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

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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.ssss1