Early modern English concepts of ‘friend’ and friendship, as elsewhere in Europe, were heavily influenced by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia, two works that proposed a vision of friendship that exalted virtuous unions between men who shared similar interests and social status. The Anglo-Saxon friund, derived from the Germanic base for ‘free’, denoted a condition akin to mutual trust and intimacy, or freedom from tribute. ‘Friend’ shared a similar formation to its antonym, fiend.[1]
Ciceronian views of friendship were particularly popular in Tudor intellectual circles. In his translation of De amicitia (1550), John Harrington explained to his readers that his translation of Cicero’s ‘booke of friendship’ aimed to promote ‘the goodly rules, the natural order, and civil use of friendship’ and demonstrate that only a ‘faithfull, a sure, and a trusty friend, must need be a good, a wise, and a virtuous man’.[2] Richard Hoper mentioned Cicero’s work in The instruction of a Christian man, in vertue and honestie (1580) to support his theory that ‘friends are to be reverenced and worshipped’ in a relationship in which both parties are ‘good and Honest’, reciprocal, share a similar social status and education.[3] Opposed to ‘mutual love and favor’ were ‘unlikeness of studies, and diversity of manners’ which ‘break and departe friendship in sunder.[4] True friendship, Thomas Churchyard maintained, ‘proceeds from virtue, and hath so noble a nature (by a divine motion of goodnesse) that neither vice can corrupt, nor any kind of vanity vanquish’.[5]
Friendship manuals were highly attuned to issues of social status and political loyalty. In A tipe or figure of friendship (1598), Walter Dorke argued along the lines of Cicero that ‘[f]riendship is a perfect consent and agreement with benevolence & charity in all things, appertaining as well towards God as men' and only possible ‘among good men, and cannot be where virtue is not’.[6] This emphasis on virtue led Dorke to exclude ‘the profitable friendship which is among Merchants…the pleasant friendship which is among Courtiers…[and] the common friendship which is among Clowns’ from ‘the true, perfect, and unfeigned friendship, which is neither for pleasure partely, nor for profit chiefely, but for vertues sake onely’.[7] Dorke’s ‘petite pamphlet’ was written with the intention to stimulate ‘our Anglians to entertain & embrace Friendship as a mightie co[m]panion and aide to vertues’.[8] The perfect embodiment of friendship, according to Dorke, was possible in England, a ‘flourishing Iland’ with religious and political stability, due to a Protestantism blessed by God and freed from the ‘vices’ that plagued other countries. In this way, Dorke defined a specific strain of English friendship by invoking the customs of other geographical spaces as foils. Roman friendships were too covetous, superstitious, and vainglorious, in Turkey ‘their Mahomet is too monstrous’, India was ‘too rude and barbarous’, Italy too ‘proud and ambitious’, Spain ‘disdainful, vile and vicious’, France ‘craftie, fierce and furious’, and the faults of German and Danish friendships were that ‘they dedicate themselves to Bacchus’.[9]
Dorke’s vision of the perfect friend as one who aligns to a Protestant morality was a strong characteristic of Elizabethan friendship books.[10] Yet at the same time, the Henrician break with Rome through the Reformation, as well as increasing contacts with non-Christians beyond Europe, meant that ‘friendship’ and ‘friend’ provided a rhetoric of well-wishing that enabled rulers to express the intention to sustain frequent and stable relations with another state or ruler despite religious differences. In many ways, Elizabeth I, as the queen of England, reflected both interpretations of friendship. The queen, according to Dorke, was an example of a true Protestant Christian friend for ‘her gracious inclination and readiness in aiding the oppressed…her godly zeale in planting the Gospel…her princely care, pitie, and pietie towards her own people and country, it would seem such, and so great, that it might well make all other Princes and Potentates rather amazed to hear it, than apt to imitate it’.[11] However, the popular Ciceronian notion of friends as individuals engaged in a relationship of mutual kindness also enabled her to contribute to a developing rhetoric that evoked amity or the prospect of friendship even between hostile states. Elizabeth I could thus address other European rulers, including her arch-rival Philip II of Spain, with the formula ‘Brother, cousin and our dearest friend’.[12] Elizabethan foreign policy in the East was also often expressed in terms of such regal friendship.[13] In 1601, for example, Elizabeth raised the utility of diplomatic friendship in a letter addressed to the Sultan of Aceh, in which she suggested that when ‘one land may have need of the other’, they could ‘breed intercourse and exchange of their Merchandise and Fruits, which doe superabound in some Countries, and want in others: but also ingender love and friendship betwixt all men, a thing naturally divine’.[14]
