relief by their paltry surroundings: towers and arches, aqueducts and temples, that had defied the havoc of the ages. For such antiquarian treasures seventeenth-century Europeans had an eye, and they lavished upon the past all the enthusiasm which the Orient of their day failed to evoke in them. There were also the public buildings added by the Turks—superb mosques, vaulted baths, and bazaars resplendent with the fabrics and redolent of the spices of the East. Above all, there was the matchless beauty of the situation—a natural privilege which rendered the capital of the Sultans beyond comparison the most wonderful city on the face of the earth; and of all parts of that capital not the least advantageously situated were the suburbs of Galata and Pera in which the Franks had their residence, separated from Stambul by the harbour of the Golden Horn.

Galata, the business quarter, occupying the lower slopes of a hill, and Pera, where the Embassies stood, the higher, formed an amphitheatre which commanded a panoramic view of the circumjacent seas with all their bays and islands. Down below gleamed the Golden Horn: a scene of ceaseless animation: merchant ships of all nations riding at anchor; light caïcks flitting to and fro with the grace and the swiftness of swallows; enormous, heavily gilded galleys sailing in and out, some bound north for the Black Sea, others south for the Aegean. From behind this ever-moving panorama, the city of Stambul surged up in all its majesty; a sierra of seven hills broken by the massive domes and slender minarets of innumerable mosques, it glittered in the sunlight and moonlight of the East like a jewel in a silver setting. The most precious gem in this regal jewel was the Grand Signor’s Seraglio—a gorgeous assemblage of palaces, mosques, baths, and kiosks scattered amidst gardens and groves. It covered a walled space four miles in circumference, with the Golden Horn on one side, the Sea of Marmara on the other, while round the third side, blue and limpid as the sky itself, swept the rapid stream of the Bosphorus. Across the Bosphorus, on the coast of Asia, rose the bold promontory of Scutari, its slopes encrusted with kiosks and grottos, thickets and hanging gardens, its summit crowned with the domes and minarets of a stately mosque. And close by, in striking contrast, were seen the dark cypress-groves of Scutari—a procession of mourners watching over a city of the dead. In these congenially solemn groves the Turks loved to sleep their last sleep, permitting the infidels to plant their cemeteries with other trees, but reserving the cypress jealously to themselves. Hither, to the soil of Asia, whence he had come, the Turk loved to return at the last, as if he considered himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe, as if he felt that here alone his remains would not be disturbed by the revengeful Giaour, when the day of reckoning dawned.

Amidst these exotic scenes, the witchery of which no artist has yet found means to represent on canvas, our countrymen dwelt in spacious and commodious, if unpretentious, houses, with many servants and slaves to minister to their wants. His rank naturally imposed upon the Ambassador proportionate magnificence, and before leaving England he had laid out no less than £2500 on clothes and plate: he knew that his foreign colleagues tried to outshine each other, and he was resolved not to be eclipsed by any of them.[46] The merchants also, though free from such onerous obligations, lived on a scale which at the present day would be pronounced extravagant. Every self-respecting factor kept horses, dogs, and hawks; dressed, drank, gambled—led in the East the existence his contemporaries led at home: we are dealing with English gentlemen of the Restoration, a period when the excessive austerity of the Puritan regime had yielded to a reaction of debauchery.[47] Only in the East the opportunities for self-indulgence were more ample.

No part of the globe has been so liberally blessed with the things that enter into the mouth as the Levant. Western residents and travellers grew ecstatic at the abundance of good cheer they found in Turkey and its amazing cheapness. For a halfpenny it was possible to buy bread enough for three meals; for little more than a halfpenny a robust man might get as much mutton as he could consume; a pheasant could be had for five pence, and a brace of partridges for nine farthings.[48] The soil there yields its fruits and the sea its fish in equal profusion and variety; and a temperate climate imparts to everything an exquisite flavour. Not less remarkable than the abundance of food was the multiplicity of forms under which it made its appearance on the table. Greek, Turkish, and Italian Masters had combined for centuries to bring the gentle Art of Levantine cooking to a height of perfection that only the Archimageirus of Zeus could have excelled. It is not hard to understand the sentiments of mingled pleasure and mystification with which these succulent dishes were approached by people fresh from a land where a sirloin of beef or a venison pasty represented the utmost achievements of the kitchen, and where every meal was haunted by the unsalted and unsanctified presence of the tedious boiled potato. Turkey was, indeed, a veritable Academy for any Englishman who chose to devote himself seriously and single-mindedly to the cultivation of his stomach.

As for drink—a mighty question!—at home few Englishmen could afford to intoxicate themselves and their guests properly with anything less coarse than beer; in the Levant the choicest wines were common beverages; and those Franks whose palates craved greater variety supplemented their cellars with the products of the West. Ambassadors were even privileged to import 7000 measures of wine a year duty-free. Sir John Finch, who loved the wines of Italy dearly, but could not consume in his own household more than 2000 measures, was thus able, by selling the surplus, to have his annual supply for nothing.[49]

Things being so, Britons, on the whole, found life in Turkey tolerable enough, and in a place like Constantinople well worth living. To be sure, there were frequent earthquakes and fires, which always caused inconvenience, often grave trouble, sometimes severe suffering. But the most vexatious affliction of all—Turkish oppression—was least felt at Pera. In that suburb Europeans tasted a snatch of liberty not to be found elsewhere throughout the Ottoman Empire, except at Smyrna. There hats and wigs might show themselves abroad with little fear of being struck off the wearer’s head. In each other’s houses the merchants could indulge their sociable proclivities without let or hindrance. Those among them who had more room than they knew what to do with harboured paying guests, and every now and again there arrived from England a transient visitor whom the residents entertained with hospitable prodigality; for the English in the Levant had caught all the geniality of the Levantine climate, and prided themselves on nothing more than on their warmth towards strangers.

When the summer heats and the Plague, which visited every Turkish town with devastating regularity, made Pera unendurable, the English “Nation” resorted to Belgrade—a well-wooded and well-watered, peaceful little village not more than ten miles distant, open to the fresh and wholesome breezes of the Black Sea. Here, in the company of other Franks, they could dine and dance on the grass near the rivulets and fountains as freely as in any country-place in Europe. Here the ladies also, who at Constantinople were obliged to efface themselves, more or less, in conformity to Oriental notions of decorum, joined in the amusements of the men. All this served to alleviate the pains of exile for ordinary Britons.

But alas! the best of these sources of happiness—the happiness that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse—was sealed to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern satraps—attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes, attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common run of his countrymen—that he stood in the scale of creation as far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects. This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was; and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant.

Fortunate in this respect also, Sir John Finch had under his own roof all the society he needed. It consisted of one person—Sir Thomas Baines, another Doctor of Medicine, some years his senior. Finch had made Baines’s acquaintance at Christ’s College, and from that moment the two had become inseparable. Together at Cambridge, they went together to Padua, where they read the same books and took the same degrees. When Finch returned to England in 1661, he saw to it that Baines shared his good fortune. Both were elected Fellows of the College of Physicians of London on the same day, and together they were made Doctors of Medicine at Cambridge. Finch’s devotion knew no bounds. When he was appointed Minister at Florence, he got his friend appointed physician to the Legation, interested all his relatives in him, and, through the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Conway, procured him the honour of Knighthood in 1672. After living with Finch in Italy and England, Baines followed him to Turkey in the character of a comrade and confidant.

His life-long attachment to this College chum is the one romantic episode in Sir John Finch’s history. Without wife and children, he had concentrated all his unused affections on this friend for whom he entertained an admiration little short of idolatry, to whom he communicated all his thoughts, and whose advice he sought in all his difficulties. At Constantinople it soon became a current jest that there were two Excellencies, and the merchants humorously distinguished between them, by referring to the one as the Ambassador, and to the other as the Knight or the Chevalier.[50] It must be owned that the sight of that eternal pair of middle-aged physicians turned diplomats, each wrapped up in the other and each sufficient unto the other, had its comic as well as its romantic side. They presented to our ribald factors an object lesson in what the French call égoïsme à deux—natural only in the case of married couples, especially if they have not been married long.

Truly, it was, in Sir John’s own words, “a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls”—suave et irruptum animorum connubium; and, like all unions of the kind, it owed its strength to a happy meeting of opposites. If we may judge from the correspondence of the pair, their minds belonged to widely different types. The letters of the younger man are, on the whole, simple, straightforward, and spontaneous; the writer every now and again proves himself capable of a picturesque phrase, of a pithy statement, of a sound, if not very profound, observation. On the other hand, the elder man’s ponderous and pedantic epistles are unreadable, often unintelligible; his attempts at pleasantry painful; his whole style that of a pompous pedagogue. Of the talents which Sir John attributed to him no trace is visible in these dissertations. It is impossible to find in any of them a single remark on philosophy, religion, or society which is not dreary commonplace. And the same thing applies to the records of his conversation: they reek of stale school-learning. There can be no doubt that Finch, though no dazzling genius, had the finer intellect of the two. But intellect is not everything. As the portraits of the two friends stand confronting each other, Finch’s sensitive face with its weak mouth and melancholy eyes contrasts very suggestively with Baines’s stronger and coarser countenance: look at those lips still shaped in a firm, superior, benignant smile—the smile of one sure of his own wisdom and of his power of guiding weaker mortals! It is easy to guess at a glance to whom, in this “marriage of souls,” belonged the masculine and to whom the feminine part.

