The panic into which Duquesne’s feat had thrown the Porte had subsided. The French admiral was still cruising about the Levant coasts, but did nothing. Kara Mustafa saw that he had little to fear from France. Nor had he much to fear from England. Scarcely had Lord Chandos received satisfaction for past injuries, and he had not yet received the additional privileges promised to him, when news reached Constantinople that English ships laden with a vast estate were on their way to Turkey. For this injudicious precipitancy the Levant Company was not to blame, but only some members of it, our old friend Dudley North chief among them. For reasons of his own he had from the first opposed the suspension of trade, and now, by representing the scheme to the King and the Privy Council, through his brother the Lord Keeper, as a treacherous design inspired by the Opposition with a view to hurting the Royal Exchequer, he got the Government to force the merchants to rescind all they had done.[296] The result was such as might have been foreseen. Kara Mustafa, concluding that the English were anxious for trade at any price, decided to make them pay for the blow they had dealt at his purse and his pride. All that he needed was a specious pretext; and he had not far to look for one.
The English by their Capitulations were obliged to pay a 3 per cent export duty on silk. But the Turks, to avoid fraud—an art in which foreigners surpassed the natives—preferred to collect this duty from the native seller, who charged it to the foreign buyer and handed over to him together with the goods the official receipt. Such had been the established practice for over thirty years. Nevertheless, the letter of the law remained unaltered; and it was in this pure technicality that Kara Mustafa found his pretext. Suddenly our merchants were called upon to pay the duty on all silk they had exported for five years past, a sum amounting to over 100,000 dollars, and it was suspected that this was only a beginning, the intention being to extort ultimately the duty for the whole thirty years. On their refusal to comply, the Customer of Smyrna stopped the ships which the Oxford was to convoy.
Lord Chandos was summoned by the Grand Vizir to the Divan and asked if his Nation ought not, in accordance with their Capitulations, to pay a 3 per cent duty. He replied in the affirmative. “But,” said the Vizir, “do you?” Chandos naturally answered that the duty was paid by the sellers on account of the buyers. “Oh,” said Kara Mustafa, “that shall not serve your turn. The sellers are the Grand Signor’s subjects, and he may lay what he pleases on them. What they paid was on their own account, but you must pay for yourselves,” and, without further argument, he gave a kind of sentence against the English. The Ambassador protested, but was told that, if he did not obey, he should be put in irons, and was sent away to think about it. What a clap of thunder to our merchants: their victory turned suddenly into a ruinous disaster!
Chandos thought of nothing less than submitting; but Finch, who itched to see the last of Turkey, positively declared that he would not stay more than a few days: if the matter was not settled quickly, he would sail in the Oxford, leaving the four merchantmen behind. Chandos considered what this would mean: an indefinite detention of the ships, to the great loss of freighters and owners, not to mention the danger of confiscation. He therefore offered the Vizir 25,000, 40,000, 55,000 dollars. But all these offers were rejected. Thereupon the English had recourse to “other means, wherein by a marvellous Providence we succeeded.” This providential intervention consisted of a bribe of 12 purses, or 6000 dollars, administered to the Smyrna authorities. It acted like a charm: the vessels were suffered to slip away, and Sir John was able to pursue his voyage in peace.[297]
The shores of Turkey gradually merged in the sea-mists. That harsh Eastern world lay hushed behind him. Before him, ready to welcome the exile, friendly Italy; and beyond, England, dear relatives, and leisure, and rest.
On January 18th, 1682, we hear of the ex-Ambassador’s arrival at Argostoli on the island of Cephalonia, where he was treated by the Venetian Governor very courteously.[298] On March 11th he was at Leghorn, purchasing Italian pictures, statues, and wines. From Marseilles he intended to travel overland to Calais in a litter; but he changed his mind and continued his journey by sea, visiting Seville on the way and purchasing Spanish wines. By the time he reached the Downs he had with him, besides some sixty trunks, nineteen enormous chests of books, twenty-three of Italian pictures and statues, fifteen of Florence wine, a butt of Smyrna wine, and six of Saragossa. From the Oxford he wrote to his nephew, giving him minute directions about this baggage: “I believe a barge will be most convenient as I can put three or four trunks upon it which cannot well be left for any other passage.” The chests of books and pictures and statues “will require a hoy or vessell that hath a dry hold to keepe them from rain above and sea water below.” “If wine in bottles pay no custome, I will have 50 dozen bought for me with good corks.”[299]
That a man who had suffered such a bereavement should have any thoughts left for pictures and statues; that he should, to the sad cargo of his friend’s coffin, be adding chests of wine and ordering corks, may to the impercipient seem strange, and to the cynical convey a suggestion of insincerity. But those acquainted with the psychology of grief will understand. In reality it was distraction from thought which these thoughts brought him. Sir John sought some antidote—he felt the need, which certain natures under the stress of intolerable sorrow feel, of turning to commonplace occupations, of busying himself with trivial details, as the only means of reducing the dreary melancholy which else would crush him utterly.
His attempt was rewarded by a measure of success. Although during the early part of the voyage he had been so depressed that he made his will, in July he landed on his “native soyl” in much better spirits than he could have hoped “after so much weaknesse and sicknesse and sorrow.” But the rally was only temporary: the anxieties, the mortifications, the apprehensions he had endured at Constantinople had undermined his delicate constitution: the worm of grief had gnawed too far into his heart for anything to be remedial now; and after laying the remains of Sir Thomas in the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge, as if the last frail tie that held him to life had snapped, Finch himself succumbed to an attack of pleurisy on the 18th of November 1682.
His body was conveyed to Cambridge and buried, as he had desired, beside his friend’s under the tomb which is still visible: a marble monument, the laboured elegance of which reflects the Italian tastes of the age and of the men in whose joint memory it stands. It is adorned with a Latin epitaph from the pen of Henry More—the tutor who had first introduced the two friends to each other. Thus years that were far asunder were bound together, and the hand which had started Sir John and Sir Thomas on their common course rounded off its common end.