Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution--Revisited [Revised] 0198206682, 9780198206682
This is a revised edition of Christopher Hill's classic and groundbreaking examination of the motivations behind th
1,096 126 17MB
English Pages 440 [492] Year 1997
Polecaj historie
![The Origins of Christmas [Revised Ed.]](https://dokumen.pub/img/200x200/the-origins-of-christmas-revised-ed.jpg)
![The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 [Revised Edition]](https://dokumen.pub/img/200x200/the-origins-of-modern-science-13001800-revised-edition.jpg)
![Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution--Revisited [Revised]
0198206682, 9780198206682](https://dokumen.pub/img/200x200/intellectual-origins-of-the-english-revolution-revisited-revised-0198206682-9780198206682.jpg)
Table of contents :
Title Pages
Christopher Hill
Title Pages
(p.i) Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (p.ii) (p.iii) Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited
Title Pages
Dedication
Christopher Hill
Dedication
Epigraph
Christopher Hill
Epigraph
(p.vii) Preface to the Revised Edition
Christopher Hill
(p.vii) Preface to the Revised Edition
(p.viii) (p.ix) Preface to the Original Edition
Christopher Hill
(p.viii) (p.ix) Preface to the Original Edition
(p.viii) (p.ix) Preface to the Original Edition
(p.viii) (p.ix) Preface to the Original Edition
(p.xiv) (p.xv) Abbreviations
Christopher Hill
(p.xiv) (p.xv) Abbreviations
(p.xiv) (p.xv) Abbreviations
Introduction
Christopher Hill
Introduction
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Notes:
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
London Science and Medicine
Christopher Hill
London Science and Medicine
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
London Science and Medicine
I
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
II
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
III
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
IV
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
V
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
VI
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
VII
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
VIII
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
IX
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
X
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
Notes:
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
London Science and Medicine
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Christopher Hill
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
I
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
II
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
III
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
IV
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
V
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
VI
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
VII
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Notes:
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Christopher Hill
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
II
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
III
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
IV
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
V
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
VI
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
VII
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
VIII
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
IX
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
X
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
XI
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
XII
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
XIII
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
XIV
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Notes:
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Christopher Hill
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
I
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
II
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
III
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
IV
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
(p.223) V
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
VI
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Notes:
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Conclusion
Christopher Hill
Conclusion
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Conclusion
I
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
II
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
III
Conclusion
Conclusion
IV
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
V
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes:
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
Christopher Hill
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
I
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
II
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
Notes:
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Christopher Hill
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Notes:
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Christopher Hill
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
I
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
II
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
III
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
IV
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Notes:
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Christopher Hill
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Notes:
William Tyndale and English History
Christopher Hill
William Tyndale and English History
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
William Tyndale and English History
William Tyndale and English History
William Tyndale and English History
William Tyndale and English History
Notes:
William Tyndale and English History
William Tyndale and English History
Feudal Tenures
Christopher Hill
Feudal Tenures
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Feudal Tenures
Notes:
Feudal Tenures
The Many-Headed Monster
Christopher Hill
The Many-Headed Monster
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
Notes:
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
The Many-Headed Monster
A Three-Sided Revolution
Christopher Hill
A Three-Sided Revolution
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
A Three-Sided Revolution
A Three-Sided Revolution
A Three-Sided Revolution
A Three-Sided Revolution
Notes:
A Three-Sided Revolution
Secularization and Other Influences
Christopher Hill
Secularization and Other Influences
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
I
Secularization and Other Influences
Secularization and Other Influences
Secularization and Other Influences
Secularization and Other Influences
Secularization and Other Influences
Notes:
Secularization and Other Influences
Unfinished Business
Christopher Hill
Unfinished Business
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
Notes:
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Christopher Hill
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Notes:
The Norman Yoke
Christopher Hill
The Norman Yoke
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
The Norman Yoke
The Norman Yoke
The Norman Yoke
The Norman Yoke
Notes:
The Norman Yoke
The Norman Yoke
Venetian Observers
Christopher Hill
Venetian Observers
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Venetian Observers
Notes:
Venetian Observers
Literature and Revolution
Christopher Hill
Literature and Revolution
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
I
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
II
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
III
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Notes:
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Literature and Revolution
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Christopher Hill
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Christopher Hill
Abstract and Keywords
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Notes:
(p.401) Index
Christopher Hill
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
(p.401) Index
Citation preview
Title Pages
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Title Pages (p.i) Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (p.ii) (p.iii) Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited
(p.iv) This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 GDP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States
Page 1 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Title Pages by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Christopher Hill 1997 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-820668-2
Jacket illustration: Woodcut from The Mansell Collection, London, showing Cavalier and Roundhead masters with their dogs.
Access brought to you by:
Page 2 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Dedication
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Dedication (p.v) for T. S. Gregory
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Epigraph
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Epigraph (p.vi) And well he therefore does, and well has guessed, Who in his age has always forward pressed: And knowing not where Heaven’s choice may light, Girds yet his sword, and ready stands to fight. A. MARVELL The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Preface to the Revised Edition
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface to the Revised Edition THIS IS a revised edition of my Ford Lectures of 1962, published by Oxford University Press in 1965, paperback 1980. I have made only minor corrections to the text of my original edition but I have added several new chapters, in which I have tried to take account of work produced by myself and others during the past thirty years. I don’t think these afterthoughts modify in any significant way my arguments of 1962, but I hope they extend and justify them with a good deal of new material, making this in effect a new book—my last will and testament as it were, after living with the English Revolution for fifty years. I still see it as a turning–point in English history, and this book attempts to trace the origins of the ideas which contributed to the overthrow of the old monarchy and the proclamation of the republic. The restoration in 1660 by no means represented a return to the old régime. My warm thanks are due to Anna Illingworth and Jeff New for their. tolerant resourcefulness in the difficult task of uniting and editing the two parts of this book. They saved me from many mistakes and infelicities; those which remain, I fear, are my own. My thanks are also due to Tony Morris of Oxford University Press for suggesting this new edition, and to him and my wife for their patience in waiting for these new chapters to materialize. This book was originally dedicated to the Rev. T. S. Gregory. The revised edition, alas, must be dedicated to his memory.
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Preface to the Original Edition
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
(p.viii) (p.ix) Preface to the Original Edition THIS BOOK is an expansion of the Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term, 1962. My thanks are due in the first place to the Electors for doing me the honour of choosing me for this lectureship; and secondly to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College who gave me a sabbatical term in which to finish the writing. A much abbreviated version of the lectures appeared in The Listener between 31 May and 5 July 1962. The origin of this book in lectures should be borne in mind by the reader. I was advancing a thesis, not attempting to sketch the intellectual history of England in the fifty years before 1640. I therefore picked out evidence which seemed to me to support my case. So, though I hope I have suppressed no facts which make against me, I have often (e.g. in biographical particulars) omitted facts which seemed to me ‘neutral’. When I mention the Countess of Carlisle at p. 128n. I describe her as Pym’s friend, because Pym has occurred in an earlier chapter: I do not add that she was also the friend of the Earl of Strafford, since Strafford has no place in my story. If I had been writing an intellectual history of the period, I should have had to differentiate more sharply than I do between the experimental scientists, the Baconians, and Gresham College professors on the one hand, and on the other the inheritors of the alchemical, astrological, neo– Platonist, and magical traditions. During the revolutionary period the cleavage between the spokesmen of the two attitudes became as sharp as that between Presbyterians and sectaries: indeed the two quarrels often coincided. But I believe that before the civil war men were less conscious of what divided than of what united them, just as ‘Puritans’ were more aware of their common dislike of Archbishop Laud than of the theoretical differences over which they were soon to disagree. In seeking the intellectual origins of the English Revolution I was more struck by the unexpected connections which forced themselves upon me than by divisions. Acontius links Thomas Blundeville, the Earl of Leicester, John Page 1 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Preface to the Original Edition Goodwin, and John Dury (p. 157n.); Prince Henry links the founder of the Lumleian Lectures with Edward (p.x) Wright and again John Dury (p. 192). But I am aware that I have dealt inadequately with what separated the experimental scientists from the heirs of Paracelsus. I hope this complicated subject will be tackled by those more competent to deal with it than I. Secondly, this is not a total account of the origins of the civil war, obviously, nor even of the non–material factors leading up to it. I deal only indirectly with Puritanism; I say nothing about the irrational motives which may have stirred the Parliamentarian rank and file—fear of Catholicism, prophecies, rumours, and so on. It is far from my intention to argue that the intellectual trends which I discuss were the only ones that mattered, or even the most important. I want merely to suggest that they existed, were of some significance, and have been neglected. One advantage of lectures is that they have no footnotes. In preparing these for publication, I found that I had made some generalizations, with intent to provoke, which could not be substantiated without lengthy digressions or notes. Since my object was not to write a definitive work, but with luck to start a discussion, I have ventured to leave a few such remarks naked of documentation, hoping that readers, and especially my kindly professional colleagues, will give me the benefit of the occasion. I have trespassed into the fields of too many experts not to feel in need of indulgence. I have drawn a great deal upon the work of others. I am very conscious of my indebtedness to Professors B. Farrington, F. R. Johnson, R. F. Jones, E. G. R. Taylor, L. B. Wright and Commander Waters; and especially to Dr. S. F. Mason. I owe my interest in the history of science mainly to the stimulus of his books and articles, and still more of his conversation during the all–too–brief period when he lectured on the History of Science at Oxford. Articles by Dr. Mason and Mrs. Joan Simon in The Modern Quarterly, vol. iv, no. 2 (1949), first made me think about the general theme of this book. I am also grateful to the following for generous help of various kinds: Mr. C. B. L. Barr, Dr. A. C. Crombie, Mr. J. G. Crowther, Professor Mark Curtis, Professor A. H. Dodd, Professor K. H. D. Haley, Mr. and Mrs. G. D. G. Hall, Mr. D. M. Hallowes, Dr. W. O. Hassall, Mr. Charles Hobday, Dr. H. F. Kearney, Professor J. Le Patourel, Mr. Jack Lindsay, Professor L. Makkai, Mr. Dipak Nandy, Mr. Leo Miller, Dr. R. M. Ogilvie, Mr. Christopher Platt, Mr. Colin Platt, Professor D. B. Quinn, Mr. T. H. H. Rae, Mr. K. V. Thomas, Professor H. R. Trevor–Roper, Mr. Peter Wallis, Dr. C. V. Wedgwood and Mr. F. P. White. The Clarendon Press’s reader corrected many careless slips, and helped me to express myself more clearly. Mr. (p.xi) R. S. Roberts very kindly read proofs of part of Chapter 2, and Miss Margaret Bamford and Mr. Robin Briggs undertook the labour of reading the whole book in proof. The errors which remain are my own. Above all I am indebted to my wife, without whose encouragement and support the lectures would never have been delivered, let Page 2 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Preface to the Original Edition alone published. Professor F. S. Fussner’s excellent The Historical Revolution unfortunately came out too late for me to make more than occasional reference to it. I should have approached Ralegh rather differently if I had read Professor Fussner first. Where no reference is given for biographical details, they will be found (I hope) in the Dictionary of National Biography, that much maligned and indispensable work. The dedication acknowledges a thirty-five-year-old debt which can never be repaid. How can one ever be sufficiently grateful to the person who first showed one that all accepted truths, just because they are accepted, tend to become lies? C.H. Oxford, June 1963
Access brought to you by:
Page 3 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Abbreviations
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
(p.xiv) (p.xv) Abbreviations Add. MSS. - British Museum, Additional Manuscripts. C.J. - Commons’ Journals. C.S.P.D. - Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. C.S.P.Col, Ven. - Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, or Venetian. D.N.B. - Dictionary of National Biography. Econ. H.R. - Economic History Review. E.H.R. - English Historical Review. H.L.B. - Huntington Library Bulletin. H.L.Q. - Huntington Library Quarterly. H.M.C. - Historical Manuscripts Commission. L.J. - Lords’ Journals. L.Q.R. - Law Quarterly Review. M.L.N. - Modern Language Notes. N.R.S. - Commons’ Debates, 1621, ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Relf, and H. Simpson (Yale U.P., 1935). P.M.L.A. - Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. P. and P. - Past and Present. S.P. - Studies in Philology. T.R.H.S. - Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. U.P. - University Press. V.C.H. - Victoria County History. Unless otherwise stated, Bacon is quoted from the edition by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 volumes, 1862–74. Since there is no standard edition of Ralegh, I have used those which I happen to possess: Ralegh, History, refers to The History of the World, Edinburgh, 6 volumes, 1820; Ralegh, Works, to T. Birch’s two-volume edition of 1751. G. Hake-will’s An Apologie or Declaration of
Page 1 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Abbreviations the Power and Providence of God is cited as Hakewill, Apologie. I have used the third edition of 1635. It was first published in 1627. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been modernized in all quotations, but not in titles of books. (p.xvi)
Access brought to you by:
Page 2 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Introduction Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords Revolutions are not made without ideas, but they are not made by intellectuals. Steam is essential to driving a railway engine; but neither a locomotive nor a permanent way can be built out of steam. This book deals with the steam. However, a sociological approach to intellectual history carries its own risks. Karl Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men's ideas were merely a pale reflection of their economic needs, with no history of their own. So, although this book is concerned mainly with intellectual history, it claims that the thinkers were not isolated from their societies. The history of ideas necessarily deals with trends to which there are individual exceptions. The book argues that on the whole the ideas of the scientists favoured the Puritan and Parliamentarian cause. Keywords: revolutions, ideas, steam, Karl Marx, history, thinkers, societies, scientists
When you have considered that…the vicissitudes of things ordained by Providence require a general predisposition in men’s hearts to co-operate with fate toward the changes appointed to succeed in the fullness of their time, you will think it less strange that Britain, which was but yesterday the theatre of war and desolation, should today be the school of arts and court of all the Muses…. It hath been the reformation [of the state of learning] that drew on the change; not the desire of change which pretendeth the reformation. W. CHARLETON, The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657),
Page 1 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction pp. 49–52. MY TITLE IS intended to recall that of Daniel Mornet’s Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française. In this book M. Mornet discussed Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau—the intellectual influences which all historians recognize when they try to explain the French Revolution. His title has always seemed to me something of a challenge. It is perhaps not so heretical now as it was thirty years ago to hold that there was more in common between the seventeenth-century English Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789 than traditional English historiography allowed, and that comparisons and contrasts between them can be fruitful and illuminating. But one fact on which there is wide agreement among historians is that the English Revolution had no intellectual origins. It just happened, in the typically British empirical way in which we always like to imagine ourselves muddling through: in a fit of absence of mind. ‘There was no Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx of the English Revolution.’ I might have cited many historians to that effect: in fact the words quoted were my own. And yet, almost by definition, a great revolution cannot take place without ideas. Most men have to believe quite strongly in some ideal before they will kill or be killed. If there was no Rousseau, perhaps there were Montesquieus, Voltaires, and Diderots of the English Revolution? (p.4) There were. The Bible, especially the Geneva Bible with its highly political marginal notes, came near to being a revolutionists’ handbook, not for the last time in history.1 Mr. Hampden, we are told, had his vade-mecum in Davila’s History of the Civil Wars of France.2 Sir John Eliot’s vade-mecum was Sir Walter Ralegh’s Prerogative of Parliaments Ralegh’s History of the World is the only book Oliver Cromwell is known to have recommended. John Lilburne had the Bible in one hand, the writings of Sir Edward Coke in the other. Levellers and Diggers looked back to the heretical tradition, to Lollards and Foxe’s martyrs. Milton drew on Knox and Buchanan. The republican Henry Nevile spoke of ‘honest John Calvin’ as the originator of the ideas of him and his like.3 If we lift our gaze beyond merely political events, we shall remember that in the seventeenth century the scientific revolution was completed in England, a revolution which Professor Butterfield regards as the greatest landmark since the rise of Christianity.4 In the closely related Battle of the Books, between the Ancients and the Moderns, those who believed that it was impossible to improve on the wisdom of classical antiquity and those who thought that knowledge was cumulative—in this battle, victory by the end of the seventeenth century lay with the Moderns. In both fields the crucial name is that of Francis Bacon: the connexion of Baconianism with the Parliamentary cause is a subject to which I shall return later. A few preliminary cautions. First, I am sceptical about pedigrees of ideas—A is influenced by B who got his ideas from C, and that explains action Z. It is always easy to construct chains of causes once you know what you have to explain.5 Nor Page 2 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction do ideas evolve in a vacuum. ‘The great philosophers’, Mornet wrote in concluding his Origines intellectuelles, ‘were not revealing unknown lands: they were mapping those known. If the old régime had been threatened only by ideas, the old régime would have run no risk. The poverty of the people, the political malaise, were also needed to give the ideas leverage. But the ideas set men in motion.’6 Ideas do not advance merely by their own logic. There is clearly a relation between Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and the practice of lay preaching by many sects in the sixteen-forties, even (p.5) of preaching by women. Yet a long time intervened between Luther’s enunciation of the principle and Mrs. Attaway’s tub-thumping practice.7 The time-lag can be explained by the repressive power of the Church; but another way of putting this is to say that the logical implications of Luther’s doctrine could not be realized in practice in England until political circumstances—the collapse of the hierarchy and the central government—were propitious. Ideas were all-important for the individuals whom they impelled into action; but the historian must attach equal importance to the circumstances that gave these ideas their chance. Revolutions are not made without ideas, but they are not made by intellectuals. Steam is essential to driving a railway engine; but neither a locomotive nor a permanent way can be built out of steam. In this book I shall be dealing with the steam. Yet a sociological approach to intellectual history carries its own risks. Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men’s ideas were merely a pale reflection of their economic needs, with no history of their own; but some of his successors, including many who would not call themselves Marxists, have been far more economic-determinist than Marx. It seems to me that any body of thought which plays a major part in history—Luther’s, Rousseau’s, Marx’s own —‘takes on’ because it meets the needs of significant groups in the society in which it comes into prominence. This is the very opposite of saying that once we have related the ideas of a Luther to his society, then they can be disregarded. There is a danger that historians, trapped in the Namier method, may too lightly assume that the ideas which swayed men and women in the past can be dismissed as hypocrisy, rationalizations, or irrelevancies. So, although this book will be concerned mainly with intellectual history, I hope I shall make it clear that the thinkers were not isolated from their societies. I shall take as my model here one of my predecessors in these lectures, Professor Tawney, who was too wise to study religion and the rise of capitalism except in the closest connexion with the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century and with usury; and who associated Harrington’s interpretation of his age with the rise of the gentry and with business and politics under James I. But I shall not forget, I hope, that English intellectual history must be related to ‘the general crisis of the seventeenth century’.8 England’s intellectual crisis is part of (p.6) a wider European movement of thought, which itself bears some relation to an Page 3 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction economic and social crisis. Since my subject is England, I may seem not to refer as often as I should to this European background. But I shall return to it in my last chapter, and I hope that its presence will be assumed even when it is not specifically mentioned. Second, the attempt to draw parallels between the English and the French Revolutions has its dangers. The men of 1789 had English experience to draw on, the experience of a successful revolution culminating in 1688, the obverse of subversive anarchy. But seventeenth-century England had very little to look back to. I shall discuss later the influence on England of the Revolt of the Netherlands and of the wars of religion in France:9 it was considerable. But the Dutch Revolt was directed against an alien and papist king. In France the Huguenots were supporting first the heir to the throne and then the legitimate king. So in each the problems were different from those of seventeenth-century England. Neither stimulated conscious revolutionary thinking about society in the way that English experience, even as summed up by Locke, stimulated it in eighteenthcentury France. So we should not expect too much political sophistication in our English revolutionary thinkers. We should indeed recall that even Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, radical though their criticisms of the old régime were, still hoped for reform, not revolution. The history of ideas necessarily deals with trends to which there are individual exceptions. I shall argue that on the whole the ideas of the scientists favoured the Puritan and Parliamentarian cause. I shall not be unduly depressed if it is retorted that individual Roman Catholics like Nicholas Hill (if he was one)10 made important contributions to the new spirit; or that an individual Parliamentarian like William Prynne attacked Copernicus;11 or that Charles I’s physician William Harvey was a royalist during the civil war. Individual Puritans like Richard Holdsworth,12 and individual believers in religious toleration like William Chillingworth, also took the King’s side: yet by and large it remains true that Puritanism and religious toleration received more encouragement after Parliament’s victory than they had ever done under the old régime. The problem that I want to discuss is so obvious that we are apt to (p.7) overlook it. For as long as history recorded there had been kings, lords, and bishops in England. The thinking of all Englishmen had been dominated by the Established Church. Yet, within less than a decade, successful war was levied against the King; bishops and the House of Lords were abolished; and Charles I was executed in the name of his people. How did men get the nerve to do such unheard-of things? We have come to regard execution as an occupational risk of kings, but this has become true only in the last 200 years. Medieval kings in plenty had been assassinated, not always in the nicest of ways; but the sanctity that hedged a king had never before been publicly breached. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 came dangerously near to setting a precedent: Good Queen Bess would, very naturally, have preferred the old English method Page 4 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction of assassination. The act of 1649 was so uniquely shocking that on hearing of it, we are told, ‘women miscarried, men fell into melancholy, some with consternations expired’.13 Men, that is to say, do not break lightly with the past: if they are to challenge conventionally accepted standards they must have an alternative body of ideas to support them. Puritanism is the most obvious such body of ideas: you could brave the King of England if you were obeying the orders of the King of Kings. I do not propose to deal directly with Puritanism. There has been a large literature on the subject since Gardiner first invented ‘the Puritan Revolution’ a century ago. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Haller’s Rise of Puritanism, and other recent work on the social and economic causes of the civil war, have shown how Puritanism attracted and organized the nameless urban and rural unprivileged classes who supplied most of the volunteers for the Parliamentary armies and who paid for them. Puritanism was perhaps the most important complex of ideas that prepared men’s minds for revolution, but it was not the only one. After two decades of economic interpretations of the English civil war, the time, I believe, is ripe for a revival of interest in the ideas that motivated the seventeenthcentury revolutionaries. So, leaving Puritanism aside, I propose to discuss some of the other ideas which seem to me relevant, directing my attention particularly to those which appealed to ‘the middling sort’, to merchants, artisans, (p.8) and yeomen. This for two reasons. First, Parliament could never have defeated the King without their enthusiastic backing. ‘Freeholders and tradesmen are the support of religion and civility in the land’, Richard Baxter wrote.14 Those who cite that passage, including myself, have perhaps neglected the significance of the words which I have italicized. Secondly, it is the expansion of these classes, in numbers and in wealth, which offers the most obviously new social fact in England during the century before 1640. Throughout the Middle Ages weavers had been associated with heresy, the urban poor with millenarian revolt. But the heresies and the revolts had been suppressed before the ideas associated with them had attained to the dignity of a system—so far, at least, as we know: the defeated leave little evidence. But in the sixteenth century, thanks to the growing strength of the manufacturing element in society, to its invention of printing, and to the Reformation, new bodies of ideas began to be formulated to challenge those traditionally accepted. This was true of science no less than of theology: Paracelsus and Copernicus were contemporaries of Luther, and Paracelsus supported the German peasants in 1525. Sixteenth-century middle-class Englishmen, encouraged in literacy so as to be able to read the Bible, taught at grammar schools which merchants had founded in order to free education from clerical control, grew up into a confusing world. Traditional ideas were in retreat, but no new synthesis had replaced them. Humanism, with its concern for the education of a ruling class, and with the Page 5 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction classics to the exclusion of the vernacular, could not appeal to the ‘middling sort’; yet the humanist emphasis on the education of the individual, like the Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience, lent itself to more democratic interpretations. The urban way of life, pragmatic, utilitarian, and individualistic, where things mattered more than words, experience more than authority, was in harmony with new trends in Protestant and scientific thought. But nothing was clear-cut. Paracelsan chemistry, with its stress on experiment, was still entangled with alchemy. Some magicians and astrologers accepted the heliocentric system. There is a danger in the history of science of giving marks for being ‘right’—e.g. to Copernicus, whose ideas were not scientifically confirmed until the seventeenth century—and of dismissing others as ‘wrong’— e.g. astrologers and alchemists, forgetting that the eminent mathematician John Dee was an astrologer and that Robert Boyle was to transmute alchemy into chemistry; (p.9) forgetting that there were Fellows of the Royal Society who believed in witches; forgetting that both Napier and Newton attached more importance to their researches into the Apocalypse than to logarithms or the law of gravitation.15 For our purposes at least, what subsequent history pronounced to be ‘right’ is unimportant: Newton’s obsession with problems of Biblical chronology was almost certainly a stimulus to his scientific imagination.
Page 6 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction The most striking feature, then, of the intellectual life of pre-revolutionary England is its confusion and ferment. ‘The vision of reality that had supported the rational consciousness of man for a thousand years was fading.’16 In retrospect Renaissance and Reformation, the discovery of America and the new astronomy, had been far more successful in undermining old assumptions and prejudices than in substituting new-truths. Some of the new ideas—those of Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, for instance—must have seemed terribly wicked to timid traditionalists. (And of course, as the names just quoted show, this is not merely an English phenomenon: we are in the age of Montaigne.) There is no need to quote the inevitable lines from Donne to show that the new philosophy called all in doubt—assumptions about society as well as about the universe—or that all coherence was gone. Long before Donne, Gabriel Harvey wrote that there were ‘every day, fresh-spun new opinions: heresy in divinity, in philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded much upon hearsay; doctors contemned: the text known of most, understood of few, magnified of all, practised of none’.17 In 1623 Drummond of Hawthornden echoed Donne to say, ‘The element of fire is quite put out, the air is but water rarefied, the earth is found to move and is no more the centre of the universe, is turned into a magnet; stars are not fixed, but swim in the ethereal space, comets are mounted above the planets; some affirm there is another world of men and sensitive creatures…in the moon; the sun is lost…. Thus sciences, by the diverse motions of this globe of the brain of man, are become opinions, nay errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths. What is all we know compared with what we know not?’18 Drayton, soon after Donne, said: (p.10) Certainly there’s scarce one found that now Knows what t’ approve, or what to disallow; All arsey-varsey, nothing is its own, But to our proverb, all turned upside down.… Where hell is heaven, and heaven is now turned hell.19
‘We have seen the best of our time’, said Gloucester in King hear, after a similar speech.20 ‘Our age was iron, and rusty too’, Donne concluded.21 We should not underestimate the depth of this spiritual crisis in which men found themselves. Emphasis on man’s ‘double heart’ is familiar to students of the literature of the time.22 The despair described in so many autobiographies of the period is too facilely ascribed to Calvinist theology: Calvinists thought it characteristic of the Anabaptists.23 It was surely as much a symptom as a cause of the melancholy which Robert Burton set himself to anatomize. The great physician William Harvey told a future bishop during the Interregnum that he had met with more diseases generated from the mind than from any other cause. A similar observation was to be made about the French Revolution.24
Page 7 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction Whilst the intellectuals despaired and anatomized, whilst doctors prescribed elephant tusks as a remedy for melancholy, our merchants and artisans, confident in their ability to handle things, busy, as Professor Jordan has shown us, modernizing the institutions of their society,25 were in search of an ideology. They looked first and longest, naturally, to the Church: hence the hunger for sermons which is characteristic of the age. But too often they looked in vain. Badly paid parsons were rarely better educated than their urban congregations: Whitgift, Bancroft, and Laud were apt to silence the livelier preachers who tried out unconventional ideas.26 They looked in vain to the universities, which were still seminaries for training ministers, and which were becoming finishing schools for the gentry. There were many, very many, clever (p.11) young men at Oxford and Cambridge; but there was little new thought. The new ideas which I want to consider came from laymen, not from clerics; and from men not associated with university teaching.27 Against this confusion and failure of nerve among the traditional intellectuals, we must set the political and artistic achievements of the new England in which our self-educated thoughtful artisans and merchants grew up, and which they were helping to create. The fifty-odd years between the defeat of the Spanish Armada and 1640 fall into two sharply contrasting periods. The twenty-six years from 1588 to the publication of Ralegh’s History of the World saw the peaceful union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the defeat of Spain, the subjugation of Ireland, the beginnings of the colonization of America, the foundation of the East India Company. They also saw the publication of The Faerie Queene, of Arcadia and Sir Philip Sidney’s poems, most of the poetry of Drayton, Daniel, Campion, and the beginnings of English verse satire, whilst Donne’s and Ralegh’s poems circulated in manuscript; the tales of Deloney and Nashe; the performance of all Shakespeare’s, Marlowe’s, Greene’s, Chapman’s, Tourneur’s, Marston’s plays, the best of Jonson’s, Middleton’s, Dekker’s, Beaumont and Fletcher’s, and Webster’s; Fulke Greville’s plays and Life of Sidney had been written. These years also saw the publication of the Marprelate Tracts, the works of Perkins and Hooker, the Authorized Version, Bacon’s Essays, Coke’s Reports, the foundation of the Bodleian Library. Pride in England’s historical achievement was summed up by the full edition of Sir Thomas Smith’s Commonwealth of England (1589), by Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Camden’s Remaines…Concerning Britaine and Britannia (English translation 1610), Speed’s History of Great Britaine, Stow’s Survay of London, Daniel’s Historic of England, Ralegh’s History of the World and by the many editions of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563. This was the heyday of the popular theatre, and historical plays were among the most popular in its repertoire.28 The vernacular had arrived with a vengeance; Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proclaimed its right to respect.
Page 8 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction That rather tedious enumeration was necessary to make the contrast with the next twenty-five years, from whose publications one can pick out only George Herbert’s poems (licensed after long arguments with the censor), Comus, and Lycidas and a few plays by Jonson, Middleton, (p.12) Massinger, and Ford: though for completeness we must mention Wither, Quarles, George Sandys, Randolph and Carew. Apart from Milton and Herrick (whose poems remained mostly unpublished) there was little originality; poets drew on the traditions established by Spenser, Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare.29 In prose the typical works were Donne’s and Andrewes’s Sermons and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy much of the work of Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke remained unpublished until after 1640. The sudden exuberance and national pride of the earlier period gave place to the gloom and introspection of the late Jacobean and Caroline age, in which the confident optimism of Bacon and Hakewill seemed out of place: in which the fussy and self-important Samuel Purchas constituted himself heir to the dedicated patriot Richard Hakluyt. The idea of the progressive decay of nature was more specifically expressed and defended in these years than ever before.30 This idea, as we shall see, was a main target of Bacon, Hakewill and the defenders of the Moderns against the Ancients, of science against scholasticism.31 National disgrace caused or at least accompanied the change. There were the massacre of Amboyna, unavenged as long as the monarchy lasted, the fiasco of English policy in the Thirty Years War, followed by war with Scotland: colonization of America owed everything to private enterprise and nothing to state support. Royal policy broke the boom which began with the peace of 1604. At court these were the scandalous years. One royal favourite was convicted of poisoning; another was suspected of unnatural vice; a Lord Treasurer and a Lord Chancellor were dismissed after being successively convicted of corruption; Lord Audley was sentenced to death for ‘sodomy, unnatural adultery, and incest’,32 and was a papist to boot. At court offices and honours were openly sold, judges dismissed for refusing to give verdicts desired by the government. Economic policy lurched from the disaster of the Cokayne project to the abuse of monopolies. At a time when most Englishmen regarded popery as anti-national, diplomatic relations were restored with the Vatican. Absolutism on the continental model was believed to threaten. Already Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney, probably written between 1610 and 1614, sharply contrasts the glories of the later Elizabethan age (p.13) with the ‘decrepit’, ‘effeminate’, and degenerate age into which Sidney’s friend had survived.33 Glorification of Elizabeth was soon to become fashionable among the Puritans. The gloom which followed the death of Prince Henry in 1612 seems exaggerated, important as he had been in many spheres of intellectual life: but men sensed that an epoch had ended.34
Page 9 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction The contrast between our two periods is particularly striking if we look at the social orientation of literature. From the second period we recall no popular pamphlets and tales like those of Marprelate, Deloney, and Dekker; no popular religious works like Arthur Dent’s Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s Practice of Piety (1612 or 1613). There is all the difference in the world between the pastoral of Sidney, Spenser, Wither, Browne (and Milton)— consciously intended to convey a message35—and the mere escapism to which dons and some country gentlemen increasingly resorted. Miss Røstvig dates very precisely ‘between 1612 and 1616’ the first appearance of ‘the Stoic theme of the happiness of country life’. ‘The high-tide of English neo-Stoicism came in the second quarter of the seventeenth century.’36 The significance of this for our purposes is that Miss Røstvig identifies her neo-Stoics with the defenders of the Ancients, the opponents of modern science and of the Puritans.37 The Puritan and Parliamentarian George Wither, though he could turn out a poem in praise of rural retreat on occasion, roundly denounced those who withdrew into ‘an hermetical solitariness’ as ‘weak,…slothful and unjust’, men who ‘wrong their country and their friends’.38 George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar abandoned Court and City for God. Shakespeare stopped writing for the stage in his forties, as the cheap popular theatre ceased to exist, and court and stage became more closely identified. ‘The courtly and fashionable sections of the London public were thus separating from the rest The dramatists now tended to identify themselves with the dominant Cavalier section of their public. The age of a national drama was over.’39 This may have been partly (p.14) due to the tightening of the censorship in the prerevolutionary period, and the consequent voluntary abstention of many men from publication. Much of the best writing was anti-court in tone—Massinger, Middleton, Wither, Milton.40 But by 1613 the light had gone out of English painting and music too.41 And the age of a national Church had also come to an end. The Authorized Version, the product of co-operation between divines of all shades of opinion, was the last great act of a Church to which virtually all Englishmen wanted to belong. Twenty years later Laud was, by Elizabethan standards, as narrow and one-sided as William Prynne. In religion as in literature, causes deeper than government repression were dividing the nation. This is our starting-point. Notes:
(1) P. Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), pp. 85–7. (2) Sir Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I (1813), p. 265. See p. 248 below. (3) See pp. 185–6, 255 below.
Page 10 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction (4) H. Butterfield, Origins of Modern Science (1949), p. 174. (5) Cf.K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton, 1961), p. 398. (6) D. Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1933), p. 476. I have translated rather freely. (7) Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, II (1646), pp. 10–11. (8) E. Hobsbawm, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th century’, P. and P., nos. 5 and 6; H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The General Crisis of the 17th century’, Ibid., no. 16; and a general discussion, Ibid., no. 18. (9) See pp. 218–55 below. (10) For Hill see p. 130 below. (11) W. M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne (1963), pp. 13–14. (12) For Harvey see my ‘William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy’, P. and P., no. 27; for Holdsworth see pp. 52, 274–5 below. (13) W. Sanderson, A Complete History of the Life and Raigne of King Charles (1658), p. 1139; cf. Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes (ed. W. H. D. Longstaffe, Surtees Soc, 1867), pp. 108–9. Among those alleged to have ‘with consternations expired’ were James Gordon, Viscount Aboyne, and John Geree, the Puritan divine (D.N.B.). (I am indebted to Dr. C. V. Wedgwood for the first three references, and to Mr. K. V. Thomas for Geree.) Eikon Basilike (1649) started the fashion of comparing Charles the Martyr with Jesus Christ. (14) R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (ed. M. Sylvester, 1696), i. 89. (15) There were twenty-one editions of Napier’s Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John between 1593 and 1700, the last year to which Napier thought the world could survive. Newton must have seemed far more eccentric at the end of the century than Napier at its beginning. Both were also interested in alchemy. (16) M. H. Carré, Phases of Thought in England (1949), p. 224. (17) Quoted by H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), p. 13. (18) W. Drummond, ‘A Cypresse Grove’, in Poetical Works (ed. L. E. Kastner, 1913), ii. 78. (19) M. Drayton, ‘To my noble friend Master William Browne, of the evil time’, in Works (ed. J. W. Hebel, 1961), iii. 209–11. Page 11 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction (20) Lear, Act 1, scene ii. (21) Donne, ‘An Anatomie of the World’, in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (1929), p. 208. (22) W. Perkins, Workes (1609–13), ii. 5; R. Sibbes, The Soules Conflict (1635), p. 469; Joseph Hall, Works (1837–9), viii. 147; Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 285; F. Greville, Poems and Dramas (ed. G. Bullough, n.d., ?1939), i. 194–5; R. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 11–13; Sir F. Beaumont, Poems (ed. E. Robinson, 1914), p. 13; A. Marvell, Poems (ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 1927), p. 20; A. Cowley, Poems (ed. A. R. Waller, 1905), p. 113; J. Bunyan, Works (ed. G. Offor, 1860), iii. 253–4. See my Puritanism and Revolution (1958), pp. 340–2. (23) Cartwright spoke in 1609 of ‘the Anabaptists’ error of desperation’ (ed. A. Peel and L. H. Carlson, Cartwrightiana, 1951, p. 77). Cf. also Bacon, Works, viii. 93. (24) T. H. Buckle, Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works (1872), iii. 631. (25) W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660 (1959), passim. (26) See my Society ad Puritanism (1964), pp. 40, 51. (27) See Appendix. (28) A. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), pp. 85, 260. (29) I am indebted to Mr. Charles Hobday for this point. (30) V. Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949), pp. 148–9. Mr. Harris dates the appearance of a more optimistic atmosphere from the third edition of Hakewill’s Apologie of the Power and Providence of God’ in 1635. All his examples, however, come from after 1640. (31) See pp. 81, 178–81, 199–201 below. (32) I quote from the shocked record of the Puritan E. Burghall, Providence Improved (ed. J. Hall, Lancashire and Cheshire Record Soc, 1889), p. 4. (33) Cf. D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (2nd ed., 1962), pp. 230–1. Rather naturally, the Life was not published until after the fall of the monarchy (34) See pp. 190–5 below.
