The four travellers who are the subject of this paper were young Englishmen. All four were diplomats, though only three of them held a diplomatic post at the time of their travels. Two of them had an existing connection with Turkey through the Levant Company. They all knew each other, often worked and travelled together. All four were involved in the negotiations in Paris and Vienna which settled the shape of Europe in the decades after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Between two of them there was a warm friendship, and between two of them a professional relationship which turned so sour that it ended in the madness of one and the end of the career of both.

Before introducing them, it may be worth reminding ourselves briefly of the political and diplomatic background of the time. Turkey in 1800 was a major power in European politics. Not yet the sick man of Europe, still in possession of its Balkan and Middle Eastern empire, it had, until the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars, been largely seen and experienced by the European powers as an actual or potential threat. The power which had burst open the last bastions of Byzantium in 1453 had more than once since then beaten on the gates of Vienna and threatened to dominate the entire Mediterranean littoral. Its strategic importance was thrown into sharp relevance by the Napoleonic wars. It could still mobilise vast armies which from the Balkans and the Caucasus could strike at Russia or Hungary. It controlled access for foreign navies to the Black Sea, or from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Through its nominal vassals, the Mamelukes, it also controlled the overland route to India via Egypt, where French and British were vying for commercial supremacy.

Turkish government and society were still largely closed to Europeans, and organised on principles which were different to those of even the most despotic of European societies. If the European powers were to influence this strategic power, it would be important to know and understand it better. There was therefore a flurry of diplomatic activity directed at Turkey, in which the French and British were prominent. France which, until the onset of the Napoleonic wars, had had the closest ties with Turkey through its domination of foreign trade during the eighteenth century, severely blotted its copy-book by invading Egypt in 1798. It is thanks to this that the characters who are the subjects of this paper travelled where they did, and it is time to introduce them. Our first two protagonists formed part of the staff of the Earl of Elgin, who was appointed Ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople in 1798, and arrived to take up his duties in 1799.

William Richard Hamilton was the first person to be recruited by Elgin to his staff, as his secretary. The name Hamilton offers alarming scope for biographical confusion. The number of C18 and C19 Hamilton entries in the Dictionary of National Biography is prodigious. In particular one can be forgiven for confusing the two William Hamiltons who appear during the Napoleonic era. Not only do they share the same name, not only were they both diplomats who, within a thirty-year period, held the post of Minister at Naples, but they were both noted antiquarians. Today’s William Hamilton was not the complaisant husband of Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s great love. Only 22 when he was recruited by Elgin in 1799, he was a Scot by descent, of a prominent clerical family, who had had a good grounding in the Classics at Harrow and then at Cambridge. (Like Byron, curiously, also a Harrovian and traveller in Greece and Turkey, Hamilton was lame, but did not allow this to interfere with his travelling. Unlike Byron, though, he never tackled the Hellespont.) Hamilton also spoke and wrote good Italian, valuable in the Near East where the language of Genoa and Venice was still the European lingua franca, though no longer the main diplomatic language.

Elgin’s other indirect contribution to the early literature in our area of interest was the appointment of John Philip (Jack) Morier. Jack Morier was the eldest of three remarkable brothers, and son of the British Consul-General in Constantinople, the Swiss Huguenot descended Isaac Morier. Isaac Morier had established himself in Turkey as a merchant in the late CI8, had married into the well-connected Smyrna Dutch family of Van Lennep, and through them and their aristocratic British connections, the Waldegrave family, had acquired influential British patronage. Like Hamilton,than whom he was a year older, Jack Morier was schooled at Harrow. He was staying with his father when Elgin arrived in Constantinople and recruited him to complement Hamilton’s work. He must have seemed a highly suitable choice: an Englishman schooled in England with local knowledge and a diplomatic background who was conveniently at hand and instantly available. His old school-fellow Hamilton probably vouched for him personally.

A mention of the peculiar diplomatic arrangements at Constantinople may be appropriate here. Up until Elgin’s appointment, British Ambassadors to Turkey were formally appointed by the Levant Company, with the approval and sometimes on the nomination of the British Government, which in difficult trading times had sometimes taken the responsibility for paying the Ambassador’s salary. Elgin’s appointment was exceptional, in that he was purely a Crown appointment, although in 1803, the year of his recall, he was also appointed ambassador for the Levant Company, the last but one of such appointments. The British Embassy, like those of other countries, was at Pera, the foreigners’ quarter outside the city, which in Byzantine days had been the Genoese colony of Galata.

