The Friend

388 Pages·2003·31.34 MB·English

by  Alan Bray

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