SIR THOMAS BAINES.
From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.

To face p. 42.

Further, Finch’s face reveals vanity, and Baines’s letters a turn for flattery—gross and inflated beyond even a seventeenth-century measure. Thomas, clearly, had established over John an ascendancy by accustoming him to lean upon his strength and to feed upon his praises. There is also evidence to show that Thomas was not the man to relax his hold: to surrender or share a domination which interest and sentiment alike made precious to him. In 1661 Finch met in Warwickshire a young lady who had the good fortune to please him. The moment Baines got wind of this matrimonial project, he set vigorously to work to defeat it. He used many arguments of a prudential nature, but the one that clinched the matter was this: Suppose you have children, then you die, and she marries again, how can you be sure that she will not dispose of her estate to her second husband and his progeny?[51] The logic of Thomas triumphed over what John called his love, and he never again caused his friend any uneasiness upon that score. Thenceforward his whole life was annexed and welded to the life of Baines in a degree which, perhaps, has no counterpart in authentic history. As to Baines, he does not seem to have ever loved anybody except Finch and himself.

Needless to say, Sir Thomas did his best to solace Sir John for the loneliness which is the penalty of greatness. That he was a cheerful companion it would be absurd to imagine: he was just as cheerful as could be expected from one who often lay, as he himself tells us, “under the torment of gout and stone both in bladder and rheyns”[52]—common distempers of the times. Not that Finch enjoyed wild spirits either. Both were of a studious and sedentary disposition, and their long residence in Italy had confirmed their constitutional languor: so much so that their friends in England had found the ways of these “Italians,” as they nicknamed them, a little hard to understand. As a consequence, they both indulged rather freely in exercises of a theologico-philosophical character and in the pleasures of the table. For the rest, their recreations appear to have been of a strictly conventual innocence. Let us intrude for an instant upon their domestic privacy.

It is the beginning of summer, 1674, and Sir Thomas is seated at his escritoire, writing to Lord Conway. After enumerating “my Lord Ambassadour’s” multitudinous achievements, he descends to matters of a less exalted and more pleasing nature. His very style loses much of its rhetorical affectation as he writes:

“As to the House in itself, it affords no great aspect to the eye without, but truly it is very convenient within, and I think it gives great content to my Lord, as I am sure it does to me. We both taking a great delight to set in our chairs and see the birds in the court lodge upon the cypress tree with as much alacrity and security as the malefactors fly into a church in Italy or a publick Minister’s house, upon the foresight of which my Lord from his first coming gave order to all his servants not only [not] to shoot a gun at them, but not to throw a stone: insomuch that at this time we have little wrens which begin to learn to fly first from bough to bough, then from tree to tree, then from tree to the top of the house and so back again, and all under safe protection.”[53]

It is a vividly realised picture, sympathetically painted. We see, across the dead years, that long since vanished courtyard at Pera, with its tall bird-haunted cypress tree—and on the open gallery above, behind its wood railing, two clean-shaven, middle-aged English bachelors in full-bottomed wigs, seated side by side, watching the young wrens try their wings; while around them lay the splendour and the havoc of the East: a world in which semi-tones existed not—in which the dominant note was exaggeration—where life was a singular, often a sinister, mixture of brilliant light and deep gloom, and reality partook alternately of the enchantments of a dream and the horrors of a nightmare.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Busbequius (Eng. Tr., 1694), p. 18.

[43] Roger North’s Life of Sir Dudley North, pp. 118-19; Covel’s Diaries, pp. 178-9.

[44] Sir Thomas Roe to Lord Carew, May 3, 1622, Negotiations (London, 1740), p. 37.

[45] March 30, 1663, Finch Report, p. 247.

[46] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 58.

[47] See [Appendix VI].

[48] Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant, in Pinkerton’s Collection, vol. x. p. 263; Thevenot’s Travels into the Levant (Eng. Tr., 1687), Part I. pp. 27, 92; Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 58. More than two generations later, the famous French renegade Comte de Bonneval could keep an establishment including six wives and twenty horses at less than 20 sequins, or £10, a month. See his Mémoires (Paris, 1806), vol. ii. p. 339.

[49] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 58.

[50] See Life of Dudley North, passim.

[51] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 33.

[52] Baines to Conway, June 1-11, 1677, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[53] Baines to Conway, May 25, 1674, ibid.

CHAPTER IV
THE MEN ABOUT THE AMBASSADOR

Not the least of the many features that differentiated the Constantinople Embassy from all other embassies was the institution of the Dragomans[54]—persons through whom all transactions with the Porte were carried on and upon whom therefore the Ambassador had to depend for the most essential part of his work. The Dragomans, in their dual capacity of Intelligencers and Interpreters, had always been important members of the Embassy staff. But their importance had increased immeasurably since the Elizabethan tradition of appointing ambassadors who had served their apprenticeship as secretaries to their predecessors had yielded to the practice of sending out diplomats new to Turkey, her language, and her ways. Cut off from direct contact with the country, the Ambassador now relied almost entirely upon his Dragomans’ reports. The Dragomans were his eyes and his ears, as well as his mouth: they were, in fact, absolute masters of business and of their employer.

The system laboured under the usual disadvantages of dealing by proxy, and a good many more peculiar to Turkey. As Intelligencers the Dragomans were not all that might have been desired: their information was often inaccurate, and sometimes, when information failed, they, in order to keep up their reputation for omniscience, had recourse to invention. Our Ambassadors had already learnt from experience to receive their news with extreme caution.[55] Hardly more satisfactory were the Dragomans in their character of Interpreters. Absurd as it may sound, the persons who performed this most delicate and confidential function were not subjects of the sovereign they served, but of the Grand Signor: natives of Pera, mostly of Italian extraction. This rendered them very indifferent vehicles of the ambassadorial mind. When the message with which they were charged happened to be disagreeable to the Porte, they manifested the strongest disinclination to deliver it. Fear tied their tongues: they would much rather risk their employer’s displeasure than the brutal fury of an angry pasha. There was nothing to wonder at in this: Dragomans had often been drubbed, sometimes even hanged or impaled, for doing their duty. So real was the danger and so powerless was the Ambassador to protect his own servants against the savagery of their liege lords that even in his presence the Dragomans dared not translate faithfully his words, if they were of a nature to irritate his Turkish collocutor. At the mere sound of such words, they were seized with panic: their faces grew red and white by turns, their foreheads were covered with beads of sweat, their limbs trembled, their mouths went suddenly dry—as if they already felt the stick on the soles of their feet or the halter round their necks. It was no unusual thing to see the Dragoman of a European Ambassador, after stammering out an expurgated version of the message, drop on his knees before the Turkish Minister and burst into abject apologies for his temerity. At times, ingenious interpreters gifted with presence of mind were known to improvise imaginary dialogues—to substitute speeches of their own inspiration for those really made by the parties on whose behalf they acted. The position was both tragic and ludicrous; but no ambassador not utterly devoid of reason and humanity could complain. He himself, if he were in the Dragoman’s shoes, would behave as the Dragoman behaved. Even as it was, despite his non-subjection to the Grand Signor, despite also the theoretical inviolability of his person, a prudent ambassador shrank from irritating a Turkish pasha: envoys of various Powers who had forgotten to hold their tongues had been affronted, assaulted, dragged down the stairs by the hair of their heads, imprisoned in noisome dungeons. All things considered, the wonder is not so much that the Dragomans fulfilled their perilous task inadequately, as that they dared undertake it at all.

Other inconveniences connected with the system enhanced its inherent viciousness. The Dragomans of the English Embassy were Roman Catholics, and as all Roman Catholics in Turkey were protected by the representatives of the Catholic Powers, they were so much biassed in favour of their patrons that, when the interests of England clashed with those of a Catholic Power, the English Ambassador could scarcely trust them. Again, the Dragomans were often men with large families, and they were very poorly paid. The temptation therefore to betray their trust for money was hard to resist. Further, motives of religious sympathy and cupidity apart, there was the lure of vanity which frequently impelled a Dragoman to babble out the secrets of his employer in order to show his own importance. As if to multiply the dangers of indiscretion, Dragomans serving different ambassadors were often nearly related to one another, or a Dragoman who served one embassy at one time might later on transfer his services to its rival. It was even possible for a Dragoman of an embassy to become a Dragoman of the Porte, or, while employed by the embassy, to have a kinsman similarly employed at the Porte. How secrecy and fidelity under such conditions could ever be looked for it is not easy to understand.

