William Harborne

William Harborne, merchant and diplomat, was probably born at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the second son of William Harborne, administrator, of Great Yarmouth, and his wife, Joan Piers, or Pearce. Harborne senior, originally from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, became a leading citizen of Great Yarmouth, was elected bailiff in 1557 and 1572, and was initially chosen as MP for the borough in 1575 but the election was contested and another candidate got the seat. He probably had trading interests and may have invested heavily in one of his second son's commercial ventures in the Ottoman empire, the failure of which reduced him to penury in 1582. William Harborne's elder brother, Thomas Harborne, travelled with him on at least one journey, returning from Constantinople in 1579 as courier of the first official letter from Murad III to Elizabeth I. His younger brother Piers Harborne may also have been a merchant, and was in Portugal about 1579 in contact with Dom Antonio, unsuccessful claimant to the Portuguese throne after the death of Sebastian.

Harborne himself probably entered the service of the London merchant Edward Osborne about 1559 and travelled abroad first as the latter's factor and later on his own account. In 1577 he was listed as one of the sixty principal members of the newly incorporated Spanish Company. English traders who met him on the island of Chios in 1581 considered him a rich London merchant and gentleman; his personal prosperity was maintained by involvement in trade throughout his life, despite the unusual expenses of his several years' residence in Constantinople.

English commercial interest during the 1570s in establishing regular trade in the Ottoman empire was complemented by the desire of Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary, to explore the diplomatic advantages of having an official, potentially anti-Spanish, presence there. On Osborne's recommendation Harborne was sent as agent to Constantinople to seek from the sultan, Murad III, a guarantee of safe conduct for English traders, to enable them to sail under their own flag rather than that of France, the only other Western nation with appropriate trading privileges.

Leaving London in July 1578, he took the overland route via Hamburg, Poland, and the Danubian principalities and arrived in Constantinople on 28 October. This was Harborne's preferred route for subsequent journeys (and for those of his individual couriers and agents), since it helped maintain good Anglo-Polish relations and also avoided the suspicions and hostility of the Venetians and Spanish which would inevitably have been raised by a sea voyage through the Mediterranean.

As the principal English trading commodities of tin, lead, woollen cloth, and other military-related items were particularly welcome to the Ottomans after the outbreak of war with Iran in the summer of 1578, Harborne was immediately successful in negotiating individual trade concessions for Osborne, Richard Staper, and himself, confirmed in Murad's grant of privileges in March 1579, and in the opening of friendly diplomatic correspondence between the sultan and Elizabeth. The subsequent ‘unilateral charter of privileges to the English nation’ granted by Murad in May 1580 formed the basis of Anglo-Ottoman relations and trade capitulations for the next 300 years.

English merchants generally were guaranteed freedom of passage for themselves, their servants, and their goods, by land or by sea, through territories held or controlled by the Ottomans, on condition that they ‘mind their own business and be occupied with their ordinary duties’. Englishmen were not to be taken prisoner or enslaved; English ships in distress at sea should be assisted. The English trading colonies would be subject to their own regulations as decreed by the ambassador, so long as no disorder ensued; on all matters of trade or other relations with Muslims, the English would be subject to the authority of the kadi's court acting in all fairness. Englishmen would not be subject to the Ottoman poll tax and were entitled to appoint their own interpreters; none would be held responsible for the debts of other Englishmen and their goods would not be seized after death. In July 1581 Harborne departed for London, his mission apparently accomplished.

On 11 September 1581 Elizabeth granted the first charter for the newly formed Turkey Company. Although this venture was possible only as a result of Harborne's negotiations in Constantinople, he himself is not listed as one of the twelve London merchants granted a seven-year monopoly of the Turkish trade, possibly because he was absent from London when the company was being formed, possibly because of the Bark Roe incident. He was, however, too prominent a figure to be ignored for long. Osborne, as head of the new company, petitioned the queen early in 1582 to send a permanent representative to Constantinople to secure the sultan's recognition of the Turkey Company and to look after the interests of the increased numbers of English traders expected there. On 20 November 1582, after considerable debate over the propriety of establishing such a resident in a non-Christian state and more particularly over who to appoint (the queen or the company was to support him financially), Harborne was named ambassador, at the company's expense. Departing from London almost immediately and this time travelling openly by the Mediterranean sea route in the company's ship Susan, he reached Constantinople on 29 March 1583 and was received in audience by the sultan on 24 April.