Page 12 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction (35) Greville makes it clear that the allegorical form of works like Arcadia and The Faerie Queene ‘is an enabling of freeborn spirits to the greatest affairs of state’ (Life of Sidney, ed. N. Smith, 1907, pp. 2–3. First published 1652). (36) Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man (Oslo, 1954), pp. 101, 113, 120. (37) Ibid., pp. 53–6; cf. my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 349–53. (38) G. Wither, Abuses Stript and Whipt (1622), in Juvenilia (Spenser Soc. reprint, n.d.), i. 272. (39) L. G. Salingar, ‘The Social Setting’, in The Age of Shakespeare (ed. B. Ford, Penguin Books, 1955), p. 45; cf. pp. 110, 429, 440. Cf. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, passim; Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, ii, 1576–1660, Part 1 (1963), passim. (40) I owe this point to Mr. Hobday. We should add the pamphlets of Thomas Scott (see pp. 184–5 below). (41) I owe this point to discussions with Dr. H. K. Andrews. Cf. ‘a new trend’ in English painting from about 1616, caused by the decline of miniature painting (E. Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, 1962, pp. 184–5, 205–10).
Access brought to you by:
Page 13 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
London Science and Medicine Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords There is a curious academic division of spheres of influence in England, as a result of which the history of science and the history of ideas have become something quite separate from ‘history’. Some ‘historians’ are perhaps dimly aware of another world in which historians of science write the history of science for historians of science, and historians of ideas write the history of ideas for the Journal of the History of Ideas. However, their work has not been absorbed into our thinking about English history. Scholars like Professors R. F. Jones and F. R. Johnson, and Professor E. G. R. Taylor and Commander Waters, have revealed new facts which will transform the understanding even of political history when they have been assimilated. This chapter draws heavily on their researches to examine science and medicine in London. Keywords: history, science, England, medicine, London
Mechanics and artificers (for whom the true natural philosophy should be principally intended). T. SPRAT, History of the Royal Society of London (1667), pp. 117–18. And we desire to know the stars in skies Ourselves thereby to wished ports to bring. SIR ARTHUR GORGES, Poems (ed. H. E. Sandison,
Page 1 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine 1953), p. 68. We care not for those martial men That do our states disdain; But we care for the merchant men Who do our states maintain. T. RAVENSCROFT, Song of the Three Poor Mariners, in Deuteromelia (1609).
I THERE IS A curious academic division of spheres of influence in this country, as a result of which the history of science and the history of ideas have become something quite separate from ‘history’. Some ‘historians’, as we call ourselves, are perhaps dimly aware of another world in which historians of science write the history of science for historians of science, and historians of ideas write the history of ideas for the Journal of the History of Ideas. But their work has not been absorbed into our thinking about English history. Yet scholars like Professors R. F. Jones and F. R. Johnson, and (in a different field) Professor E. G. R. Taylor and Commander Waters, have revealed new facts which will transform our understanding even of political history when they have been assimilated. I shall draw heavily on their researches in what follows. In the past thirty years such scholars have established two apparently contradictory points about Francis Bacon and the early history of science in England. Bacon, they tell us, was a prophet unhonoured in (p.16) his own country in the reigns of James I and Charles I. Only after 1640 did he acquire the great reputation and influence which he was so long to retain. The second point may be stated in the words of Professor Johnson, who has done so much to establish it: ‘Most of the fruitful ideas of science that were popularly associated with the work of Bacon in the seventeenth century were already part of the publicly avowed creed of English scientific workers throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century’1 Bacon’s task—an important one—was to synthesize and systematize this body of practical thought. So we are left with the paradox that Bacon’s ideas, although not novel among scientists, took a long time to win wider acceptance. The reasons for this time-lag, I shall suggest, were social and political. In the eighty years before 1640 England, from being a backward country in science, became one of the most advanced. English astronomers were making telescopic observations of the heavens long before Galileo’s discoveries were announced; they at once tested and confirmed them, and suggested their possible relation to other problems of physical astronomy.2 In 1639 a twenty-twoyear-old Englishman, entirely self-taught in astronomy, was the only man in the world, so far as we know, to observe the transit of Venus.3 This intellectual revolution, in its initial stages, was virtually ignored by the official intelligentsia. The science of Elizabeth’s reign was the work of merchants and craftsmen, not Page 2 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine of dons; carried on in London, not in Oxford and Cambridge; in the vernacular, not in Latin. In 1593 Gabriel Harvey, himself the son of a rope-maker, wrote: ‘He that remembereth Humphrey Cole, a mathematical mechanician, Matthew Baker, a shipwright, John Shute, an architect, Robert Norman, a navigator, William Bourne, a gunner, John Hester, a chemist, or any like cunning and subtle empiric, is a proud man, if he contemn expert artisans, or any sensible industrious practitioners, howsoever unlectured in schools or unlettered in books.’4 Bacon assimilated, synthesized, and put before the intellectuals this body of popular thought. Official Oxford and Cambridge still contrived to ignore it. In sixteenth-century England there was a greedy demand for scientific information. Thus Thomas Langley in 1546 translated Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum ‘to the end that also artificers and others, persons not expert in Latin, might gather knowledge and take pleasure (p.17) by the reading thereof’. Robert Wyllyams, shepherd ‘keeping sheep upon Seynbury Hill’ in Gloucestershire, paid 14d. for his copy in 1546.5 Something like an adult education movement, as we shall see, emerged from this desire to ‘gather knowledge and take pleasure’. So far as I know, there was nothing similar in Counter-Reformation Italy, Spain, France, or Germany; even in the Netherlands, the only comparable Protestant country, the stimulus of the Revolt was counteracted by the absence of peace and stability, and by the clerical domination, which accompanied it. England seems to have been unique in its vernacular scientific literature, and in its level of popular scientific understanding. Here are some of the facts: Over ten per cent of the books listed in the Short Title Catalogue between 1475 and 1640 deal with the natural sciences. Nine out of every ten of these books were in English. With the doubtful exception of Italy, no country has anything like so high a proportion of vernacular scientific books at this date. In William London’s Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (1657), whose aim was to extend the civilization of London into the four northern counties, one book in every six was scientific. The better vernacular textbooks were superior in scope and quality to those used at the universities, more up to date. They were also relatively cheap. In 1576 Martin Frobisher paid £1 for a ship’s Bible; for two scientific handbooks he paid 10d.6 The authors of these textbooks included the ablest scientists of the day, many of them self-educated men who had either never been to a university or held no academic posts there.7 They consciously aimed at a public of merchants, artisans, mariners, gunners, surveyors. Many of their books ran through a large number of editions, some of which have altogether disappeared, perhaps
Page 3 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine because they were read to pieces. But few of their books are in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Take Robert Recorde, for instance, ‘the founder of the English school of mathematics’, who died in 1558. He was a Cambridge graduate, but failing to establish himself in either university he moved to London, where he earned his living as a physician, and gave popular lectures in mathematics. He also depended on the patronage of the Muscovy Company, to which many of his works were dedicated. His writings were all (p.18) in English, and long remained the standard popular textbooks: his arithmetic (The Ground of Artes) had at least twenty-six editions between 1540 and 1662.8 Countless English scientists of merchant or artisan origin in the century after his death acknowledged him as their tutor. Adam Martindale learnt mathematics from Recorde’s books in the early sixteen-forties, though by 1666 he had come to regard him as old-fashioned.9 Recorde’s readers would not only learn mathematics from him: they would also learn that ‘it is meet for no man to be believed in all things, without showing of reason’.10 All statements, including those of Aristotle, should be tested by mathematical reasoning and personal observation.11 John Dee (1527–1608), who edited and augmented the twelfth edition of Recorde’s Ground of Artes in 1582, offers another example. He was an outstanding mathematician, whose work profoundly influenced the next generation. Ramus, who vainly urged Elizabeth to found chairs of mathematics at Oxford and Cambridge, thought that Dee would have been an obvious candidate for one of them.12 Dee had the greatest mathematical and scientific library in England, perhaps in Europe. For thirty years he placed it at the disposal of a wide circle, which included Sir Walter Ralegh, Frobisher, Drake, and Hakluyt at one social extreme, a whole generation of simple pilots and navigators at the other.13 In 1570 Dee wrote a Preface to and annotated a translation of Euclid made by Henry Billingsley, alderman, later Lord Mayor, of London. The chief reason for making the translation, Dee said, was to help the many ‘common artificers’, who, thanks to ‘their own skill and experience already had, will be able (by these good helps and informations) to find out and devise new works, strange engines and instruments: for sundry purposes in the commonwealth’.14 This Preface, with its utilitarianism and its vigorous defence of experiment, made a great impact on young men of the middle class, sons of traders and craftsmen. (Dee referred to himself as (p.19) ‘this mechanician’.)15 Billingsley’s Euclide was republished in 1651, and Dee’s Preface was quoted in 1654 by a chemist who was trying to persuade the universities that mathematics should be taught there as a practical subject of use to merchants, mariners, and mechanics.16 Dee also produced textbooks of navigation and almanacs for seamen. In 1583 he tried to persuade the government to adopt the Gregorian calendar, but was defeated by the bishops, and England retained a distinct system of dating until the mid-eighteenth century. An intimate friend of Gerard Page 4 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Mercator, Dee was for some thirty years technical adviser to the Muscovy Company, and tutor to their sea-captains. Dee’s advice was sought on the subject of the North-West and North-East Passages: Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, Walsingham, the younger Hawkins, Sir Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, all came to his house.17 Take Dee’s pupil and friend, Thomas Digges, another outstanding mathematician and astronomer. He was the son of Leonard Digges, a participant in Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary; the father of a leader of Parliamentary opposition under James I and Charles I.18 Leonard Digges had himself been a popularizing mathematician who believed strongly that artisans should be taught elementary mathematics.19 The invention of the telescope has been claimed for him, as that of the microscope for his son.20 Thomas Digges in 1576 was the first Englishman to proclaim Copernicus’s as the only possible theory of the universe; and he did so in English. His Parfit Description of the Celestiall Orbes had at least seven editions between 1576 and 1605. The year after its publication the Earl (p.20) of Leicester took Digges under his patronage, a fact to whose significance I shall revert later.21 In his discussions of the infinity of the universe—the most intellectually exciting of Copernicus’s ideas—Digges went much further than Copernicus himself. His book contained a diagram more daring than anything Copernicus ever produced, showing the stars at varying distances from the sun out to infinity. It was this diagram which became associated in the popular mind with the new heliocentric theory. Thanks largely to Digges, in England the idea of an infinite universe came to be taken for granted: all scientists assumed the need for progressively testing theories by observation and experiment, and thus the brilliant metaphysical speculations of a Giordano Bruno were comparatively uninfluential here.22 Recorde, Dee, and Digges were scientists of the highest standing. Their vernacular works were deliberately intended to help ‘mechanicians’ to educate themselves.23 Thus Robert Norman, mariner for twenty years and compassmaker, whose discovery of the dip of the magnetic needle greatly influenced Gilbert, paid tribute to Recorde and to Billingsley and Dee’s Euclide in a book whose Epistle Dedicatory asked the reader to regard not the words but the matter. Norman rejected ‘tedious conjectures or imaginations’, arguing only from ‘experience, reason, and demonstration, which are the grounds of arts’. He claimed to set down whatever he could find from ‘exact trial and perfect experiments’, and defended the experience of ‘mechanicians or mariners’ against ‘the learned in those [mathematical] sciences…in their studies amongst their books’, who ‘can imagine great matters and set down their farfetched conceits in fair show, and with plausible words:…yet there are in this land divers mechanicians that in their several faculties and professions have the use of those at their fingers’ ends, and can apply them to (p.21) their several Page 5 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine purposes, as effectually and more readily than those that would most condemn them’,24 thanks to the work of translators and popularizers. Norman’s Newe Attractive remained a standard work until the eighteen century. What is important for our purposes is the close understanding between the leading scholarly scientists of England and the technicians for whom they wrote, as well as the co-operation between the scientists themselves in this work of adult education. Edward Worsop, ‘Londoner’, who described himself as ‘a simple man among the common people’, thought that the books of Recorde and the Diggeses ‘cannot be understood of the common sort’: so he ‘set forth this discourse to their behoof…for their easiest understanding’, to lay the secrets of geometry ‘open unto the understanding of every reasonable man’, so that they should not be fooled and cheated by surveyors.25 Another popularizer was William Bourne, a self-educated man, the first non-university mathematics teacher and writer known to us, who was also the first Englishman to publish a book on the practice of navigation. This was A Regiment for the Sea, a manual written in a popular style ‘for the simplest sort of seafaring men’, which had at least six editions between 1574 and 1596. Bourne’s Treasure for Travellers (1578) aimed at popularizing the mathematics of Dee’s Preface. Bourne also did practical work on lenses.26 There was Thomas Hill (died c. 1575) who published a vast number of translations and treatises on popular science, many of which went into seven, eight, or nine editions. He, too, signed himself ‘Londoner’, and was a citizen with no more than a grammar school education. He specialized in expositions in simple English which sold at from 2d. to 1s., with cheap but serviceable woodcuts. He was himself converted to Copernicanism, and helped to raise the level of popular science above that of the cheap handbooks, mostly translations by incompetent hacks, with which publishers in the first half of the sixteenth century had tried (p.22) to meet the new demand.27 The 1600 edition of Hill’s Arte of Vulgar Arithmetick contains an eloquent preface establishing the independence of mathematics from religion.
