That the French nobility under Louis XIV. carried punctiliousness to the length of absurdity is well known to readers of contemporary French literature: the memoirs and letters of the men and women who composed the Court of Louis are full of serious, sometimes dangerous, disputes arising out of the most ludicrous points of etiquette, and narrated with a becoming sense of their importance. Nowhere was this triumph of Ceremonialism over common sense more notable than in the rules that governed diplomatic relations. But—a thing forgotten by modern critics—the French Republic of our time is hardly less tenacious of ceremonial forms in its international relations than the French Monarchy was. Nay, democratic America herself, as everybody acquainted with her State Department will bear witness, sets as much store by these trifles as any country of aristocratic Europe. The truth is that, when nations deal with one another, they have to stand on strict ceremony: forms have been invented to prevent friction; and States which wish to cultivate mutual friendship are therefore extremely wary of departing from established usages.
The extreme irritability of M. de Nointel may have been relative to the nation—a great nation, but a thin-skinned—to which he belonged. But its cause, however contemptible it may appear to us, to English diplomats of his time—men not wholly devoid of understanding—did not appear so.
Sir John Finch was at dinner with some of the merchants, when one of the Embassy Janissaries, whom Nointel had borrowed from him for the solemn function, returned home bringing the sensational news that the French Ambassador, after four hours’ stay at the Porte, had gone away without audience.
From all he had heard of Kara Mustafa Finch had foreseen that many strange things would befall; and for that reason, instead of competing with the Frenchman for precedence, as his habit was, he had deliberately let him have the first audience: much as the polite fox in the fable let the elephant try first the rickety plank that bridged a dangerous-looking stream. Nevertheless, he was greatly startled by the news. What had happened to Nointel might happen to him. So, dismissing his guests, he set at once to work to ascertain what had happened: there was not a moment to lose; and indeed, before he had completed his investigations, a messenger arrived from the Porte. Finch easily guessed the purport of his errand, and in order to gain time for further information and reflection, he decided to have an attack of diplomatic fever. To give his fiction verisimilitude, he retired hastily to his bedroom and received the messenger in his bed. The message was as he expected: “The Grand Vizir desired that His Excellency should come to audience on the following morning.” Sir John answered from his couch that it was a favour which he had sought for, but he was sorry that his “indisposition of body” would not permit him to accept it. He prayed the Grand Vizir to excuse him.
Kara Mustafa had no difficulty in diagnosing the “indisposition of body” which afflicted Sir John, but dissembling his wisdom, he promptly ordered that, since the Ambassador of England was indisposed, the Bailo of Venice should take his place next morning, and the Resident of Holland should come in the afternoon. Both these diplomats were content to receive their audiences on the Vizir’s terms, while the Resident of Genoa sought for audience on those same terms and could not obtain it. Such, then, was the position of the Diplomatic Corps on the Bosphorus in the spring of 1677: the French Ambassador in open defiance of the Porte; the Venetian Ambassador, the Dutch Resident, and the Genoese Resident in open compliance with it; the English Ambassador alone remained uncommitted, “as lying under the Maschera of indisposition of body.”
Sir John counted that by his clever strategy he had at least gained this: that he had not set the example of submission. Had he done so, the King would have received complaints from all Christendom that his envoy was the first to put on “the yoke of this high-minded Visir” and by his example had forced the other foreign Ministers to take up the same yoke: ay, the meanest of them would have said that, had he not established a precedent, they would have scorned to submit. As it was, Sir John had freed himself from any imputation, and left the others to answer for their own pusillanimity. “Neverthelesse,” he naïvely admits, “this Maschera of a distemper at the first seen clearly through both by Turk and Christian must not be wore long.”
Seven days he considered enough to get well. He spent this period of convalescence studying the situation and deliberating what “prudent and wary resolutions” it befitted him to take. Then he called his Dragomans to him and asked them whether they had ever known an English ambassador receive from a Grand Vizir audience with his stool below the Soffah? They answered with one voice No! such a thing had never been known; and their memories served them so readily that they went through eight or nine Vizirates by name, as if they were repeating a lesson they had by heart. Whereupon Sir John bade them deliver to the Vizir a Memorial which he had drawn up. In this document the Ambassador informed Kara Mustafa that the King his master was known to be equal to the greatest prince in Christendom, but he was even more widely renowned as surpassing all other princes in the sincerity and constancy of his friendship towards the Sublime Porte: his Majesty had at all times not only abstained from sending succours to any of Turkey’s enemies, but supplied her with whatsoever served for the convenience of peace or the necessity of war. After thus hinting at his claim to better treatment than his French colleague, Sir John pointed out that not only he himself in all his audiences of the deceased Vizir had his seat upon the Soffah, but that, as far as he could learn, there had never been an instance of a Vizir denying an English ambassador such a seat. Lastly, he declared that he was under rigorous instructions from his King to preserve intact the respect always rendered him in this Court; and his master might justly shed his blood, if he should do anything repugnant to his Majesty’s honour and commands.[190]
When the Dragomans came to the passage in which Finch, as his composition originally stood, told the Vizir that he had about him servants of so many years’ standing who knew what the practice had been under so many Vizirs, they said that they dared not deliver “such a Paper.”
“Why,” asked the Ambassador, “is this part not true?”
“Yes,” they agreed, “but we dare not say it is so.”