Jack Morier was the first to be despatched on his travels, sent in 1801 to join the Turkish Army which was attempting to drive the French under General Kleber out of Egypt. His physical travels were all in Syria and Egypt, following the Turkish army from EI Arish to Cairo. His account of his mission was later published as a Memoir of a Campaign with the Ottoman Army in Egypt and differs from the typical narrative of the scholar-antiquarian travelling in the Near East. For a start, there is very little description of the monuments, the history, the customs, the religions and the languages of the peoples among whom he travelled. His focus is much narrower, deriving from the nature of his mission, and that is to describe, from the inside, the make-up and customs, as well as the functioning, of the Turkish Army; and in doing that to give something of a sociological as well as military account of this important Turkish institution. These topics were of lively interest to governmental and military circles in Britain, both because of the successes of the Turkish armies in the not very distant past, and because of their potential value as military allies in the present - or indeed their potential capacity for threat.

In his published account he describes vividly the different elements of the Turkish army. First, there were the janissaries from the Balkans, no longer enslaved, but rather mercenary volunteers, who like the Roman Praetorian Guard could and did make and unmake rulers. Notoriously insubordinate and politically intriguing, they were capable, as in the Smyrna riots of 1797, of fighting on opposing sides when their loyalties were divided. Morier considered them to be a brave group, with the greatest pretensions in the Turkish army to military discipline,if one excepted the Syrian janissaries, whom he held to be “poor effeminate Asiatics.”

The second group distinguished by Morier were the Arnauts who came from the Morea, Epirus, Albania and Macedonia, the pashalik of Ali Pasha. He describes them, ominously in the light of the forthcoming Greek uprising, as a warlike people who retained much of the ferocity of the Spartans. “They wear a breastplate of silver, and a species of armour covers their legs; many of them walk in sandals; the forepart of the head, as far as the middle of the crown, is shaved, and only a tuft of hair hangs loose on the back of the head; a red skull-cap of cloth comes far over their eyebrows and gives them a very fierce look.” According to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife to a previous British Ambassador some eighty years before, the Arnauts on their home territory had found a prudent means of skirting religious controversy by going to the mosque on Fridays and the church on Sundays. After the Arnauts came the Lesghis from Georgia and Circassia -the Caucasian troops who formed a light cavalry. Morier found them “a fine manly race, extremely handsome, fair and well-shaped They are inured to war, from the constant hostile state in which they live among themselves in the inaccessible heights of Mount Caucasus and from the frequent skirmishes which they have with the Russian troops on their frontiers.” Some modern resonances there, perhaps.

Last of Morier’s categories was made up of the volunteers, in his words “the religious enthusiasts who... come from the most remote parts of the empire to follow the standard of Mahomet. The most numerous and famous of this adventurous tribe are the Delis. This name, which signifies madmen, is well applied to them; they form a light cavalry and boast of never refusing to undertake the most hazardous enterprises; they are the “enfans perdus” of the Turkish army.” They had a well-merited reputation for pillage and rapine within Turkey as well as outside it. John Bidwell, of whom more later, found it prudent not to stir outside the British embassy in Pera in 1809 when the Delis were mustering in town, for fear of being the target for pot-shots from trigger-happy warriors in the streets, for whom all Franks, whatever side they were on, were equally legitimate targets.

Morier’s judgement on the Turkish army was damning. Individual soldiers or even units were brave, but they lacked all sense of discipline, their security was negligible, and they were badly and cruelly led. The army was encumbered with huge crowds of camp followers in the manner of the nomadic Tatar hordes, and the direction of the armies was hampered by the intervention of the civilian bureaucracy, with ministers from every department of government following the Grand Vizier into the field. Whether as allies or potential foes, there were morals to be drawn for a British government. These judgements were shared by Elgin’s other secretary, and Morier’s colleague, William Richard Hamilton, who arrived in Egypt around the time that Morier had finished his mission. Hamilton’s resulting published work, Aegyptiaca, contained, besides his archaeological observations, much shrewd comment on the military and political situation in Egypt, and on the recent fighting with the French, which had led to their final withdrawal. However this, and his successful wresting of the Rosetta Stone from the hands of the French General Menou, Kleber’s successor, with the help and encouragement of Edward Daniel Clarke, is not the subject of this paper. Here, rather, I want to mention his travels in Asia Minor, which he seems to have intended at one stage in his life to write up without ever realising his ambition to do so.

