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The writer of the second MS. we have before us is mentioned by Evelyn in his Diary (ii, 338) as “Covel, the great Oriental traveller”. Evidently he intended either to publish a work himself, or that his diary should be published shortly after his death, for he divided part of his MS. into chapters, put in illustrations, and collected together everything connected with himself, every scrap of letter and paper that would be of use, even down to his testamur when he took his B.A. in 1657; but this mass of MS. has remained hidden in the British Museum, and has never yet seen the light of day. It is easy to see why any publisher would recoil from bringing out so prolix a work, for the Doctor is wearisome in the extreme. Before we leave Deal, in his first chapter, at the outset of his travels, we are treated to at least thirty closely-written pages on the wonders of the deep, which he picked up there; soon follows a long dissertation on sea-sickness, and its supposed causes; and whenever he came near any place of archæological interest, such as Carthage, Ephesus, Constantinople, etc., he gives us enough information to fill a good-sized volume on each spot. Consequently, it has been found necessary to eliminate much in Dr. Covel’s exceedingly bulky diaries.

His narrative is, however, extremely interesting on many points: during the six-and-a-half years he resided at Constantinople, from 1670 to 1677, he noticed everything; his sketches of life, costumes, and manners are minute and life-like. Sir George Wheeler says, in his volume of travels: “Dr. Covel, then chaplain to his Majesty’s ambassador there, amongst many curiosities shewed us some Turkish songs set to musick; which he told us were, both for sense and music, very good: but past our understanding.” Being, as he was, intimately connected with the embassy, he had ample opportunity for studying the politics of the time. Dr. Covel was present at the granting of the capitulations of 1676, which gained for the Levant Company privileges which established it, for the ensuing century and a half of its existence, on an unapproachable foundation.

John Covel was born at Horningsheath, in Suffolk, in 1638, and educated at Bury St. Edmunds and Christs College, Cambridge, in the hall of which his portrait, by Valentine Ritz, is still to be seen. He studied medicine in early life with a view to being a physician, which will account for his intimate knowledge of botany and drugs; but eventually, being elected to a Fellowship at his College, he changed his line in life and took Holy Orders.

Covel was distinguished for his erudition, and was a scholar of no mean repute, as his MS. shows; and on the Restoration, in 1661, he was deputed to make a Latin oration in the hall of Christ’s College, to celebrate the return of the Stuart family to the throne of England. He composed a long poem also to celebrate this event, a few stanzas of which I give here:

“The Horrible winter’s gone,

And we enjoy a cheerful spring;

The kind approach of the Sun

Gives a new birth to every thing.

“The trees with blossoms are crowned now,

Which then did penance in snow;

And there with busy noise the Bee

Practise mysterious chemistry.

“Just so, great Prince, when you arrived,

Each drooping heart revived;

Your glorious rays and divine influence

Gave us new life and sense.

“Too rigid Fate

Had blasted Church and State;

And, with a boisterous storm,

Put all things out of form.

“Oh, may your glories ever shine!

Always rising still more bright.

What never stops at any height

Can never decline.”

In 1669 Covel was appointed as chaplain to the ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Daniel Harvey, by the Levant Company, and Charles II gave him a dispensation to go to Constantinople and hold his Fellowship at the same time: it runs as follows:

“Given at our Court at Dover, 19th day of May, in the 22nd year of our reign. Our will and pleasure is that you dispense with the absence of the said John Covel, so that he receive and enjoy (by Himself or his assignees) all and singular the profits, dividends, stipends, emoluments, and dues belonging to his fellowship in as full and ample manner to all intents and purposes as if he were actually resident in the College.”

During his residence at Constantinople he witnessed many important sights, notably the great fêtes at Adrianople in honour of the circumcision of Prince Mustapha, and the marriage of the Sultan’s daughter, which were the most noted fêtes of the century in Turkey,[3] and also the granting of the capitulations during the time of the plague. The next nine years of Covel’s life were spent in travel. In 1679 he returned to England, and immediately afterwards took his D.D., and was chosen as Margaret preacher of Divinity at Cambridge. In 1681 he got one of his college livings of Kegworth, and was soon afterwards appointed as chaplain to the Princess of Orange, and resided at the Hague. In October 1685 the Prince of Orange intercepted a letter written by Dr. Covel to Skelton, the English ambassador, giving an account of Prince William’s tyrannical behaviour to his wife. Dr. Covel was forthwith dispatched home again in great disgrace; he never spoke of what had transpired, and it was long a mystery. There is, however, a letter to Princess Mary amongst his papers, in which he speaks of the scurrilous reports which alleged that he tried to make mischief between the King and the Prince, and between the Prince and your Royal Highness, and concludes, “in the words of the Royal Martyr, your most glorious grandfather, that as He hath given us afflictions to try our patience, so He would give us Patience to bear our afflictions.”

