One such was Samuel Hartlib, a Protestant refugee from central Europe. Hartlib combined aninterest in Baconian science – that is, knowledge based on verifiable experience, and located within a coherent intellectual system which is often regarded as the forerunner of modern natural science – with an interest in the educational ideas of Comenius (Jan Komensky) and John Dury’s interest in the promotion of Protestant unity. Here the key issue was sound knowledge – of nature and of scripture – organized and taught in a coherent way, to produce an educated, properly Christian population. These ideas were presented in Macaria in 1641 and it was at Hartlib’s invitation in 1644 that John Milton wrote Of Education, an outline of an education suitable for a better world, training boys to govern, cultivate and defend their commonwealth.38
A central element of these ideals was the communication of knowledge and experience, and Hartlib was himself a tireless letter writer and, when funds permitted, publisher. Accurate knowledge, and a method to understand its meaning, was also associated with the creation of institutions to validate truth: a college of experience in the utopian tract Macaria (and another college to consider doctrinal matters); the Office of Address in a later and more limited proposal. These hopes had a millenarian aspect too. Hartlib and many of his correspondents believed that in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall, Adam had enjoyed a perfect knowledge of creation. Through an active use of the resources around him, Adam was never hungry, or ill, and was at one with God’s Word. Restoration of this knowledge would help to prepare the way for the return of Christ and the saints. This was an active and practical millenarianism, continuously concerned to make productive use of the environment.39
This desire to read the book of nature in order to come closer to God was akin to the interest in astrology, which promised to read in the heavens signs of God’s intentions: the book of nature provided a means to supplement our knowledge of God’s purposes derived from the often inscrutable book of scriptures. Clearly the conditions of the 1640s made that an enticing prospect. According to one modern authority, ‘Astrology was probably the most ambitious attempt ever made to reduce the baffling diversity of human affairs to some sort of intelligible order’, and the millenarian Baconianism of the Hartlib circle was scarcely less ambitious. Astrology fostered its own college too: the Society of Astrologers.40
In Samuel Hartlib’s case, intellectual creativity was married to attempts at practical mobilization. He had visited England in 1626 and settled there in 1628, pursuing an ambitious programme of educational reform throughout the 1630s. In 1641 and 1642 it looked like his moment had come: convinced that the English were under a special dispensation from God, he was able to secure visits from Comenius and Dury and was clearly building a significant amount of support in Parliament. Although this moment passed – interest in Macaria gave way to a more immediate fear of armed popery – he was tireless in mobilizing support for projects throughout the 1640s and 1650s. A crucial element of many of them was the more effective use of God’s bounty: the chemical manufacture of saltpetre (an essential ingredient of gunpowder, but also a powerful fertilizer); setting the poor to productive work, making idle hands useful to the commonwealth; or promoting Atlantic trade, which would maximize use of natural resources, increase knowledge and strengthen the commonwealth. Other projects included sponsorship of a woollen tank and testing torpedoes in the Thames, an interest in jam-making, bee-keeping and the cultivation of silk worms in Virginia. Behind these projects lay a single vision, of making full use of natural resources and political opportunities to edge the world back to a prelapsarian harmony with nature. Like astrology, this offered to lend meaning to the current confusion, and to provide a guide to the truth in conditions which made that an elusive commodity. As a series of practical proposals, it was given impetus and public appeal by the political circumstances of the 1640s, and in 1646 it seemed as if his time had come again.41
In 1644, the year of Marston Moor and the first signs of serious fracture in the alliance with the Covenanters, Hartlib had published two pamphlets enjoining correspondency among the Protestant churches. In August 1646, with a parliamentary victory looming, he published The Parliaments Reformation, a characteristic attempt to take advantage of a moment to push forward his larger agenda. His interest in saltpetre had reflected the difficulty of acquiring this crucial ingredient of gunpowder, and had concentrated on artificial manufacture rather than digging up pigeon lofts for the material in the nitrogen-rich droppings. It was a practical project, helping to meet a practical need while at the same time removing a common grievance. It would also push forward chemical knowledge and employ the poor. This latter concern was at the forefront of his concerns in the 1646 pamphlet – an injunction to use Parliament’s power to force men to be good:
because the major part of the people do never move to any good work willingly before they are commanded; and the command must be upon a penalty too, else they will do little; now consider, who can impose a command on the subject for the carrying on of a good work, and to lay a punishment upon the neglecters of the command, but a parliament’s power.