The link between ‘friends’ and political relationships can be seen in the rhetoric of friendship that guided wider diplomatic language, particularly in dealings with Eastern polities. The ambassador Anthony Jenkinson described his mission to the court of Tahmasp I of Persia as an intent ‘to intreat friendship and free passage, and for his safe conduct to be granted unto English merchants to trade into his Seignories, with the like also to be granted to his subjects, when they should come into our countries, to the honour and wealth of both realms, and commodity of both their subjects’.[15] The relations forged in cross-cultural trade were often used as a vehicle for diplomacy and evoked as a sign of friendship between different states that could expand commercial exchanges. In 1618, Richard Cocks reported to the administration of the East India Company (EIC) that the English factory at Bantam hoped to use their ‘China friends’, identified as Andre Dittis and Captain Whaw, to translate and send two letters from James I to the Chinese emperor, which included ‘one in a friendly sort, and the other some stricter terms’.[16] After reading the two letters, Dittis and Whaw advised the EIC ‘not to send the threatening letter, for they are assured there will nothing be done with the King (of China) by force…and the English nation worse thought of’.[17]
Diplomatic friendships between states were often confirmed or established by treaties of ‘friendship and alliance'. [18] This association between friendship and alliance consolidated in the second half of the seventeenth century, during which diplomatic relations in Europe became increasingly formalized, even as conflicts between England, France, Spain and the Netherlands escalated. Terms such as ‘friend’ or ‘ally’ therefore tended to be used in diplomatic texts and treaties to express an intention to normalize the relation between rival states, or to establish a set of conditions to avoid future conflicts. Rather than an indicative of ‘true’ friendship, they made communication between competing states possible. For example, the peace treaty signed between the Commonwealth of England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1654 established that ‘the two Commonwealths shall remain confederate friends, joined and allied together’ and that both parties were ‘bound to treat each other on both sides with all Love and Friendship’.[19]
Like ‘friend’, the term ‘ally’ (and ‘alliance’) often described specific types of political relationships. Alliances intended to formalize a set of rules that would secure the mutual kindness between both parties. These usually included the obligation to allow the subjects of each party to travel and trade freely in each territory and to be protected by the same laws; the obligation to include each party in other treaties of friendship and alliance signed with other princes or states; the prohibition to aid each other’s enemies; and the obligation to provide military assistance.[20] The duties imposed by treaties of alliance, however, were fragile and subordinate to reason of state. The religious controversialist Peter Heylyn criticized the pope for allowing the breaching of ‘the Oaths of Princes, when they conceive themselves induced upon reason of State, to fly off from those Leagues, and break off those Treaties, which have been solemnly made and sworn betwixt them and their Neighbours’.[21] The administrators of the East India Company had a more cynical vision of the mutual obligations determined by these treaties, stating, during a period of conflict with Dutch East India Company in the 1680s, that ‘the obligation of protecting an Ally, is but a political artifice’.[22]
