Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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And so, after five years of eminently undistinguished and discontented sojourn at Florence, Sir John returned home, in August 1670, served for two years on the “Councell for matters relating to Our Forreigne Colonies and Plantations,” and then, the ideal office still failing to present itself, he had, after all, to accept the Embassy he abhorred.

He set out in May 1673. His frame of mind on leaving England can be seen from the note by which he bade Lord Conway farewell: “This is the third time I have left my Native Soyl,” he wrote. “If God Almighty make me so happy as to return once more to your Lordship, I shall then thinke it is time to fix at home and leave of (sic) all thoughts of further wandering. But [if] my life by its period abroad putts one to my Travell I beseech your Lordship to believe that you have lost the most faythfull and zealous servant the World yet was ever possessed of....”ssss1

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.