John Finch and Thomas Baines

John Finch (1626-1682) and Thomas Baines (c.1624-1681) met as students at Christ’s College in 1645. They moved into a set in the newly constructed Fellows’ Building and began a lifelong partnership. After “those five happy years in Christ Colledge in Cambridge”, they mostly lived abroad, first in Italy, then in Constantinople. Their relationship was the defining fact of their lives. Writing in his final years, Finch stressed its longevity and constancy. It seemed to him “a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls, and a companionship undivided during 36 complete years”, as he reflected that, in all their years of “intimate and endearing communication together… wee never have bin separated two moneths from each other”.

Cambridge

To begin with, though, they came from different worlds. Baines was the older of the pair and he knew Cambridge and Cambridgeshire better; he was born in Whaddon, went to school in Stortford, and matriculated at Christ’s aged fourteen, in 1638. For at least some of his time at Christ’s, he was a ‘sizar’, a student who could subsidise his living expenses by serving other students. Finch was younger and much wealthier, from a family deeply embedded in English institutional life. After attending Eton and Oxford for his first degree (probably at Balliol College), following a path laid down by his two older brothers, the Civil War intervened, forcing Finch to leave Oxford. He incorporated his degree at Cambridge and came to Christ’s in 1645. The men of his family had piled up honours and good offices of state: his father Heneage Finch had been Speaker of the House of Commons, with John’s oldest brother (also Heneage) becoming Lord Chancellor and eventually first Earl of Nottingham. 

As the third son, the young John Finch enjoyed the Spielraum to pursue his own interests abroad. Still, perhaps the pressures of so many family accomplishments contributed to a somewhat scratchy relationship with his oldest brother Heneage (often referred to, a little derisively, as ‘Mr Attorney’ in his letters), whose fervent encouragement to John to find a wife was not always welcome. But whatever the tensions with his male relatives, John Finch adored his younger half-sister, the Lady Anne Conway (b. 1631), a prominent philosopher and member of the Cambridge Platonists, and thus a striking exception to seventeenth-century gender norms. 

Finch wrote more letters to Anne than to anyone else, a dense body of correspondence which stretches over almost three decades, from when Finch and Baines set out for Italy in 1651 until Anne’s death in 1679 (“I never wrote into England but that I wrote to you”, Finch tells her). They are notably affectionate: Finch often began letters to Anne with the appellation “My dearest Soule”, terms he would transfer to Baines in later years. Anne and Baines must have met and become acquainted during the couple’s Cambridge years; their earliest surviving exchanges are familiar and gabby. Anne also met the couple’s philosophy tutor, Henry More, who seems to have taken her on informally as a student when she was a teenager (and a married woman, having wed Edward, Earl of Conway in 1649 aged seventeen). The two worked together as colleagues in philosophy throughout Anne’s adult life, corresponding frequently with each other and with Finch and Baines, and it is above all through Anne, via Henry More, that the couple always retained a tether back to Christ’s College.

Padua and Pisa

Through Anne’s correspondence with Finch and Baines, we see the couple’s uncertain but exciting early years in Padua, studying anatomy and medicine as postgraduates in their mid-twenties. They quickly adjusted to life in Italy, adopting the epistolary sign-offs Giovanni Finchio and Tommaso Baines. In Padua, Finch and Baines joined the currents of competitive theorising about the mechanics of the body and the circulatory systems of animals. Baines was transfixed by public dissections and the glimpses they revealed of the body’s hidden machinery. In finely wrought Latin verses he described “the secret marriages of the arteries with the veins, how they exchange sweet kisses, and rejoice constantly in mutual embraces”. 

Finch, by contrast, evaluated the knifework on show before him, coolly rating the medical acumen of the experts he encountered across mainland Europe. He intervened strongly when Anne, who suffered from chronic, debilitating migraines, disclosed a plan to travel to Belgium to consult Jan Baptista van Helmont, a Flemish physician who claimed to have invented a ‘universal medicine’. “He is a very ignorant Person,” Finch wrote Anne in his first few months at Padua, “and though I have diligently observed him I never knew him speake or doe anything extraordinary… If you would have me speake plainly to you, Helmont shall alwayes be more prized where he is not than where he is”. Finch could certainly be acerbic in his letters, but here he may have been speaking from particularly bitter experience. In Geneva, while the couple were on their way to Padua, he had been struck down with a brutal illness for two weeks and had found the local doctors wanting. The expertise of the van Helmonts of the world was nothing compared to the devotion of Baines, as he related to Anne: “Mr Baines, God reward him, 3 whole nights satt up with me and indeed was the onely comfort I had in my disease by his care and vigilancy”. 