The vices of the system were flagrant; but the difficulty of finding a remedy was no less great. An interpreter to do his duty satisfactorily had to be both competent and courageous. But no interpreter, under the Turkish rule, could possess both these qualifications in the same degree. If he was a foreigner, he could not have the necessary knowledge of the Turkish language, customs, and character. If he was a native, he could not have the necessary courage. The French, whose Dragomans had suffered most grievously from Turkish ferocity, were the only European nation to attempt a solution of the problem. Their great Minister Colbert had, a few years since, initiated a reform by sending twelve young Frenchmen to Smyrna, there to be taught in the Convent of the Capuchins Turkish, Arabic, and Modern Greek, and then be distributed among the French Consulates, the ablest of them being destined for the service of the Embassy. This departure secured to the Diplomatic and Consular services of France in the Levant a supply of interpreters who, though they might not possess a native’s intimacy with Turkish ways, could be trusted to carry out their instructions honestly and boldly. The advantage gained by this change was so patent, that the best-informed Englishmen hastened to recommend its adoption;[56] and, in fact, it was adopted by England—two hundred years later.

Meanwhile, Sir John Finch had to work through his Perote, Italian-speaking “Druggermen.” The chief of them, Signor Giorgio Draperys, “knight of Jerusalem, and of the most noble and ancient family in this country,”[57] was a man well stricken in years. He had served the English Embassy for half a century, and had witnessed all its vicissitudes under six different occupants. His long and varied experience made Signor Giorgio invaluable to a novice: no man had a more thorough acquaintance with the rules of Turkish procedure or with the usages and precedents that governed the mutual intercourse of foreign envoys than this Patriarch of Pera. His honesty was not above the normal. For instance, a Prince of Moldavia, who owed his elevation to Lord Winchilsea, presented the Dragoman with 6000 sheep for himself, and with 12,000 sheep—as well as 4000 crowns in cash, a ring worth 1000 crowns, and a horse worth 300 crowns—for the Ambassador. There is reason to believe that none of these tokens of Moldavian gratitude ever reached His Excellency.[58] Of the second Dragoman, Signor Antonio Perone, who eventually succeeded Signor Giorgio, we shall hear enough in the course of this story.

In addition, Sir John had an English Secretary, a Mr. William Carpenter, of whom little more than the name is known to us; and, besides, he was assisted by the Levant Company’s Cancellier, an officer whose business it was to draw up all legal documents and to register them in the Embassy Cancellaria. This office was at the time filled by Mr. Thomas Coke, a man small in stature, but, it would seem, of great ability and amiability.[59]

Three other Englishmen with whom business brought Sir John into frequent contact were personages sufficiently notable in themselves, and they play sufficiently prominent parts in our story to deserve special notice.

Paul Rycaut Esq. late Consul of Smyrna; Fellow of the Royall Societie.
From the Engraving by R. White after the Portrait by Sir Peter Lely.

To face p. 53.

At Smyrna he had met our distinguished Consul, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Paul Rycaut, a graduate of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an author of European reputation. As his name implies, Rycaut was of foreign extraction—the son of a wealthy banker of Brabant who, having settled in England under James I. and ruined himself for Charles I., died leaving a large family all but destitute. It fell to the lot of Paul to provide by his labours for most of these victims of Loyalty. After six arduous years at the Constantinople Embassy, as Secretary to Lord Winchilsea—who found him “so modest, discreet, able, temperate and faithfull” that he transferred him from the steward’s table to his own and treated him “more like a friend than a servant”[60]—he obtained from the Levant Company the Consulate of Smyrna. Important and lucrative as this post was, it was hardly one of those that give tranquillity to an ambitious heart or enjoyment to a cultivated mind. While performing its duties with exemplary energy and conscientiousness, Rycaut looked upon it as a stepping-stone to higher things. In 1666, during a long visit home on public business, he had brought himself to the notice of the Court by his work on The Present State of the Ottoman Empire—a book which, running into many editions and translated into French, Italian, German, and Polish, made the author famous,[61] without, however, making him what he wished to be. Lord Arlington testified to Rycaut’s “good parts” and other good qualities,[62] but did nothing for him. We may congratulate ourselves that his promotion was postponed so long; to that circumstance we are indebted for much valuable information. But Rycaut had small cause to feel pleased. The Smyrna Consulate cramped him like a prison cell. His discontent is written as plain as large print can make it in the Epistle Dedicatory prefixed to the History of the Turkish Empire which he published a few years later: “Ever since the time of Your Majesties happy Restauration,” he grumbles, “my Lot hath fallen to live and act within the Dominions of the Turk.” The same feeling is not less plain in the portrait (a fine engraving after Sir Peter Lely) which adorns the volume. It shows us a refined face that combines the irritability of a scholar with the keenness of a place-hunter; an emaciated face with eyes large, expressive and aggressive, thin lips tightly pressed, and a chin of remarkable pugnacity—the face of a man determined to get on and very angry at Fortune’s slow pace. It is said to resemble Molière’s. The resemblance certainly does not extend to a sense of humour. Perhaps it was this want (for assuredly it was not want of push) that condemned a person of Rycaut’s abilities and attainments to rust in the Consulate of Smyrna, when his intellectual inferiors became Secretaries of State in London. Charles II. had little use for men who could not laugh.

Many were the prickly problems that Sir John Finch and Mr. Paul Rycaut had to handle together during the next few years; and on all occasions the Ambassador found a most loyal and respectful lieutenant in this highly accomplished and polished Cavalier.

Of quite a different mould was the Rev. John Covel, Chaplain to the Embassy and afterwards Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge. Like Finch and Baines, Covel hailed from Christ’s College. Like them, too, he had studied Medicine in early life, but eventually discovering an easier vocation, he threw physic to the dogs, took holy orders, and got a Fellowship at his College. To him also, as to the others, the Restoration had come as a providential blessing: witness the Latin prose and English verse wherein he vented his feelings. The merits of his Latin performance were such as might have been expected from an erudite young don. Those of his English effusion may be judged by the following sample:

The horrible winter’s gone,

And we enjoy a cheerful spring;

The kind approach of the Sun

Gives a new birth to every thing.

Among other things, it gave a new birth to the songster’s prospects.

In 1670 an adventure beckoned the Rev. John from afar, and his heart leapt to greet it. The Constantinople chaplaincy had fallen vacant by the retirement of the learned Dr. Thomas Smith (known to history as “Rabbi” Smith). There was the romance of the East with its new skies and seas and lands; there were curious old creeds to be investigated, a strange world of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Franks, with their various ways of life: by all means let us go! He obtained the appointment from the Levant Company, and from the King a dispensation which enabled him to retain his Fellowship at the same time. Thus, while drawing at Constantinople a handsome salary and considerable perquisites for the little he did, our lucky divine also received from Cambridge, for doing nothing at all, “all and singular the profits, dividends, stipends, emoluments, and dues belonging to his Fellowship in as full and ample manner to all intents and purposes as if he were actually resident in the College.”[63]

It may be doubted whether a happier Englishman ever trod the soil of the Grand Signor than the Rev. John. He revelled in the rich colours and savours of the Levant. The ceremonies of the Turkish Court and the rites of the Greek Church were a perennial fountain of interest to him, while the noisy wrangles of theology touched a vibrant chord in his sympathetic breast. Did Eastern Christians believe that the bread and wine in the Eucharist turned into flesh and blood, or did they believe that it remained bread and wine? This riddle raged just then at Constantinople; and the reverberations of the controversy, expanding in wider and yet wider circles, reached Rome, Paris, London, stirring up everywhere suitably attuned minds to intense, passionate, and to us almost incomprehensible virulence. The Rev. John plunged into the transubstantial vortex with all the polemical zest of a theologian and with a vague notion of writing a big book about it one day. He discussed the holy and unwholesome question with everybody—Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant—he could lay hands on, always ending at the point whence he started—the creed of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Not less eagerly did our Chaplain plunge into the ecclesiastical politics than into the metaphysical polemics of the place. The age-long feud between Greek and Latin was then blended with the squabbles of rival Greek pretenders to the Patriarchal throne of Constantinople: Patriarchs arose and Patriarchs fell as Grand Vizirs did formerly; anathematising their predecessors cordially and being as cordially anathematised by their successors, to the Rev. John’s indescribable delight.[64] That was life, pardieu—the absorbing interplay of warm human hearts and even warmer human heads.

Though Covel devoted some attention to archaeology, it was with a lack of interest which he is at no pains to conceal. He could hardly express his scorn for the “whiflers” who came out of England and France and careered over the Ottoman Empire buying or stealing classical antiques. The lore he really loved was folklore: Greek legends, Turkish songs, living superstitions. If we except manuscripts dealing with early Heresies, for which he had a passion (even the sanest of us are mad), the Rev. John only collected curios that appealed to his sense of the beautiful—if he came across them cheap. For the same reason he had an appreciative eye for costumes, jewels, carpets, and other articles of personal or domestic adornment: they all served to make life pleasant. On all these topics our Chaplain would talk and scribble with unflagging volubility—“at full gallop,” to use his own racy simile—repeating himself, digressing, returning to the subject, straying from it again, losing himself in a labyrinth of minute irrelevancies. Fond of shooting and riding, a friend of gay young men and no enemy to gay young women, especially pretty ones, the Rev. John was immensely popular with our factors, who found in him a “papas”[65] after their own hearts.

