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.