Isaac Basire

Basire was born, probably at Rouen in Normandy,^[1] or, according to Anthony à Wood, in Jersey. His full name was Isaac Basire de Preaumont, but he dropped the latter part of the name when he settled in England. His father was a Protestant, and belonged to the lowest order of French nobility. Little is known of his early years, but at sixteen he was sent to school in Rotterdam, and two years later (1625) he removed to Leyden University. At Leyden he published (1627) a disputation which he had held there, De Purgatorio et Indulgentiis.^[2]

In about 1628 Basire settled in England, and in 1629 he received holy orders from Thomas Morton, then Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, who soon afterwards made him his chaplain. In 1632, Morton was translated to Durham, and Basire accompanied him there. In 1635 he married Frances Corbett, a member of an old Shropshire family. In 1636 the University of Cambridge conferred upon him the degree of B.D., in compliance with the royal mandate, and appointed him one of the university preachers through England and Ireland. In the same year Bishop Morton bestowed upon him the rectory of Egglescliffe, near Yarm.^[2]

In 1640 he was made D.D., and in 1641 chaplain extraordinary to King Charles I. In 1643 he was collated by Bishop Morton to the seventh stall in Durham Cathedral, and in 1644 to the Archdeaconry of Northumberland^[3] with the rectory of Howick annexed. These were, for the present, merely nominal appointments, for in consequence of the civil war both the duties and emoluments were in abeyance. In 1645 the rich living of Stanhope became vacant; it was in the gift of the Bishop of Durham, but Morton, "oppressed and overawed by the terrors of the rebels, durst not dispose of it". It therefore lapsed to the crown, and the king gave it to Basire, who was then in attendance upon him as chaplain at Oxford; this also, of course, was only a nominal preferment.^[2]

In 1646 Basire, who as royal chaplain had markedly identified himself with the king's cause, was seized at Egglescliffe and taken to Stockton Castle and his livings were sequestered. On his release he was "forced by want of subsistence for himself and his family" to go abroad, leaving his wife and children to live upon the so-called "fifths", which "were paid by sixes and sevens, or rather by tenths and twelfths", and upon the small sums which Basire conscientiously remitted to them whenever he possibly could. Mrs Basire, however, found a kind friend in Richard Busby, who had been most intimate with her husband, and who frequently expressed himself under great obligations to him for spiritual counsel. When Basire went to London he always stayed with Busby at Westminster School, and he placed his eldest son under the doctor's charge at an unusually early age.^[2]

Basire commenced his travels by visiting Rouen, where he had a small patrimony of about £8 per annum. Here he was joined by three pupils, two of whom bore the aristocratic names of Lambton and Ashburnham, while the third was a Mr Andrews. With these three he began his travels in the summer of 1647, going first to Paris, where he had an interview with the unfortunate Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, who gave him a recommendation to Sir Kenelm Digby, the English legate at Rome. Thence he travelled to Naples and Sicily, and reached Rome in 1649.^[2]

One by one his pupils left him, and he does not seem to have sought any others. It appears from his letters to his wife that he had considerable difficulty in getting paid for his pupils, and he had now a nobler object in view. That object was nothing less than to disseminate the Anglo-Catholic faith throughout the East. It seems at first sight a wild and quixotic enterprise for a man who had no knowledge of any eastern language to attempt to impress his religious opinions upon the unchanging East; but he had a thorough conviction that the true position of Anglicanism only required to be known to secure its acceptance among earnest and intelligent Christians, and the result proved that his design was more than a day-dream. Basire visited Messina, Zante, the Morea, Smyrna, Aleppo, Antioch, Jerusalem, Transylvania, Constantinople, Mesopotamia, and many other places, ever keeping his one object before him. In a letter written in 1653 from Pera to Sir Richard Browne, the father-in-law of John Evelyn, and the mainstay of the English church in Paris, he describes what he had effected. At Zante he met with great success "in spreading among the Greeks the catholic doctrine of our church", mainly through a Greek translation of the church catechism. He made such way that he incurred the enmity of the "Latins", that is, those members of the Roman church in the East who perform their services in Latin. He was therefore obliged to go on to the Morea, where the Metropolitan of Achaea allowed him to preach twice in Greek at a meeting of bishops and clergy. At Aleppo he held frequent conversations with the patriarch of Antioch, then resident there, and left copies of the church catechism translated into Arabic. From Aleppo he went to Jerusalem, where he was honoured both by the Greek and the Latin Christians. The Greek patriarch "expressed his desire of communion with our old church of England", and gave him his bull or patriarchal seal; while the Latins received him into their convent, a rare honour then to be paid to someone they considered a heretic. "Then", he says, "I passed over the Euphrates and went into Mesopotamia, Abraham's country, whither I am intending to send our catechism in Turkish to some of their bishops". This was in 1652; he spent the winter of 1652–3 at Aleppo.^[2]

In the spring of 1653 he went from Aleppo to Constantinople by land, a distance of about 600 miles, unaccompanied by any one who could speak any European language. He had picked up a little Arabic at Aleppo, and he joined a company of twenty Turks, an apparently dangerous escort; but they treated him well, because he acted as physician to them. He now enjoyed a little comparative rest. At Pera, near Constantinople, he undertook to officiate to the French Protestants, on the express condition that he might use the English liturgy in French. They consented to this, and promised "to settle on him a competent stipend". Here he became known to Achatius Barcsay, envoy to the Porte from Prince George II Rákóczi. Barcsay introduced him to the prince. "In 1661", he wrote:

"I was honourably engaged, and that still with the royal leave, in the service of that valiant Achilles of Christendom, George Ragoczi II, Prince of Transylvania, my late gracious master, who for the space of seven years had honoured me with the divinity chair in his university of Alba Iulia, the metropolis of that noble country, and endowed me (a meer stranger to him) with a very ample honorary, till in that very year, that prince dying of his wounds received in his last memorable battel with the Turks at Gyalu, the care of his solemn obsequies was committed to me by his relict, the Princess Sophia, whereby I was kept a year longer out of England."

Basire still kept his one object in view at Alba Iulia, for we find him writing to Sir Edward Hyde (afterwards Lord Clarendon) in 1658: "As for maintenance here 'tis competent; but my especial loadstone hath been the opportunity in the chair to propagate the right christian religion as well for discipline as doctrine". He had great influence with Prince Rákóczi, and was not afraid of boldly telling him his mind. When a Turkish invasion was imminent, he wrote to the prince, urging him either to exert himself to save his country or to abdicate his throne. The appeal was not in vain. Rákóczi made an heroic but unsuccessful struggle against the invaders at the Battle of Gyalu, but was mortally wounded and died soon after (June 1660). All this time Basire had not severed his connection with his other royal master, Charles II. In 1655 he wrote a long letter in Latin to the king, exhorting him to be true to his religion; and in the same year Charles wrote to Prince Rákóczi thanking him for his kindness to Basire, and another letter a little before the prince's death begging him to send Basire back to England. Rákóczi, "loath to lose him", concealed this letter from Basire for a while, and after his death his widow begged him still to stay in Transylvania and educate her son. This, however, he refused to do. The Church of England was now restored, and his wife and his five children were still in England.^[2]