The editor has been unable to discover more about this envoy than that in 1693, after his return to England, he was appointed one of the Lords Justices in Ireland and that at his death in April 1704 he held the office of comptroller-general of army accounts. There is suggestion in the dispatches that he was kin to the wealthy banker, Charles Duncombe, Lord Mayor of London in 1708, whose nephew was raised to the peerage as Lord Feversham, and it is probable that he was the member for Bedfordshire in the parliaments of 1688 and 1695.

Duncombe while at Stockholm had the good fortune to be served as secretary by the Rev. John Robinson, chaplain to the embassy, who after the death in 1684 of Duncombe's predecessor, Philip Warwick, had been appointed “minister agens,” his commission then recording his long residence in Sweden and experience in affairs. On Duncombe's departure he was recommissioned in that quality and continued the envoy's work, for the same reasons, as set forth in the fragment of a report of his preserved, with as little fruit. After a visit to England in 1696, when he received the degree of doctor of divinity, he returned to Stockholm with the character of minister resident, both the war with France and the reign of Charles XI being then nearly at an end. His chief business in the next years was to bring Sweden into definite relations with the sea-powers. Success was attained when treaties of defensive alliance were concluded, the one with Great Britain under date 6/16 January 1699/1700, the other with Great Britain and Holland just a week later. During the remainder of the reign of William III his chief concern was with matters resulting from those treaties, as the repression of Denmark in 1700 and performance of the stipulations for mutual succour.

Robert jackson is one of the multitude of men whom long and faithful service has left unknown to fame. As commissary at Stockholm during Robinson's absence, and even as minister resident after that envoy's recall, he had little to do with political affairs; for Charles XII, even when in exile, kept the direction of them in his own hands. There was rupture of diplomatic relations in the years 1717 and 1718, and after the death of Charles Great Britain was again represented at Stockholm by envoys. Jackson's special concern was with matters of trade, in which he was an expert. He stayed at Stockholm as minister resident until recalled in 1729.

The following documents illustrate the attitude of Great Britain towards Sweden at the end of Queen Anne's reign and in the first months of that of George I.

George Mackenzie had been from 1710 to 1712 secretary in charge of affairs at Warsaw. His present mission to Russia lasted only till February 1715. References in the dispatches to his ability are not complimentary, and he does not seem to have been employed again.

Captain Archibald Hamilton was perhaps the youngest brother of James, fourth duke of Hamilton, in later life governor of Greenwich Hospital and of Jamaica and a lord of the admiralty. His inglorious experience on the present occasion has been noticed in the introduction.

The admirals who conducted British squadrons to the Baltic in the successive years 1715 to 1721 and in 1726 and 1727— Sir John Norris, Sir George Byng (afterwards Viscount Torrington), Sir Charles Wager—have their proper recognition in the Dictionary of National Biography. Details of the doings of the two former in the earlier period will be found in the editor's George I and the Northern War.

Nothing need be said in this place about John Carteret, Lord Carteret, himself, nor more about his work in Sweden than to set down the sequence of its successes. He procured the signature of a preliminary convention, by which the Swedes consented to give up Bremen and Verden to Hanover, on 11/22 July 1719, when he had been at Stockholm but eleven days. A second preliminary convention, with Great Britain, followed on 18/29 August, when Sir John Norris had at last been allowed to take his squadron forward into Swedish waters. The first separate article of this guaranteed the Hanoverian convention, the second obliged Sweden to sell Stettin and its district to Prussia. Final treaties were signed with Hanover on 9/20 November 1719 and with Great Britain on 21 January/1 February 1720, on which date also Carteret and his French colleague, Jacques de Campredon, signed as mediators a treaty with Prussia, the Prussian envoy, Knyphausen, declining to commit his master to pay for his acquisitions twice as much as George I was to pay for Bremen and Verden. However Frederick William I, caught in a good temper, accepted the treaty three weeks later. Last, and most difficult of all, came the treaty with Denmark, accomplished on 22 June/3 July 1720.

On Carteret's departure from Stockholm his secretary William Finch, second son of that man of weight in home politics, Daniel Earl of Nottingham, replaced him with the character of envoy extraordinary. His principal business in the years 1720 and 1721 was to bring the Swedes to accept from Peter the Great any terms that he would grant. For again in these years Sir John Norris failed in his mission to destroy the Russian naval power; as in 1719 he could neither reach the tsar's fleet in its harbours nor prevent the landing of troops on galleys to ravage the Swedish coasts. George I had to realise that his enemy could not be coerced. Disappointed of that inclusion in the treaty of Nystad, on which he had insisted and of which he had been assured, George professed to take little further interest in Swedish affairs until in 1723 negotiation opened for a new treaty between Sweden and Russia. In this again Peter refused to associate him. When in February 1724 it was concluded without him and apparently in hostility towards him, and when there followed report of intention on the part of Frederick I to abdicate, it was decided to replace Finch, who had failed to prevent these developments, by a stronger man. To avoid offence to his father he was transferred to the Hague, a post more honourable, but which the intimate personal relations of Lord Townshend with the leading Dutch ministers rendered less onerous.

The man chosen to replace William Finch at Stockholm was a trusted henchman of Lord Townshend, Stephen Poyntz, of whom there is due notice in the Dictionary of National Biography. He reached his post in October 1724. During the first year his task was to re-establish British as against Russian influence in Sweden and to deal with the new situation created by the death of Peter the Great in February 1725. Afterwards his efforts concentrated on obtaining the accession of Sweden—the first, with that of Holland, sought—to the treaty of Hanover, concluded between Great Britain France and Prussia on 23 August/3 September 1725. For eighteen months he and his young French colleague, the count de Brancas-Céreste, strove with the partisans of Russia and Hoi-stein, obliged to humour the tendernesses of the constitutionalists, hampered instead of helped by their Prussian coadjutors, and unable to bring Count Horn to declare himself until in the end the riksdag of 1726 made him the master and the longer purse prevailed. The accession was signed at last on 14/25 March 1726/7. In reward for his success Poyntz was promoted ambassador and named to represent Great Britain at the congress proposed for assembly at Aix-la-Chapelle.