Finch and Baines concluded their studies at Padua in 1657, taking their doctorates. In December, they started to think about coming back to England. They sent ahead their two dogs, Julietto and Vittoria, providing Anne with a long list of instructions for their care. But the plans to return seemingly came to nothing. The Accademia del Cimento, a new scientific society which would serve as the model for both the Academy of Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society in London had just been established at Florence by Leopoldo de’ Medici, brother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Finch and Baines numbered among the attendees at its earliest meetings. Membership of the Accademia took the couple to Pisa in 1659 where Finch, aged 33, was appointed Professor of Anatomy. By then, they had both performed their own dissections including, disastrously, attempting to dissect a live stingray – lifting it up with their bare hands and experiencing “a prickling sensation like that which comes when you suddenly put cold fingers to the fire. If the hand is not quickly taken away, the pain goes up the whole arm”. Baines came off worst: he was left with a lasting tremor in one arm. 

England

According to the records of the University of Pisa, Finch’s professorship lasted from 1659 to 1663, but in fact in 1660 the couple finally took the long-delayed journey home and spent two years back in England. Still only in their mid-thirties, their successes in Padua and Pisa and the intercessions of friends and family had earned them a bouquet of honours. They gained admission as Fellows Extraordinary of the Royal College of Physicians in 1660 and were granted honorary doctorates from Cambridge. In 1661 Baines was appointed as Professor of Music for Gresham College (a royal appointment) and Finch was knighted. The following year, they were both inducted as new Fellows of the Royal Society, admitted as part of a cohort that also included John Dryden and Christopher Wren.

Their return in 1660 had coincided with the restoration of Charles II to the monarchy. Under the restored King, Finch’s brother Heneage prospered, becoming, in quick succession, MP for Canterbury, then Solicitor General, then MP for Oxford in the Cavalier parliament. Finch had his own point of contact with the King: according to a diplomatic passport issued at the time, he was serving as Physician to the Queen Consort (the 24-year-old Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza), although the appointment seems to have been largely honorary. The monarch’s favour of the Finch family, combined with the couple’s growing visibility as distinguished physicians trained in Italy led Finch to his first ambassadorial post, as the King’s Resident to the Ducal Court of Florence. 

Even after only two years back in England, this removal to Italy necessitated some delicate disentangling. Baines got royal permission to take a long leave from his post at Gresham College, with the added clause that “he may receive meanwhile all the profits of his fellowship”. In the months leading up to their departure the couple also sold, to Finch’s brother Heneage, a house they had been maintaining in London, an attractive and comfortable two-storey Jacobean mansion set within some acres of gardens to the west of Hyde Park. When Heneage became first Earl of Nottingham in 1681, the property was briefly renamed Nottingham House. In 1689, Heneage’s son Daniel sold it to the Crown, and it was rechristened with the name it still bears: Kensington Palace.

Tuscany

Having made the necessary arrangements for their departure, Finch and Baines set out for Florence in the autumn of 1662. On arrival, they continued their scientific projects for the Accademia del Cimento, a crafty way of staying visible to Ferdinando II de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose brother Leopoldo had founded the Accademia. They took trips to Naples and Rome to research the poisons produced by snakes and the effects of volcanic soils on human health. Their expeditions were not always successful; on one occasion, the couple made it to the base of Vesuvius, but, as Finch remarks disconsolately in his notebooks, after walking for an estimated “12 miles” up the mountain, could not find the summit. 

Their true focus, however, remained on the Ducal Court. They relied on their old contact Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici, who provided letters of introduction to leading Italian scientists and scholars for Finch and “suo amicissimo” Baines. They balanced their scientific pursuits with political duties. From 1665 onwards, Finch worked with the leading men in Florence in brokering trading agreements in wool, slaves, silks and other goods. Back in England, friends groused about how busy the couple now seemed. Finch and Baines had long been notoriously terrible at staying in touch, but even their closest correspondents began to complain about unanswered letters and messages. “I thought they were out of the world, and resolved wholly to forget their friends, that their friends might as justly forget them” huffed one, after a two and a half year wait for a response. Even Anne was sometimes reduced to writing to mutual friends to find out how they were. To Henry More, she complained: “I hear so little from themselves, it makes me very desirous to gitt what information I can from others, and therefore I hope you will pardon my desire to know what you have found relating to their designes, if there be any thing of that kind which you have forgot to Impart”. Finch and Baines had long been known as “the doctors” to some of their friends. Now, as they seemed increasingly inaccessible and cut off, they acquired a new nickname: “the Italians”. Nevertheless, and despite occasional visits back to England, by the end of the 1660s the couple were growing restless to return and, in the summer of 1670, when Ferdinando II died and a new Grand Duke of Tuscany took over, they got their wish. 