The pamphlet laid out practical proposals to house the poor, and employ them working on hemp and flax. He anticipated concerns about the effects on trade and the interests of clothiers, and made detailed suggestions about funding (including, for example, the use of fines on sins such as drinking, swearing, Sabbath-breaking and adultery to help meet the costs of the scheme). Overall, it was a plan for ‘such a godly and politic government; that the godly and laborious poor may be countenanced and cherished, and the idle, and wicked poor be suppressed’. Full reformation would come through the education and employment of the children of the poor – orphans, those with careless parents, or those with godly but indigent parents. These, he thought, were ‘the greatest part of the children in the kingdom, and most of them are like to become wicked members to the Commonwealth without this government’.42
This was clearly at an angle to the main political business of 1646, but it was a creative response to a widely remarked problem – poverty – and a new possibility – that Parliament might use its political muscle to promote reformation in the fullest sense. Behind it lay a distinctive vision of how to establish social, economic and political truths. With his eyes on this larger game, Hartlib was non-committal on the details of practical settlement in church and state:
I conclude with my prayers to God for the prosperity of this work; and that God will unite King and Parliament, to carry on this holy, godly and charitable work, that the poor children unborn may praise God, for the Parliament’s preservation, and the Kingdom’s reformation, for which we owe to God praise, and prayers, and all spiritual service.
In June, Hartlib had been granted £100 by a parliamentary committee dominated by Independents, but in August advertised this project as a concern for the new Presbyterian church.43
Hartlib enjoyed such minor but significant patronage from successive parliamentary regimes, and associates of his occupied important places in, for example, the drafting of the navigation laws (which governed the English and then British empire for a hundred years) and the survey of Ireland following the English conquest during the 1650s.44 He was at the centre of a network of correspondents and fellow travellers, and promoted their shared vision in print. In those respects his efforts were like those of many other pamphleteers, mobilizing and galvanizing opinion, taking advantage of the press and political opportunities, to promote a particular agenda. In his case the aim was not a constitutional settlement of a particular kind, but the promotion of full reformation – one embracing all social problems and not just doctrine, church government and forms of worship.
Hartlib had close personal connections with Oliver St John and John Pym and was, we can presume, sympathetic to the more radical wing of the parliamentary cause, committed to the use of Parliament’s power to transform, not merely defend. Cheney Culpeper, one of his regular correspondents, certainly was.45 But Hartlib maintained c
orrespondence with people of widely differing religious and political opinions: at the heart of his correspondence was a willingness to suspend differences about issues which were beyond human certainty in order to further human knowledge. Searching for a means to more secure knowledge in the future seems to have entailed for Hartlib and his associates a willingness to live with uncertainties in the present. It allowed for toleration of differences in spiritual matters, and for co-operation with those of differing opinions and temperament.