II Economic historians rightly emphasize the importance of the Tudor peace in making possible England’s economic advance in the century before 1640. Whilst most continental countries were engaged in dynastic, religious and civil wars, internal law and order for the most part prevailed in England. The Tudor peace was no less significant for intellectual history. The two are of course intimately connected. As landlords beat their swords into ploughshares, so the professional surveyor began to demand an improved mathematics: Recorde and the Diggeses gave it to him. Gilbert watched foundry-workers and talked to navigators in the preparatory work for his De Magnete (1600); pumps used for draining mines and ships supplied Harvey with the idea which proved the circulation of the blood; improvements in glass-making made possible the manufacture of telescopes and Page 6 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine microscopes. But to the Tudor peace we should add the Tudor Reformation: for without the Reformation, with its challenge to authority, its stimulus to education and popular literacy, its relatively free discussion (Henry VIII failed to ‘abolish diversity in opinions’)—without all this the popular contribution to scientific thinking would have been impossible. The reign of Edward VI, the great age of radical Protestantism, was a period in which the relaxation of the censorship allowed popular science to break through. Northumberland, his son, later the Earl of Leicester, and his son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney, gave enthusiastic support to a deliberate policy of commercial expansion based on improved knowledge of mathematics, navigation and geography, which derived ultimately from Dee.28 It is no coincidence that Recorde, both Diggeses, and many others of the early scientists were keen Protestants.29 William (p.23) Turner, ‘the true pioneer of natural history in England’, an itinerant Protestant preacher under Henry VIII and an exile under Mary, in 1564 was suspended as Dean of Wells for refusing to wear the prescribed vestments. He ordered penance for adultery to be performed in a priest’s square cap, thus simultaneously demonstrating his contempt for the sacrament of penance and for popish vestments. He deliberately published his scientific works in English rather than in Latin.30 The botanist Thomas Penney, ‘the first Englishman to anticipate the Baconian insistence upon the collection of data as the essential preliminary to theorizing’, was censured by the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘ill-affected towards the establishment’, and was a supporter of Thomas Cartwright.31 Dr. John Halle, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, was almost as well known for his anti-popish poems as for his writings on anatomy and surgery and against astrology.32 William Bullein was at once a medical writer and a Protestant propagandist.33 Nicholas Udall, a very early advocate of the Reformation at Oxford and another Protestant propagandist, translated one of the most important anatomical treatises of the sixteenth century.34 William Fulke, one of the founders of scientific meteorology in England, who by emphasizing secondary as against supernatural causes did much to reduce superstition, was also an outspoken Puritan. He was driven from St. John’s College, Cambridge, though as chaplain and protégé of Leicester he later became Master of Pembroke Hall. Fulke was interested in astronomy and optics, and was an opponent of astrology.35 Reginald Scot, whose epoch-making Discoverie of Witchcraft was published in 1584, distrusted alchemy and astrology, and was a stout opponent of papists and priestcraft. George Gifford, author of a sceptical Dialogue concerning witches and witchcraft (1593), was a Puritan lecturer.36 Napier, the inventor of logarithms, thought the Pope was Antichrist.37 (p.24) Jeremiah Horrocks, the young astronomer who observed the transit of Venus in 1639, and who in some respects anticipated Newton’s theory of gravitation, came from a Lancashire Puritan family, was an undergraduate at Page 7 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Puritan Emmanuel College and a protege of the Puritan Gresham professor Samuel Foster. He subsequently became assistant to an extremely Puritan rector in his native county.38 Among other leading Puritans favourable to science were Alexander Nowell, George Downham, Richard Greenham, Walter Travers, Robert Cleaver, William Perkins, and Samuel Ward.39 There was agreement between scientists like Recorde, Dee, the Diggeses, Thomas Hill, Norman, Bourne, Thomas Hood, William Gilbert, Edward Wright, William Bedwell, John Gerarde, who asserted the perfection of God’s universe; and Puritans like Nowell, Perkins, and Preston who used the argument from design to prove the existence of God.40 John Preston, the Puritan political leader of the sixteen-twenties, had contemplated medicine as a career before he opted for divinity. His sermons show that he retained an interest in astronomy and other sciences.41 Sir Thomas Bodley, son of a Marian exile and himself a pupil of Calvin and Beza, founded his Library to forward the struggle against popery. But the Bodleian was a pro-scientific as well as an anti-Catholic influence in Oxford. The frieze in the Upper Reading Room must have shocked conservatives by including figures so strange to the university as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Paracelsus, Vesalius, Mercator, and Ortelius (as well as Guicciardini and Sir Philip Sidney) alongside the great philosophers and theologians.42 William Hakewill was one of Bodley’s executors.43 Thomas James, the first Librarian of the Bodleian, who was also the radical Protestant son of a Marian exile, used the Roman Index ‘that we may know what books and what editions to buy, (p.25) their prohibition being a good direction to guide us therein’.44 James himself had a Miltonic dislike of expurgating indexes.45 The sharp division in Protestant theology between natural and supernatural knowledge helped to establish the independence of the former. Some (though by no means all) English Protestants denied the association between sin and disease traditionally favoured by the Catholic Church, and became champions of more scientific and hygienic methods.46 Rejection of the miracle of the mass and of wonder-working images, scepticism of all miracles since the age of the primitive Church, anxiety to minimize the area in which direct divine intervention prevailed and to proclaim the rule of law in the universe—all these Protestant tendencies unwittingly helped to create an atmosphere favourable to science. ‘God alters no law of nature’, declared Preston, at a time when Popes still practised magic.47 Sprat’s comparison of the scientific revolution to the Protestant Reformation48 was thus obvious. Nor was it original. Richard Bostock in 1585 had compared the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the Paracelsan revolution in chemistry to the Protestant Reformation of which Wyclif had been a precursor: and Bacon claimed Luther as a predecessor.49 Recent attempts to disprove the Page 8 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine well-attested connection between radical Protestantism and the rise of science have been, in my opinion, unsuccessful.50 (I stress connection, and suggest no causal relation.) In this book I use the word ‘Puritan’ to include all those radical Protestants who wanted to reform the Church but (before 1640 at least) (p.26) did not want to separate from it. The sectaries are ‘Puritans’ only by extension.51 In relation to medicine England’s Protestantism put it in an interesting half-way position between Catholic France and the republican Netherlands. Theodore Mayerne, for instance, an advocate of chemical medicine, had been declared by the Paris College of Physicians ‘an unlearned, impudent, drunken, mad fellow,… unworthy to practise physic in any place’, because he opposed Hippocrates and Galen;52 but he was safe in England with royal patronage, and throve to knighthood. Royalty patronized many Protestant refugee doctors. Mayerne was physician to James I, Theodore Diodati to Princess Elizabeth, Peter Chamberlen the elder to Queens Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. Gideon de Laune was apothecary to Anne of Denmark, Wolfegang Rumler to Charles I.53 The forceps of the radical Protestant Chamberlens not only brought them the favour of two papist queens; after 1660 they also led the court to overlook the revolutionary radicalism of the younger Peter Chamberlen, who was appointed physician to Charles. II.54 In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy merchants and artisans had made contributions to scientific thinking comparable to those of England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; but this did not survive the shock of Reformation and counter-Reformation in Roman Catholic countries, Venice with its university of Padua only excepted.55 And even there, though Harvey owed much to Padua, still it was an Englishman and not an Italian who first published the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Some recent historians have written of the persecutors of Galileo with such human understanding of their predicament that we need to remind ourselves that it was Galileo who was forced to recant, and that his ideas could be publicly developed only in Protestant countries. The great anatomist Vesalius was cut off in his prime by the action of the Inquisition.56 In 1609 the Parlement of Paris (p.27) ordered chemists to subscribe to the teachings of Aristotle, on pain of death. An inquiring spirit like Lucilio Vanini was burnt at Toulouse in 1619 after having his tongue torn out. Campanella had to endure ghastly tortures, followed by nearly thirty years in Italian dungeons, to reflect on the unwisdom of thinking unorthodox thoughts. Descartes was so worried by Galileo’s fate that—even though he retreated to the safety of the Protestant Netherlands—he left much of his work unpublished, and disguised his real beliefs in what he did publish. It did not help. His works were placed on the Index, where they still remained in 1948.57 Even the Laudian censorship never amounted to anything like the Roman Index, on which all books advocating the Copernican theory remained
Page 9 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine until the eighteenth century, and which prohibited books like those of Johannes Weyer, who suggested that witches might be psychologically ill.58
III Nevertheless, there was a battle of the books in sixteenth-century England too, as well as in the seventeenth century. Thirty-five years ago Mr. Conley revealed that the first English translators of the classics were a homogeneous group of non-university Protestants and Puritans, mostly young and inspired by an ardent patriotism. A similar group of translators and compilers, recently studied by Miss Rosenberg, occupied themselves in making scientific learning available to all who could read, whether it was in medicine, surgery, geography, mathematics or astronomy; or in history. Both these groups aimed at ‘a mean sort of men’, between ‘the rascal multitude and the learned sages’, and regarded the creation of an enlightened lay public opinion as a bulwark of true religion and national independence at a time when both protestantism and England’s existence as an independent state seemed to be threatened by Spain.59 These were braver enterprises than one might think. Again and again (p.28) the early popularizers, from Sir Thomas Elyot onwards, like the early translators of the Bible, had to defend themselves against the charge that they were debasing the value of the originals, or making learning too common. They show constant fear of the greedy conservatism of the vested interests whose secrets they were revealing—the universities, the College of Physicians.60 Even in the seventeeenth century the view that ‘the Moderns exceed the Ancients’ seemed to Bishop Goodman ‘an opinion most prejudicial to the professors of all sciences, to universities, colleges, libraries, and all ancient foundations;…and is therefore of dangerous consequence’.61 ‘The Papists and the College of Physicians’, declared Nicholas Culpeper in 1649, ‘will not suffer divinity and physic to be printed in our mother tongue, both upon one and the same ground.’62 ‘Vile men would, prelate-like, have knowledge hid’, sang John Collop ironically six years later.63 Thomas Gale, whose Certaine Workes of Chirurgie, published in 1563, is ‘a landmark in British surgery’, sought the protection of the Earl of Leicester in a dedication which reveals, quite simply, that he was afraid. His translation of Galen, completed in 1566, was not published until twenty years later, despite Gale’s high patrons.64 In 1570 John Dee had to argue that the translation of Euclid did not diminish the honour and estimation of the universities or hinder their studies.65 Robert Norman in 1581 defended translation on patriotic grounds, and attacked learned mathematicians who wish ‘that all mechanicians were such as for want of utterance should be forced to deliver unto them their knowledge and conceit, that they might flourish upon them, and supply them at their pleasures’.66 In 1585 Richard Bostock, defending Paracelsan medicine, savagely attacked the Galenists who (in the College of Physicians) ‘shroud
Page 10 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine themselves under the wings and protection of princes, privileges and charters’, and prevent the development of true experimental chemistry.67 (p.29) William Clowes’s A Prooved Practice for All Toung Chirurgians (1588) suggested that the old guard did not want to see any medical books published at all.68 These fears and suspicions were not idle. The spreading of popular knowledge had democratic implications and was for this reason opposed by political and religious conservatives, papists in high places, and advocates of a Spanish alliance.69 The translators and popularizers continually found it necessary to appeal against persecution to their patrons, who fortunately included Cecil and Leicester. For our purposes Leicester’s patronage of Clowes and William Cunningham is worth noting. Cunningham’s Cosmographicall Glasse (1559) ‘did for cosmography, and to some extent for navigation, what Robert Recorde’s books had done for mathematics; it brought the subject from the recesses of the scholar’s closet to the shelves of the gentry and the desks of the merchants’.70 Leicester’s patronage of Thomas Blundeville, whom we shall meet again as a popularizer of William Gilbert, is also of interest.71 It is easy for us, who know the end of the story, to assume that the victory of this group of Elizabeth’s councillors was always inevitable, and to discount the popularizers’ shrill cries for help. But this would be a mistake. Leicester’s policy of encouraging popular enlightenment, for whatever reasons he adopted it, was by no means certain of success. Had Mary Queen of Scots or some other papist succeeded Elizabeth—as always seemed possible down to 1588—the consequence might have been very unpleasant for him and for the group of scientists and translators which he protected. Leicester might after all have taken warning from the fate of his father, the Duke of Northumberland, from whom he seems to have inherited an interest in overseas expansion as well as a readiness to gamble on the victory of radical Protestantism. Leicester and his protégés performed an important service to their country, whose significance is only just beginning to be appreciated, thanks to the work of Miss Rosenberg.72 (p.30) It is formally true to say, then, as Professor Kocher does, that ‘neither the Church nor any other organized body in Elizabethan England ever persecuted a single scientist or imposed upon a single scientific book the kind of censorship which obtained in some continental countries’.’73 But the negative pressures of Church and conservative opinion, still socially powerful, may well have been more oppressive than Professor Kocher’s statement implies. George Gascoigne, whom Ralegh admired, was a victim of persecution for his activities as a translator.74 In 1577 the third part of Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Arte of Navigation was banned as politically dangerous. Recorde and Hill were cautious and ambiguous in their references to the Copernican theory. Professor Jones believed that this theory ‘was more widely Page 11 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine accepted in private than is apparent from published opinions’.75 Some translators of Ramus were reluctant to put their names on the title-page. Dudley Fenner’s 1584 translation of Ramus’s Dialecticae Libri Duo was published at Middelburg, where he was serving as chaplain to the English merchants after being expelled from Cambridge for Puritanism. Fenner defended himself against those who opposed the popularization of academic subjects, and warned them against keeping learning rare and dear lest the people curse them’.76 The first translator of Ramus into English had also felt it necessary to rebuke those who ‘would have all things kept close either in the Hebrew, Greek or Latin tongues’.77 One translation of Ramus was suppressed, and the translator expected ‘storms of reproach and ingnominy’ when he tried again as late as 1632.78 In other spheres—drama, history—we know something of the working of the censorship.79 Elizabethan and Jacobean governments refused (p.31) to license the printing of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and Discorsi, either in the original or in translation.80 Together with hints like those noted in the preceding paragraph, all this leads me to suspect, though I cannot prove, that there was a silent censorship, usually self-imposed, which made Gilbert leave so much of his work unpublished, and may mislead us into supposing that Bacon, Hakewill, and Harvey were relatively uninfluential in their own country before 1640, and then suddenly leap into prominence.81 It seems to me more probable that this is an optical illusion: that it was the breakdown of the old regime and its censorship after the meeting of the Long Parliament which allowed men to speak and write more freely: though this freer atmosphere would also allow new ideas to circulate faster and more widely.82 We might have expected things to improve after the defeat of the Armada had made Protestantism and English independence secure; but this did not happen. The external danger had forced radicals to remain loyal to Elizabeth for fear of a worse alternative: the removal of this unifying factor roused the Queen and the conservatives to a flurry of repressive activity. With Leicester and Walsingham dead and Ralegh in disgrace in the fifteen-nineties, the bishops began a determined drive against Puritanism and free thought. This was not checked by the accession of James I, as the Hampton Court Conference shows. Under James the two leading patrons of science after Leicester, Ralegh and the Earl of Northumberland, both found themselves in the Tower. It was in 1608 that Ralegh’s friend the great mathematician Thomas Hariot wrote to Kepler: ‘Things with us are in such a condition that I still cannot philosophize freely. We are still stuck in the mud. I hope almighty God will soon put an end to it.’83
IV In 1594 the great navigator John Davis, who himself kept fully abreast of the new mathematics, declared proudly, ‘our country is not inferior to any for men of rare knowledge, singular explication, and exquisite (p.32) execution of the arts Page 12 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine mathematical; for what stranger may be compared with M. Thomas Digges, Esq., our countryman, the great master of archemastry? and for theoretic speculations and most cunning calculation, M. Dee and M. Thomas Hariot are hardly to be matched’.84 Among the scientific popularizers who helped to pass the new mathematics down was Thomas Hood (c. 1556–soon after 1611), son of a merchant tailor of London. He was the author of a series of textbooks on mathematics, astronomy, and navigation, and wrote a treatise on the use of globes Tor the mariners’, as well as translating part of Ramus’s Scholae Mathematicae. He also practised physic. In 1589 Hood was, with Hakluyt, one of the subscribers to Ralegh’s Virginia Company.85 Hood invented a sector, ancestor of the slide-rule and the calculating machine, in 1598, the same year as Galileo.86 In the fifteen-eighties he was lecturing privately in the Staplers’ Chapel, Leadenhall, on mathematics, geography, and navigation. This lecture was financed by a group of Londoners, headed by Thomas Smith, later first Governor of the East India Company, Governor of the Muscovy Company, and Treasurer of the Virginia Company. In 1588, with the approval of the Privy Council, a public lecture in mathematics was endowed at the initiative of the same sponsors; it was intended primarily for captains of trained bands, but was also open to the general public; and Hood was the lecturer. Richard Hakluyt had been trying for years to get such a public lecture endowed, with special reference to navigation: and Drake had promised to contribute £20 a year towards it.87 But it needed the panic of the Armada year to get it started: now it was ‘earnestly requested by the whole City’.88 Once the invasion scare was over, however, the emphasis of Hood’s lectures shifted from the mathematical basis of military tactics and fortifications to problems of navigation, of greater interest to the seamen who formed the bulk of his audience. This experiment in adult education came to an (p.33) end when it was replaced by the more grandiose project of Gresham College.89 Sir Thomas Gresham (1518–79), merchant and financier, the son and nephew of Lord Mayors of London, built the Royal Exchange and left the revenue from shops there jointly to the City of London and the Mercers’ Company to endow a college. Despite pleas from Cambridge that the money might more appropriately be left to the university, Gresham followed the example set by many merchants who endowed grammar schools in the sixteenth century, and was careful to put control of his college in the hands not of clerics but of merchants like himself. He endowed seven professorships: in Divinity, Law, Rhetoric, Music, Physic, Geometry, and Astronomy, with higher stipends than Henry VIII had given the Regius Professors of Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge. Gresham College, like the Bodleian Library, was founded to combat popery. The Professor of Divinity was naturally the senior professor: he was to employ his time in sound handling of controversies, ‘especially against the common adversary of the Church of Rome’.90 Page 13 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine The Gresham professors were instructed to lecture, free of charge, in Latin for the benefit of foreigners and in English because the founder had ‘a special respect of the citizens, of whom few or none understand the Latin tongue’, and did not want the lectures to be for the learned only.91 For the first ten years the music lectures were delivered in English only, because John Bull could speak no Latin. The instructions for the lectures, drafted by City perchants, were astonishingly forward-looking. The professors were set free from the university practice of merely commenting on a set text. The astronomy lecturer was to demonstrate the use of nautical instruments Tor the capacity of mariners’, and to apply this to practical purposes by teaching them geography and navigation. The geometry professor was to lecture on arithmetic and both theoretical and practical geometry. ‘Forasmuch as the greatest part of the auditory is like to be of such citizens and others as have small knowledge, or none at all, in the Latin tongue, and for that every man for his health’s sake will desire to have some knowledge in the art of physic’, the physic professor was told to deal with modern theories of physiology, pathology, and therapeutics. His lectures were to follow the method of Fernelius ‘rather than be disjointed and delivered out of order by exposition of some part of Galen or Hippocrates’. The law lectures (p. 34) were not to be delivered after the manner of the universities, by commenting on texts, but ‘in the most perspicuous method’, by selecting topics such as ‘are more usual in common practice,…to the good liking and capacity of the said auditory’. The handling was to be analytical, after the order of Wesenbekius and certain others.92 These two models, Fernelius and Wesenbekius, call for a word of comment. Jean Fernel (1497–1558) was a French physician who revolted agaisnt scholasticism and proclaimed that ‘it seems good for philosophers to move to fresh ways and systems’. He was a resolute partisan of the Moderns: ‘There is nothing for which our age need envy its predecessors.’ Although he had not mastered the experimental method, he believed in observation, and had no servile veneration for Aristotle and Galen. He was the first man of modern times to measure a degree of the meridian. He was a skilled anatomist, and wrote the earliest systematic treatises on physiology and pathology, inventing the modern usage of both terms. His works were used as textbooks in all European countries until the end of the seventeenth century. There had been thirty-four editions of his Opera by 1681. Fernel’s great merit lay in his hitherto unequalled analytic method, and in his rejection of a mass of medieval superstitions, as well as of astrology and alchemy. Within half a century after Gresham College had adopted him Fernel’s system was outmoded by the discoveries of Harvey and Descartes: but in 1598 he was a good model.93 Wesenbekius, Mathaius Wesenbeck (1531–86), was a Fleming who migrated to Saxony because of his Protestantism.94 His commentary on the Digest, published 1565–82, dominated juristic literature on the Continent for the century after his death, and his method was the ruling one until the eighteenth century. The Page 14 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine essence of this method was (p.35) Wesenbeck’s emphasis on practice, on matters of daily use, and dislike of logical subtleties, scholasticism, excessive citation of authorities.95 The attraction which this approach to the law would have for citizens is obvious. The Gresham professor was instructed to deal with subjects like wills, trusts, usury, contracts, sale and purchase, ships, seamen and navigation, monopolies, trade and merchants, pirates, &c, which would be of direct interest to his audience.96 Lectures were followed by discussion. This system of free adult education was consciously designed to supply the teaching in modern subjects which the universities were conspicuously failing to give. At Oxford and Cambridge lecturers on medicine had to proceed by way of commentary on Hippocrates and Galen, astronomy lecturers by commenting on Ptolemy, cosmography lecturers on Pliny, Strabo, and Plato. In 1574 a Ramist at Cambridge was ordered to defend Aristotle against all other philosophers.97 In 1586 questions ‘disagreeing with the ancient and true philosophy’ (i.e. Aristotle’s) were forbidden even to be discussed in the Oxford schools.98 In 1583 Matthew Gwinne, future Gresham Professor, was permitted by the University of Oxford to discontinue his lecture on music because ‘suitable books were difficult to procure, and the practice of that science was thought to be disregarded (inusitata) if not useless’.99 There was no chair of mathematics at Cambridge until 1663.