To the Ambassador also the Rev. John was very acceptable. Going everywhere, seeing everybody, and hearing everything, the divine had much to say that was useful for a diplomat to know, particularly about Greek Patriarchs, Latin friars and their quarrels; a subject, as we shall see hereafter, by no means foreign to an English ambassador’s business in those days. Precluded by his dignity from crossing the water in person, Sir John could employ the Rev. John as a channel of communication between Pera and the Phanar. And the Rev. John, as one gathers from his own voluminous writings, was versatile enough to act as the friend of all contending parties in turn, according to the exigencies of the political vane, far too worldly-wise to let consistency interfere with preferment. For Covel, though content with the present, never forgot the future; he was not less anxious to get on than Rycaut, only built on softer, more supple and sinuous lines, he glided where the other stumbled.[66] Altogether an astonishingly brisk, jovial, garrulous parson of six-and-thirty this, full of harmless little vanities, human levities, and healthy little profanities.

But the most striking personality among the English residents, and the one Sir John Finch had most to do with, was the Treasurer of the Levant Company at Constantinople, the Honourable (afterwards Sir) Dudley North, younger son of Lord North,—a handsome man of thirty-three, already eminent and destined to be famous. In literary attainments North fell far short of Rycaut and Covel, but in natural intelligence, in initiative, in resource, in tenacity, in self-command, in knowledge of the world, and in the other qualities which conduce to success in life, he was surpassed by no man of his time. His career is one of the most deeply interesting documents that have come down to us from the seventeenth century; even episodes apparently trifling in themselves become full of meaning when viewed in connection with the general character of the times.

Like all younger sons Dudley had to carve his own way to independence. One of his brothers went to the Bar,—ending as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in succession to Sir John Finch’s own brother,—another went into the Church. Dudley might have followed in the footsteps of either. But the Bar required much reading, the Church imposed many restraints. Dudley, not studious enough for the one profession and too lively for the other, revealed at an early age the calling for which Nature designed him. At school, while proving himself a hopeless dunce at book-work, he drove a most profitable trade among the other boys, buying cheap and selling dear. Manifestly commerce was his metier.

In seventeenth-century England no social cleavage existed between the world of commerce and the world of the Court. Since Feudalism had expired in the Wars of the Roses, differences of birth had ceased to divide the landed from the moneyed classes. All the county families had their kinsmen in the towns, and the ambition of many a nobleman’s younger son was to become an alderman, to attain which eminence he had to serve his apprenticeship behind the counter and to work with his hands like a menial. The snobbishness which again divides the two worlds in our day did not set in until the latter part of the eighteenth century. It is necessary to emphasise this fact in order to correct an erroneous impression promulgated by brilliant and superficial historians.[67]

So young Dudley was forthwith placed in a London “writing school” to acquire the arts of book-keeping and penmanship. At that school he gave further evidence of his financial genius by extricating himself from the clutches of his creditors through the simple device of presenting his noble parents with faked bills of expenses—not crudely, as an amateur might, but as a born artist would. The next step in our promising youth’s fortunes was his being bound apprentice to a Turkey Merchant. By this time Dudley, with remarkable precocity, had sown his wild oats and had made up his mind on the one thing needful. As his master’s limited business left him ample leisure, he employed it in helping his landlord, a packer, at the packing-press, whereby he not only eked out his slender allowance, but also acquired experience which was to be of great value to him—the skilful packing of cloth sent to Turkey being one of the first mysteries of the trade a novice had to master. His initiation over, North at the age of eighteen was sent out to Smyrna as a factor. For capital to trade with on his own account he had only four hundred pounds advanced him by his family, and he depended therefore chiefly on the commissions from his master, supplemented by an occasional order from some other Turkey Merchants he had ingratiated himself with in London by officiously doing odd jobs for them. These resources were very meagre, and the standard of living in the Smyrna Factory, as at the other Levant factories, was very high. Nowhere did conviviality reach greater heights.[68] With extraordinary strength of mind young North refused to bow to fashion. He lodged humbly, dressed plainly, fed simply, kept no horses, dogs, or hawks, made in every way a virtue of penury; his settled principle being to save abroad that he might one day be able to spend at home. From that principle neither the gibes of his fellows nor the impulses of his own young blood ever swayed him. Once the others pressed him very earnestly to go a-hunting with them. The wise youth, not to give offence, complied—but with characteristic originality, instead of buying a horse he hired an ass.

In this thrifty way, mindful of his high aim and philosophically indifferent to public opinion, North passed several years at Smyrna, working hard, thinking hard, conciliating by his wit the young whom his eccentricity would otherwise have alienated, earning by his capacity the respect of the old, and making his company sought after by “the top merchants of the Factory.” His letters are full of acute observations and mature reflections on all matters that fell within his vision. His curiosity was as voracious as Covel’s, but it did not feed on the external aspect of things. North took nothing for granted. He burnt with a desire to know the cause and reason of everything—from an earthquake to a fever, from the navigation of a ship or the construction of a building to the government of an empire. He was perpetually on the path of inquiry and discovery, never allowing his faculties to rest or rust. While engaged in the practice of commerce, he brought his vigorous analytical mind to bear on its underlying laws, striking out, in opposition to the generally accepted views of his day, a theory of trade which anticipated David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s economic philosophy by nearly a hundred years.

The chance for which North waited and prepared came at last. There was a celebrated house of English commission agents and merchants at Constantinople—the house of Messrs. Hedges and Palmer. Their business was very large, but through mismanagement it had fallen into the utmost confusion. North was invited to become a partner and set things straight. He jumped at the invitation. Through his doggedness, resourcefulness, and adroitness, old debts were recovered, compounded for, or written off, the book-keeping department was reorganised; and order was evolved out of chaos. As soon as Mr. Hedges saw the business fairly under way he retired to England at the beginning of 1670, leaving him and Palmer to carry on by themselves. Then the trouble began. Palmer was everything that North was not. He lived in a great house and at great expense. His table was loaded with plenty, and guests were never absent from it. They came at noon and spent the rest of the day helping their host to empty his bottles. By the time North had finished his work Palmer had finished his dinner. North returned home very tired and found his partner very drunk. After many unpleasant scenes, he took a strong line. He wrote to all the correspondents of the firm in Europe, explaining the reasons which led him to break with his partner and soliciting the continuance of their patronage to himself. His reputation stood so high, and apparently Palmer’s so low, that the principals did not hesitate.

This may be described as our Factor’s first stride. He was now captain of his own ship. Only, as English merchants did not care to trust single agents abroad, because on their deaths, or even in their lives, there was always danger of embezzlement, he thought fit to take into partnership his younger brother Montagu, who, like himself, had been bred a Turkey Merchant and then resided as factor at Aleppo. Henceforward North’s career was one continuous run of prosperity. He soon became the chief English merchant in Constantinople, was elected Treasurer by the Levant Company, and went on amassing wealth at a great rate, deeming no enterprise too high or too low for the end he had in view, imparting to everything he did a touch of his own original genius.

The ordinary Englishman in the polyglot Levant was content to transact his business through interpreters. North would have nothing to do with vicarious communication. He acquired Italian, which was the Lingua Franca of the Near East, the debased Spanish spoken by the Jews of Turkey—descendants of the refugees expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella—who had made themselves indispensable as brokers to Franks and Turks alike, and (a much rarer accomplishment) the Turkish tongue. Moreover, he learnt the laws of Turkey. In litigation before a Turkish court he was his own pleader, as in conversation he was his own interpreter. He did not, however, trust implicitly to his own intimacy with the subtleties of Ottoman Justice. He kept a tame Cadi to whose advice he had recourse upon occasion. Further, before a trial, he took care to make his case known to the judge and to quicken the judge’s intelligence with a present. When his case came on, if North had no true witnesses to produce, he produced false ones. Indeed, he preferred the latter kind on principle, having found by experience that a false witness was safer; for, if the judge had a mind to confuse a witness, an honest man who did not know the game could not so well wriggle through the net of captious questions as a rogue versed in all its rules.

The Honourable Dudley showed equal tact in his other dealings with the Turks. Not the least remunerative of his occupations was usury—lending money to necessitous pashas at 20 or 30 per cent. Now, by Turkish law all interest was illegal, and the debtor could not be forced to pay a farthing on that score. So a world of cunning and caution was needed, and the wisest might suffer through inadvertence. To avoid accidents, North combined hospitality with business. He built and furnished a room where his victims could loll on soft cushions, sip endless cups of coffee and liquids stronger than coffee, smoke endless tchibooks in safety (under Mohammed IV. tobacco was rigorously forbidden), and be fleeced in comfort. The host, it goes without saying, was not fastidious about the morals of his guests. No narrow prejudices of virtue ever hindered his familiarity with all human beings that chance might fling in his way. The sinner and the saint were equally welcome, so long as there was anything to be got out of them. Among his most intimate boon companions and clients was a particularly unsavoury captain of one of the Grand Signor’s galleys. North used to lend him money and also to palm off upon him his rotten cloths.

