Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

JOHN SPURR

D ENIS GRANVILLE D.D. , archdeacon of Durham, gentleman, and spendthrift, should have enjoyed his ‘retirement’ to Provence in 1676. 1 Life was ‘commodious’ at La Tour d’Aigue, which boasted ‘not only two good cabarets, but an able physician, ... chirurgeon, ... apothecary, ... advocate, a good taylor, shoemaker and cooke, and many other useful persons and small things’. 2 Quiet days were passed playing chess and tying trout flies, climbing mountains, and managing his female relatives and his stretched finances. Yet the archdeacon was troubled: fretting over his incapacity for study, worrying about his spiritual state, and plagued by self-doubt, this was a man who needed to unburden himself; and so his hopes of making a new ‘bosome freind’ soared when John Locke arrived in Montpellier that winter. 3 Late in 1676 the archdeacon and the virtuoso did meet, but thereafter, and despite Granville’s entreaties, somehow Locke was never available; wherever Granville arrived, Locke had always just moved on: ‘you doe seem to play Bo-peep with mee,’ chided the archdeacon. 4 Over the next three years, then, theirs was to be an epistolary, and a largely one-sided, relationship. Granville’s loss is, of course, our gain: his surviving twenty-three letters to Locke are intriguing. 5 In these disorganised, whimsical, solipsistic, and occasionally hysterical epistles, Granville begged Locke’s friendship and advice on a range of topics, and with astonishing candour. The archdeacon confided, among much else, that ‘I have a Confused head very full of thoughts and notions about vertue and vice, and our Demeanour here in this life, in order to a better’. 6 That is a striking admission by a senior churchman; and it is surely odd that a doctor of divinity should consult Locke, a layman, who actively avoided the clerical career path, and was not yet a published ‘philosopher’, on matters of morality. It is a puzzle to which we will return. 1 This paper draws on Granville’s papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Rawlinson D 849-52; ‘The Remains of Denis Granville’, ed. George Ornsby in Miscellanea, Surtees Society, xxxvii (1861); The Remains of Denis Granville, ed. George Ornsby, Surtees Society, xlvii (1865) – respectively cited as Remains (1861) and Remains (1865), which reprint much of the Rawlinson MSS – and, above all, on Granville’s correspondence with John Locke published in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. De Beer (8 vols., Oxford, 1976-89), i and ii. The spelling of Granville’s surname follows these sources, although he often spelled it as ‘Grenville’: see William Marshall, ‘Granvelle (formerly Grenville), Denis (1637-1703), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . The ‘retirement’ reference is at Locke, Correspondence, i. 477. I regret that I have not been able to consult R. Granville, The Life of Denis Granville (1902). 2 Remains (1865), p. 32. La Tour d’Aigue (Vaucluse) is 28 kilometres north of Aix: Granville and his entourage also spent time in Aix, Montpellier and Paris between 1676 and 1679. 3 Locke, Correspondence , i. 541. 4 Locke, Correspondence , ii. 13; also see i. 634. 5 There are 23 letters from Granville and three replies by Locke, some letters include ‘papers’ on topics such as recreation, conversation, business, study and devotion. They have received scant attention, although Mark Goldie remarked on Granville’s ‘interminably anxious importunity’ and printed part of his letter of 6/16 March 1677, in Mark Goldie, ed., John Locke: Selected Correspondence (Oxford, 2002), p. 53. 6 Locke, Correspondence , i. 477.

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