Byzantium/America

Their return to England was, once more, to be short-lived. In 1672, unwelcome news arrived. The couple would be split up, with Finch posted as English ambassador to the heart of the old Roman empire in Constantinople, while Baines (newly Sir Thomas Baines, having been knighted in 1671) was to go to the New World, as one of the King’s Commissioners in Massachusetts. The Commissioners’ responsibilities were euphemistically described as examining “the differences concerning the boundaries of Massachusetts and the rest of the colonies”. Those ‘differences’ would erupt in 1675 in ‘King Philip’s War’, waged between the English King’s soldiers and a federation of Algonquian-speaking peoples under Metacom, Great Sachem of the Wampanoag people, and long remembered as an exceptionally bloody and vicious conflict. 

Fortunately for Baines, then, and according to a process lost to the historical record, the proposal to send him to Massachusetts fell through. By December of 1672, we find him ensconced in preparations to travel east with Finch, slightly bashfully cataloguing for Anne the great quantities of fine plate with which the couple were hoping to entertain the Ottoman emperor, Venetian and French ambassadors in Turkey (“in publick things, where the Honour of the Nation is concern’d, Parcimony is a great fault”).  

Constantinople

Arriving in 1673, Finch and Baines remained in Constantinople for the next eight years. For much of that time, they had the company of John Covel, Chaplain of the Levant Company (precursor to the Foreign Office in the region) and soon-to-be fifteenth Master of Christ’s College. Life in Constantinople confronted the couple with new ways of being and believing, mores that challenged them to develop their thinking about morality and religion. They had both long taken a moderate approach towards other religions, albeit one tinged with some scepticism towards Christian denominations other than their own. Finch and Baines were fond of telling a story about a dinner from their time in the Ducal Court in Florence, in which a group of Catholics, boasting about swearing a “Vow of perpetuall Enmity with Turkes” had been bested by Baines, who “pleasantly” reminded them of their daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and wondered how, when they had made “a solemn vow against forgiving their Enemy’s, Contrary to the Doctrine of Christ” they could expect their own sins to be forgiven. 

Baines was, in Finch’s description, a “Man of charming Witt”, and his sharp tongue was proverbial among his friends. But Covel’s account of these years in Constantinople also reveals a man who, in a new environment in his fifties, was genuinely curious about the unfamiliar ideas he found. In Constantinople, Baines read the Quran and held long, committed discussions with Muslim religious leaders in which, as Covel reports, “Sr. Th. B. saies he wept, and said he could not believe any Christian came so near true Musselmen, but that they had all been Idolators… Sr. Tho. said he was now about 55 years of age, and his bones were dryed and hardened to their forme; and his understanding was in like manner settled by long practice of his own religion, and it would be a hard task, and of some long time, to unrivet his notions". 

For Finch, the years in Constantinople shaped his views on religious pluralism. In a series of treatises, he argued that states and empires could only survive if they accommodated a range of religious viewpoints, Jews, Catholics, and Muslims included. It was crucial to a state’s continued existence that no single religious denomination should challenge or seek to monopolise government. When Anne, bedbound and chronically sick by now, converted to become a Quaker in 1677, Finch received the news with some bemusement, but immediately adapted. Noting Quakers’ preference for specific pronouns, Finch reassured Anne “since you seem to affect the Words of Thou and Thee, I can easily reassume that Dialect”. Although not everything in Constantinople was to the couple’s liking – Baines railed against Turkish coffee-houses and tried to get them restricted in England, condemning them as “inconsistent with Government” and “mints of mutiny”, and Finch wrote supporting letters to friends with detailed recipes on brewing coffee at home – overall, the collision with all that was new and unfamiliar in Constantinople suited Finch and Baines well. Living life on their own terms, they were accustomed to and energised by habits and customs that departed from convention or stood outside their previous cultural experience. 