Hartlib’s circle were important to the promotion of knowledge of the natural world and saw this as closely connected to the political crisis in England. Others also took advantage of the practical opportunities to pursue intellectual enquiry. Richard Wiseman, for example, gleaned much important surgical knowledge from his wartime experience and it is possible that the supply of corpses allowed for increased anatomical observation in wartime Oxford. It has often been claimed that there was a connection between Puritanism and science, and the Hartlib circle have been central to that discussion; in any case, it is clear that there was a connection between these wartime conditions and science. It was in part a matter of free intellectual expression, and the more or less inviting possibilities of the changed print market. But it was also a matter of practicalities – the great Thomas Hobbes, for example, was drawn into a debate about the mechanics of the sword stroke, something of immediate interest but long-term significance to the science of mechanics.46
Hartlib’s circle are well-known because of the riches that survive in his papers, but there were clearly many such networks in this period. One with which his interests eventually intersected was a group of London merchants, with interests in New World trade and associated with the Independent congregations in London. Bound together by their hostility to the great merchants of the monopolistic Chartered Companies, men like Maurice Thomson, William Barkley and Owen Rowe can be seen at the cutting edge of the radicalization of the parliamentary cause throughout the 1640s. Their time was to come in 1651, when their in fluence can be seen at work in the transformation of state regulation of overseas trade.47
Another set of transatlantic ties was also crucial – that between the exiled godly and those who had stayed at home. Hugh Peter returned to put fire into the belly of God’s soldiers, and Roger Williams came back in search of a charter for his godly community, pausing to reignite the divisions among the London godly over the correct form of church government. The diversity of these networks, and their intersecting, overlapping and sometimes conflicting visions, contributed to the confusion of post-war politics. In the next three years Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton would unite as ‘Levellers’, championing popular sovereignty as the basis of political order. Thomas Hobbes, already on a rather singular route, may have started work on his classic Leviathan in 1646, refiguring the classical heritage accessible to early modern gentlemen (Hobbes was a tutor in an aristocratic household) to argue for a new political world.48 Milton, in Areopagitica (1644), had already made a case for freedom of speech as the best means to arrive at truth; an argument of second nature to Western liberals in the twenty-first century. Such intellectual creativity, and the fluidity of political alliances, prompted attempts at a fundamental rethinking of politics.
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Creativity was manifest in the content of arguments, in the forms in which they were expressed and the means by which they were disseminated. It was a product of the fluidity of the two coalitions and doubts about what would constitute a successful peace; and of escalating war efforts which had made both things more rather than less complex, and which sought to mobilize opinion and support among wide and overlapping publics. The resulting polemical morass exposed fundamental elements of political culture to sustained critical observation; and that public debate was far less socially bounded than was considered decent before 1640.
It was not the novelty of the problems which made this crisis remarkable. The problems of, for example, the origins of religious and other truths, the nature of the Christian community, and the relationship between religious and secular authority had all generated traditions of learned argument. What was remarkable about England in the 1640s was the depth and extent of their public discussion, the urgency with which they imposed themselves, and the creativity of some responses to them. Polemical fury had created a world of competing certainties: about the personal honour of particular individuals such as Nathaniel Fiennes, the trustworthiness of the King or the impropriety of revealing his private correspondence. Rival claims and rival accounts of the same event created a problem of authority: the authority of truth-claims. Expert testimony from physicians was a means of fixing the meaning of Pym’s death; Laud’s equally contested death was discussed in terms of martyrdom and hypocrisy. Print accelerated, generalized and amplified particular causes. Pamphlet debates articulated anxieties and uncertainty even as they laid claim to the truth, and in the course of the controversies some authors responded very creatively to these opportunities. Print was a means to mobilize, and the forum in which anxiety was amplified and creativity flourished.
