The Friend ALAN BRAY Winner of the 2004 Longman-History Today Book Award The Friend ALAN BRAY The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Alan Bray was Honorary Research Fellow in Birkbeck College, University of London, and co-convenor of the Seminar on Society, Belief, and Culture in the Early Modem World. He also wrote Homosexuality in Renaissance England. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2003 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2003 Paperback edition 2006 Printed in the United States of America 12 II 10 09 08 07 06 2 3 4 5 ISBN: 0-226-07180-4 ( cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07181-7 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-07181-2. (paper) Portions of the book appeared previously in the following publications: "The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century," with Michael Rey, in English Masculinities, 1600-1800, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London: Longman, 1999 ): "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," History Workshop Journal 2.9 ( 1990 ): 1-19 ( used by permission of Oxford University Press), reprinted in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); "Friendship, the Family, and Liturgy: A Rite for Blessing Friendship in Traditional Christianity," Th,olcgy and Sexuality 13 ( 2000 ): 15-33 (used by permission of Sheffield Academic Press Ltd.), reprinted in Celebrating Christian Marriage, edited by Adrian Thatcher (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001 ): "Why Is It That Management Seems to Have No History?" Reason in Practice: The Journal of Philcsopby of Managtment 1, no. 1 (2.001): 2.1-25; "Medieval Blessing," Lesbian and Cay Christians 57 ( 2000 ). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bray, Alan. The friend / Alan Bray. P· cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-22.6-07180-4 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Male friendship-England-History. 2. Homosexuality, Male-England History. I. Title. BJ153J.F8 8755 2003 177'.62109-dc21 @The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1992. To the memory of my beloved parents, Elsie and Jack Bray In Paradisum deducant eos angeli: in eorum adventu suscipiant martyres, et perducant eos in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. JOHNSON. "Why, Madam, strictly speaking, he is right. All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others; so that an old Greek said, 'He that has friends has no friend.' Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren, which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers. Surely, Madam, your sect must ap prove of this; for, you call all men friends." MRS. KNOWLES. "We are com manded to do good to all men, 'but especially to them who are of the household of Faith."' JOHNSON. "Well, Madam. The household of Faith is wide enough." MRS. KNOWLES. "But, Doctor, our Saviour had twelve Apostles, yet there was one whom he loved. John was called 'the disciple whom J Es us loved."' Jo HN s o N. ( with eyes sparkling benignantly) "Very well, indeed, Madam. You have said very well." BOSWELL. "A fine appli cation. Pray, Sir, had you ever thought of it?" Jo HN s o N. "I had not, Sir." From this pleasing subject, he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American." -James Boswell, &swell's Lift of Joh11son He who loves his Enemies betrays his Friends; This surely is not what Jesus intends. -William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel *** Even the friend may sometime become a foe; Even the foe may sometime become a friend; Remembering this, bear enmity to none . . -Tibetan proverb told to Sir Charles Bell *** Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer. -Oscar Wilde, "A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated" CONTENTS Editor's Note x1 Introduction 1 1 Wedded Brother 13 2 Friend to Sir Philip Sidney 42 3 Families and Friends 78 4 The Body of the Friend 140 5 Friends and Enemies 177 6 Friendship and Modernity 205 7 Coda: The Lickey Hills, August 1890 289 Afterword: Historians and Friendship 307 Notes 325 List of Works Cited 351 Index 373 EDITOR'S NOTE When Alan Bray died on 25 November 2001, he left this book in typescript. The typescript was complete. He had reviewed it thoroughly and entered only a dozen marginal corrections. Alan Bray did not have time to prepare the citation apparatus, the notes and the bibliography, in the style of the University of Chicago Press. For example, almost every citation to a printed book lacked necessary informa tion, and the cumulative bibliography was organized idiosyncratically. Be cause I had reviewed the manuscript before its acceptance, and because I had corresponded with Alan about his last revisions of it, it fell to me to help the press prepare the manuscript for publication. Our overriding desire has been to respect Alan's wishes as we could read them from the typescript. If we have rewritten most notes, reconstructed the whole list of works cited, and corrected some faults in the body, we have not tampered either with the book's argument or with its voice. Despite my best efforts, I may well have introduced or approved errors while redoing the manuscript. I apologize for these to Alan Bray and to his readers-but to Alan first of all. Mark D. Jordan, Emory University INTRODUCTION This book began in the chapel of a Cambridge college. Nearly twenty years ago, I visited Cambridge to give a lecture. As I was finishing breakfast in col lege the morning after my lecture, I was joined by my host Jonathan Wal ters, then a graduate student in the university. We walked to the chapel of Christ's College, where we looked at the seventeenth-century monument by the communion table that marks the burial in the same tomb ofJ ohn Finch and Thomas Baines. "What," I was asked, "do you make of this?" This book is a long-delayed reply to that question. It is a book, as will become apparent, about ethics; but it is also the work of a historian, and it may puzzle and then anger scholars in both ethics and history. Others may recognize in its terms a question and a possibility that had already begun to form in their minds: that at least is my hope. With this in view, I set out to explain in this introduction why I have written this book-and why it may matter. That morning walk in Cambridge is of a kind with other moments that have shaped the book. These have rarely been in the setting of the academic seminar room or