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.