Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

JOHN SPURR

from Durham or from his older brother, the ageing dean soldiered on in Corbeil, near Fontainebleau, until his final release in 1703. 24 This sketch requires some shading. While steadfast Anglicanism and royalism were the threads of principle running through Granville’s public life, his inner life was more complex: ‘I am made up in a manner of contradictions’. 25 He was not a profound thinker: his intellectual insecurities made him reluctant to study much more than the Bible; and with ‘miserable’ French, he took little interest in French life or letters. 26 He could be proud, vindictive, misogynistic and prickly, incautious in how he expressed himself, especially about his ecclesiastical superiors, and prone to an overbearing ‘strain of drollery’. 27 Money was his Achilles’ heel; he even thought open-handedness ran in the family: his own debts soured close relations, including with his wife and father-in-law, and led to his humiliating arrest in the cloisters at Durham in 1674. 28 Self-doubt preyed on him and undermined his confidence in his vocation: as a cleric, he was obliged to guide others, and indeed may have given them useful counsel ‘in those very matters concerning which I have needed it myself’. 29 Nor was he a stranger to self-pity: ‘how considerable a C[hristian] & minister might I have been’? 30 The remedy to such failings was what Granville called ‘government’. Central to the oversight he exercised as a pastor and a dignitary of the church, this term was also applied to familial issues, such as the management of his wife’s mental distress or the fraught Provençal household shared with his sister. 31 It was, however, Granville himself who most needed ‘government’: ‘I have long been, and am still, in quest of A le[a]d Phylosopher ,’ he told Locke: ‘a Coadjutor (as to the prudentiall Government of my selfe and affaires, not the Execution of my Office)’; ‘a Governour I must have’ as ‘I am soe dissatisfied with the last 20 years Government of my selfe, in reference, to my fortune, and to my studies etc. that I am resolved to put my selfe into better 24 For this second French exile see Remains (1865), pp. 188-257. 25 Locke, Correspondence , ii. 54. 26 Remains (1865) p. 207; Locke, Correspondence , i. 550, 564. 27 A nephew was alleged ‘to reply pertly, when I doe (after my way) give him a merry rebuke’ and to be ‘over tender of reproofe, tho’ it bee but insinuated by way of drollery’: Remains (1865), p. 167. 28 ‘This sin of v[ain] gl[ory] is the sin of our family’ and one of which he had been ‘egregiously’ guilty: ‘alas! My conscience tells mee that I have; otherwise it had not been possible for mee to have squander’d away so many thousand pounds.’ Remains (1865), p. 27; also see MS Rawl D 849, fo. 65; Locke, Correspondence , ii. 76; Counsel , pp. 119-20; Remains (1861), pp. 245-50. 29 Locke, Correspondence , i. 470. 30 MS Rawl D 852, fo. 22. 31 After several years apart, and unable ‘to beare the fatigue of her distemper any longer’, in September 1679 Granville placed her ‘under Government (A province I am very unfit for) … with a person famous for the ordering distempered persons’ in Worcester: Locke, Correspondence , ii. 77, 91, 60. On Joanna and Mary Thornhill, see MS Rawl. D 852, fos 178v, 179v, 182v; Locke, Correspondence , i. 636.

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