The fertility of North’s invention did not stop there. His shrewd study of human nature had taught him that men are influenced by externals far more than by essentials. He endeavoured to make the Turks feel at home with him by making himself outwardly like one of them. Knowing their prejudice against clean-shaven faces he grew a prodigious pair of moustaches, such as the best of them had. He tried to sit cross-legged, as they sat, and learnt to write as they wrote, resting the paper on his left hand, and making the lines slope from the left top corner downwards. He taught himself to use parables, apologues, and figures of speech, as they did, and to swear as they swore. Of this last accomplishment he was especially proud. He held that for purposes of vituperation Turkish was more apt than any other language, and he grew so accustomed to its aptness that even when he returned home his tongue would run into Turkish blasphemy of itself. Let us add another external trait that tended to make this infidel acceptable to true believers, though it was a trait for which he was indebted to nature rather than to self-culture. “It seems,” says his biographer, “that after he found his heart’s ease at Constantinople he began to grow fat, which increased upon him, till, being somewhat tall and well whiskered, he made a jolly appearance, such as the Turks approve most of all in a man.”

North’s pains to please had not been wasted. The Turks whom he entertained at 30 per cent were so delighted with this wonderful Giaour that they pressed him to become really and wholly one of them by abjuring his false religion. North always parried these awkward blandishments with his usual adroitness. He never argued on religion, or indeed on any other subject, with the Turks. Nobody likes to be contradicted, and the Turks were not accustomed to bear dissent from a Giaour. Our Treasurer would not lose profitable customers for any consideration. He had not gone to Constantinople to quarrel but to climb; and he had long since learnt that at Constantinople, as elsewhere, climbing could only be performed in the same posture as crawling. So without attempting to argue, he laughed away the suggestion of apostasy by saying, “My father wore a hat and left that hat to me. I wear it because my father left it, and”—clapping his hands on his head—“I will wear it as long as I live!” He knew the Turks well enough to know that he lost nothing in their eyes by his attachment to the paternal hat. For though keen on proselytising—always by temptation and persuasion, hardly ever by constraint—they had little respect for the proselyte.

By such means our Treasurer waxed not only wealthy but also wise. The Turks, as a rule, were too proud to converse familiarly with Christians, thinking (perhaps not without reason) that few Christians were worthy of their confidence. The result was that the English and other Franks who lived amongst them and dealt with them knew about as much of Turkish life, of Turkish ways of thought, of Turkish maxims of conduct, as an undesirable alien dwelling in Whitechapel knows of English life. Dudley North was the only Frank who, thanks to his natural adaptability and flexibility, had contrived to insinuate himself, more or less, into the spirit of Turkey. On those occasions of convivial expansion, while his guests sedulously swilled his liquids, North not less sedulously pumped their minds. He picked up every hint that dropped from their lips, hoarded it in his retentive memory, connected it with other hints, and, assisted by uncommonly quick powers of deduction and induction, learnt a good deal more in five minutes than the average European would in as many months. Conscious of his unique position as a first-hand authority on the Turks, he thought very little of Rycaut as an expert in the religion, manners, and politics of the Ottoman Empire. He described his work as very shallow. Once he went over the whole of it, and noted on the margin its errors. That copy, with some other curiosities he had collected and a Turkish dictionary he had compiled, was stolen from him. He could never discover the thief, but he thought that the things he had lost might perhaps be found among the belongings of the Rev. John Covel.

From this it would appear that the Consul and the Chaplain had not an admirer in our Treasurer. Nor, it may be presumed, had he in them fanatical worshippers.

Such was the Honourable Dudley: independent, self-reliant, holding in profound contempt the weaknesses, stupidities, and conventionalities of his neighbours; yet withal knowing how to use them for his own ends; a man infinitely flexible of plan, but fixed of purpose, and, happen what might, intent not to play the dilettante in this world.[69]

FOOTNOTES:

[54] “Dragoman” is of course a clumsy transliteration of the Turkish, or rather Arabic, Targuman, interpreter. Seventeenth-century Englishmen gave to this word many forms, more or less fantastic and more or less remote from the original (drichman, truckman, etc.), but it most commonly figures as Druggerman (pl. Druggermen).

[55] See e.g. Harvey to Arlington, Dec. 4, 1670; April 30, July 19, 27, 1671, S.P. Turkey, 19. But the most eloquent testimonial to Dragoman information is furnished by Harvey’s Secretary: “Here seldome happens anything worthy remarke and when there does it is so uncertainly reported to us by our Druggermen who are our only Intelligencers, that experience makes us very incredulous; what wee heare one day is com̴only contradicted the next, and shou’d I give you a dayly account of things according to your desire, my busines wou’d bee almost every other Letter to disabuse you in what I had writt to you before.”—Geo. Etherege to Joseph Williamson; Endorsed: “R. 8 May, 1670,” ibid.

[56] Rycaut’s Present State, pp. 169-70. For examples of the terrorism exercised by the Turks towards European envoys and their Dragomans, see that work, pp. 155 foll., as well as the same author’s History of the Turkish Empire, and his Memoirs, passim.

[57] Finch to Coventry, Jan. 6-16, 1675-76, Coventry Papers.

[58] See Finch Report, p. 521.

[59] “A man of singular parts, an excellent gentleman’s companion, capable to undertake and go through with any business whatsoever.”—Lord Pagett to the Right Hon. James Vernon, July 23, 1698, S.P. Turkey, 21.

[60] Winchilsea to Sir Heneage Finch, Jan. 11, 1662 [-3], Finch Report, p. 233. How much the Ambassador owed to his Secretary is shown by a comparison between his despatches and Rycaut’s Memoirs.

[61] Pepys, after the Great Fire, which burnt most of the first edition, had to pay 55 shillings for a copy. It is true that this was one of the six copies printed with coloured pictures, “whereof the King and Duke of York and Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arlington had four.”—Diary, March 20, April 8, 1667.

[62] Arlington to Winchilsea, Oct. 13, 1666, Finch Report, p. 442.

[63] “Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel,” in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, Introd. p. xxix. This essay can be safely recommended only to experts capable of checking its innumerable ineptitudes.

[64] See such a scene in his Diaries, p. 145, where for the printed date “Nov. 8th 1674” read “Nov. 8th 1671” (cp. his Account of the Greek Church, Pref. p. xi).

[65] Greek for priest: so the English in the Levant styled their parsons familiarly.

[66] Among the State Papers at the P.R.O. (Turkey, 19) there are several letters from him to Lord Arlington and his secretary Joseph Williamson. The one in which Covel congratulates this very mediocre gentleman (to whom he was a perfect stranger) on his elevation to the post of Principal Secretary of State, dated “Pera, Jan. 8th 1674-5,” breaks all the records of adulation known even to that sycophantic age.

[67] See [Appendix VII].

[68] See [Appendix VIII].

[69] My sketch of Dudley North is based on the Life of him by Roger North. It is amusing to find the biographer, who idealised and idolised his brother, holding him up as a pattern of truthfulness, probity, and honour, and at the same time relating all the above facts, without the least suspicion of the impression that some of them might convey to an unbiassed reader.

CHAPTER V
STRENUA INERTIA

We must now return to Sir John Finch.

We left him in the middle of 1674 at Pera, and there we still find him at the end of the year. In the interval the Grand Vizir, after a successful summer’s campaign, had returned to Adrianople and taken up his winter pastime—negotiations for peace. French emissaries and Hungarian malcontents fostered these attempts with all their might in the hope of turning the attention of the Turks against their Austrian enemy. The Turks, Sir John understood, were “heartily weary of this lean warr in so cold and beggarly a country, having spent allready in it 13 Millions of Dollars,” but as the Poles were in precisely the same mood, Ahmed Kuprili, like a good diplomat, had no mind to come to terms in a hurry. Hostilities, therefore, were to be continued, but in a languid fashion, and to be pleasantly diversified with festivities. The Sultan had decided to pass the next season in mirth and jollity, celebrating the circumcision of his son and the marriage of his daughter. Both these interesting domestic events had been in contemplation since 1669—when the boy was about six and the girl not more than one year old; but circumstances over which the happy father had no control had caused their postponement. They were at last to take place in the spring of 1675, “with all the magnificence that at such a feast can be shown. The Records of the Serraglio here being to this effect sent for to Adrianople, it being 60 years since this publick festivall has bin celebrated.” So Sir John reported, adding, “My Audience I have designd’ to be at the same time that I may see the Grandeur of this Empire in all its glory; I imagine that I shall see a Great Army, Great Quantity of Excellent Horses; Most rich furniture and Livery’s as to Jewells and all Pompe of Embroaderys.”[70]

It would have been better for Sir John, if he had hastened to a Court whither business called him, and where he was expected, instead of waiting for festivals to which he had not been invited. But, at any rate, in the months that were yet to elapse before he moved, he found at Constantinople plenty of scope for his diplomatic skill.

