CHAPTER XXI RELEASE
How Lord Chandos would have acquitted himself of his delicate mission, had he been left to his own resources, it is impossible to say. As it was, the unaccountable Power which, for want of a better term, we call “luck” seconded him beyond his own or any one else’s most sanguine hopes. Just as he arrived on the scene, the strain between France and Turkey ripened to a crisis.
Besides her grievances against the pashas on the Bosphorus, France had many scores to settle with the pirates of Barbary. Louis had put up with their depredations for eight years—so long, that is, as his war against Holland, Denmark, Spain, and Germany tied his hands. But the pacification of the West had set him free for action in the East. The monarch who had humbled all the Powers of Europe would no longer brook humiliation at the hands of the petty principalities of Africa. He decided to deal with them summarily and, at the same time, with their patron in Stambul: the combination, in truth, was unavoidable, for the corsairs were permitted to prey upon the French even in the ports—nay, in the very towns—that lay directly under the Grand Signor’s rule. Only a few months ago the French Consul at Cyprus and a French merchant were carried out of their houses during the night aboard a Tripoli man-of-war, and after being soundly drubbed were forced to ransom themselves. M. de Guilleragues could obtain from the Grand Vizir no satisfaction for this outrage; and the pirates improved the occasion by taking a French ship worth 100,000 dollars as it sailed from Smyrna.[290]
So the famous Admiral Duquesne was sent with a squadron to scour the Mediterranean. His orders were to seek and destroy the pirates wheresoever he found them. After sweeping everything before him farther west, Duquesne entered the Archipelago. The Grand Signor’s Capitan Pasha met him with his Fleet and asked what he came into these seas for. The Frenchman quoted his orders. “Nay,” said the Turk, “the Grand Signor will never allow the Tripolines to be attacked in his own ports.” “We shall see about that,” replied Duquesne, and made for Chios, where four Tripoli men-of-war and four petaches lay careening with their guns all ashore. The Admiral sailed into the port (July 13, 1681) and, without any ceremony, went for the disarmed pirates. They fled into the Grand Signor’s Castle, which fired two guns. Duquesne retorted with thirty, and a message that, if the Grand Signor’s Castle protected them, he would knock it down about the ears of the Grand Signor’s garrison. The Turks, terrified, desisted from further acts of hostility, turned the Tripolines out, and sent word to the Admiral that they would remain neutral. Duquesne then set to work: in four hours, and at the expense of 8000 shots, he disabled the Tripoline vessels (how he managed not to destroy them does not appear), slaying about 300 of their crews and, incidentally, doing some damage to the town. Some of his shots battered down several buildings, among them a minaret, and killed some of the inhabitants. Whereupon loud uproar in Stambul: it was the greatest affront the Ottoman Empire had ever received since its foundation! Rumour added that Duquesne had sailed to the Dardanelles, whence he had addressed, through the Turkish commander of the Castles at the Straits, a message to the Vizir demanding to know how the French Ambassador would be treated as to the Soffah and stating that he would shape his conduct accordingly! Cause enough for uproar.
At the Porte all is confusion. Councils are held in quick succession; orders are despatched to the Capitan Pasha to put his Fleet in a place of safety; couriers fly in different directions on secret errands. Until their return, what steps Kara Mustafa will take, no man can tell, he least of all.
Among the French residents all is consternation. M. de Guilleragues, after repeated demands and denials, had only a week before obtained leave for his wife and daughter to depart on the plea of ill-health: now, fearing lest the Porte should cancel the permission, he hastens to send them away; but he is not quick enough: the vessel has fallen down the Sea of Marmara some leagues, the ladies are on the very point of following in a boat, when a peremptory command from the Vizir stops them and compels the vessel to turn back. Simultaneously the Ambassador is summoned to give an account of what was done at Chios; but before he has set out, a countermand comes, ordering him to hold himself ready for another summons. While waiting for this summons, M. de Guilleragues gives out that, when he appears before the Vizir, he will not utter one word, unless he has his seat on the Soffah: he will only hand to him the King’s letters—which all these months still remain undelivered—and, let him do his worst, Kara Mustafa shall have no other answer. Very fine—but the French merchants, in great alarm, apply to the various foreign Ministers to save the best of their effects.
