Traces of sustained exchanges between Swiss and British individuals are amongst the most fascinating aspects of the SwissBritNet corpus. Sometimes just two or three letters are enough to glimpse a developing friendship, a theological debate, business relationship or networking effort. Letters also served to keep in touch after a student returned to his own country, and in some cases, these contacts continued in the following generation: In the Buxtorf and Zwinger families from Basel, for example, father, son and grandson corresponded with friends in England.

In the 1580s, the English physician and MP Thomas Moffet addressed 26 letters to Theodor Zwinger the Elder. The English Hebraist Hugh Broughton exchanged at least 23 letters, mostly in Classical Greek, with the Basel Professor Jacob Zwinger, and was also in touch with Johannes Buxtorf the Elder. Jacob Zwinger in turn corresponded with the English baron Edward Zouche, whose son James, a courtier, wrote warmly to Johann Jacob Frey to urge his return to England in the mid-1630s. After Frey’s early death prevented this, his posthumous son visited his father’s mentors on his own iter literarium. Great affection for a Swiss student is also evident in the letters which Daniel and Elizabeth Penington wrote to their lodger and “son” Johann Heinrich Hummel after his return to Switzerland. Hummel, a student from Bern, had ended up in England because of a shipwreck en route to Holland and then spent several years in London.

A more formal kind of correspondence went on between academics. The Irish Archbishop James Ussher exchanged elaborately courteous letters with the Geneva professor Friedrich Spanheim and the Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf the Younger from Basel. These men may never have actually met, but they expressed great respect for each other’s work. Similarly, Théodore Tronchin from Geneva wrote to James Ussher to ask for support for his son Louis, who was embarking on his iter literarium, and a few months later, young Louis Tronchin wrote to Ussher himself from Leiden, probably en route to England. On the other hand, the two letters to Johann Jacob Frey which we have from the Oxford scholar John Gregory are part of a scholarly exchange which must have started when they were both studying at Christ Church College. Viscount Dungarvan, the young Anglo-Irish nobleman who was chaperoned by Frey on his continental Grand Tour, regularly reported to his father in Dublin, as did his younger brothers, who travelled with a tutor from Geneva.

The liveliest letters of all were written by an Englishman in Switzerland to his Swiss acquaintances. Sir Oliver Fleming produced charming, multilingual and verbally creative messages during his tenure as the English “resident” in Zurich. Fleming described the “doggish pragmatism” of his spaniel (using the word “pragmatism” two centuries before the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary!), advised a Swiss friend not to drink too much at his wedding so he would not fall short in his “duties to Venus”, and signed some of his letters to the Zurich Antistes Johann Jacob Ulrich as “Sir Hinterzünen”, a nickname derived from his address in Zurich, “Hintere Zäune”. Fleming’s correspondence with Johann Jacob Frey is the most extensive in the corpus: for several months in the winter of 1635-1636, remarkably confidential letters (written, remarkably, in English!) went to Zurich from Basel and vice versa every week, sharing private plans, gossip about mutual acquaintances and news about the war.

A less pleasant aspect of Fleming’s character is evident in the huge debts he left behind in Switzerland. Struggling to maintain an appropriately ambassadorial lifestyle on insufficient funds, he borrowed massively from Frey and in the 1640s neglected to pay Emanuel Meyer, the son of Basel Professor Wolfgang Meyer, when the young Swiss was working for him in London. Father Meyer wrote a series of increasingly exasperated letters in the hope of getting money out of Sir Oliver. At one point, he was actually looking after the wife that Fleming had left behind in Switzerland, while Emanuel was struggling to feed himself adequately in London.

These messages markedly contrast with the insouciance of Wolfgang Meyer’s own student years half a century earlier: during the 1590s, he wrote from Cambridge to Jacob Zwinger and to his family and was admonished by his (possibly envious) brother in Basel not to spend too much time and money on playgoing! Kaspar Thomann from Zurich was in Britain a few years later: the elaborate letters he wrote home to find support for his studies at Oxford represent a very different, increasingly lonely, student experience, and and a couple of years after Thomann settled in London, contact with Switzerland broke off. Finally, in the 1660s, the studies of Johann Rudolf Battier and Johann Jacob Buxtorf in Oxford and Cambridge were disrupted by the Plague and the Great Fire of London. The resulting delays had to be explained to sponsors back in Basel – yet another colour on the rich palette of Swiss-British epistolary exchanges in the 17th century.

Regula Hohl Trillini