One response to this effect of print was, of course, repressive. The lapse of licensing in 1641 had been unintentional, and a series of press-licensing measures followed, often in periods of acute political tension. Book-burnings were in a sense more than measures of censorship: they declared particular publications anathema to civil, Christian society. Whether an act of censorship or a statement of repugnance it was not only the content of the argument that attracted repression – it was often the form of expression. The 1643 Licensing Ordinance, for example, had cited ‘seditious’ texts as a problem, but in a longer list which was primarily concerned with civility: ‘false, forged, scandalous, seditious [and] libellous’ publications. Free speech in Parliament required that people have the freedom to speak – denunciation, misrepresentation, dishonourable satire all made the free exchange of views impossible. Secrecy about public proceedings, in Parliament and village bodies, was designed not simply to exclude the vulgar, therefore, but to allow political elites to discuss freely without the danger of their divisions becoming public, or the fear of public censure preventing them from making an important argument.49
With the spectacular growth of print these questions had become much more pressing. Some burnings – for example, those of Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent or of the Book of Sports – reflected a deep hostility to what they contained. Others seem more particularly a response to tone and form. Dering’s collection of speeches, burned in February 1642, had been scandalous to the proceedings of the House, rather than particularly offensive in their opinions. In early 1646 a collection of declarations published by the Scots was nearly burned, at a moment of tension in the military alliance – although in the end only the preface suffered this fate, presumably on similar grounds to Dering’s.50 Another case may have been the spoof of the parliamentary Souldiers Catechisme. Both armies were provided with catechisms, capturing the justness of their (conflicting) causes in apposite scriptural citation. The parliamentary catechism was issued seven times and there was a fake eighth edition, satirizing the use of biblical language in such an obviously godless enterprise.51 Questioning the religious basis of the parliamentary cause was hardly unusual – but executing such a dangerously false and counterfeit text as a way of making the case was clearly offensive. Of course, these values were interpreted politically – satire in a good cause was unlikely to be proposed for burning – and so what was burned at any particular point reflected the influence of particular opinions. The general principles seem to have been fairly consistent, however: John Milton (whose pamphlet had been burned along with Overton’s in August 1644) was unusual in arguing that there should be no prior restraint. Licensing, on any grounds, ran the risk of suppressing truth as well as error, and it was better to allow error than to suppress truth.52 Most contemporaries were less excited about expanding truth than they were anxious about proliferating error and the corrosion of political decencies, h
owever.
Polemic and mobilization, along with the attendant anxiety and creativity, were not only a matter for pamphlet readers, however. Soldiers and civilians of humble status were confronted by the material costs of the fighting. If they could not avoid these realities of war it is also unlikely that they could avoid the political principles that the war raised. The circulation of rival proclamations (something taken very seriously by both sides), the raising of armies and of money, and the elaboration of local bureaucracies to achieve this: all these things forced an engagement with the arguments and costs of the war. So, too, did the many independent mobilizations – petitioning campaigns, the clubmen movements and the religious ginger groups anxious to impose their view of an appropriate settlement. The presence of garrisons and passage of field armies, perhaps even service in them, all fostered political education, and engagement.
Before the war the middling and poorer sort had on occasion deployed the language of authority in order to legitimate their own claims. These opportunities were increased during the 1640s, by the greater variety of political languages available. Partisanship became a common feature of local disputes – disputes in Warwickshire over the legality of soldiers” actions, for example, reveal how deeply the languages of national politics had penetrated; elsewhere malignant contested with well-affected, and scandalous ministers were denounced.53 Thomas Miles was prosecuted at sessions in late 1648 for saying ‘that the parliament men were rogues and traitors, and that he would be one of the first to cut their throats and that the Lord General [Fairfax] would die like a rogue and rot limb from limb’. He counter-sued that the witness against him, Anne Smith, had scandalized the Queen. Smith not only denied this but claimed in her petition: ‘it is dubious… whether any suit can justly be commenced against [her] in the name of the Queen, so long as she is declared traitor by both Houses of Parliament’.54 Others claimed to be of ‘approved fidelity’, or to have suffered for upholding order against those who ‘did give out very opprobrious and railing speeches against the parliament’, or suffered ‘opprobrious words against the parliament’ while carrying out its commands: partisan identities were self-consciously adopted throughout England.55 People with reputations for malignancy were not good friends to have. William Flacke was anxious to dissociate himself from Richard Filch, ‘a person disaffected to the parliament and an enemy to the present government’. Flacke was present at a particularly violent outburst, but was anxious to point out that he had been ‘incidentally in his company’.56
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