The English await developments with tense interest: “Every day is like to produce great matters,” writes Sir John, and the writing, much larger and with wider spaces between the lines than usual, illustrates his excitement. “The result of these resolute orders of His Most Christian Majesty can end in nothing mean.” France, he thinks, has gone too far to draw back: she must either come to an absolute breach with the Porte, or “make the Proud Heads of this place to stoop”—in which case all Christendom will reap the benefit: “If the Turk once finds that things are not tamely putt up, transactions here will be more easy, and I hope My Lord Chandos will find the good effect of this passe.”[291]
The anticipation was abundantly verified. Chandos made the most of this fortunate conjuncture. During the weeks he remained incognito waiting for the Oxford, he prepared the ground, and in his audience with Kara Mustafa he delivered the sterner letter from the King: the Vizir read it through most carefully and bade the Ambassador welcome, without any allusion to its contents. But it was obvious that he had been deeply impressed; and the Ambassador did not fail to strike while the iron was hot. He struck so vigorously and skilfully that by the 5th of September he had obtained full satisfaction on the two main points: The money extorted from Finch for the Capitulations was refunded to the Treasurer of the Levant Company by Kara Mustafa’s Jew, who, to save the Grand Vizir’s face, pretended that it came out of the dead Kehayah’s hoard. This was a triumph of which Chandos might well be proud—restitution of money had never yet been procured from a Turk; and it was followed by another, not less pleasant: in his own words, “the false demand upon his Excellency for a prodigious sum of money by the Pasha of Tunis is also for ever damn’d by the most valid way in their Law we could desire without parting with one asper.” And even that was not all: “We are also now promised several other Articles of considerable benefit to trade in these parts and shall have them in our custody in a few days.” On one point only the Ambassador found the Vizir adamant and was forced by the haste which the Company’s interests required not to lose time in disputing it, but to accept his “parole of honour that if any prince in the world ever had the priviledge of the Suffra we should have it the first”—a promise which the Vizir had no difficulty in making, as he went on to add that “heaven should be earth and earth heaven before any such thing should be condescended to by them!”[292] That a man, while parting with solid cash, should cling so passionately to an empty form, is but another manifestation of the mysterious workings of the official mind. However, we were more than satisfied with a liberality which would have been more meritorious, but could not have been more welcome, had it been voluntary.
At the same time Lord Chandos obtained leave for Sir John to depart when he pleased. But alas! the boon which a little while ago would have filled Sir John with joy found him now unable to enjoy anything. On the 22nd of August his friend Baines had been seized with a malignant double tertian, of which he was very certain that he would die, in accordance with the method of Providence. “For,” he told Finch, “God had under many diseases preserved him so long as he could be any wayes usefull or serviceable to me, but that now, returning into England where my friends were all so well in their severall posts, he could no longer be of any use to me, and therefore God would putt a period to that life which he onely wished for my sake.”
His comrade’s condition, reacting upon Finch’s own system through the subtle laws of sympathy, “cutt off the thread of all my worldly happinesse and application to business,” so much so that he himself fell ill of a tertian. Then, on September 5th, the very day on which the leave to depart was brought to him, Baines died: the friend from whom during thirty-six years he had never been separated for more than a week or two at a time—“the best friend the world ever had, for prudence, learning, integrity of life and affection”—was taken away from him.
For this calamity Sir John’s mind ought to have been prepared. About a year before, while he and Sir Thomas were sitting in their gallery after supper, there came upon the table a “loud knocking.” Such was the first warning. The second was not less significant. A few days before Sir Thomas’s illness one of Sir John’s teeth dropped out of his head without any pain whilst they dined together: “which,” notes the ex-Professor of Anatomy, “seemes to confirm the interpretation of those who make the dreaming of the losse of a tooth to be the prediction of the losse of a friend.”[293]
These reflections, however, came to poor Sir John afterwards. At the moment he was not in a state for coherent thought of any kind. The blow fell upon him with all the stupefying force of an unforeseen catastrophe: it prostrated him: his tertian rose to a double continual tertian, which reduced him to such weakness that he was given over by his physician and all others. Thus he lay, forlorn, desolate, broken in mind and body, for about a fortnight. By September 22nd, however, he had recovered sufficiently to indite a lengthy despatch, in which, after touching upon his bereavement, he gives the sequel of the French Admiral’s exploit.
So far the only outcome of the debates held at the Porte had been an embargo imposed on French ships and men throughout the Empire. The Turks did not find themselves in a condition to express greater resentment; for Duquesne’s squadron, small as it was, was “more than doubly able to fight all the force the Ottoman Empire is able to make appear at sea. So that, contrary to the bilious and proud procedure of this Court, they go on with Spanish phlegm. The Porte are very sensible that France can doe them all manner of mischief, both by its power and its vicinity, and that they can take no other but the small, pitifull revenge of exercising their indignation upon the French Ambassadour and as many of the King’s subjects as reside in the Empire.” The Tripolines, left in the lurch, sued for peace. But “Mons. de Quesne refusd’ to treat with such a company of rascalls.” Some fruitless negotiations between the Admiral and the Capitan Pasha ensued. Then, Sir John adds three weeks later, a courier from the Capitan Pasha came with the news that the Admiral had blocked up his whole Fleet in the port of Chios. On receipt of this fresh instance of the Giaour’s temerity, “the heat of the Gran Signor was such that he ordred the Gran Visir to send for Mons. de Guilleragues and send him to the Seven Towers. The Visir