Sir Edward Barton was the first resident ambassador at Constantinople. Harebone had evidently been only sent out as a plenipotentiary extraordinary to inaugurate the intercourse with the Levant. Hakluyt (vol. ii) gives us an account of the present which Sir Edward Barton took out on the ship _Ascension_ in 1593 for the Sultan Amurath III: “12 goodly pieces of plate, 36 garments of cloth of all colours, 20 garments of cloth of gold, 10 garments of satin, 6 pieces of fine Holland, and certain other things of good value.” To his powerful wife, the Sultana Safiye, Queen Elizabeth sent a “jewel of her Majesty’s picture set with rubies and diamonds; 3 pieces of gilt plate; 10 garments of cloth of gold; a very fine case of glasse bottles, silver and gilt; and 2 pieces of fine Holland.” With Mahomed III, who succeeded his father, Amurath III, in 1595, Sir E. Barton seems to have been on most intimate terms, carrying on the traditional alliance, and hopes of possible hope of support which had been started in his father’s reign. Mahomed III was the eldest son of Amurath, one of his 103 children. He was a son of his Venetian wife and favourite, the Sultana Safiye, a lady of the House of Baffo, who had been captured by a Turkish corsair in her youth. Mahomed III put nineteen of his brothers to death on his accession, the grossest instance of fratricide even in Turkish annals. He was at the outset of his reign chiefly engaged in wars in Hungary, and in these Sir Edward Barton accompanied him. They ended in the victory of Cerestes, and, on his return to Constantinople, Sir E. Barton, worn out by the rigours of the campaign, died. In Sultan Mahomed III’s letter to Queen Elizabeth, in 1596, he thus alludes to Sir E. Barton: “As to your highnesse’s well-beloved Ambassador at our blessed Porte, Edward Barton, one of the nation of the Messiah, he having been enjoined by us to follow our imperial camp without having been enabled previously to obtain your highness’s permission to go with my imperial Staff, we have reason to be satisfied, and to hope that also your highness will know how to appreciate the services he has thus rendered to us in our imperial camp.” Mustapha, the first Turkish envoy to England in 1607, also alludes to Sir E. Barton: “Mr. Barton was in the army ... when Raab, _alias_ Severin, was won from the Christians.” Sir E. Barton came of a Yorkshire family, and was sent out to Constantinople as ambassador in 1593, with the title of “Agent for her Majesty with the Grand Seignior”. Subsequently, however, he received his stipend from the Levant Company. He died at Chalki, one of the Prince’s Islands, in 1597, and was buried at the monastery there. His tombstone (which Dr. Covel saw, _vide_ p. 281) was displaced and put over the door of the monastery wrong way up, until Lord Strangford had it put in its present position, and the following inscription is still legible:—