Introduction

The intense life of Basel-born Johann Jacob Frey (1606-1636) was cut short before he could fulfil his great promise as a scholar or enjoy the career in the Church of England that he was hoping for before he died of the plague. More than two hundred extant letters testify to an extraordinary talent for friendship, which can also be gauged from the grief which his death caused to friends, family and colleagues in Switzerland and Britain. Frey cultivated relationships across the Channel and across political, social and confessional factions, with male and female aristocrats in Britain and family members in Switzerland and France, with scholars, academics, politicians and churchmen.

Frey's correspondence – which features seven of the eight or nine languages he knew - also belongs to the Republic of Letters, which linked scholars all over Europe in learned exchanges. It also testifies to the social opportunities of the 1630s, a decade which was – in the midst of the Thirty Years War – comparatively idyllic in Switzerland as well as Britain. This did not last long; within ten years of Frey's death, two of his powerful English patrons had been executed, another displaced and King Charles I., whose son Frey may have been asked to tutor, would be beheaded in 1649. What survives are Frey's books and the letters, in which he could "unfold the very secrets of my heart".

They document an extraordinary personality and throw an individual light on some of the great debates and events of the early seventeenth century.

Regula Hohl Trillini