John Bargrave

John Bargrave (1610 – 11 May 1680), was an English author and collector and a canon of Canterbury Cathedral.

Early life Bargrave was born in Kent in 1610, the son of Captain John Bargrave and Jane Crouch. His sister Jane married Lodowick Wemyss, who was a church minister, and their child Anne Wemyss was a noted writer. Bargrave's father had fought in the war between the English and the Spanish and had returned to Bridge to raise a family. The Bargraves had recently come to be considered local gentry and this had resulted in the marriage of Bargrave Snr. and the daughter of London haberdasher, Giles Crouch, Bargrave (Jnr.) was a nephew of Isaac Bargrave, Dean of the Canterbury Cathedral.

Education Bargrave was first educated at The King's School, Canterbury and then at St. Peter's College at Cambridge. Bargrave became librarian there and then a fellow of the college in 1637.

Immediately after this promotion he departed with Archdeacon Selleck on the dangerous errand of ransoming English captives at Algiers, for whose redemption ten thousand pounds had been subscribed by the bishops and clergy. He acquitted himself successfully of his mission, and spent the rest of his life at home, dying at Canterbury on 11 May 1680.

In 1665 Bargrave married the well-connected childless widow, Frances Osborne (born Wilde). originally written in 1660 while Bargrave was in Rome and not originally intended for publication.

The work consists of scraps selected from three anonymous contemporary Italian publications (La Giusta Statura de' Porporati, Il Nipotismo di Roma and Il Cardinalismo di Santa Chiesa; the last two by Gregorio Leti), with considerable additions of his own. The profiles were originally designed to illustrate a collection of portraits of the pope and cardinals published by Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi in 1657 called The Effigies.

Bargrave's work was edited by James Craigie Robertson for the Camden Society in 1867, with a memoir of Bargrave and a descriptive catalogue of the curiosities he had acquired in his travels. His cabinet of curiosities, complete with riding boots and a miniature of him and his young travelling tutees, Raymond and Alexander Chapman, by Matteo Bolgnini, survives intact in the Canterbury Cathedral Library.