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]