Dr. Covel was twice Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first time in 1689, when King William visited the University, and his letters show a considerable degree of anxiety as to how the King, whom he had maligned as Prince, would receive him. In reply to these anxieties, King William sent a curt answer, stating “that he could distinguish between Dr. Covel and the Vice-Chancellor of the University”.

Dr. Covel, was not fortunate with his voluminous writings; he got into another scrape with the Court in a book entitled The Interpreter of Words and Terms; it was ordered to be destroyed, being, as it was supposed, “in some points very derogatory to the supreme power of this Crown”. He also wrote on gardening and fruit-trees; but his magnum opus was a work on the Greek Church, which he published shortly before his death, which remained for long the standard work on the subject. It is entitled: Some Account of the present Greek Church, with Reflections on their present Doctrine and Discipline, particularly on the Eucharist and the rest of their seven Pretended Sacraments. In his Preface he apologises for the long delay, owing to his “itinerant life”, and having been “chained to a perpetual college bursar’s place”. It is evident from his diary that, when at Constantinople, Dr. Covel gave himself up to this study very closely, in fact, he was deputed to do so, for the controversy was then at its height which was started by M. Arnold, Doctor of the Sorbonne, as to whether the Greeks held the doctrine of transubstantiation or not, and a union between the Eastern and Western Churches was much feared by the Protestants. The eccentric Marquis de Nointel, who was the French ambassador to the Porte at that time, was most eager to bring this about, and as he was on very friendly terms with Sir John Finch, it was suspected that he used his influence to win over the English ambassador; hence Dr. Covel had an important task to perform, and no wonder he writes so bitterly on the ignorance and corruption of the Greek clergy. To show his zeal, the Marquis de Nointel celebrated Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1673, in the cave of Antiparos, with a broken-off stalactite as his communion-table, on which may still be read the words he carved:—

“Hic ipse Christus adfuit

Ejus natali die mediâ nocte celebrato

MDCLXXIII.”

The ambassador was accompanied by five hundred people—his domestics, merchants, Greeks, and Turks—and he was so impressed by it, that he repeated the experiment on two subsequent occasions. The proposed union of the Churches, however, never came to anything, and by the time Dr. Covel’s book came out the controversy was at an end and forgotten.

Dr. Covel was appointed Master of Christ’s College in 1688, and retained this position until his death in 1722, at the ripe age of eighty-four.

The good work that Sir John Finch did for the Company in getting the capitulation of 1676, as Dr. Covel relates, in the teeth of the plague at Adrianople, did much for the security of trading and property in the Levant. Attached to these capitulations is the following clause: “That two ships’ loads of figs and currants should be allowed to be annually exported from Smyrna for the use of the King’s kitchen.” Sir John Finch was the son of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and was brought up as a physician, together with his bosom companion Thomas Baines; they studied together in England, and in Padua, and when Sir John was appointed as Minister to Tuscany, he got Charles II to attach his friend as physician to the legation, and also to bestow on him the honour of knighthood. When Sir John Finch was moved to Constantinople Sir Thomas Baines accompanied him in the same capacity; they were together with Covel during the trying time of the plague at Adrianople, and frequent allusion is made to them both in the diary. They were known in Constantinople as the ambassador and the chevalier, the two inseparable friends, whose attachment to one another was as romantic as that of Damon and Pythias. Sir Thomas Baines died in Constantinople in 1680, and, in great grief, his friend had his body embalmed and sent home to be buried in Christ’s College. Two years later, immediately on his return to England, Sir John Finch himself died, and, by special request, was buried in the same tomb as his friend, with the same marble slab over them, on which Henry More wrote a touching epitaph. Jointly, they endowed two scholarships and two fellowships for Christ’s College, and are still jointly thanked as benefactors of that very College over which their friend and companion in adversity, Dr. Covel, ruled for forty years after their deaths.