Meanwhile the party in England which called for closer relations with Holland had temporarily gained the ascendant, and, in obedience to instructions from home, Sir John would fain support her representative now. But it was too late. The utmost he could do was to send Collyer his compliments privately, and to explain to him the reasons why he dared not do more: by this time himself stood in a “Ticklish condition” (such is his expression) with the Porte again.
“Ticklish,” indeed, was hardly the word for it. Had Finch foreseen all that lay in front of him, he would probably have described his condition as “Tragick.”
[245] “To my dayly comfort I was the last of all the Christian Ministers that submitted.”--Finch to Coventry, March 1-11, 1679-80.
[246] “I am fully perswaded that in the Turkes’ judgment, nay, that of the Visir himselfe, I am a gainer every way.”--The Same to the Same, Sept 2-12, 1678.
[248] Baines to Conway, June 1-11, 1677, _S.P. Turkey_, 19.
[249] _Life of Dudley North_, pp. 124-5. Oddly enough, Sir John himself tells a similar anecdote at the expense of the Polish Ambassador: Finch to Coventry, Nov. 29, S.V. 1677. If we could but see ourselves as we see others!
[251] Owing to a gap in the Ambassador’s correspondence and to the absence from the scene of our candid Treasurer, much of what follows rests on the authority of North’s second-hand reports (see _Life of Dudley North_, pp. 90-92) and of a Narrative which the Levant Company submitted to the King (_Register, S.P. Levant Company_, 145), both sources in sad need of critical scrutiny.
[252] A parallel case, between an Englishman and a Greek of Smyrna, had just elicited such a protest. See Finch to Coventry, March 1-11, 1679-80.
[253] Finch to Coventry, Aug. 4-14, Aug. 29/Sept. 8, 1676.
[254] Finch to Sir Leoline Jenkins, Aug. 21-31, 1680, _S.P. Turkey_, 19.
[256] _Ibid._ Cp. _Life of Dudley North_, p. 100.
[257] Finch to Jenkins, _loc. cit._; the Same to Sunderland, Nov. 6-16, 1680, _S.P. Turkey_, 19.
[258] Finch to Jenkins, Aug. 21-31; the Same to Sunderland, Nov. 6-16.
Our Ambassador bad every right to expect that the ransom he had paid down would be accepted by Kara Mustafa as a price of immunity from persecution for the remainder of his sojourn in Turkey. But it was not to be. Kara Mustafa had in store for him another tempest--a tempest beside which all those he had outlived might seem as spells of fine weather. It arose, by a singular irony, out of the very event which had once filled him with so much pride and so many hopes of a serene and prosperous career at the Ottoman Court.