A visit to Rome, however, and to other places, such as St. Omer, where "seminaries" existed for English Roman Catholics, was usually forbidden in the licence to go abroad which every Englishman had to obtain unless he was a merchant, and which was not granted without good reason shown. This contained ordinarily a time limit also, one year's leave, or three; and prohibition of communication with disloyal countrymen or entry into a State at war with England: supervision of a kind which was exercised by practically every European ruler. A Roman Catholic, for instance, incurred excommunication if he passed into a country at war with the Pope.
The precautions of Protestant sovereigns were against Roman Catholicism inasmuch as there lay political dangers, but so far as religion was concerned, as much precaution might reasonably have been taken against Mohammedanism. In no European country did ability bring a man to the top so readily as in Turkey, and being a foreigner was in a man's favour; not even at Venice was there such a mixture of nations as at Constantinople; the majority of the Grand Signor's eminent subjects were renegade foreigners. Dallam might refuse the invitation; many accepted it; and a Turk considered it only humane to give an unbeliever at least one definite invitation to salvation. An occasion which many would make use of to turn Turk was during the fortnight preceding the circumcision of the Sultan's heir. One traveller saw two hundred circumcised at such a time, many of them adult, one said to be as old as fifty-three. As a particular instance of an English "Turk" there is the case of the English Consul at Cairo in 1601. He was "taking care" of much belonging to English merchants at the time, in the possession of which the Turks no doubt confirmed him. At the same time there was an exactly similar case of a Venetian, for the same purpose. But besides the causes of the chance to rise in the world, or the attractions of others' property, there was another reason for apostacy, the chief one—mitigating the sufferings of captivity.
But the renegades came mostly from the lower or the commercial class, and did not come home, so that the fact that a guide was required to be a sectarian, in contradistinction to a Christian, is another comment on the characteristics of the Average Tourist. Sir Walter Ralegh, however, did not make that a qualification, for he chose Ben Jonson to chaperon his son. There is only one anecdote about Ben Jonson in that capacity, the one he told Drummond himself. "This youth" [_i.e._, Ralegh's son] "being knavishly inclined, caused him to be drunken, and dead drunk, so that he knew not where he was; thereafter laid him on a car, which he made to be drawn through the streets, at every corner showing his governor stretched out and telling them that was a more lively image of the Crucifix than any they had: at which young Ralegh's mother delighted much (saying his father when young was so inclined), though the father abhorred it."