The reciprocal obligations imposed by these treaties echoed the understanding of the term ‘alliance’ as it pertained to marriage or to a union between families. Marriages, like peace treaties or political alliances, were theoretically based on mutual or contractual obligations, as when Elizabeth I styled herself as the Virgin Queen, married to her realm. Female bodies were often used to effect this double-pronged understanding of alliance as both marriage and political or diplomatic bond, serving to bring families and states together through their bodies. The justification of a sinner (1650) presented ‘the contract of Marriage’ as an alliance since ‘all Alliances are also Contracts; because an alliance is alligatio partium…a binding or tying of parties together each to other’..[23] Marriage was therefore the basis of ‘all natural and legitimate alliance by blood’, in which ‘man is thereby bound to perform unto his Wife all the offices and duties of a Husband, and reciprocally the woman is bound to all the offices and duties of a Wife; for hence Marriage is called Wedlock, because it lockes and binds the parties wedded’[24] Like the conditions determined by treaties of ‘peace, friendship and alliance’, marriages ought to not be temporary, ‘but of perpetuity for ever’.[25]
At the same time, women were often seen as coming between or rupturing the politically and diplomatically loaded bonds of friendship between men. In Thomas Painter’s 1567 retelling of the Roman conquest of Africa and the virtuous suicide of the Carthaginian noblewoman, Sophonisba, the Roman general Scipio seeks to dissuade his friend Massinissa from losing his territorial conquests at the expense of lust. ‘Sophonisba with hir toyes & flatteries did alienat and withdraw king Syphax from our amitie and friendship’, Scipio maintains, and she would do the same with him.[26] Although the embodiment of civility – a ‘passing faire gentlewoman, of flourishing age and comely behaviour, none unto hir within the whole region of Affrica…[with] pleasant grace by amiable gesture’ – Sophonisba ‘intrapped and tangled [Massinissa] in the nettes of Love’, nearly causing Massinissa to lose his political authority.[27]Johann Crell’s analogy between a marriage and a treaty of alliance reflected an increasing trend by the mid-seventeenth century to use terms such as ‘friend’ or ‘ally’ to describe relationships between family members, spouses, or business partners. In Jeremy Taylor’s The Measures and Offices of Friendship (1657), discussions of classical, medieval, and Renaissance visions of friendship led to the conclusion that ‘friends are meant our acquaintance, or our Kindred, the relatives of our family or our fortune, or our sect’.[28] Taylor’s universal notion of ‘friend’ suggested an equality between men and women, an idea that was present in the creation of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in the mid-seventeenth century, but which collided with the more traditional views proposed by classical and puritan works.[29]
In sum, the uses and pleasures of friendship were celebrated throughout this period as good and necessary for civil society, while notions of friendship were often laced with warnings against false friends and the threat of enmity and deception. As England’s global connections developed, discourses of friendship and alliance became increasingly important in providing a framework for contact across religious and cultural divides. At the same time, transatlantic friendships were viewed as a means of maintaining bonds between subjects and settlers that modelled earlier visions of trust and love. Panegyric verses that prefaced travel narratives, like ‘Samuel Purchas of his friend Captaine John Smith’, lauded those ‘friends’ who had ventured abroad in service to the state and the project of expansion.[30] Such verses, set against the supposedly ‘savage’ or rude fabric of indigenous societies, continued to place male friendships in particular at the heart of stable civil society. Writing for audiences in New England and London in the 1620s, the colonist and clergyman Robert Cushman specifically viewed ‘the sweetnesse of true friendship’ as the means whereby English colonialism and the ‘civilizing’ of Native Americans might be effected.[31] In the end, then, friendship was valued for the bond it brought between individuals as a kind of virtuous, pragmatic, but also quasi-spiritual and deeply-valued companionship. Since friendship bonded people together, it was inevitably entangled in political and social ideas about civility and the nature of civil society itself. Whoever truly loved solitude and withdrew for public life, Francis Bacon maintained in his essay ‘On Friendship’, was either ‘a wilde Beast, or a God’.[32] A person’s ‘[a]versation towards Society’ made them a ‘[s]avage Beast’, unable to better themselves or the world around them.[33]