V Gresham College was primarily a teaching rather than a research institution. But it also gave scientists what they had hitherto lacked, a central meeting-place and clearing-house for ideas. The first Gresham Professor of Geometry, until his resignation in 1620, was Henry Briggs. He was a man of the first importance in the intellectual history of his age, who still awaits a full-scale modern biographer.100 He was born in 1561 near Halifax, turbulent centre of economic activity and radical Protestantism, (p.36) and lived until 1631. Under him Gresham at once became a centre of scientific studies. He introduced there the modern method of teaching long division, and popularized the use of decimals.101 He published many books on arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry, as well as tables for navigation: his Commentaries on Ramus’s Geometry were not published. But, significant though Briggs was as a mathematician in his own right, his greatest importance was as contact and public relations man. He was a member of William Gilbert’s circle at Wingfield House, one of the less plausible of the many claimants for the honour of being the original nucleus from which the Royal Society developed.102 In his productive years Gilbert (1540–1603) was living in London and actively collaborating with scientists there. His De Magnete, ‘the first physical treatise…based entirely upon experiment’,103 so important for the science of navigation, was in many respects a co-operative work. Gilbert drew on the earlier research of craftsmen like Page 15 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Robert Norman and William Borough.104 Briggs was at the centre of Gilbert’s group. At Gilbert’s request he calculated a table of magnetic dip and variation. Their mutual friend Edward Wright recorded and tabulated much of the information which Gilbert used, and helped in the production of the De Magnete.105 Thomas Blundeville, another member of Briggs’s group, and—like Gilbert—a former protege of the Earl of Leicester, popularized Gilbert’s discoveries in The Theoriques of the Seven Planets (1602), a book in which Briggs and Wright again collaborated.106 Blundeville, Wright, and William Barlow (another member of Briggs’s circle) constructed the instruments which would render Gilbert’s work accessible to mariners; Gresham College popularized them.107 So the great work of ‘the father of electrical science’, which Galileo admired, and which gave such impetus to the scientific imagination and prepared for Newton’s theory of gravitation, derived from the work of unlearned craftsmen and was (p.37) closely connected in origin and publicization with the Gresham group. Christopher Wren, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Astronomy at Gresham in 1657, lauded Gilbert as ‘the father of the new philosophy, Cartesius being but a builder on his experiments’; and added that Gilbert’s work was ‘augmented’ by the Gresham professors.108 We should note in passing the extent and variety of Gilbert’s scientific interests. In addition to those already discussed, he was President of the College of Physicians and physician-in-ordinary to Elizabeth; and, like his friend Richard Hakluyt, he was keenly and expertly interested in chemistry and botany.109 Gilbert was also attracted by Bruno’s astronomical views.110 Hakluyt, who like Gilbert was on the fringe of the Gresham circle, was another polymath, who studied biology and anthropology, and was ‘no less excellent in the chiefest secrets of the mathematics’. His brother was a doctor.111 A full study of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution would have to take account of the wide-ranging scientific interests of key figures like Gilbert and Hakluyt, who helped to link the many spheres in which original work was being done.112 Knowledge was shared by men working in what would now be regarded as unrelated fields. Matthew Gwinne was Professor of Physic at Gresham College after being lecturer in music at Oxford; Thomas Clayton, Professor of Music at Gresham from 1607 to 1610, was later reader of the anatomy lecture at Oxford.113 Professor Quinn has pointed out that each of the significant figures in natural history in sixteenth-century England (William Turner, Thomas Penney, Thomas Moffet, John Gerarde, and others) collected information from pioneers of overseas enterprise like Drake, Cavendish, Frobisher, and John White.114 Edward Wright (1558–1615), who co-operated with Briggs and Gilbert, is a man whose work has been underrated because of the way in which he shared it with the members of the Gresham circle. Wright was a former Fellow of Caius, who went to sea with the Earl of Cumberland in 1589. He explained theoretically the method of constructing maps upon Mercator’s projection, and made it practically useful for mariners. The Wright-Mercator projection was ‘probably Page 16 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine the greatest advance (p.38) ever made in marine cartography’. Wright’s discovery was made known to the world, with his permission, by Blundeville and Barlow. In 1598 Wright published Certaine Errours in Navigation detected, a work which evolutionized the science and ‘set the seal on the supremacy of the English in the theory and practice of the art of navigation’. To this work Briggs contributed a number of tables, later improved by another Gresham professor, Edmund Gunter; Gellibrand, a third Gresham professsor, added an appendix to a later edition.115 Wright was also a skilled instrument-maker and a surveyor, who was employed by Sir Hugh Myddelton in his New River scheme for bringing water to London.116 Briggs seems to have been the first person to appreciate the significance of Napier’s invention of logarithms—another great advance which owed nothing to the universities. As soon as Briggs heard of it he rushed off to Edinburgh; and from his interview with Napier onwards Briggs used all Gresham College’s resources to popularize this discovery. Briggs himself made a significant contribution to the development of logarithms in a work which was ‘never superseded by any subsequent calculations’.117 Logarithms were at once introduced into the teaching at Gresham. In 1617 Briggs published a table of logarithms Tor the sake of his friends and hearers at Gresham College’;118 two years later he edited one of Napier’s works.119 Briggs’s friend Edward Wright translated Napier into English as A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes, but died before it was published in 1616. The inevitable Briggs saw it through the press, for the benefit of ‘those who…cannot come to hear me’ at Gresham, added a preface and completed a table. The work was dedicated to the East India Company, which had encouraged Wright to make the translation.120 Through A Description logarithms were first brought into popular use, originally for navigators and surveyors, though their commercial importance was soon realized. In 1619 John Speidall, a self-educated mathematics teacher and a member of Briggs’s circle, published New Logarithmes, of which six impressions (p.39) appeared in five years.121 The rapid adoption of logarithms all over Europe in the early seventeenth century owed much to the enthusiasm of Briggs and later Gresham professors.122 Logarithms even reached the stage by 1632.123 Another friend of Briggs’s who was influenced by the new teaching at Gresham was Aaron Rathborne, who advocated the use of logarithms for surveying within a few years of their invention. His Surveyor (1616) was an orderly and formal textbook teaching the elements of geometry and trigonometry, a great advance on the chatty Elizabethan dialogues. It looks forward to Leybourne’s classic Compleat Surveyor of 1653. The surveyors were among the first to use the slide rule.124 The College brought together many groups of scientists. Raphe Handson, a pupil of Briggs’s, was persuaded by Hakluyt in 1600 to publish the first English textbook on Trigonometrie, a translation with additions of his own. It greatly simplified the calculations necessary for mathematical navigation. It was dedicated to the two Governors of the East India Company who had founded Page 17 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Wright’s lecture on navigation, and in the book Handson makes clear his debt to Briggs.125 The indefatigable activities of Briggs extended into many other spheres. He acted as link between Gresham College and a group of master shipwrights and others interested in navigation which centred round the mathematician John Wells, Keeper of Naval Stores at Deptford. Briggs was one of the referees in a dispute about a new design for ships. The connection continued after Briggs’s resignation, and (p.40) brought Gresham into direct contact with practical navigational problems.126 The publication of Wells’s Sciographia (1634) had been earnestly solicited by Briggs and Gunter, and Gellibrand wrote a preface to it.127 Another friend of Briggs and later Gresham professors was John Man (fl. 1614– 47), compass- and dial-maker successively to James I and Charles I.128 Briggs knew and admired the mathematical genius of Thomas Hariot, and so had at least some connexion with Sir Walter Ralegh’s circle of scientists which I shall be discussing later.129 (p.41) Another member of Ralegh’s circle, Robert Hues, is also associated with Gresham College in one seventeenth-century account.130 The cheap globe which Emery Molyneux made, with help from Ralegh, John Davis, and Hakluyt, was popularized by Hues; globes were used for teaching at Gresham.131 Hues pointed out that Molyneux’s globes were smaller and cheaper than their predecessors, so that ‘the meaner students might herein also be provided for’.132 Briggs was an active member of the Virginia Company, serving on its committees and acting as auditor. He was a great friend of its secretary, Nicholas Ferrar, who at Briggs’s instance was offered the Gresham chair when Briggs moved to Oxford.133 Briggs wrote a Treatise on the North-west Passage which was published in a volume of Virginia Company propaganda put out by the Company’s secretary, and was later reprinted by Briggs’s friend Samuel Purchas, together with a map also attributed to Briggs.134 Another member of Briggs’s circle was Mark Ridley (1560–1624), a protagonist of the Copernican hypothesis and one of the earliest English writers to recommend the carrying out of popular scientific experiments. He had been physician to English merchants in Russia.135 There was also William Bedwell (1561 or 1562–1632), a distinguished Arabic scholar, translator of the Authorized Version and of Ramus’s Geometry (1636), who wrote popular science manuals for the use of carpenters and produced almanacs.136 Bedwell is said to have been a friend and admirer of Thomas Hood.137 So close was Bedwell’s association with the Gresham group that Aubrey thought he had been a professor at the College.138 Bedwell, who dabbled in astrology, forms another link with Ralegh’s circle, since he helped with the chronology of the History of the World.139 Briggs was also interested in the new astronomy, though ‘the most satirical man’ against astrology ‘that hath ever been known’, the astrologer Lilly Page 18 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine tells us.140 When Briggs’s friend George Hakewill published his manifesto of the partisans of the Moderns against the Ancients, Briggs contributed a paper on modern inventions in mathematics, and went out of his way to write to Hakewill emphasizing his agreement with his thesis.141 The youthful mathematical prodigy John Pell (1611–85) was discovered by Briggs, and later worked with another Gresham professor, Gellibrand. Pell was subsequently associated with the Comenian group in England, of which I shall shortly say more.142 In 1643, none of the few jobs for mathematicians in England being vacant, Pell accepted a mathematics chair in the Netherlands. He returned only in 1652, when the Commonwealth’s Council of State promised him £200 a year, a house, and a mathematics lectureship. The latter did not materialize, and Pell became instead the republic’s diplomatic representative at Zurich. In 1658 he was meeting with the group which later formed the Royal (p.42) Society, and was one of its original Fellows.143 In 1628 Briggs was active in trying to raise funds for the relief of Calvinist academics who had fled from the Palatinate —enthusiastic support for whom was the shibboleth which divided Puritans from Arminians. Briggs was a great friend of the Calvinist Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, himself a keen mathematician and one of Comenius’s patrons.144 Theodore Haak, a refugee from the Palatinate to whom Briggs lent manuscripts, and who also knew John Greaves, Gresham Professor of Geometry, was later a central figure both in the Comenian group and in the group which formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. It was at Haak’s instance that the famous meetings of this latter group started at Gresham College in 1645.145 Under Briggs, then, Gresham College was a centre of advanced science as well as of adult education. In 1601 Richard More, a master carpenter, told his fellow artisans to read Billingsley’s Euclide and to attend Briggs’s lectures every Thursday if they wanted to learn modern methods of mensuration and quantity surveying based on geometry. Richard Delamain, a joiner who acted on this advice, acquired enough mathematics from lectures and discussions at Gresham to become a teacher of the subject himself, and to invent a slide rule. Another who educated himself at Gresham was Edmund Wingate (1596–1656), a lawyer who in 1630 published a textbook of arithmetic with a commercial emphasis, which went through many editions.146 We hear of such cases only by accident: not many of those whom Briggs helped recorded their gratitude as eloquently as the sea-captain who named some north-western islands ‘Brigges his Mathematickes’.147 (In view of Briggs’s interest in the North-West Passage, the compliment was appropriate.) But there can be no doubt that Gresham College helped greatly to raise the level (p.43) of mathematics teaching in this period, as well as to increase the number of teachers.148 Briggs left his chair for Oxford in 1620, but his tradition was continued by Edmund Gunter and Henry Gellibrand, who held the chair of Astronomy from 1619 to 1636. Gunter (1581–1626) was a close friend of Briggs’s, and may have Page 19 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine obtained the chair on Briggs’s recommendation. Gunter was a notable mathematician who continued Briggs’s work on logarithms. He took very seriously the instruction to Gresham mathematics professors ‘to explain the use of common instruments for the capacity of mariners’. The publication of his Gresham lectures made him with Edward Wright the most important English writer on mathematical navigation of his period. His books, written with great clarity and with easily comprehended mathematics, ran to many editions. ‘Before,’ wrote Aubrey with some exaggeration, ‘the mathematical sciences were locked up in the Greek and Latin tongues and so lay untouched, kept safe in some libraries. After Mr. Gunter published his book ["of the quadrant, sector, and cross-staff"], these sciences sprang up amain, more and more, to that height it is at now (1690).’149 With John Wells and Phineas Pett Gunter devised a more accurate method of calculating ships’ tonnage.150 Gunter also invented a number of instruments to simplify calculations—Gunter’s line of numbers, Gunter’s Scale (a slide rule), Gunter’s Quadrant, Gunter’s Chain, this last remaining in use until the mid-nineteenth century. He gave the first clear explanation of the use of the log-line to assess distances travelled at sea, and so to calculate position: Gunter may even have invented it. When Captain Thomas James went to look for the North-West Passage in 1630, his instruments were Gunter’s, and Gunter’s textbook was his principal guide to practice. Before he sailed he made a special journey to discuss his voyage with Briggs, now in Oxford.151 I suggested earlier that we should not despise the beliefs of the early scientists just because we know that they turned out to be unfounded: (p.44) they might for all that be fruitful. The existence of the North-West Passage is such a belief. Its historical importance is that it led to scientific, nautical, and commercial enterprises, which linked John Dee with Sir Humphrey Gilbert and George Gascoigne,152 Gresham College (Briggs, Gunter) with practical explorers like Foxe and James, with Hakluyt, with the Virginia Company, with big City financiers like Sir Thomas Smith and Sir John Wolstenholme, and with Parliamentarians like Sir Dudley Digges. The discovery of a North-West Passage, John Davis argued in 1595, by offering the speediest route for the import of Indian commodities, would make England ‘the storehouse of Europe’.153 Gellibrand (1597–1637), another friend and protege of Briggs’s, completed his master’s work on logarithmic trigonometry tables; wrote on navigation; and demonstrated the secular variation of magnetic declination.154 His work was known to Mersenne.155 When we recall the close connexion between Gresham and the technical experts of the Royal Navy and Trinity House throughout the forty years covered by the professorships of Briggs, Gunter, and Gellibrand, we get some idea of the College’s ramifications.
Page 20 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine In 1633 the thirty-year-old virtuoso Kenelm Digby, desolated by the death of his Venetia, came to settle at Gresham College. For two years he had a laboratory under Richard Holdsworth’s room, in which he conducted experiments in botany, embryology, magnetics, and optics. Digby was also closely associated with the Deptford circle, and was later a friend of William Harvey. He made significant contributions to embryology, and as a foundation Fellow of the Royal Society illustrates the connexion between that body and Gresham College.156 Samuel Foster, Gellibrand’s successor, continued Briggs’s tradition. (p.45) He had been an usher at Coventry Grammar School between going down from Emmanuel and his appointment to his chair. Foster helped Jeremiah Horrocks, improved Gunter’s Quadrant, and published popular treatises on The Use of the Quadrant and The Art of Dialling. So it was no accident, but the natural result of half a century of history, that it was in Foster’s chambers at Gresham, after his weekly astronomy lecture, that the group which later formed the Royal Society first began to meet, in the year of the battle of Naseby.157 In 1648–9 the leading figures of this group—Wilkins, Wallis, Goddard—were imported to Oxford by the Parliamentary commissioners, though they still retained close connexions with Gresham. So the higher scientific achievements of London and Gresham were brought to a reluctant Oxford.158 Gresham College rendered another service to popular education through its association with almanacs., Almanacs often included pages on astronomy, cosmography, and the tides, as well as on astrology; and at 1d. were cheap enough to have a very wide circulation among the lower classes. With the Bible they might often be the only literature in a small household. An almanac might be the first stimulus to an interest in mathematics: teachers of the subject thought it worth while to advertise their services in almanacs. Many almanacs were used especially by seamen, whom the almanac-makers deliberately aimed at educating in mathematics and astronomy.159 Since the mid-sixteenth century many leading mathematicians, doctors, and scientists had contributed to this form of popular education. Andrew Boorde is the first Englishman known to have issued a printed almanac and prognostication.160 John Field, who taught in London, printed an almanac in 1556 (with a preface by Dee) which included one of the earliest English references to Copernicus.161 Richard Forster (President of the College of Physicians and mathematician, protege of Leicester), William Cunningham, Dee, Leonard and Thomas Digges, William Bourne (whose almanacs were intended especially for mariners), Richard (p.46) Grafton (the chronicler), and Thomas Hill all published almanacs under Elizabeth. Thomas Digges’s Prognostication Everlasting, which was regularly republished until 1635, did much to popularize the Copernican system.162 Knowledge of the heliocentric theory was extended in the seventeenth century by the almanacs of Edward Gresham and Arthur Hopton.163 In 1601 John Tapp, a self-educated mathematics teacher, started The Page 21 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Seamans Kalendar, prototype of the Nautical Almanack. This was written in a very simple popular style. Tapp ‘ranks high amongst the men who…went far towards transforming the art of navigation into a science by bringing into use the methods of arithmetical navigation’. In 1613 he dedicated his Path-Way to Knowledge to Sir Thomas Smith.164 In all this Gresham had its share. Tapp probably knew Gunter and had access to his papers. Thomas Bretnor, who published A Newe Almanake and Prognostication from 1605 to 1630, was also a friend of Gunter’s. Bretnor was the most advanced Copernican among the almanac-makers, and referred to Ptolemaic astronomy as ‘the old dotage’.165 William Bedwell, Briggs’s friend, produced an almanac in 1614, The Travellers Companion, the Preface of which speaks favourably of Bretnor and Hopton.166 George Gilder, who produced an almanac in 1616, was another friend of Gunter’s.167 After Tapp’s death in 1631, Henry Bond (c. 1600–78) edited The Seamans Kalendar for the next twenty years. He was a humble man who taught himself mathematics from Briggs’s textbooks, and became ‘Reader of Navigation to the Mariners’ in the Royal Dockyards, Chatham. He remained closely associated with the Gresham circle, and was influenced by Gellibrand to put forward a new method of discovering longitude in which the Royal Society was later interested. Bond was a friend of Samuel Foster and edited his posthumous works, as well as those of Gunter.168 Gellibrand got into trouble with Laud for helping to produce an almanac.169 (p.47) The prophetical element in almanacs had always worried governments and conservatives. One lucky prognosticator came perilously near to forecasting the date of Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, and Nashe associated almanacmakers with rebels.170 In 1635, a correspondent told John Winthrop two years later, almanac-makers had been ‘blasted…with Jupiter’s thunderbolt for being too curious in their predictions’, and had abandoned prophecy in consequence.171 The breakdown of the censorship after 1640 naturally benefited almanac-makers, who at once became more polemical and propagandist, and appealed to a wider public. They also became more universally Copernican and Baconian.172 It was highly appropriate that when in June 1643 Parliament set up its own censorship, the licenser for books on mathematics, almanacs, and prognostications was the Reader of Gresham College for the time being, or Master John Booker.173 But in pursuing the tradition started by Briggs we have run on too far. There were other traditions at Gresham College. Matthew Gwinne, first Professor of Physic (1596–1607), was a former associate of the Sidney group and an acquaintance of Giordano Bruno.174 In 1592 he had defended the Moderns against the Ancients in a disputation at Oxford before Queen Elizabeth. He was apparently so alarmingly successful that the Proctors cut him off after a quarter of an hour. He returned to the same theme in his Inaugural Lecture at Gresham,
Page 22 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine preferring London to Athens or Rome.175 Gwinne also lectured on anatomy at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall.176 Edward Brerewood, first Professor of Astronomy (1596–1613), wrote on logic, linguistics, geography, optics, and the weights and measures of the ancient world, as well as on his own subject: he was a member of the Society of Antiquaries. His Enquiries touching the Diversities of Languages and Religions (1614) was translated into French and was (p.48) much admired by Mersenne.177 Brerewood was an advocate of Protestant unity on lines which anticipate those later associated with the name of John Dury.178 Brerewood also wrote a most remarkable treatise on Sabbatarianism. His nephew, apprenticed to a City merchant, suffered a crise de conscience in consequence of his master ordering him to perform household duties on Sunday. The prentice had heard from Nicholas Byfield, a minister in Chester, that servants should refuse to obey such orders. Edward Brerewood was himself liable to suffer if his nephew’s indentures of apprenticeship were broken, since he had gone surety for him. So the uncle refuted Byfield’s thesis in a powerful argument which must have delighted the hearts of City employers. The law of nations, he argued, binds servants to obey their masters; and the law of God did not dissolve the law of nations. The commandment to observe the Sabbath was given to masters: it was not given, was not fit to be given, to servants, who ‘do not need to be commanded to take their ease on the Sabbath’. Servants are not homines juris sui, nor operum suorum domini: they are but their masters’ living instruments.179 If the master gave wrongful commands, the sin was his, not the apprentice’s: the latter’s duty was to obey without question. In any case the commandment to obey the Sabbath had been in part revoked by the teaching of Jesus; ‘the Apostles knew full well that to tell servants to disobey their masters was not the way to propagate the Gospel’. Mr. Byfield’s doctrine could lead to ‘nothing but disturbance and sedition both in church and commonwealth’.180 No one penetrated so deeply into the social issues involved in the Sabbatarian controversy.