First of all, it was in these months that the thread of Sir John Finch’s career became intertwined with that of his French colleague, the extravagant, eccentric, magnificent, and altogether picturesque Marquis de Nointel, who aimed at notability and achieved notoriety. He broke in upon Sir John’s life at this moment like a flaming meteor, to illumine it or otherwise we need not say: perhaps the story itself will show. The connection was inevitable. By the Treaty signed at Dover in May 1670, Charles, for a consideration which he hoped would enable him to settle domestic affairs to his own liking, had bound himself, in foreign affairs, to the chariot of Louis. Thanks to this covenant, the secular antagonism between the Governments of England and France had ceased, and together with it the friction between their representatives at the Porte. This is not to say that English diplomacy in Turkey had become entirely subservient to French diplomacy. Sir John’s immediate predecessor Harvey, as is made abundantly clear by his despatches, knew perfectly well where to draw the line. During his last two years at Constantinople (1671-1672) he had lived on the most intimate terms with Nointel. Yet not only he never did anything calculated to prejudice the interests of his country, but showed the greatest vigilance in checking every encroachment on the part of his friend: watching his attempts to obtain from the Porte privileges detrimental to English commerce or prestige, preparing to counteract all such attempts, if necessary, and reporting home the French Ambassador’s failures with undisguised satisfaction.[71] In the queer business of diplomacy co-operation on some points does not preclude opposition on others, and the closest friendship can flourish beside the bitterest enmity. It is perhaps the only field of human activity that presents such a constant combination of incompatibles. It was part of Sir John’s duty to continue this qualified cordiality.

Unfortunately, since his arrival, there had occurred some incidents which, unless very tactfully handled, threatened to jeopardise the success of his efforts.

Although the Courts of England and France were at this time allies, the English and French nations in the Levant continued to be as, without interruption, they had always been, jealous rivals in trade and everything else; and the intercourse between them had not been improved by the character of that alliance: the English felt irritated at the humiliating position in which the policy of Charles placed them, while the French felt proportionately vain of the eminence they owed to the power of Louis. In these circumstances every tiff was magnified into a tempest, as must be the case whenever the point at issue, however trivial in itself, can be brought into any relation with national pride. When men meet each other in a spirit of discord, predisposed at every moment to give or receive offence, how soon is difference converted into hostility, hardened into hatred, exasperated into rage. What folly and outrage may not be expected to ensue! These psychological conditions rendered the incidents Sir John had to deal with serious—even alarming.

The first had occurred at the very moment of his landing at Smyrna. A number of French merchants had been sent by their Consul to greet him and to grace his entry into the town. But the cavalcade had scarcely moved when a lively dispute about precedence broke out between the French and the English Factors, and the former—hot-tempered and not overbred Marseillese for the most part—in spite of Consul Rycaut’s endeavours to appease them, left the procession, hurling at the English words unfit for polite ears. After this scene Sir John during his sojourn at Smyrna received from the French “Nation” none of those civilities to which the representative of a Court in alliance with theirs was entitled, nor any mark of respect from the French ships on his departure, though all the other European vessels in the harbour hoisted their flags and fired their guns in his honour. Sir John was sorely vexed: he had intended his advent to be an occasion for strengthening Anglo-French relations, and it had been the signal for fresh animosities. Doubtless he would have offered an explanation to the French Ambassador as soon as he reached Constantinople, but that gentleman was at the time away on a tour through the Levant—visiting the various centres of French enterprise, commercial and religious, and spreading the fame of France over the Orient. Thus the matter remained pending, and meanwhile to the Smyrna incident had been added another at Aleppo.

On June 22nd, 1674, three Majorca corsairs—part of a squadron of 20 that was infesting the Syrian coasts—entered the port of Scanderoon, where an English man-of-war, the Sweepstakes, lay refitting after a bad storm, and two French merchantmen ready to sail for home. On the appearance of the corsairs the French vessels besought the protection of the English warship, the captain of which, though in a sad plight himself—his topmast was down—promised to protect them, on condition they took no action until they saw him begin. In accordance with this promise, when the pirate flagship came within speaking distance, he hailed her and warned her not to violate the peace. The pirate replied in the affirmative, and then, passing under the stern of the Sweepstakes, cast anchor between her and the French vessels. The latter, panic-stricken, fired, whereupon the Majorcans made short work of them. The French of Aleppo furiously denounced the English commander to the Turkish authorities as an accomplice of the pirates, and, when they had cooled a little, referred their grievance to M. de Nointel, who just then was at Tripoli in Syria. The English Consul of Aleppo stopped the mouth of the Turkish governor with a bribe of 1500 dollars and wrote to the French Ambassador the truth of the matter. But Nointel, unconvinced, sent to Sir John the French version of the affair, accusing the English commander of treachery and collusion, and asking that Finch should give a proof of his friendship and at the same time furnish the King of England with the means of restoring the honour of his flag by procuring the punishment of one who, whether from interest or from whatever other motive, had tarnished it in such a cowardly manner.[72]

This “imbroyl” had cost the English Factory no small trouble. Nevertheless, when presently M. de Nointel came to Aleppo, our factors went out in a body to meet him—a troop of young cavaliers whose looks, mounts, and garments excited in the French Ambassador’s entourage admiration and envy mingled with astonishment. Why, these English traders were cadets of good family—even “des fils de milords,” making their own fortunes in a far-away land! But M. de Nointel spurned them, for they had come without their Consul, and therefore their homage was not “dans les formes.”[73]

Evidently the noble Marquis was, to use the slang of the times, “in a Huff”; and it was in no amiable frame of mind that, on the 31st of December, the very anniversary of Sir John’s arrival, he touched at Smyrna on his return voyage.

Our Factory seized the opportunity to pay the French back in kind: neglect for neglect, and slight for slight. Twenty-four boats, carrying the French Consul and all his compatriots—also the Consuls of Venice, Genoa, and Messina, each in a boat flying his national colours—met the man-of-war that bore the noble Marquis in the middle of the bay; but of the English Nation there was no sign or ensign. Neither did the good ship Hunter that chanced to be in port hang out her “Ancient” or fire a gun as the French Ambassador passed by. We simply did not know that “any such person was come.” The French received exactly the treatment they had meted out to us a year ago. “Onely our Consul did more like a Gentleman then theirs.” That this snub might not seem strange to the noble Marquis, Mr. Rycaut sent him a letter in beautiful French, explaining at length the weighty reasons of national dignity which compelled us to abstain from paying his Excellency the homage, etc. M. de Nointel returned a verbal answer: he was sorry for that misunderstanding, but he was none the less the courtly Consul’s friend and servant. “Thus farr things seemd’ to looke like reciprocations, and to be layd asleep.” But Eris—the dread goddess of strife—slept not. She lay awake revolving in her heart how to set the “Nations” by the ears. And behold: twenty-four hours after, at break of day, discord broke forth afresh.

As dawn spread her saffron twilight over the Bay of Smyrna, two French ships sailed in: they came from Marseilles, bringing, among other things, many letters for the English Factory. The Hunter did not salute them. And M. de Nointel retaliated by detaining the English letters. Let it be said at once that this fresh neglect had nothing of human design in it: it was a pure accident—solely the work of the mischievous goddess aforesaid. The commander of the Hunter, in Sir John’s own words, “having bin merry over night, was not so early in the morning fitted either for ceremony or buisenesse.” Mr. Rycaut, after reprimanding him very severely, sent to the French Consul his excuses, protesting that what seemed a deliberate affront was really done without order and was due entirely to the fact that Captain Parker had passed the night ashore—folk at all acquainted with the traditions of Smyrna did not need to be told more. He begged that the letters might be delivered. But our candid apology met with a worse response than it deserved. The French Consul, in a mighty passion and with much noise, cried out that his Ambassador was highly offended with Mr. Rycaut, that he regarded both him and his Nation as enemies, and that his Excellency was resolved not only to keep those letters, but also to give orders at Marseilles to throw overboard all English despatches that should be consigned to French vessels.

This was surely hitting below the belt: this was degrading a stately duel to the level of a sordid business squabble. Not thus did Mr. Rycaut understand the law of retaliation. He sent his passionate colleague word that this was more than the English in time of war did to their foes; but it mattered not: every day the Smyrna factors expected English ships which would bring them copies of their letters, and also many letters for the French, which he would deliver, notwithstanding the detention of ours. But both this and several subsequent applications remained fruitless: the English mail was kept from the 2nd of January until the 8th of February, to the great prejudice of the whole Levant Company and to the scandalisation of all disinterested foreigners who, looking upon letters as the life of trade, pronounced the interception of them an act unfriendly and all the more unpardonable since the Dutch, who were actually at war with France, had their mail duly delivered to them. Meanwhile Mr. Rycaut makes another effort “to moderate,” as he says, “the heat of contests, not knowing how farre they may proceed nor in what point they may terminate.” Two English ships, the William and John and the Bonaventure, as they came into port, saluted, by order of their Consul, the French man-of-war; but they received no return of the compliment by express order from the French Ambassador. So pass the days; and one’s hopes of reconciliation are baulked; and Eris goes on adding fuel to the flame....