Ends

Sir Thomas Baines died in Constantinople on September 5th, 1681, in his late fifties, after an illness of two weeks. “He gave up his soul into the hands of most mercifull God, and I received his last breath”, Finch wrote. It was an appalling loss. Finch found it impossible to find the right words. He wrote repeatedly, in different genres, trying to pen an adequate memorial. His notebooks cycle through obituary drafts, snatches of final memories, letters, poems. One decision to be reckoned with was how to communicate his private grief to the outside world. Two years after Anne Conway had died, Finch was suddenly without both his closest confidantes. In one unfinished entry in his notebook, Finch wrote that Baines’ death had “cutt off the thread of all my worldly happinesse”. Writing to his brother Heneage, he was more reserved: “There needs no comment to your Lordship on this subject, who knew all things that ever passed between us, and have been exercised in griefs of a high nature”. A stiff, formal postscript to the same letter apologises that in his misery “I had like to have forgotten to congratulate with your Lordship his Majesty’s favour in creating you Earle of Nottingham, which now I doe from all the facultys of my soul, beseeching Almighty God to grant you a long and happy life”. But Finch was clear on how he wanted his contemporaries to understand their relationship. Of the repertoire of options available in the seventeenth century for describing male intimacy (brothers, comrades, friends), Finch chose for Baines’ epitaph in Constantinople the language which best suited their sustained partnership and committed, lifelong love: theirs had been an animorum connubium – “a marriage of souls”. 

Knowing that he wanted to be buried together with Baines when his time came, Finch buried Baines’ viscera in Constantinople, and had his bones transported back to England in a coffin, for deposition in Christ’s College Chapel, as per Baines’ wishes. He travelled back to England in the early months of 1682 and made his way to Cambridge. The Fellows and Scholars of Christ’s met him with Baines’ remains at Trumpington and conveyed them to the College in coaches and on horses. College members lined up outside the Great Gate to receive them, and a dinner in Baines’ honour was held that evening. 

Finch had sickened on the journey back to England, and eventually succumbed to pleurisy in London, dying on the 18th of November 1682. He had written his will on the boat, and matched Baines’ legacy of £2000 for Christ’s College with one of his own. His nephew, Daniel Finch, commissioned a joint memorial for the Chapel, and the couple’s former College tutor, Henry More, supplied the words for their epitaph. Since Daniel Finch, a succession of Christ’s College members have continued to find ways to remember them. George Howard Darwin, son of the more famous Charles, found inscriptions set up in Aula Magna, Padua in 1657, which honoured the pair as young doctors. Darwin featured these inscriptions prominently in his pamphlet “On monuments to Cambridge men in Padua”, published 1894, and John Peile, College Master at the time, had the inscriptions restored at personal expense. 

Finch and Baines occupy a central place within the queer history not just of Christ’s College but of the University of Cambridge and of seventeenth-century England more generally. They lived varied lives, full of travel and action, but their relationship was a constant. One of the legacies of Finch and Baines, perhaps, is that their example retains the power to expand, and even to challenge, modern perceptions of the depth of queer history, a reminder that those born centuries ago already had available to them a great many different ways to live and to love. 
 
Further Reading:

British Library, Add. MS. 23215 (correspondence of John Finch)
Covel, J. and Bent, T. (ed., 1893), Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant: I. The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599-1600 ; II. Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670-1679; with Some Account of the Levant Company of Turkish Merchants, Hakluyt Society 87, London.
Darwin, G. H. (1894), ‘On monuments to Cambridge men in Padua’, Transactions of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 36.3: 337–47.
National Archives of the UK, SP 99/45 (dispatches from Italy, 1652–63)

Alie, R. (2017), ‘Empire without end: John Finch, Orientalism and Early Modern Empire, 1674–81’, unpubl. diss., University of Western Ontario.
Bray, A. (2001), The Friend, Chicago.
Brown, C. (2016), Friendship and its Discourses in the Seventeenth Century, Oxford.
Crane, P. (2020), ‘The memorial to John Finch and Thomas Baines in the Chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge’, Christ’s College Magazine 245: 52–6.
Hall, M.B. (2005), ‘Arabick learning in the correspondence of the Royal Society, 1660–1677’, in Hamilton, A. et al. (eds), The Republic of Letters and the Levant, Leiden: 147–57.
Horwitz, H. (1968), ‘The Work of Sir John Finch’, Notes and Queries 15: 103–4.
Hutton, S. (2004), Anne Conway: a woman philosopher, Cambridge.
Hutton, S. (2011), ‘Sir John Finch and Religious Toleration: An Unpublished Letter to Anne Conway on Her Conversion to Quakerism’, in L. Olschki (ed.) La Centralita Del Dubbio: Un Progetto Di Antonio Rotondo 1: 287–304.
Lepore, J. (1998), The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, New York.
Malloch, A. (1917), Finch and Baines: a seventeenth-century friendship, Cambridge.
Underwood, T.L. (1978), ‘Sir John Finch and Viscountess Anne Conway: two unpublished letters’, Quaker History 67.2: 112–21.
Wilson, J. (1995), ‘Two names of friendship, but one Starre: Memorials to Single-Sex Couples in the Early Modern Period’, Church Monuments 10: 70-83.
 

Dr Ella Kirsh, Junior Research Fellow