VI When Gresham College was started, great care was taken not to offend Oxford and Cambridge. Lectures in English were defended (possibly rather disingenuously) on the grounds that they would be ‘less offensive and damageable to the universities’.181 Oxford and Cambridge were (p.49) asked to make recommendations for filling the first chairs, and six of the seven went to their nominees. But rivalry inevitably remained. Heywood’s play, If You Know Not Me you Know Nobody (1606–9) shows us the popular image of Gresham. He has Puritan sympathies: his son tries to play up to these by promising to attend morning lectures at St. Antholin’s! Gresham, the richest commoner in England, cries ‘Tut in thy teeth, although thou art a knight!’ to the papist Sir Thomas Ramsay.182
Page 23 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine The whole method of teaching at Gresham was an implied criticism of Oxford and Cambridge, where for the first twenty years of Gresham’s existence geometry and astronomy were either not taught, or taught very badly. At most grammar schools mathematics was taught only to ‘dull’ boys unfitted for a university education. The many excellent Elizabethan scientists and doctors of university origin learnt their subjects after they had gone down. Medical men went abroad, to Padua or Leiden, to complete their training.183 None of the most famous scientists and mathematicians of the early seventeenth century—Gilbert, Harvey, Bacon, Napier, Hariot, Wright, Oughtred—held university posts. In the sixteen-thirties men like Wallis and Seth Ward who wanted to study mathematics had to leave the university and stay near London with the greatest mathematician of his day, William Oughtred (1575–1660), a parson for whom the universities had found no place, but who was a member of Briggs’s circle.184 It was difficult for a scientist to earn a living without a patron (Hariot, Hues), unless he sold instruments (Norman, Wright) or became a doctor (Recorde, Hood).185 ‘Alas!’ said Bishop Williams to the mathematician John Pell: ‘what a sad case it is that in this great and opulent kingdom there is no public encouragement for the excelling in any profession but that of the law and divinity. Were I in place as once I was, I would never give over praying and pressing his Majesty till a noble stock and fund might be raised for so fundamental, universally useful and eminent [a] science as mathematics.’186 From 1619 an effort was made to ‘Greshamize’ Oxford. The Savilian (p.50) chairs of Geometry and Astronomy, the Sedleian chair of Natural Philosophy, the Tomlins Lecture in Anatomy were established.187 Geometry is almost totally unknown and abandoned in England, said Sir Henry Savile in the preamble to the deed of foundation of his chairs.188 The first two Savilian Professors of Geometry and the second Professor of Astronomy were all ex-Gresham professors. When Briggs came to the chair of Geometry in 1620, followed by Degory Wheare to the newly established Camden readership in ancient history in 1622, the battle for modern subjects in Oxford might seem to be won.189 In 1622 the University Press reprinted a book entitled Philosophia Libera, originally published abroad, which attacked the Aristotelean system of philosophy.190 But the university has always been skilful at resisting reform and absorbing reformers. The Savilian professors were instructed to lecture in the traditional way, by commenting on the familiar classical authorities, Plato and Aristotle, Euclid and Archimedes; Copernicus was the sole modern mentioned. The Sedleian Lectures on Natural Philosophy, endowed in 1622, were to be on Aristotle. Even the Tomlins lecturer did not himself dissect, still less his students.191 Aubrey’s story of Gunter’s interview when being considered for the geometry chair may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the difference between the Oxford and the Gresham conceptions of lecturing, and the Oxford attitude towards handicrafts. Gunter ‘came and brought with him his sector and quadrant, and fell to resolving of triangles and doing a great many fine things. Page 24 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Said [Sir Henry Savile] “Do you call this reading of geometry? This is showing of tricks, man!” and so dismissed him with scorn.’192 Briggs’s successor in this chair was not Gunter but a supporter of the Ptolemaic astronomy, who had to be purged by the Parliamentary commissioners in 1648. In 1636 the Laudian Statutes insisted that the holder of the (p.51) Tomlins anatomy lectureship should lecture ‘in Hippocrates or Galen’, and proclaimed that the authority of Aristotle was paramount. When Briggs moved to Oxford, he did not enter as a conqueror: he expressed a timid hope that ‘Oxford will go further’, and that Cambridge would follow apace.193 He was right to be cautious. Looking back in 1656, after the Parliamentarian purge, Osborn tells us that ‘not a few of our then foolish gentry’ used to keep their sons away from Oxford, ‘lest they should be smutted with the black art’ of mathematics: slender though the university’s proficiency in that subject had then been, to its shame.194 Since the universities were becoming so dependent on sons of the gentry, this was a serious matter. Even Seth Ward, even in 1654, when Oxford really had been ‘Greshamized’, thought the full Baconian programme of ‘abandoning disputations and public lectures for agriculture, mechanic chemistry and the like’ would not be very suitable Tor the nobles and gentlemen who send their sons here’. Hobbes, whom Ward quoted, said that the universities themselves had only just stopped thinking geometry was an ‘art diabolical’.195 That Hobbes and Osborn did not exaggerate can be seen by a glance at Thomas Hall’s hysterical Vindiciae Liter arum (1655).196 Meanwhile Gresham College itself had been the object of conservative attention. The most obviously dangerous chair was that of divinity, about which anxiety had been expressed from the beginning, lest it should stir up controversy.197 The first professor, Anthony Wotton, chaplain to the Earl of Essex,198 was a Modernist and Ramist. In 1604, after he had left Gresham—presumably to marry —Wotton was in trouble with Bancroft because as lecturer at All Hallows he was alleged to have prayed ‘God to open the eyes of the King, that he may be resolved in the truth, without respect of antiquity’. Wotton defended William Perkins; attacked Richard Montague’s Appello Caesarem; translated Ramus’s Art of Logick (1626); was accused of Socinianism, and was defended by no less a person than his friend the Puritan Thomas Gataker: a good radical career.199 So it is hardly surprising that, after the resignations of Wotton and his successor, James in 1604 ordered the electors to choose a harmless Cambridge don who was needed in London to (p.52) translate the Bible, Tor that the place is of importance to be well supplied, being in our chiefest city of this kingdom’, and the lectures being delivered to the common people. James again intervened in 1606 to order the election of George Mountayne, later to have a decorous episcopal career.200 Samuel Brooke, who followed Mountayne in 1612, was an Arminian in 1618, if not earlier.201 Not until 1629 was a London preacher popular with the Puritans appointed as divinity professor—Richard Holdsworth, who succeeded John Preston as Master of Cambridge’s most Puritan college and Page 25 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine was one of the few patrons of modern educational methods in either university. He started his Gresham lectures by referring to Jesus Christ as ‘the good merchant’.202 But meanwhile in 1607, when the sinister Dr. Cowell was a candidate for the Chair of Law, he was passed over in favour of Clement Corbet, uncle of one of the Five Knights of 1627, and of the regicide Miles Corbet.203 Briggs was ‘a severe Presbyterian’, who associated mainly with ‘persons of that judgement’, Lilly tells us.204 He co-operated actively with the Puritan party in Cambridge before his election to the Gresham chair. In 1589 he had even supported the campaign in favour of the imprisoned Francis Johnson, soon to emigrate to the Netherlands as a separatist. Six years later Briggs was one of those who protested against William Barrett’s attack on Calvin; he campaigned actively on the Puritan side in a disputed election to the mastership of St. John’s. So he was a known Puritan when the Gresham electors appointed him. He plotted with Ussher and William Crashawe about the printing of books which they expected the bishops to dislike.205 Under Laud, Gresham College had more trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. Gellibrand had to appear before the High Commission for approving the publication of an almanac which annoyed Henrietta Maria by omitting many of the traditional saints and replacing them by Marian martyrs.206 Though Gellibrand was acquitted when he showed (p.53) that similar almanacs had been printed earlier, Laud threatened him with further prosecution since ‘I hear you keep conventicles at Gresham College after your lectures there’. Prynne alleged that Gellibrand died of a fever fit as a result.207 In 1636 Samuel Foster was ejected from his Gresham chair for refusing to kneel at the Communion table: he was restored in 1641.208 His will shows him to have been a zealous Puritan. Richard Holdsworth, though he took the King’s side in the civil war, had protested in the Convocation of 1640 against the fourth canon, which prescribed the kneeling position for refusing which Foster had been deprived; and he objected to Convocation sitting after Parliament had been dissolved. He defended the Petition of Right even in 1642.209 Laud thus silenced some scientists and drove others into exile (like the self-taught ex-seaman, Richard Norwood),210 just as he silenced some Puritans and drove others into exile. The two were united in Sir Kenelm Digby’s friend, the younger John Winthrop, clamouring from New England for the latest scientific books and instruments.211 Meanwhile many Gresham scientists assisted the Professors of Divinity to carry out the founder’s instructions to combat ‘the common adversary of the Church of Rome’.212 Hungarian Calvinists had contacts with Gresham College in the sixteen-thirties. Sir Kenelm Digby had the assistance of a Hungarian chemist, Hans Hunneades (Báfyhunyadi), in (p.54) his laboratory at Gresham.213 When Lord Clarendon described the regicide Isaac Dorislaus as a former Gresham
Page 26 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine professor, he was wrong; but the mistake is significant of Gresham’s reputation.214 What is not clear, and will not be until we have a full modern history of the College, is how far royal intervention and closer relations with Oxford and Cambridge counteracted the original character of Gresham College as an institution of popular adult education. There is even some doubt as to how far professors carried out their obligation to reside at the College. This is a difficult question, for some professors were anxious in the later seventeenth century to prove that their predecessors had not resided: so some of the evidence is tainted.215 Brerewood and Holdsworth at least seem to have resided: John Greaves did so in the period immediately following his election as Professor of Geometry in 1630,216 but subsequently spent most of his time abroad, until he was deprived for negligence in 1643. He can have contributed little to adult education in London. But Greaves was a respectable scholar. He wrote a useful book on astronomy and geography, and when in 1637–8 he went to examine the Pyramids he made careful measurements and drawings which he afterwards published. He also printed studies in the history of astronomy.217 But he was a supporter of the Ptolemaic astronomy, and was purged from Oxford by the Parliamentary commissioners in 1648. Greaves seems to have owed his election at Gresham College to his predecessor, Peter Turner: both Turner and Greaves held fellowships at Merton together with their Gresham professorships: both were royalists in the civil war. Peter Turner was a Laudian, although the grandson of William Turner, Marian exile, embattled Puritan controversialist, and father of scientific biology in English. Peter Turner’s father was Sir Walter Ralegh’s doctor, who in 1603 wrote against the use of amulets against the plague.218 Peter’s brother, Samuel, was the (p. 55) M.P. who in 1625 charged the Duke of Buckingham as the author of all the state’s misfortunes. Samuel had failed to be elected to the Gresham chair of Astronomy in 1613; his brother apparently drew the appropriate conclusions.219 Mungo Murray, a renegade Scot in Anglican orders, was made Professor of Astronomy on Charles I’s recommendation in 1636. He published nothing. The chair of Rhetoric was held by a dynasty of the legal family of Croke from 1613 to 1638. But the Crokes had opposition associations, and Edward Williamson, who married a Croke and succeeded a Croke as Rhetoric Professor, was to be a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. An interesting tract of 1633 gives a full account of the Gresham science and mathematics lectures, which suggests that they were still highly utilitarian in content and expressed in a popular way.220 There were complaints that the less scientifically minded seamen failed to attend; but the repeated demand for the lectures to be given out of as well as in term suggests that they were popular both with London citizens and with gentlemen and others who found themselves
Page 27 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine too occupied during the law terms.221 But—apart from Gunter and Gellibrand— too many of the later professors seem to have published, if at all, in Latin.222 We may perhaps provisionally conclude then that the institutionalization of adult education by Gresham College was a mixed blessing, since it gave the chance of control from above. Nevertheless, the contribution of the College to the history of science in England has been persistently underestimated by historians who fix their eyes on Oxford and Cambridge. Contemporaries made no such mistake. Wren, in his inaugural lecture at Gresham in 1657, mentioned the names of Gunter, Brerewood, Gellibrand, Foster as ‘perhaps in the mouths of all mathematicians’. ‘I must congratulate this City’, he continued, ‘that I find in it so general a relish of mathematics and the libera philosophia, in such a measure as is hardly to be found in the academies themselves.’223 Sprat, (p.56) the historian of the Royal Society, said that although at Gresham the choice of professors was ‘wholly in the disposal of citizens’, nevertheless those appointed were ‘of the most learned men of the nation’.224 John Woodward, Gresham Professor of Physic, 1693–1728, writing probably in the late seventeen-twenties, was even more lyrical about his College: ‘The fame of it went over the whole world. The most important discoveries of those times took their rise from Gresham College…. There’s hardly any part of useful knowledge that has not received great accessions from thence; and some of the most considerable discoveries in philosophy, physic, anatomy, in all the parts of mathematics, in geometry, in astronomy, in navigation, came forth of Gresham College…. We feel them in our persons, in our health, in the enlargement of our minds, in our strength by sea and land, as well as in our power and interest abroad. This everybody must assent to that is not wholly a stranger to the history of learning; or does not know that Dr. Gwinne, Mr. Gunter, Mr. Foster, Mr. Bainbridge, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Gellibrand, Mr. Greaves, Mr. Brerewood, Dr. Winston, Dr. Holdsworth…were all professors there…Their instructions have been happily extended to mechanics, and even the meanest artificers: to trade and all the manufactures of the nation.’225
