Lucky, indeed, were all those who could leave a land in which life had become so hard. But Sir John himself would not now be very long. His six years’ contract had expired, and he had informed the Levant Company that he cherished no wish to renew it—nor, we may easily surmise from many hints, was the Company reluctant to dispense with his services. All that he waited for was the appointment of a successor. As to another post, he had put himself in the hands of his brother, the Lord Chancellor, and would acquiesce in whatever was done for him: any seat would be a seat of roses after Stambul.[242]
The waiting was not now so irksome to Sir John as it would have been a year or two ago. It is true that in one of his despatches there occurs a passage tinged with pessimism: “I must,” he wrote towards the end of 1679, “committ all to the Protection of the Almighty, and God direct me in these difficult times in the carrying on His Majesty’s concerns in the commerce of His subjects, which is at this time greater then ever in this place, and by consequence more envious and more exposd.”[243] But this was only a passing mood. In the same despatch he thanked God for not being “strooke” by Kara Mustafa’s thunder; and some months later we even detect in his tone an optimism to which he had long been a stranger: “As to my condition here, I must needs say, that I loose no ground as to the Publick Interest, but advance”[244]—we seem to hear again the complacent, self-satisfied Finch of the pre-Mustafa period. And then, all of a sudden, we hear him asking the Secretary of State to guess how he is “tossd’” by “the present tempestuous Goverment in Turky.”
What had happened?
The curious will find it in the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[230] Finch to Coventry, June 17-27, 1679.
[231] Ibid.
[232] The Same to the Same, March 4-14, 1679-80.
[233] The Same to the Same, Jan. 3-13, 1679-80.
[234] The Same to the Same, Dec. 12-22, 1679.