In 1803 Hamilton had a breathing space in his labours for Lord Elgin. In the late summer of the previous year he had supervised the loading at Piraeus of a large cargo of marbles from the Parthenon onto the brig Mentor, bound for England via Malta. He and Captain Leake, one of his companions on his Egyptian travels, then embarked on the Mentor, only to be shipwrecked off the island of Kithera, where the ship went to the bottom in a storm, with the marbles and all Leake’s precious journals. Hamilton and Leake managed to scramble to safety, and Hamilton then remained on the island to organise a salvage operation. As winter approached and the sea became too rough and cold for the sponge divers who were working on the wreck, the rescue had to be put on hold. His health had not been good. He first went on a mission to Ali Pasha in Ioannina to try to negotiate terms of an alliance against the French, and then seems to have decided to continue his archaeological investigations of Turkey, for which his travels up the Nile with two young army officers, Captains Hayes and Leake, in 1801 had been, as it were, a first instalment. Whether for practical reasons, whether out of personal affinity, or simply out of the goodness of his heart, he took as his travelling companion and amanuensis the fifteen-year old Francis Peter Werry, son of the British Consul for the Levant Company in Smyrna, Francis Werry. In this there was an echo of his chief’s recruitment on the spot of Philip Morier, son of the Levant Company Consul-General in Constantinople, Isaac Morier. Moriers and Werrys of course knew each other well.

Their travels together from August 1803 to early October of that year are recorded in Werry’s privately published memoir, and it seems clear that Hamilton had in mind to follow with a critical eye in the steps of Richard Chandler, whose travels in Asia Minor some forty years before on behalf of the Society of Dilettanti had been published under that title in 1775. Werry records at least three sites where Hamilton either went where Chandler had not gone, or where he disagreed with Chandler’s identification of an ancient city: a site for Homer’s cave near Smyrna; an ancient city with some fine carvings and a theatre on the coast overlooking Lesbos; and a new site for the ancient city of Magnesia, where the two travellers were sure that they had found the remains of the famous temple of Diana, second only in Asia Minor to that of Ephesus. Hamilton was also able to spend more time at Troy than Chandler, who was fearful of bandits at that point in his journey and had to beat an early retreat.

After Troy, Werry and Hamilton separated. They were not to meet again until 1811, this time in England. Neither was to contribute any more to the literature of travel writing in Turkey, if we except a short description by Werry in his memoirs of a visit to Constantinople in 1809. He was on his way back to Smyrna after the signature of the Convention of the Dardanelles (which restored official relations between Turkey and Britain), and witnessed among other things the arrest by janissaries under the Stamboul Effendi of a cheese seller for giving false measure. But at the same time as he was leaving, Jack Morier was returning to Constantinople with the new envoy, Mr Robert Adair, accompanied by a young Foreign Office clerk, John Bidwell. (The other member of the diplomatic team was Stratford Canning, who was of course to achieve great distinction in the diplomatic service in the future, first as Minister Plenipotentiary in Turkey at the tender age of 24, and eventually, now Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, as British Ambassador in Turkey decades later in the period before and during the Crimean War.)

John Bidwell was a rather different sort of man to Morier, Hamilton or Werry. He came from a provincial English background. His family were merchants in Thetford in Norfolk, where his uncle Shefford was manoeuvring to become mayor. Another uncle, Thomas Bidwell was already ensconced as a Clerk at the Foreign Office. He had never travelled abroad before, though he had clearly been beguiled by the descriptions of Turkey and its beauties in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. His accounts of his experiences in Turkey have a certain kind of naiveté about them, but an accompanying freshness which is sometimes missing from the pages of more seasoned travellers. These accounts are contained in manuscript letters to his uncle and his cousin Sally, and a manuscript journal, all held in the British Library, and have never to my knowledge been published.

Reading them, one has the impression that at first Bidwell intended them for publication and made some consequent observations on military dispositions, on topography and on the character of the Turks which might have some political or diplomatic interest. But his heart was not really in it. He was much more interested in the dervishes, whirling, howling and contemplative (I use his terms) whose ceremonies he visited; in Turkish and Greek social customs, in the veiled beauties of Turkish women over which Lady Mary had enthused so seductively, and in the ruthless political intrigues of the Turkish court. He was also quite an accomplished artist, and the Bidwell papers contain some vivid coloured drawings of the Sultan, of a Sultana, one of the Sultan’s sisters, and of women in Greek and Turkish costume. With Jack Morier he masqueraded as an English prince to be admitted to the encampment of the Turkish army preparing to set out for the Balkans, and was struck as much by the picturesqueness of the scene as by the military implications of the apparent confusion. The Bidwell papers cover a period of three years, during which his letters reveal first a longing to return home soon, then a desire to prolong his stay, and finally a growing anxiety about his promotion prospects at the Foreign Office if he stays much longer abroad.