the university library. The last such moment was the walk across the Norfolk countryside to Wiveton Parish Church, where at last I saw-all at once-what it was that had im pelled the book forward. But on that morning in Cambridge, the walk to Wiveton Parish Church lay many years ahead, and my difficulty in answering the question lay in grasping that what I was seeing in the chapel of Christ's College was near the far shore of a continent that by the end of the seventeenth century already stretched back across more than half a millennium. Later at the suggestion of the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, I visited Merton College chapel to see the great memorial brass that at the tum of the fourteenth cen tury was placed above the tomb of John Bloxham and John Whytton, 2 INTRODUCTION standing side by side under canopies. I realized then that I had found the perspective I was looking for: that and the scale of the task that now faced me. The result was the silence of the years that followed and this book. Like many of the works of history that I would seek to equal, it is a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its subject is the distinctive place friendship occupied in traditional society. What I mean by "traditional so ciety" I shall come to shortly. My book extends from the opening of the year 1000, as Europe acquired a shape that was to become its enduring form in the centuries that followed. It pursues its account into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until the forms of society that it follows seem finally to fade from view under the civil society of the eighteenth century. Whether indeed they do fade is a question I will return to. What I think is not to be gainsaid is that, in the centuries after the opening of that second millen nium, the bonds offriendship-between individuals and between groups would become part of the sinews of an expanding and increasingly confi dent culture. From the viewpoint of the modern world, that traditional society seems far away ( and long ago). Friendship is now certainly a comforting relation and a good one perhaps, but understood to be essentially private-"just" friends. Yet the present turning point in late modern culture can be de scribed, I think, as a crisis of friendship; and if this book is more than the account of a past world, it is because I am convinced that history allows us to interrogate the uncertain ethics of this crisis. Herein lie my motives for writing this book. The principal difference between the friendship of the modern world and the friendship I describe in this book is that, in the traditional culture that it explores, friendship was significant in a public sphere. In modern civil society friendship has not been perceived to be a public matter, or more precisely ought not to be so. Yet increasingly it is. Feminism was perhaps the first sign of that change, together with the corresponding suspicions and the crisis in masculinity that have accompanied it. But its most contested form in western Europe and North America has concerned the claims of homo sexual friendship to constitute a family, claims that have had the effect of radically putting at issue a view of the family ( and its place in what is as sumed to be traditional religious belief). This book is likely to be perceived as addressing those claims. In part, that would be right. In part, it is to mis understand it, perhaps gravely. Let me explain. Certainly this book will explore that "traditional fam ily," and may appear to find its academic context in the writings of other historians on that subject. But how clear is that academic context? This INTRODUCTION question came increasingly to occupy me as I attempted to master the many writings by historians on the history of the family. It began to bear on me how little those writings seemed to cohere, to add up. It was as if a piece was missing. That curious impression would play a subsequent part in shaping this book-through what at first seemed a stray detail. I noticed that one of the most influential early academic works on the history of the family, Peter Laslett's World We Have Lost, appeared first not as an academic publi cation but in a series of broadcasts by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the spring of 1960. Why? I pursued the question to the volumes of the Listener in the stacks of the London Library: it was to be a second crucial moment. The yellowing pages of the Listener contained the text of Laslett' s broadcasts, and I heard again his broadcast voice as he moved to his con clusion. An attack on the Soviet Union and the regimes of Eastern Europe. I had found my missing piece. Laslett' s broadcasts pointed me toward the realization that the polemics among historians on the "history of the family" was a proxy for the politi cal tensions of the postwar years. What was at issue was not only the friend ship created by kinship in the past. It was also the proper scope for friend ship between individuals and groups in Britain as it emerged into the postwar welfare state, and in a United States that would never forget Roo sevelt's New Deal. The twentieth-century writings on the history of the family were dom inated by two hostile camps that appeared to divide sharply over the role to be assigned to the conjugal family of mother, father, and children. One stressed the modernity of that unit and saw it emerging in the sixteenth cen tury from a wider frame of "extended" kinship relations. This was a view identified with Marxist historians and with other historians who were ulti mately influenced by them without necessarily sharing their political pro gram. The opposed school, identified rather with the contending claims of economic individualism, argued on the same ground (and, in their account, crucially in England) that there is no effective kin group to be identified, at any point as far back as the records take us, beyond that conjugal unit of mother, father, and children: that the extended family of the other camp was a myth. These opposing views of history are something that I deal with at much greater length in the afterword to this book, with its technical and academic detail: a guide to the pipes and plumbing that lie concealed beneath the sur face of this book. My concern here is something broader: despite the differ ences between them, both of these schools nevertheless shared the assump tion that the conjugal family is the interpretative crux for any history of the