A Conflict of Wills. The Seventeenth-Century Diarist Isaac Archer and His Father

Abstract

Isaac Archer (1641-1700) was a godly man, an Anglican minister, a good father to his nine children and the son of a possessive father. The order in which his life roles are listed here is not random. For a considerable part of his life he kept a diary in which he recorded the many struggles with his sinful nature and presented himself as a man whose priority was to submit to the will of God. His humbleness was frequently and most painfully tested in the context of his parenthood, but it was the challenges that he faced in the relationship with his own father that seemed to have had the greatest impact on his spiritual as well as daily life. This article is a portrait of this very turbulent relationship between a seventeenth-century adult son and his strong-willed father. Parents and their adult children Family life, both in the present day and in the past, has been governed by certain norms regulating parent/child relationships. Recent studies clearly show that the model of formal, unaffectionate contacts between parents and their offspring in early modern England, described by Lawrence Stone in the 1970s (Stone 1977), cannot be universally applied to all English families, and that there was, in fact, much space in family life for love, affection, care and commitment (Pollock 1983; Ozment 1983; Macfarlane 1987, Houlbrooke 1990; Woods 2006; Fletcher 2010). This new interpretation of historical evidence does not, however, invalidate completely the traditional view of early modern parenting. Affectionate and caring or not, parents were seen as agents of God's will, and their roles as nurturers, disciplinarians, providers and educators had a divine mandate. The children, in return, were obliged to honour and obey their parents because obedience to them was obedience to God (O'Day 1994: 46- 49). Parents' role was to prepare their children to live in the world, while children's duty was to follow the prescriptions and demands of their parents (Ben-Amos 2000: 292). But how long was this supposed to last? How long were parents obliged to be involved in the lives of their children, and to what extent were adult sons and daughters supposed to meet their parents' expectations? What was the nature of parental/filial love in the period beyond adolescence and early youth? Theoretical traditions such as attachment theory, family solidarity theory, exchange theory, bioevolutionary approaches, social integration theory, and psychoanalytic theory, used in studies on contemporary family life, emphasize the importance of the parent/child relationship over the course of life. Children's financial independence or physical distance are seen as less important than a distinctive history, a set of experiences, carried by family members and connecting them throughout their lives (Umberson 1992: 664-665).