He returned to London in 1812, and as the wars in Europe drew to their close the other protagonists of this story were also being brought together by the fortunes of history. Jack Morier, who had made himself unpopular with Lord Elgin by lauding the diplomatic achievements of Sir Sidney Smith, Elgin’s diplomatic predecessor in Constantinople, had first gone as Consul to the court of Ali Pasha at Ioannina, now in North-Western Greece, with his younger brother David, and thence to Washington, not a sought-after posting, and South America. He was to return to the Foreign Office around 1814. William Hamilton had returned already in 1804, hoping for a parliamentary seat. Failing in his hopes, he joined the Foreign Office the same year. By 1809 he had risen to the post of Under-Secretary, one of two such officials who were in charge of this vital Department of State. Francis Peter Werry arrived in London in 1811, was immediately taken under Hamilton’s wing, found a job at the Foreign Office and attached to the new embassy to Russia under Lord Cathcart in 1812.

By 1814, events were coming to a climax. After Napoleon’s abdication, Werry, Bidwell and Hamilton found themselves in Paris, where Castlereagh and Wellington were leading the diplomatic negotiations, and then, after Waterloo, in Vienna and again in Paris, where the final treaties were signed. The strain on the Foreign Office of having much of its small staff engaged on the continent resulted in the returned Jack Morier being appointed on a temporary basis to fill Hamilton’s shoes as Under-Secretary in London in 1815. The Treaty of Vienna was a triumph for British diplomacy and for its chief Lord Castlereagh. Loyal to his staff, Castlereagh ensured that in time all were rewarded for their efforts. Bidwell rose relatively quickly to become chief clerk at the Foreign Office, in charge of the Consular Department, a post he held until his retirement decades later. Hamilton, after having successfully negotiated the return of the Vatican art treasures plundered by the French, was in 1821 appointed to the agreeable and lucrative post of Minister in Naples. Werry, who had no family patronage, but enjoyed the friendship and protection of Hamilton, was offered the post of Secretary of Legation and Charge d’Affaires in Dresden.

And what of Morier, Bidwell’s erstwhile colleague in Constantinople? Here was the problem. He was too senior a figure now to be made Consul-General somewhere, unlike his younger brother David, who had also taken part in the peace negotiations and became Consul- General in France He had some, but not very powerful, aristocratic patronage; he was an old school companion of William Hamilton; but he had not gone through the heat of the day with Castlereagh in Paris and Vienna. Senior diplomatic posts were few and far between and much coveted. Werry now fell ill and was slow to take up his post at Dresden. Maybe this seemed a providential opportunity. In any event it was now decided to appoint a Minister to Dresden and Morier was given the post over Werry’s head. Hamilton played an active part in appointments, and it is likely that he would have been involved in this delicate but reasonable-seeming decision. Morier and Werry, after all, shared the same Levant Company background; the families knew each other in Turkey; Jack Morier’s younger brother David had been one of Werry’s closest friends when Werry arrived in England in 1811. On paper it should have worked.

Unfortunately it did not. The two-man British mission in Dresden turned out to be a disaster. The two men had not worked closely before and took a pretty instant dislike to each other, disagreeing about work, politics and morality. They clashed repeatedly. The gap in their ages and status no doubt aggravated their disagreements. While Hamilton, a skilful manager of men, was in London and the god-like Castlereagh at the helm of the Foreign Office the problem could be and was contained. However in 1821 Hamilton was posted to Naples as the British envoy, retiring for health reasons in 1824, and in 1822 Castlereagh committed suicide. The influences which might have restrained a quarrel were no longer in place and in 1823 there was a furious row between Werry and Morier, with letters flying between them and between them and the powers at the Foreign Office. Werry was compelled to take early retirement in 1824, on a handsome pension, went mad under the strain of events and was consigned to a lunatic asylum at the age of 36. Morier was himself recalled the same year and also obliged to retire. It was a dismal end to a relationship which in other circumstances might well have flourished.

As for the other two, Hamilton and Bidwell went on to lead successful - in Hamilton’s case distinguished - lives. Bidwell retired in 1851, having been a chief clerk and head of the Consular department for 25 years, and highly regarded for his administrative abilities. Hamilton was a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society, a trustee of the British Museum, Secretary of the Society of Dilettanti, and active in various other learned societies. He was in correspondence with a legion of antiquarians and scholars. He translated Aristophanes, and agitated energetically but unsuccessfully for a classical design for the new Houses of Parliament. But neither Bidwell nor Hamilton ever seems to have repeated the adventurous exploits of their youth.