For the next five years Harborne played a dual role as Elizabeth's ‘Orator, Messenger, Deputie and Agent’ to the sultan and as representative of the Turkey Company. His immediate commission was to appoint consuls in the main Ottoman trading ports to oversee English interests. On 25 April he appointed Harvie Millers as consul in Alexandria and Cairo, and on 30 June Richard Forster as consul in Syria, to be based on the coast at Tripoli. His organization of the company's local agents was extended by the appointment on 30 March 1585 of John Tipton as consul at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (in north Africa). Consulates may also have been established on Chios and at Patras in the Morea. Harborne was also charged with ‘enact lawes and statutes’ for regulation of traders' behaviour vis-à-vis the Ottoman authorities and fellow trading nations, and for disciplining those who failed to observe these rules and thus jeopardized the English privileges generally (Hakluyt, 5.223–4). This point was particularly important since the harm that could be done to English interests by undisciplined traders had already been seen in the Bark Roe incident in 1581. Having traded her cargo of cloths and metals in Leghorn, Malta, and Chios (and by chance meeting Harborne there), this London-based ship engaged in a series of piratical acts which culminated in the seizure of two Greek ships, belonging to subjects of the sultan and flying Christian flags. Fearing punishment in England for piracy and for disturbing diplomatic negotiations with the Ottomans, the crew of the Bark Roe took refuge on Malta, where the knights of St John used the ship for carrying grain and its crew variously as mariners and soldiers before submitting several of them to the Maltese inquisition in July and August 1581. Added to the anti-Christian act of piracy were accusations of English spying in preparation for a joint Anglo-Ottoman attack on Malta, a not unreasonable fear given the long-standing enmity between the Ottomans and the knights and the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565. The depositions made to the Maltese inquisition by the crew of the Bark Roe were read to implicate Harborne, and through him Elizabeth. Murad also had grounds to doubt English sincerity in the light of the attack on his Greek subjects, who had appealed to Constantinople for redress. The fact that the Bark Roe had been able to sail from Chios in March 1581 only after Harborne's personal intervention with the Jewish customs farmer detaining the ship, in which he used the new English capitulations to prove the ship's right to sail in Ottoman waters under its own flag, appeared to confirm these doubts. Harborne thus found himself suspect on all sides. He was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and held responsible for reimbursement of the debt owed the Greek shipowners. This ran counter to the stipulations about responsibility for the debts of others in the trade capitulations of May 1580, but the Ottomans argued that as Harborne remained only an ‘agent’, and the capitulations were still to be ratified by the accrediting of a full ambassador, the agreement was not yet in force. Ironically, Harborne had no option but to seek the protection of the rival French ambassador, whose capitulations were fully ratified, in order to secure his own release. He then wrote an abject letter of explanation and exoneration to Lord Burghley describing ‘the intollerable griefe of minde which thees pirattes have caused in me’ and pleading for Burghley's favourable intercession with the queen.

The Bark Roe incident exemplifies the difficulties and pitfalls facing Harborne in his isolated role. It is testimony to his professional competence, wide experience, and strength of character that despite this set-back he was able to return to Constantinople as full ambassador in 1583, ratify the capitulations, organize the consular system, and maintain good standing in the Ottoman capital in the years following. This was achieved despite continuing French, Venetian, and Spanish attempts to discredit him in Constantinople and despite the recurrent problems of English ships falling foul of Ottoman authorities, particularly on the north African coast. Ransoming prisoners was a regular task.

A further complication was Harborne's dual role as servant of both queen and company. Although the company had eventually agreed to support him financially with a salary of £200 per annum, this was primarily in his capacity as their representative and they were loath to underwrite the extra present giving necessitated by his diplomatic role. Harborne complained regularly of insufficient support and irregular payment, asserting that of the £1200 due to him for his service in Constantinople, only £400 had actually been paid while he was there. The shortfall was presumably met from his own resources, as he continued to participate in trading ventures. However, other figures from a balance drawn up in August 1589 after his return from Constantinople itemize Harborne's expenditure during his embassy and suggest that the company did cover £13,246 of the total of £15,341 incurred, the remaining £2095 being met by an allowance from the sultan. One-third of these expenses appear directly connected with his attendance at court in an ambassadorial capacity; ransoming captives cost a further £1203, interpreter's wages £1028, food and housekeeping £4496. Harborne's successor as ambassador, Edward Barton, also complained vehemently about insufficient financial support.

On his return to Constantinople in spring 1583 Harborne took up residence at a house he called Rapamat (a corruption of Ahmet) on the Bosphorus in the Findikli area near the arsenal at Tophane. Known to the Ottomans as ‘the Lutheran ambassador’, he was clearly happy to keep a discreet distance from the other Catholic European communities up the hill in Pera. Harborne's household included his secretary Barton, who accompanied him to Constantinople in 1583, his assistant John Sanderson who arrived in 1585, a locally recruited interpreter, several domestic servants, and a guard escort of at least two janizaries.

After departing from Constantinople in August 1588, leaving Barton as agent in his stead, Harborne advised the Turkey Company and the queen on the need to maintain unbroken diplomatic representation in the Ottoman capital and pressed for Barton to be given full ambassadorial status. He favoured amalgamating the Turkey and Venice Companies into the Levant Company in January 1592, and is named in the letters patent as one of the new company's principal merchants. Meanwhile he had settled at Mundham, Norfolk, and became a freeman of Great Yarmouth in 1591. He wrote an account of his time in Constantinople that was published by Richard Hakluyt in his Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). An unpublished account of these years, ‘The relation of my tenn yeares forraine travelle’, is preserved among the Lansdowne and Tanner manuscripts. On 16 September 1589 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Anthony Drury of Besthorpe, Norfolk, and his wife. They had several children. He died on 6 November 1617 at Mundham and was buried there.