VII Gresham College was not the only place where scientific lectures were given in London. There were lectures at Surgeon’s Hall, the College of Physicians, and the Society of Apothecaries.226 Gentlemen and lawyers at the Inns of Court took advantage of these facilities. Matthew Hale left Oxford innocent of science; but whilst at Lincoln’s Inn he became well versed in medicine, anatomy, surgery, and mathematics.227 As early as 1581 William Borough had said there was enough arithmetic and geometry taught in England for all seamen to learn them.228 After Hood’s lectureship lapsed,229 the same sponsors paid for a lecture on navigation (p.57) in Sir Thomas Smith’s house Tor the better instruction of our mariners’.230 The financing of this lecture was subsequently taken over by the East India Company itself: Edward Wright held it at a salary of £50 a year until Page 28 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine his death in 1615. In the early sixteen-thirties there was a mathematical lecture for mariners at Chatham, given by Henry Bond.231 Mathematics, together with medicine, astronomy, navigation, and cosmography, held an important place in the curriculum of the Musaeum Minervae which Sir Francis Kynaston founded about 1634 to give the modern education which the universities failed to provide. Only the armigerous were to be admitted, but Kynaston nevertheless felt that he had to defend himself against those who ‘made some doubts and objections, that the institution of our academy here in London would be a prejudice’ to the ‘honour and flourishing estate of Oxford and Cambridge’.232 William Harrison in 1587 and Sir George Buc in 1612 spoke of the capital as ‘the third university of England’. Though Buc’s main emphasis was on law and theology, he listed among the subjects taught in London—in addition to Gresham’s astronomy, geometry, and physic—arithmetic, surgery, mathematics, hydrography, geography, navigation, languages, cosmography, artillery.233 Four years later George Gilder—a teacher of mathematics and a friend of Gunter’s— wrote ‘Never were there better or nearer helps to attain [a knowledge of mathematics] than at present in this City’. He referred to the teaching and textbooks of Briggs, Gunter, and Speidall; and there were many other teachers in London, especially around Tower Hill.234 Sprat said of Gresham College ‘if it were beyond sea, it might well pass for a university’.235 The Royal Society, the title of Sprat’s book reminds us, was the Royal Society of London. If we want to find a nursery of science in early seventeenth-century England, we might do better to look for it not at Oxford or Cambridge (p.58) but in London —not only at Gresham College and in the halls of City companies but also in the schools founded and supervised by merchant companies. Take Merchant Taylors’, for instance. It was founded in 1561 by a radical Protestant, Richard Hilles. Its great headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, was a friend of Dee, Hakluyt, and Camden, a correspondent of Ortelius. The old boys of the school include Matthew Gwinne, Nicholas Hill, Thomas Hood, Robert Jacob (physician to Elizabeth), Sir William Paddy (physician to James I), Peter Chamberlen, Sir Edwin Sandys, Edmund Spenser, William Croome (an original Fellow of the Royal Society), Thomas Heath (astronomer), Richard Andrews (physician), and William Howe (botanist), along with many men distinguished in other fields.236
Page 29 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine In 1599 Dekker, addressing Elizabeth, spoke of God as ‘a great mathematician’.237 Governments had to encourage mathematics, since similar mathematical principles were involved in navigation and gunnery. William Bourne wrote a treatise on each.238 Robert Norton, a gunner at the Tower of London, said that geometry was ‘the sinews of artillery’, and expected a gunner to be able to use trigonometrical and log-arithmical tables.239 The idea of fighting by geometry was sufficiently familar to raise a laugh on the London stage in the sixteen-twenties and thirties.240 The grace and disgrace of… Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, Rests in the artisans’ industry or vein.241
Fulke Greville’s rather snob comment was confirmed by the title-page of a translation of Ramus by William Bedwell published in 1636. Geometry, it said, was ‘necessary and useful for astronomers, geographers, land-meeters, seamen, engineers, architects, painters, carvers, etc.’242 It was of the decade before the civil war that John Wallis in 1697 made his famous remark: ‘Mathematics…were scarce looked upon as academical studies, but rather mechanical; as the business of traders, merchants, (p.59) seamen, carpenters, surveyors of lands, or the like; and perhaps some almanac-makers in London…. For the study of mathematics was at that time more cultivated in London than in the universities.’243 Wallis never heard of ‘the new experimental philosophy’ until years after he had left Cambridge.244 The accuracy of Wallis’s list of professions interested in mathematics in the sixteen-thirties enhances our confidence in the accuracy of his recollection sixty years later: it has sometimes been impugned.245 We may compare John Graunt’s reference to ‘the mathematics of… shop-arithmetic’ underlying his pioneer work on statistics.246 In London it seems clear that any ‘mechanician’ had access to a scientific education as good as any in Europe, and much better than that given in English universities and most grammar schools. Popular scientific treatises had long circulated which taught him to suspect the authority of Aristotle or anyone else so long as such authority was not confirmed by his own experience. Anyone interested in science would have to come to London: Recorde, Dee, Gwinne, Gunter, and Fludd were all of Welsh descent, but all made their way to the capital. For our purposes the importance of these facts lies less in their effect on the organization of science in England than on intellectual development. In 1614 a Scot, who had lived many years in England, in describing the national characteristics of the various European countries, singled out the English for their opposition to the Aristotelean cosmology and their support for Copernicus: ‘In philosophy and the mathematics, in geography and astronomy, there is no opinion so prodigious and strange, but in that island was either invented, or has Page 30 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine found followers and subtile instancers.’247 Among these prodigious and strange opinions was a growing lack of respect for the authority of classical antiquity and a new critical freedom towards sacred texts. Gilbert, whilst paying due honour to the Ancients, pointed out that far more information was available to the Moderns, who therefore might ‘philosophize freely’. He criticized only those who ‘stubbornly ground their opinions on the sentiment of the Ancients’, and ‘adopted as theirs, from books only, without magnetical experiments, certain inferences, based on vain opinions’. He (p.60) dedicated his great work to those ‘who look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves’, and praised craftsmen like Robert Norman.248 Edward Wright, in his book on navigation, completely ignored the Ancients, because they knew neither the compass nor the science of magnetism.249 In 1618 Archdeacon William Barlow, son and brother-in-law to six bishops, noted with regret that mechanics were inclined to prefer reason and experiment before the literal words of Scripture. He took umbrage at the Laudatory Address prefixed to Gilbert’s De Magnete by Edward Wright, which refused to reject the theory of the earth’s diurnal motion on Scriptural evidence alone. Moses and the prophets, Wright argued in a way that was to become very familiar among Christian apologists later, adapted themselves ‘to the understanding of the common people and to the current fashions of speech, as nurses do in dealing with babes; they do not attend to immaterial minutiae’.250 Barlow consoled himself by reflecting that though arguments in favour of the earth’s rotation ‘may go current in a mechanical tradesman’s shop, yet [they] are very insufficient to be allowed for good by men of learning and Christians by profession’.251 The contrast between ‘mechanical tradesmen’ who favoured the new science and ‘men of learning’ who despised it, could hardly have been made more sharply or more contemptuously. But alas: barely twenty years later John Wilkins abandoned even Wright’s argument that the Holy Ghost accommodated himself to his hearers: the ‘penmen of Scriptures’, said this future bishop, might be grossly ignorant.252
VIII At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign England had been backward both in mathematics and in the art of navigation. By the end of Gresham College’s second decade of existence, Commander Waters tells us, a revolution (p.61) in nautical thinking had been completed in England which ended the empirical phase and introduced mathematical navigation, thanks very largely to the instruction in the use of scientific instruments and logarithms given at Gresham.253 English mathematicians like Hariot and Wright proved better at solving the problem of ‘Mercator’s projection’ than Mercator himself.254 Well might Hakewill devote a chapter to ‘The Art of Navigation, brought to perfection in this latter age’.255 As early as 1577 Richard Willis noted that geography had ousted grammar, poetry, logic, astrology, and Greek in popular approbation.256 A common seaman of humble origins, Will Adams, after being apprenticed to a shipbuilder in 1576, Page 31 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine learnt enough mathematics to teach the subject to the Shogun of Japan.257 England’s new proficiency in mathematics and navigation was recognized abroad. By 1618 Hues’s Treatise on Globes had been translated into French. Edmund Wingate started his literary career in 1624 by popularizing Gunter’s mathematical discoveries in French. Mersenne and Descartes followed the progress of mathematics in England.258 This revolution in navigation made possible the defeat of the Armada259 and the colonization of North America. It also led very soon to conflicts between gentlemen captains, many of whom lost interest in the sea after the peace of 1604 had diminished the chances of loot, and the tarpaulins who stayed on to master the new scientific navigation.260 But an amateur interest in mathematics and allied subjects remained fashionable. Many fathers anticipated Oliver Cromwell’s advice to his son Richard to ‘study mathematics and cosmography;…these fit for public services for which a man is born’.261 Lord Herbert of (p.62) Cherbury similarly prescribed for a gentleman the serious study of geography, medicine, anatomy and botany; Francis Osborn prescribed mathematics and medicine.262 More important for our present purposes, the revolution in mathematics and astronomy had philosophical implications. It was apropos the comet of 1618 that Richard Corbett wrote: Physicians, lawyers, glovers on the stall, The shop-keepers speak mathematics all.… The mason’s rule, the tailor’s yard alike Take altitudes.
By removing comets beyond the moon, the new astronomy made it less easy for rational men to treat them as portents foreshadowing future events on earth; by breaking the hard walls of the universe and suggesting the possible existence of infinite worlds, astronomers began to create a climate of opinion in which it seemed less likely that God would intervene in the day-to-day affairs of mankind. Simultaneously the science of meteorology, by explaining cloud-formations, diminished the probability of educated men seeing armies fighting in the sky.263 In all spheres the miraculous was being ruled out of nature. Already men were seeing God as a geometer—Recorde, Dee, William Cunningham, Thomas Hill, Bedwell.264 And the scientific revolution spread into more spheres than I can now discuss. Thus in England there was a controversy over astrology similar to that which was raging on the Continent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But in England, unlike continental countries, this controversy was conducted in the vernacular, and so was not confined to academics.265 In 1650 John Jones of Neath, refuting the slander that tradesmen and artisans were illiterate, claimed that many merchant adventurers in London were well-versed (p.63) in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and physic: they
Page 32 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine had mastered ‘the very encyclopaedia and summary of all good and necessary arts and learning’.266 Thus before Bacon began to write an intellectual revolution was under way. The utilitarian value of science as a means for the relief of man’s estate on earth was being glorified; some men accepted the idea of progress through science, and of co-operation between the humblest craftsman and the scientist. ‘That which is now hidden, with time will come to light’, wrote Robert Ashley in 1594, ‘and our successors will wonder that we were ignorant of them.’267 Plus ultra was not Bacon’s device only.268 In 1601 Nicholas Hill, in the first modern work to preach atomic theories, said that new concepts demand new terms in writing, not in order to display the writer’s style, but in order to convey his ideas. To arrive at truth, we must begin by clearing our own minds.269 It was still true, as Bacon wrote in the Novum Organum, that ‘Men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in the sciences by reverence for antiquity’.270 But the more intelligent merchants and craftsmen had already discovered that they needed an up-to-date astronomy and mathematics if they were to navigate ships, drain mines, and measure lands accurately. From the mid-sixteenth century, when first Recorde and then Dee was adviser to the Muscovy Company, and the Company authorized the translation by Richard Eden, one of Dee’s pupils, of a Spanish work on navigation, through the careers of the two Hakluyts, we can see an intimate connexion between merchants and science. The lectures of Hood and Wright were sponsored by Sir Thomas Smith and John Wolstenholme of the East India and Virginia Companies. The same two together with Sir Dudley Digges ran the North-West Passage Company, and sponsored the voyages of Hudson (1610), Button (1612), Bylot and Baffin (1615), Hawkridge (1619), Foxe (1631).271 William Sanderson, a wealthy merchant connected with Ralegh, commissioned the mathematician Emery Molyneux to construct terrestrial and celestial globes for (p.64) the use of seamen and students.272 In 1614 the East India Company appointed John Woodall, an eminent surgeon, their Surgeon-General. Three years later he published the first serious treatise on medicine, surgery, and hygiene at sea—The Surgions Mate. In 1633 the Vintners’ Company asked William Oughtred to design an instrument for the more accurate gauging of wine vessels.273 Governments gave far less encouragement to science than did merchant companies. There was a partial breakthrough in Elizabeth’s reign, thanks to the patronage of men like Leicester, Gresham, and Ralegh, and to the need to rally support in the hour of England’s danger. William Gilbert had a royal pension, and in 1588 he was asked to help with the health of the navy.274 But despite agitation by Hakluyt with Drake’s backing, it was only in the same year that the Privy Council gave its blessing to the scheme for Hood’s public mathematics lecture, sponsored by leading City figures. Once the panic was over, no further official interest was taken, despite pleas for a public mathematics lecture put Page 33 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine forward (for instance) by William Barlow in 1597, by Hakluyt in 1598, by Wright in 1599, by John Tapp in 1613, by Admiral Sir William Monson some time before 1624, and by George Hakewill in 1627.275 In James’s reign court patronage was less easy to come by. Archbishop Abbott, who himself wrote a popular geographical textbook and was interested in mathematics, was not unfriendly: he was a member of the Virginia Company, and his brother was one of London’s leading merchants.276 But after Prince Henry’s death in 1612, there was so far as I am aware no patron of science of social eminence comparable to Leicester. Ralegh and the Earl of Northumberland were in the Tower; Abbott was too antiSpanish to retain much influence, and was in disgrace from 1621. Courtiers and the King himself might interest themselves in a speculative scientific or technological project if profits were anticipated;277 and some government favour was shown to the armaments industry, for obvious reasons. But there was no considered policy of supporting even (p.65) those aspects of science which were of immediate use. The Royal Navy’s medical standards lagged far behind those set by men like Woodall and Ralegh. Organized agitation in the sixteentwenties to get a reasonable allowance for medical supplies and equipment in the Navy failed. There was some improvement in the next decade, but only after Parliament had taken over control of the Navy was the medical situation radically altered.278 It might be argued that support for science was no part of the business of seventeenth-century governments. But the first four decades of the century were a period of greater paternalistic government activity in all spheres than any before in English history. Not only did the demand for mathematics lectures come from an ex-admiral, but the idea of government patronage for science received its strongest backing from James I’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon.
