About this time the Levant Company suffered somewhat from the conflicting state of parties in England. Sir S. Crowe was appointed in 1642 as ambassador of the Levant Company; he was a staunch loyalist, and, during his tenure of office abroad, his goods in England were confiscated by the Parliamentarians. On hearing this, Sir S. Crowe imprisoned many of the English factors in Constantinople, and appropriated their goods. The Parliamentarians forthwith obliged the Company to send out another representative, Sir J. Bendish, who, after some difficulty, succeeded in establishing himself as the ambassador of England, and Sir S. Crowe was sent home. On arriving in London, he was impeached at the suit of the Company, condemned, and kept in prison till 1653. The regulations of the Company with regard to their _employés_ were very strict in those days; none of the consuls under their authority might marry without the consent of the directors, and the factors or merchants at Constantinople and elsewhere in the Levant frequently received admonitions from the governing body at home against “sensuality, gambling, Sabbath-breaking, neglect of public worship”, and other irregularities of life in which the merchants, far from the influence of their strait-laced relatives at home, were prone to indulge. In 1661 the Earl of Winchilsea went out on _The Plymouth_ as ambassador for the Company. Captain Hayward was in command of the vessel, with whom Pepys (p. 50) made merry at the Rhenish Wine House. Lord Winchilsea is described as “a jovial Lord, extremely favoured by Vizier Kiuprili”. Two Kiuprilis, father and son, were practically the rulers of Turkey from 1658 to the death of the latter in 1676. Both the Kiuprilis were men of exceedingly good powers of organisation, and raised Turkey to comparative power, despite the weakness of her princes. The Sultan Mahomed IV, about whom Dr. Covel in his MS. tells us so much, was a man of weak character, devoted only to the chase, and left the organisation of the empire to his Vizier. From him Lord Winchilsea obtained further capitulations, an account of which is given us by his secretary, Paul Ricaut, in a pamphlet entitled _The Capitulations and Articles published by Paul Ricaut, Esquire, Secretary to his Excellencie the Lord Ambassador, in 1663_, and addressed to the Governors of the Levant Company. In this pamphlet he says: “The first capitulations took place 80 years before, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and have been enlarged in the time of allmost every ambassador, with such alterations as the state of affaires, and the abuses, and the iniquities of the times suggested.” The principal grievance which this set of capitulations rectified was “that English ships should be exempt from search for foreign goods”. Mahomed IV, in his address to Charles II, on the occasion of the granting of these capitulations, speaks in high-flown language of “the Queen of the aforesaid Kingdom” who commenced the Levant trade.