The French then, as now, were governed by their hearts more than by their heads. But, in the present instance, they were not prompted wholly by wounded amour propre. Their vindictiveness had its roots somewhat deeper. Just before M. de Nointel’s arrival at Smyrna a French manufacturer of spurious dollars had been detected by an interpreter of the English Embassy who had had a number of such coins foisted upon him, and through Mr. Rycaut’s exertions had been caught in the act and committed to the French Consul’s prison, whence, however, he was soon after released. In the same way, during the last year, two or three other French coiners had been exposed and allowed to escape, the French authorities, in order to save the face of their Nation, smothering the crime and spiriting away the criminals. The English, however, whose business suffered by the circulation of false money, considered it a vital interest to bring the culprits to book, and Mr. Rycaut, despite the rejection of his apologies, lodged a vigorous protest with the French Ambassador against the release of that offender. M. de Nointel, in a very short and very sharp reply, characterised the Consul’s Memorial as “ripiena di falsità”—“full of falsehood”—denouncing the English factors as abettors of the forgeries, and declaring that he would demand from their Ambassador reparation for the “calumny.” This scurrilous reply inflamed the whole English colony. In a petition to Sir John Finch they indignantly repudiated Nointel’s aspersion—“an accusation of this nature, given under the handwriting of an Ambassador,” they said, “carry’s force of beliefe and weight and authority in it selfe”: what would the Levant Company think of them: what would be the impression upon their principals, “and perhaps some of our Relations at home?” Therefore, they concluded, “Wee most humbly beseech Your Excellency to take this matter into your serious consideration, that in some publick manner the ancient repute of our Nation may be justify’d and maintaind’, and that this occasion may be so improved by a strict examination of this affayr as may wholely discover and disappoint the farther progress of false coyners by the punishment of whom others taking example may be deterr’d.”[74]

Here was a pretty state of things for a diplomat anxious to consolidate the Anglo-French alliance. But diplomacy is nothing if not the application of intelligence and tact to the management of international susceptibilities. Sir John could not believe that M. de Nointel would push matters so far as to make accommodation impossible. Their correspondence had hitherto been marked by a friendliness which he hoped a personal interview would not diminish. Certainly he intended to do all that in him lay to preserve a good understanding with the impetuous Frenchman. At the same time, he was not prepared to sacrifice one jot of his dignity. “If He comes in Person to make me a Visit as Ambassadours of long Residence, are obligd’ to them that come after them;” he wrote to the Secretary of State, “Our Intercourse will not easily breake off; But if by the returning newly from a long Journy, He hopes, or designs, to evade that Act of respect due to my character; His Majesty’s Honour will never permitt us to meet. But,” he added, “the Prudence of His Excellency conversant with buisenesse; will I presume never putt me upon that necessity.”

A few days afterwards M. de Nointel arrived at Constantinople,[75] and immediately Sir John sent his Secretary to inform him of a fact with which the Marquis was already perfectly well acquainted: namely, that he had come here, whilst Nointel was touring, as English Ambassador to the Porte, and to congratulate him on his safe return to his accustomed residence: so there could be no doubt which of the two was the new-comer and entitled to the first visit. Very politely Nointel, within half-an-hour, sent his Secretary to tell Finch that it was that Secretary’s fault that he had been forestalled, adding that he desired very close relations with him. Finch thanked the Marquis, assuring him that, on his own part, nothing would be wanting to promote such relations, “since that, there passing between both the Kings our Masters a friendship of most entire confidence, t’ would be scandalous in the face of the world for their Ministers to admitt of a conversation that had anything repugnant to intimacy.” Would the noble Marquis take the hint? Desire for cordiality battled with sense of dignity in Sir John’s bosom, filling it with tremulous speculation: “When He has made me a visit, as according to His obligation He is bound, and His Secretary tells me He designs; I shall then see upon what Basis our conversation is like to be built. I have reason to believe, if once wee meet, that all the past misunderstandings will be rectifyd’ and redressd.” But would they meet? Would the noble Marquis be reasonable enough to pay the first visit?

For about a fortnight this question racked the bosom of Sir John. During that fortnight the Carnival ended and Lent began. M. de Nointel, a good Catholic, sent to Sir John “for some white Herrings.” Sir John gave his Excellency not only herrings, but “all the sorts of our English salt fish” that were to be found among our factors at Galata. Not to be outdone in generosity, his Excellency “made a return of a Doz: bottles of Vin de St Laurens and a Barell of Cyprus Birds”—a veritable Trojan of a Frenchman this: rare wines and birds for white herrings. It augured well. Better still, at the end of the fortnight M. de Nointel’s Chief Dragoman made Sir John “a very large complement in his Name; and the Visit is appointed at three of the clock this afternoon.”

Sir John, you see, and from this you may gauge his trepidation, rushed to his escritoire and picked up his quill the moment the Dragoman was gone: he could not wait until the visit was over to let the Secretary of State know how it went off: he must needs relieve his heart by pouring out what was in it: “When I receive him, this being the first time wee have seen each other, I shall give a fayr guesse how affayrs are like to proceed between us.” It would all depend on the Marquis’s manners and pretensions: he would have measure for measure: neither more nor less: “This, Sir, you may be assurd’ of, I shall not part with the least puntiglio of the King’s Honour, or the Publick Interest. And I am halfe perswaded He will decline the trespassing against either, for I hear that He is a Prudent, and Good Naturd’ Gentleman, but how he comes to be misled by false informations I know not.”

The momentous interview took place on the 24th of February 1675. It lasted three hours—three hours spent mostly “in Expostulations upon the mutuall dissatisfactions receivd’ and given.” Item was set against item, in the usual debit-and-credit style, so that it might be ascertained on whose side lay the balance of offence. And now it transpired that, after all their neglects at his entrance into Smyrna, our factors had inflicted upon M. de Nointel an affront of a peculiarly exasperating nature. It was this: one fine day, as the noble Marquis was passing by the sea-shore, he espied on a gallery that overlooked the sea three or four of those blades. Did they salute him? Far from it: the moment they saw him, they set their hats fast upon their heads, lest peradventure the wind should blow them off and the accident be construed into a salute, and then sat still with their arms “a kimbow.” Stifling his wrath, the Marquis tried a ruse, by ordering those of his retinue who followed close behind him to salute first, which was accordingly done; but it worked nothing: the young Englishmen kept their original posture, for all the world as if they were not aware of his Excellency’s existence. What had Sir John to set against this piece of cool effrontery? Sir John rose to the occasion: “As to the unmannerly young men; I could not but confesse That it was high rudenesse”; but when he was at Smyrna he passed, not once but several times, under the French Consul’s gallery without his taking any notice of him: “And this was done by a Magistrate in goverment who should know and practise more Civility.” Having thus beaten back the attack, Sir John proceeded to carry the war into the enemy’s territory: “I told Him He must now Give me Leave to Instance in Two things which I had reason to beleive He could not Parallel.” The first was the detention of the English mail, the second the aspersion on the English factors’ character. Nointel answered the first by explaining that it was done upon the petition of the French Captains whom the Hunter had omitted to salute, but it was only a temporary delay: the letters were delivered after his departure. As to his accusation of our factors, he confessed that he had been provoked to it by Mr. Rycaut’s assertion that the French coiner had paid to one of Sir John’s interpreters “35 false Dollars, which in Truth were but five.”

Enough has been said to show that in this combat of wits, which was continued for three more hours on Sir John’s return visit three days later, the French Marquis found more than his match in the English Knight. On this, as on other occasions of the same kind, Finch proved, to the satisfaction of any impartial critic, that he had inherited a sufficient share of his family’s forensic talent. It is pleasant to hear that the combat was conducted on both sides “with patience, mutuall deference, and reciprocall respect.” It ended as it ought. “I thought it most proper,” says Sir John, “that they who had first divided us, should make the first step towards the uniting us. And therefore I propounded that the French Consul meeting our Consul at Smyrna in the usuall walke of the Cappuchin’s Garden; Should Be the First to addresse Himselfe to our Consul Telling Him That He had orders from His Ambassadour to endeavour to begett a mutuall good understanding between themselves and the reciprocall Nations; which passe being made, our Consul is to reply That He has the same orders from me.” The proposal, after some hesitation, was accepted, and the incident closed, to Sir John’s no small content with himself and with his French colleague: “I cannot but say That the character I formerly gave His Excellency is fully made good by Him; of being a Gentleman of Great Prudence and Civility.”[76]

No sooner was this bone of contention “buryd” than another affair rose on our Ambassador. The Barbary Corsairs—those redoubtable sea-wolves who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in harassing the friends of their suzerain—were once more at their old game. For some time past English navigation in the Mediterranean had enjoyed exceptional prosperity: all sorts of foreign merchants, whose nations were at war, choosing to convey their goods under the flag of the only country that was at peace with the whole world. By these voyages between Spanish, Italian, and Turkish ports, our countrymen not only reaped the benefit of the foreign freights, but besides put out their money at “Cambio Marittimo”—that is, on security of the merchandise they carried, at 20 and 25 per cent: an immense gain. But lately the Tripolines disturbed this lucrative traffic by seizing two of the vessels engaged in it. The English Consul at Tripoli managed to free the ships, as well as the English men and goods in them, but the property of foreigners, which constituted the bulk of the cargoes, could not be rescued: even as it was, the liberation of the ships and crews had raised a loud outcry against the Dey, whose subjects were either pirates or such as got their livelihood from them; and a revolt had barely been averted. In the circumstances the Dey, even if he had the will, lacked the power to restore the booty, claiming that by her Treaty with England Tripoli had the right to search English ships and to confiscate foreign goods.