sent for the Ambassadour using great threats towards him; but his Excellency carry’d himselfe with great courage, not onely refusing to sit below the Saffa, but being pressd’ to doe it, kickd’ his stool down with his feet, and then delivring the Letter from the King his master, which for more than 8 moneths the Visir had refusd’ to receive.” When Kara Mustafa urged reparation for the affront and damage done to the Grand Signor’s port of Chios, M. de Guilleragues retorted that the King of France had received none for the affront and damage done to his Consul and subjects at Cyprus, concluding that, “it was as lawfull for the King his Master to set upon his enemy’s in the Gran Signor’s ports, as for them to attack the French.” Thanks to his “dexterous and resolute prudence,” the French Ambassador was only detained in custody of the Chaoush-bashi for a while, and then, on signing a paper to acquaint his Most Christian Majesty with the Grand Signor’s desires, was released; and it was thought now that in the agreement the point of the Soffah would be included. “Certainly Mons. de Guilleragues has shown himselfe in this a Great Minister.”[294]
This is Sir John’s last official report from Pera. While penning it, he was busy with his preparations for leaving a spot to which he was now bound by nothing save memories of suffering. Every hour he passed in that house only accented his sense of desolation. With Sir Thomas Baines all that had made Turkey bearable had vanished. He was no longer there to support him. The hapless bachelor, physically and mentally worn out, and relieved of all public concerns, had now nothing to do but brood over his personal grief. He was like a shipwrecked mariner stranded on an alien and hostile shore. His one desire was to hasten home. It is much to his credit that of all this inner misery the only hint we have is contained in a paragraph of unwonted self-restraint: “I with some impatience attend the recovery of my health that I may be once freed from the commands of a Goverment so irregular that they are wholely irreconcilable to all methods of reason and honour and return into my native soyl.”[295]
It was with the same wish, expressed in the same words, that Sir John had left his “native soyl” in 1673. Eight years had passed—had he known what lay at the end of it all, would he have had the strength to persevere? And now, more than ever, he languishes for home: the longing grows, as the days go by. At last, in November 1681, he set sail in the Oxford, carrying with him the body of his friend embalmed. But he was destined to have one more experience of Kara Mustafa’s “irregular goverment” at Smyrna, where the Oxford put in that she might take under her escort four English merchantmen which lay there richly freighted. The convoy was ready for its homeward voyage, when a command from the Porte forbade it to sail. Why, oh why had he not departed two months ago? Why had he waited to recover: will accidents never cease to dog his steps? Without sharing Sir John’s superstition, no one that studies his life can help being struck by the continuity of his bad luck: everything seems to go wrong with him—not always through any wrong calculation of his own; and when something lucky happens, it is not he that reaps the gain and the glory, but his successor.
The causes of this latest check were as follows:
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.
Beneath that stone the Ambassador whose doings and sufferings we have witnessed sleeps quietly—the sleep of clay and dust. Of all those agonies and vanities: emotions once so real and vibrant—of that personality so impulsive, so susceptible to flattery, so prone to anger and fear—remains only a pale reflection in the letters we have deciphered. Out of those fussy despatches he who cares may still call up the phantom of Sir John Finch: there, if anywhere, he still lives—a soul infinitely pathetic.
For Sir John was nowise great; and such elements of greatness as may have been in him were frustrated by his one life-long attachment. From the time he met Baines, Finch lost every chance of self-development and self-realisation. Tied, heart and mind, to that monotonous, masterful pedagogue, he never used his own powers. The universe had contracted round him to the narrow circle limited by that pedant’s exiguous vision. How completely Baines kept the world, its inhabitants, and its interests from Finch may be seen from the fact that, after seven years’ residence, our Ambassador knew almost as little of Turkey as on the day of his landing. During all those years the realities about him took a second place in his thoughts: the first place was filled by abstractions according to Sir Thomas: on Sundays the twain composed essays on Theology, and on week-days they talked what Sir Thomas imagined to be Philosophy. Life-long tutelage must have a debilitating, devitalising effect; and it can hardly be questioned that the benignant Baines exercised over his friend a most malignant influence. Not intentionally, of course: Baines, we are persuaded, meant well; but much of the mischief done on this planet is done by people who mean well.
It was a sound instinct that made Finch shy at public life. As a diplomat he displayed all the faults of one to whom zeal and judgment had not been given in equal proportions. He was not born for diplomacy: certainly not for Turkish diplomacy. In all those oscillations of mood and fluctuations of the will which he so naïvely betrayed when wrought up by his feelings, we see a temperament very ill adapted to a profession which requires above all things coolness and firmness. That he failed at Constantinople cannot be disguised. But, despite his foibles and his friend, he would have done as well as any average ambassador, if he had had no exceptional difficulties to contend with. So much is clear from his history: as long as the sun shines and the waters are smooth, we see him steering on, happily enough; as soon as the tempest bursts, the helm slips from his hold and he flounders on in thick darkness, inward and outward—a fair-weather pilot, like many another. To drop metaphor, the man—everything reckoned—was essentially a victim of circumstances: chief among them the death of Ahmed Kuprili. Even more mediocre natures would have succeeded under that Grand Vizir; under Kara Mustafa only talents of the very first order could have availed. And it is poignant to reflect what a trifle would have turned Sir John’s failure into a success: had he accepted the Turkish Embassy when it was first offered to him, in 1668, his career at Constantinople would have terminated before the death of Ahmed—on such little ironies hang the destinies of poor mortals.
