Seven days he considered enough to get well. He spent this period of convalescence studying the situation and deliberating what “prudent and wary resolutions” it befitted him to take. Then he called his Dragomans to him and asked them whether they had ever known an English ambassador receive from a Grand Vizir audience with his stool below the Soffah? They answered with one voice No! such a thing had never been known; and their memories served them so readily that they went through eight or nine Vizirates by name, as if they were repeating a lesson they had by heart. Whereupon Sir John bade them deliver to the Vizir a Memorial which he had drawn up. In this document the Ambassador informed Kara Mustafa that the King his master was known to be equal to the greatest prince in Christendom, but he was even more widely renowned as surpassing all other princes in the sincerity and constancy of his friendship towards the Sublime Porte: his Majesty had at all times not only abstained from sending succours to any of Turkey’s enemies, but supplied her with whatsoever served for the convenience of peace or the necessity of war. After thus hinting at his claim to better treatment than his French colleague, Sir John pointed out that not only he himself in all his audiences of the deceased Vizir had his seat upon the Soffah, but that, as far as he could learn, there had never been an instance of a Vizir denying an English ambassador such a seat. Lastly, he declared that he was under rigorous instructions from his King to preserve intact the respect always rendered him in this Court; and his master might justly shed his blood, if he should do anything repugnant to his Majesty’s honour and commands.[190]
When the Dragomans came to the passage in which Finch, as his composition originally stood, told the Vizir that he had about him servants of so many years’ standing who knew what the practice had been under so many Vizirs, they said that they dared not deliver “such a Paper.”
“Why,” asked the Ambassador, “is this part not true?”
“Yes,” they agreed, “but we dare not say it is so.”
His Excellency had the inconceivable fatuity to retort:
“No,” was the obvious answer, “but the Vizir must know it can be none but us.”