These outrages had dealt a severe blow at the prestige of the English flag, and it was feared that they might prove a cause of greater damage still, if left unavenged: “unlesse His Majesty is pleasd to resent this searching of His ships and taking out Strangers Goods,” wrote Finch to the Secretary of State, “T’ will be impossible to keep long Argiers and Tunis from the same Trade and liberty; and at last the Maltese and other Christian Corsari will pretend to the same.” He went on to suggest that the appearance of an English squadron in the Mediterranean would have a salutary effect both as a corrective and as a preventive.[77] As a fact, the English Government had anticipated the suggestion; and presently the Ambassador received from Smyrna a letter enclosing a communication from Sir John Narbrough to Mr. Consul Rycaut: the Admiral, having been denied by the Dey satisfaction, had commenced hostilities. This vigour, no doubt, redounded to the glory of England; but at the same time it created a delicate situation for her representative at the Porte.

The Barbary States still were, at least in name, parts of the Ottoman Empire. When their enormities were brought to the notice of the Porte by European ambassadors, the Grand Signor’s Ministers professed themselves greatly shocked. But what would you? they said. The Barbary people were rebels for whose sins the Grand Signor could not be held responsible. When the ambassador requested that, such being the case, the Grand Signor should not consider himself aggrieved if his master should take his own vengeance and right his own wrongs, the Ministers used to answer that it was only just that malefactors should suffer and that those who inflicted injuries on others should receive injuries themselves. But the Grand Signor could not see with indifference his vassal States attacked: the utmost he would permit was reprisals on pirate ships afloat—an assault on the towns ashore would be regarded as an act of hostility against himself. Hence, every time an English fleet came forth to punish the African rogues, the English in Turkey trembled lest it should do something that might draw the Sultan’s wrath down upon them. Such was the situation created in 1661 by Sir John Lawson’s, and in 1669-71 by Sir Thomas Allin’s and Sir Edward Spragge’s expeditions against Algiers.[78] As Winchilsea and Harvey on those occasions, so Finch now had to bestir himself to prevent disagreeable developments. He began by transmitting the news of the rupture with Tripoli to the Grand Vizir, “that it might not be thought His Majesty Our Master had broken with those Vile People an Agreement subscribd’ by both Monarchs, but according to the Tenour of the Articles.”[79]

And that was not all: troubles seldom come single. The Pasha of Tunis, it now appeared, was not satisfied with the 30,000 dollars the Ambassador had recovered for him. He affirmed that this sum represented only a fraction of his loss, and claimed 60,000 dollars more. As to Sir John’s settlement with his Aga, the Pasha had already shown what he thought of that transaction in an unmistakable manner. The moment the Aga reached home he received, in lieu of thanks, a merciless drubbing. When he could walk, the wretched Procurator came to Finch, told him how he had been treated, and left with him the written dismissal he had from his master, saying that the Pasha was a bad man, and that document might be of use to the Ambassador one day. Then he went away to Trebizond, where he died. In the meantime the Pasha had obtained a new post at the Porte, and now favoured Sir John with a list of his alleged losses, sent through no less a person than the Grand Vizir’s Kehayah or Steward. How much this unexpected missive perturbed Sir John may be judged by his own expression: “The storm which I had thought had bin blown over, as to the depredation of the Pashah of Tunis, is turnd’ upon me more violent then ever.”[80]

He did not think it politic, however, to betray his agitation by taking direct notice of the claim. But he immediately despatched to Adrianople his second Dragoman, Signor Antonio Perone, under pretence of finding lodgings for his Audience, with instructions to own no other errand: only, after he had been there four or five days to invent an excuse for waiting upon the Kehayah and, in case that official made no mention of the matter, to say nothing about it; but if he broached the question, the Dragoman was primed what to answer. Should the Kehayah prove obstinate, the Dragoman was to address himself, in the Ambassador’s name, to the Grand Vizir and complain of the Tripoline outrages, thus meeting the Pasha’s grievance with a counter-grievance. Even if the Grand Vizir did not allude to the subject of his own accord, Signor Antonio had orders, unless he found him out of humour, to open it himself and predispose him in Sir John’s favour. It was not the weakness of his case that troubled our Ambassador: he believed that in an argument he could more than hold his own; what made him fear was the fact that the Pasha had presented one half of his claim to the Sultan, who just now wanted money badly to defray the cost of the coming festivities: “in order to which extraordinary expense He has imposd’ a great Taxe upon all those that have any charge under Him throughout the Empire.”[81]

The inadvisability of further inaction thus borne in upon our Ambassador from more quarters than one, he hurried on his preparations for the trip to Adrianople.

It was “a grand equipment,” and the task of providing the thousand and one things needed for it—tents, horses for saddle and carriage, hired servants, and so forth—devolved on the Levant Company’s Treasurer. The Ambassador was far too great a man to concern himself about matters of this sort. He serenely abandoned to Dudley North all the drudgery, and, with the drudgery, all the amusement and emolument. North enjoyed both. The only matters connected with the expedition that Sir John seems to have considered worthy of his care were matters which gave rise to points of honour—sundry acts of commission or omission, mere pinholes, maybe, to the ordinary eye; significant enough to one whose guiding maxim was, “Never to part with the least Puntiglio of the King’s Honour.”

Signor Antonio at Adrianople demanded a Command for the Kaimakam of Constantinople to supply the Ambassador with carts. The Command was issued, but it was worded in a way which suggested that the Porte had been annoyed by Sir John’s delay in presenting his Credentials: the Kaimakam was ordered to send the Ambassador to Audience. Signor Antonio returned the document, saying that his Excellency would never come on such terms: why should he be sent, when he had offered to come? The phrasing was altered accordingly. But when the Command reached Constantinople, Sir John found himself obliged to fight for the King’s honour on another “puntiglio.” The Kaimakam allotted him thirty carts, as he had done to his predecessor (Harvey, it would seem from this as well as from other instances, was not very sensitive on “puntiglios”—but then he had not the advantage of an Italian education). On being informed that the French Ambassador, when he went to Adrianople, had double that number, Sir John declared that he “was an Ambassadour of no lesse King, and had as good a Retinue,” consequently he required an equal number of carts. The Kaimakam said it was true that Nointel had been assigned sixty, but had been content with fifty. Very well, was Sir John’s rejoinder, “I would have the same assignment to me and I would be content with fifty-five.”[82]

These points carried, Sir John could proceed to his Audience with an easy mind.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Finch to Coventry, Jan. 11-21, 1674-75, Coventry Papers.

[71] Harvey to Arlington, July 1, 1672. Cp. Rycaut to the Same, June 29, 1671, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[72] Nointel to Finch, A Tripoly le 12 Juillet 1674; Consul Gamaliel Nightingale to the Same, Aleppo, July 10, 1674; Finch to Arlington, July 27, S.N., 1674, Coventry Papers.

[73] A. Vandal, Les Voyages du Marquis de Nointel, p. 155.

[74] Rycaut to Nointel (in French), Smirne ce 31 Décembre 1674; the Same to the Same (in Italian) 8, 4-14 Jennaro, 1674-75, with Nointel’s reply (in Italian); the Same to Joseph Williamson, March 8, 1674-75, S.P. Turkey, 19. Finch to Coventry, Feb. 1-11, 4-14; the Factory of Smyrna to Finch, Jan. 19, 1674-75, Coventry Papers.

[75] The exact date of his Excellency’s arrival can scarcely be a matter of deep concern to any man now living; yet, as an example of the discrepancies which beset the path of the historical student, the following may be of some interest: “The French Amb.: the Marquis de Nointell arrivd’ here the 13th at breake of day.” Finch to Coventry, Feb. 5-15; “His Excellcy: arrivd’ here Saturday Febr. the 15-25.” Same to Same, Feb. 24-March 6; “Le 20 février 1675, Nointel rentrait à Constantinople,” Vandal, p. 175.

[76] Finch to Coventry, Feb. 5-15, Feb. 24/March 6, March 1-11, 1674-75, Coventry Papers.

[77] Finch to Coventry, Jan 11-21, 1674-75, enclosing letter from Consul Nathaniel Bradley, dated Tripoli di Barbaria, Nov. 23, 1674, Coventry Papers. Cp. Rycaut to Arlington, Smyrna, Nov. 21, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19.