It was apparently an invincible fatality that compelled Sir John Finch to accept, in the month of November 1672, the appointment of English Ambassador to the Porte, in place of Sir Daniel Harvey who had died at his post some weeks before. Finch sprang from a family which, under the Stuarts, had attained to great eminence in the law and in politics. His father, Sir Heneage Finch, had been Recorder of the City of London and Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Charles I. During the same reign his father’s first cousin, Sir John (afterwards Baron) Finch, had been Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, as well as Speaker of the House of Commons: in all these capacities he had shown himself so ardent a Royalist that, in 1640, he was impeached together with Lord Strafford and Archbishop Laud, and barely saved his head by flying to Holland. His elder brother, the eloquent Sir Heneage Finch, whose pleadings, in the years that immediately followed the Restoration, were the delight of the Council Chamber and of Westminster Hall,[4] after serving the Crown as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, was about to become Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and in due time Lord High Chancellor of England and Earl of Nottingham. His nephew (another Heneage Finch), “a celebrated orator in Chancery practice,”[5] was Solicitor-General in 1679, and crowned a long and distinguished Parliamentary career under Charles II. and James II. with a Barony from Queen Anne and an Earldom from George I. Notwithstanding this remarkable family record, Sir John had evinced no inclination for a public career. After a brief residence at Balliol, he was obliged, when Oxford became the headquarters of the Royalist troops, to migrate to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and thence, in 1651, he pursued his studies at Padua, where he took a medical degree. From that University, of which he was made Pro-Rector and Syndic, he went, in 1659, to Pisa, to occupy the Chair of Anatomy, having refused the post of English Consul at Padua, ostensibly because it meant getting drunk “at least forty times in the year,” more probably because he did not wish to compromise himself by accepting office under the Usurper. Thus, while Cromwell ruled in England, Finch led a severely private life in Italy, and at the Restoration, like other Cavaliers, he came home to reap the reward of his loyalty. Unlike most of them, he was not disappointed. Honours of all kinds awaited him. In 1661 he was elected an Extraordinary Fellow of the College of Physicians of London, was created M.D. by the University of Cambridge, and was knighted by the King.[6]