IX My object of course is not to suggest a direct relationship between London science and the Parliamentary cause. It is interesting that Parliament was believed to have more support from doctors and so its troops got better medical treatment than the King’s.279 The New Model Army had a regular medical establishment. Its doctors were mostly apothecaries or surgeons, not physicians.280 Thomas Sydenham and his four brothers fought for Parliament; Nicholas Culpeper was wounded at Newbury; Paul Hobson, barber-surgeon, was a preaching colonel. Thomas Streete, who emigrated from Ireland to London, where he first attended lectures at Gresham College and then taught mathematics, made astronomical observations as an ensign in the Parliamentary army. Edmund Wingate, who also taught himself mathematics by attending Gresham lectures as a young man, and himself published very popular books on the subject, opposed the King in the civil war, and became a friend of Oliver Cromwell and a member of Parliament in 1654.281 The Robartes family neatly illustrates the links between science, Puritanism, and the Parliamentary cause. Richard, first Lord Robartes, who made a fortune in wool and tin sufficient to Page 34 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine purchase a peerage, had an excellent library. (p.66) This was looked after by his chaplain, Hannibal Gammon (c. 1582–c. 1650), a Puritan divine interested in medicine, a correspondent of Degory Wheare, and a member designate of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The second Lord Robartes led the Parliamentarian cause in Cornwall during the civil war, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.282 Such examples are of some interest, but they prove nothing in themselves, and facts can be found which point the other way. The relationship is less direct. Perhaps the most important scientific developments in England during the three generations before the civil war took place in mathematics, astronomy, and the related science of optics. I have suggested some economic applications of these sciences. But the advances were made possible only by an extraordinarily high level of skill and craftsmanship in instrument-making. These were the decades in which the English school of clock-making was established, which in the later seventeenth century was to be famous throughout Europe.283 Instrument-makers had to be mathematicians to do their job properly. But the theoreticians of the new science had to go beyond mathematics. All Gilbert’s instruments were nautical instruments, and he obtained much of his information from practical navigators like Borough, Drake, Cavendish, Robert Norman. But he also closely studied the techniques of metallurgy, which were being revolutionized in sixteenth-century England by the rule-of-thumb practices of craftsmen. ‘True philosophers’, he declared, ‘look for knowledge not in books only but in things themselves.’284 So far our emphasis has been mainly on mathematics and astronomy, of value to surveyors, navigators, merchants, and on medicine. But there was also the alchemical tradition of the craftsmen, which from the time of Paracelsus had begun to influence medicine and to interest the scientists. Dee was in this tradition, and Gilbert was not uninfluenced by it. This helps to explain Bacon’s emphasis on the study of the crafts. ‘The vexations of art are certainly as the bonds and handcuffs of Proteus, which betray the ultimate struggles and efforts of matter.’285 The nearest that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scientists could get to a laboratory, it has been well said, was in the workshops of metalworkers, glass-makers, paper-makers, dyers, brewers, sugar-refiners— new industries, (p.67) or industries in which new processes had been introduced. William Petty was the son of a clothier, who ‘did dye his own cloths’; his greatest delight as a boy ‘was to be looking on the artificers—e.g. smiths, the watchmaker, carpenters, joiners’.286 Bacon’s intention was to compile a History of Trades in which scientific reports would be made of the successful experiments carried on in these workshops. It would then be the job of the philosopher to analyse, clarify, and co-ordinate this information, with a view to ‘a connection and transferring of the observations of Page 35 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine one art to the use of another’.287 Harvey’s comparison of the heart to a water bellows or pump is a good example of the stimulus which Bacon had in mind.288 Harvey, we recall, learnt from sow-gelders and game-keepers. Bacon’s object was to bring about ‘the true and lawful marriage of the empirical and rational faculties, the unkind and ill-starred separation of which has thrown into confusion all the affairs of the human family’. ‘For where philosophy is severed from its roots in experience, whence it first sprouted and grew, it becomes a dead thing.’289 In Bacon’s New Atlantis scientific research was state-supported and state-controlled. Philosophers there, ‘looking into the experiments of their fellows,…cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man’s life and knowledge, as well for works as for plain demonstration of causes’.290 So, by studying and theorizing upon the achievements of the craftsmen, Bacon broadened and enriched the general philosophy towards which the mathematicians and astronomers had been working their way. Bruno had postulated a similar relationship between the magus and craftsman.291
X But before we turn to Bacon, let us pause for a moment to look at the organization of the medical profession. There was the College of Physicians, a self-selected body open only to university graduates, which had the right to license all medical practitioners within seven miles of London, and to fine and imprison the recalcitrant. There was the Company (p.68) of Barber-Surgeons, an independent City Company since 1540, membership of which involved a seven-year apprenticeship. Finally there were the Apothecaries, who were given freedom to prescribe for the poor by an Act of 1543, and were incorporated as a City Company together with the Grocers in 1606. In 1617 the Society of Apothecaries obtained separate incorporation—on the recommendation of Sir Theodore Mayerne and thanks to the intervention of Bacon; Sir Edward Coke, the Grocers’ Company, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen objected.292 Between these three groups there was considerable rivalry. Surgery, said 32 Henry VIII, cap. 40, was part of physic, and any physician could practise it; but the converse was not also true. Surgeons were not allowed to administer internal medicines. The College of Physicians was hostile to all ‘empirics’, especially to Paracelsans, and disliked knowledge being made available in English.293 The College was denounced as an oligarchical monopoly, jealous of any new tendencies in medicine. In 1559 a doctor was threatened with imprisonment unless he withdrew a suggestion that Galen might have erred. Since the College could prevent him earning his living, he submitted.294 There are many examples of surgeons, apothecaries and other craftsmen, and clergymen, some holding radical political and religious views, being fined and imprisoned for practising in London without a licence. Charles Goodall’s The Royal College of Physicians of London (1684) gives ‘an historical account of the College’s proceedings against empirics and unlicensed practisers’, including the elder Chamberlen and Alexander Leighton. The latter was deprived of the Page 36 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine possibility of earning a living by the College, just as Laud prevented him earning it as a minister.295 Many of those whom the College thus persecuted were unqualified quacks: but its activities must also have alienated some more respectable medical men. Thomas Vicary, who took the initiative in founding the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, wrote the first textbook of surgery in English. Andrew Boorde, who wrote vernacular best-sellers—The Brevyary of Health (1541), (p.69) The Dietary of Health (1542)—appears never to have been a member of the College of Physicians. Thomas Gale (1507–87), surgeon to Henry VIII’s army and Elizabeth’s navy, who made many innovations in surgical practice, wrote in English and incorporated his own experience. So did John Halle, a surgeon who attacked the old guard who ‘think that only to physic belongeth theory or speculation, and that to surgery belongeth only practice’. ‘Whereas theory and practice go not together,’ he added, ‘whether ye call it physic or surgery, I dare boldly affirm that there is in them no manner of perfection worthy commendation.’296 Other vernacular writers were John Bannister (1533–1610), author of The Historie of Man (1578), which long remained the standard textbook of surgical anatomy; William Clowes (1540–1604), who translated part of Fernel’s Pathologie; and John Woodall (1569–1643), author of the first practical manual of surgery and probable discoverer of fruit-juice as a remedy against scurvy.297 Their writings enormously raised the prestige of surgery in the sixteenth century and helped scientists to appreciate that they had much to learn from non-university practitioners. But only the more intelligent physicians grasped the point. The structure of the medical profession in London, and the behaviour of its members during the civil war, may be compared with the structure and behaviour of the merchant community of the City.298 A contemporary noted that among the ‘great advantages the Parliament hath had of his Majesty’ was their much greater choice ‘both of sea and land-chirurgeons’, and consequently the far more successful medical treatment of the Parliamentarian wounded.299 But as with the privileged ruling oligarchy in the City government, so the monopoly ruling group of the College of Physicians was dependent on the royal court for maintenance of its privileges. Just as some merchants—monopolists, customs farmers—provided services indispensable to the government, so the royal family had need of good doctors. A man like William Harvey was so intimately associated with the court that he had little choice but to accompany the King when civil war broke out. But he took care to get Parliament’s permission to do so.300 In Dr. Bonham’s Case (1608–10) (p.70) the common-law judges stopped the College extending its jurisdiction, and called its right to fine and imprison in question.301 In 1612 the Lord Mayor of London helped to get the BarberSurgeon Peter Chamberlen released from imprisonment by the Censors of the College.302 The Barber-Surgeons often petitioned Parliament for permission to prescribe internal medicines, describing the Physicians’ patent as Very Page 37 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine prejudicial to all His Majesty’s subjects’. In 1621 Parliament threatened to bring the patent before its Committee of Grievances. The Barber-Surgeons’ Company seems during the civil war to have been more solidly in favour of Parliament than the College.303 In the sixteen-thirties the College took a tougher line with its rivals: apothecaries appealed to Magna Carta.304 The apothecaries, those independent craftsmen of the medical profession, looked to the Crown before 1640 for protection against the College of Physicians and the Company of BarberSurgeons. Their charter of 1617 contained clauses restraining the privileges of the Barber-Surgeons: the latter appealed to Parliament against it.305 But after 1640 many of the apothecaries supported Parliament and were very radical politically. Again this is parallel to the behaviour of the independent artisans in many City companies, who first looked to the Crown to help them to win separate organization, and who later turned to the Levellers.306 We may also note attempts to organize the midwives made by members of the Chamberlen family in 1616 and 1634 and again during the revolution; and observe that the younger Peter Chamberlen became an Anabaptist.307 But though the medical profession thus falls into three distinct groups organizationally, ideas could not be prevented from passing freely backwards and forwards between them. Distinguished medical men like John (p.71) Caius, President of the College of Physicians, William Cunningham, William Paddy, Matthew Gwinne, and Peter Chamberlen lectured on anatomy to the Company of Barber-Surgeons, in order to emphasize the necessity for linking medicine and surgery.308 In 1583 the Lumleian lectures on anatomy were established at the College of Physicians: William Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood when he was Lumleian lecturer.309 These lectures were intended to direct the attention of physicians to the more practical aspects of their profession, hitherto largely left to Barber-Surgeons. After the Lumleian lectures had been delivered in Latin, a summary was given in English, so ‘as whether he be learned or unlearned that shall become an auditor’, he might still profit.310 In 1632 the Gulstonian lecture in pathology was added, soon to be delivered wholly in English.311 Hakewill thought the science of anatomy belonged exclusively to modern times;312 and the fashionableness of the word (cf. The Anatomy of Abuses, of the World, of Melancholy, of Wit) is significant. The Paracelsan chemist John Hester, who sold chemical medicines and drugs, had a long fight with the BarberSurgeons in the fifteen-seventies and eighties; but after 1590 he became more friendly to the Company, praising the books of some of its members like Clowes and Gale; and Clowes returned the compliment. Thanks to the efforts of courageous freelances like Hester, Paracelsan medicine was becoming intellectually respectable.313 Simultaneously the Herbals of John Gerarde (surgeon) and John Parkinson (apothecary) established British botany as almost Page 38 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine the best in Europe. In 1585 the College of Physicians laid out a physic garden round their Hall, and appointed John Gerarde as curator.314 Sir Theodore Mayerne, himself an experimenter and inventor, is supposed to have (p.72) persuaded the College of Physicians to adopt chemical remedies in their Pharmacoepia Londinensis of 1618.315 Yet as late as 1665 Marchamont Nedham asserted that ‘till of late years’ Aristoteleans and Galenists had stirred up princes and magistrates against the chemists. The College of Physicians, devoted to Hippocrates and Galen, tried to keep down the new ‘laborious sect of philosophers’. But ultimately their great achievements had opened the eyes of governors, and even the common people came to see that the College of Physicians was a selfish monopoly. Even Charles Goodall admitted that in Mayerne’s time ‘the physicians’ education and practice had too much prejudiced them against the noble art of chemistry’; but he claimed that this prejudice did not last long.316 The controversies among medical men also helped to advance scepticism. The Paracelsans (Richard Bostock, for instance) accused the Galenists of atheism, of studying second causes only. Many medical men threw doubts on witchcraft.317 The Paracelsans themselves were accused of witchcraft and astrology.318 ‘The best way is to join Galen and Paracelsus’, Hakewill thought, with a new openness of mind.319 It was not for nothing that Nicholas Culpeper invoked Doctors Reason and Experience against Dr. Tradition.320 Outside London, where there was no effective machinery of repression, there was both greater freedom and greater demand for apothecaries and surgeons to practise as physicians. As the East India trade in the seventeenth century began to bring new drugs into England, so the significance of the special knowledge of apothecaries (and to a lesser extent surgeons) rose. By the second half of the sixteenth century some gentlemen were apprenticing their sons to apothecaries; by the sixteen-thirties apothecaries were being licensed to practise as physicians in increasing numbers. The common lawyers seem to have assisted this development. In a test case of 1607 Sir Edward Coke imposed a severe sentence on a physician who had libelled an apothecary who was ousting (p.73) him from his practice. In consequence of this cause celebre, says Mr. Roberts, ‘the apothecaries of the West…won the right to practise’.321 In large part the rivalry was economic. The physician, as a great commander, has as subordinate to him the cooks for diet, the surgeons for manual operation, the apothecaries for confecting and preparing medicines.’322 But as their practice expanded, surgeons and apothecaries rejected this inferior status. Tray, Sir, how came the apothecaries to be your servants?’ a pamphleteer was to ask in 1670.323 Apothecaries were the doctors of the poor and middling sort. ‘If none should be suffered to use [physic and surgery] but the learned’, said an itinerant herb-doctor in Kent in 1564, ‘a great many poor people should perish for lack of Page 39 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine help.’324 In the seventeenth century some provincial apothecaries were beginning to have a fashionable clientele,325 but in London they remained the doctors of the poor. ‘Surgeons and apothecaries are sought unto, the physicians seldom but in a desperate case are consulted with’, said a London physician in 1684.326 Apothecaries were often poor themselves. We recall Shakespeare’s in Romeo and Juliet, in tattered weeds;… Sharp misery had worn him to the bones…. About his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes.’
‘Famine is in thy cheeks’, Romeo said to him; Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes…. The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law.327
During the revolutionary decades the apothecary and zealous Puritan Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54) conducted a passionate campaign against the College of Physicians’ monopoly on precisely the ground that it put medical treatment beyond the reach of the poor. In 1649 he published A Physicall Directory, or A translation of the London Dispensatory made by the College of Physicians in London. Being that book by which all Apothecaries are strictly commanded to make all their Physicke. It was a translation of the Pharmacoepia Londinensis of 1618, which the Physicians (p.74) preferred to keep in Latin. Thanks to its most useful index, Culpeper’s translation proved extremely popular. The third edition appeared in 1651, and it was reprinted at least fourteen times before 1718. An enemy said in 1664 that ‘in this age…Mr. Culpeper hath been, by the ignorant, more highly esteemed than both Hippocrates and Galen’.328 In a series of hard-hitting Prefaces, Culpeper denounced the College as ‘a company of proud, insulting, domineering doctors, whose wits were born above 500 years before themselves’, and who will not attend to those who cannot pay their fees. His translation of the Dispensatory was made out of ‘pure pity to the commonalty of England,…many of whom to my knowledge have perished either for want of money to fee a physician or want of knowledge of a remedy happily growing in their garden’. He added physicians to the traditional monopolist enemies of the radicals, priests and lawyers.329 Culpeper was attacked by the royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus as a disciple of John Goodwin, as a seeker and atheist.330 Persecution of apothecaries by the College was brought to an end in 1640. Under Cromwell, ‘who could scarcely have affection for a society of men established by royal power, of whom several had expressed so great loyalty to their sovereign’, Chief Justice St. John, to the accompaniment of loud applause in Guildhall, refused to recognize the validity of the College of Physicians’ patent because it had not been established by Act of Parliament.331 In 1647 a statute of the College envisaged the possibility of apothecaries and surgeons being admitted to their body if they withdrew from their own companies. Four years Page 40 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine later a partial licence was granted to an oculist by the College. But such concessions failed to survive the Restoration.332 Even after 1660, however, the Physicians still failed to get confirmation of their powers and privileges by Act of Parliament.333 In 1669 it was argued that the Physicians’ monopoly must (p.75) be preserved if gentlemen were to be bred up to the profession: ‘nowadays want of learning and degrees are adjudged as needful a qualification for the exercise of physic as formerly ‘twas for preaching, and the shops fit to supply both.’334 The radicalism of apothecaries was emphasized in Goodall’s history of the Royal College of Physicians. Noah Biggs had accused the Galenists of the College of ‘antipathy’ to the Commonwealth.335 Outside London any medical or surgical practitioner who had not graduated from or been licensed by Oxford or Cambridge had to obtain a licence from an archbishop or the bishop of his diocese. Midwives too had to have episcopal licences. In 1572 York corporation licensed a woman surgeon.336 There were women surgeons in Norwich. Unlicensed practitioners were presented to and punished by the church courts. Laud in 1635 used his metropolitan visitation to restrict medical practice to those with degrees. This in some cases involved repudiating licences granted by his own officers.337 It was to Laud and the Bishop of London that the 1634 petition for incorporating midwives was referred by the Privy Council.338 Outside London perhaps two-thirds of the members of the medical profession were licensed by the ecclesiastical authorities, one-third by the universities.339 The Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge admitted in 1635 that serving-men and apothecaries might be licensed to practise physic ‘without giving any public testimony of their learning and skill in the profession’.340 But none could be admitted to a doctorate without subscribing to the three Articles prescribed in Canon 36 of 1604. It could be argued that the apprenticeship which surgeons and apothecaries served gave them a better vocational training than the purely academic education of physicians. (p.76) The bishops’ right of licensing brought them into conflict with the Barber-Surgeons’ Company in London.341 From the reign of James I, and no doubt earlier, religious orthodoxy seems to have been as important as medical skill in procuring an episcopal licence.342 Many ministers deprived for Puritanism were prevented by the ecclesiastical authorities from practising physic. A number of ‘poor country vicars, for want of other means’, were driven ‘to turn mountebanks, quacksalves, empirics’: they might have no qualifications at all.343 During the Interregnum, when the bishops’ licensing broke down, there was a quarrel between the College of Physicians and the Company of BarberSurgeons over the right to license midwives. It was finally agreed that they should be licensed at Surgeons’ Hall, after three examinations taken before six midwives and surgeons. The 1662 Act of Uniformity sent them back to the ecclesiastical authorities, ‘where they had to pay their money’, take an oath
Page 41 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine which it was impossible for them to keep, ‘and return home as skilful as they went thither’.344 So there were many good reasons why all but the ruling oligarchy of the medical profession might look sympathetically upon the cause of Parliament. ‘Thou hast a rotten stinking heart within thee’, cried a Grantham apothecary in June 1642 to a man who said he would support the King against Parliament. But this apothecary went too far for the Commons when he proposed that Charles should be deposed.345 Notes:
(1) F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore, 1937), p. 296. (2) Ibid., p. 292; V. Harris, All Coherence Gone, p. 94. (3) See p. 24 below. (4) Quoted by E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485–1583 (1930), p. 161; Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art (1956), pp. 196, 201. We shall meet some of these names again. (5) D. Hay, Polydore Vergil (1952), pp. 67–69. Langley’s language is pleasantly reminiscent of that of Tyndale about the Bible. (6) D. W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (1958), p. 530. (7) L. B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), Chapter XV, passim; Johnson, Astromonical Thought, pp. 3–13; F. R. Johnson and S. V. Laskey, ‘Robert Recorde’s Mathematical Teaching and the Anti-Aristotelean Movement’, H. L. B., vii. 85–86. (8) D. E. Smith, A History of Mathematics (1923), p. 318. Recorde invented the sign = to denote equality. Johnson and Laskey suggest that it was the excellence of Recorde’s textbooks that delayed the translation of Ramus’s mathematical writings into English and limited their circulation when they were translated (op. cit., p. 85). But see p. 30 below. (9) Ed. R. Parkinson, The Life of Adam Martindale (Chetham Soc, 1845), pp. 36, 187. (10) Quoted by Foster Watson, The Beginning of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England (1909), pp. 297–300. (11) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 130; Johnson, ‘Thomas Hood’s Inaugural Address as Mathematical Lecturer of the City of London (1588)’, J.H.I. iii. 94; Page 42 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Johnson and Laskey, op. cit., pp. 59 81–86. Recorde was an active champion of Protestantism at a dangerous time. (12) E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (1954), p. 170. (13) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 138; ‘Gresham College, Precursor of the Royal Society’, J.H.I. i. 424–5. Dee shared Ralegh’s views on sea-power. See pp. 142–3 below. (14) H. Billingsley, The Elements of Geometric of…Euclide (1570), sig. A iiii. Billingsley was later a member of the Society of Antiquaries. See pp. 155–6 below. (15) Ed. J. Crossley, ‘Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee’, in Chetham Miscellany, i (1851), 63. (16) J. Webster, Academiarum Examen (1654), pp. 20, 51–52. The Preface was quoted with approval by Samuel Hartlib in 1655 (ed. J. Crossley, The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, Chetham Soc, 1847, i. 59). It was sneered at by Samuel Butler in Hudibras (ed. A. R. Waller, 1905), p. 157. (17) G. B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (American Geographical Soc, 1928), pp. 47–49; C. Fell-Smith, John Dee (1909), pp. 37, 67. (18) Sir Dudley Digges was a pupil, friend, and protégé of Archbishop Abbott, the one steady anti-Spanish influence on James I’s Privy Council. Sir Dudley was a member of the East India Company, and a pamphleteer on its behalf. He directed the North-Western Company, and helped to finance Hudson’s and Baffin’s voyages in search of the North-West Passage. He was associated in both these capacities with Sir Thomas Smith and John Wolstenholme, whom we shall often meet again (see pp. 31–33, 44, 57, 63 below). Digges continued his father’s and grandfather’s scientific interests, taking John Tradescant with him as a naturalist when he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Russia in 1618. He played a large part in winning the Petition of Right. His speech on the impeachment of Buckingham in 1626 was published in 1643 by order of the Long Parliament. A pamphlet attributed to him, Right and Privileges of the Subject, had appeared in 1642. A memorandum to Elizabeth on the defences of Dover is variously attributed to Digges or Sir Walter Ralegh (Harleian Miscellany, 1744–56, iv. 292–6). See also W. K. Jordan, Social Institutions in Kent (Archaeologia Cantiana, lxxv), p. 27. (19) Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, p. 197. (20) V. Harris, All Coherence Gone, p. 94; R. S. Clay and T. H. Court, The History of the Microscope (1932), pp. 6–7.
Page 43 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (21) Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (Columbia U.P., 1955), pp. 282–6; and see p. 29 below. Leicester may have been most interested in Digges’s application of mathematics to military and navigational problems, as in his Arithmeticall Militarie Treatise named Stratioticos (1579). Digges has been called the ‘founder of ballistical studies in England’. He was also the first to describe a theodolite, the instrument which rendered surveying an exact art (A. R. Hall, Ballistics in the 17th Century, 1952, pp. 34, 43–44, 74). (22) F. R. Johnson, ‘The Influence of Thomas Digges on the progress of modern astronomy in 16th century England’, Osiris, i, passim; Johnson and Laskey, ‘Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576’, H.L.B. v, passim: cf.A. Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Johns Hopkins U.P., 1957), Chapter II, passim. Recorde had referred to Copernicus’s theory in The Castle of ‘Knowledge’ (1556). The heliocentric theory was accepted in nearly every important English textbook from that time onwards (Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 291). (23) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, pp. 169–73. (24) R. Norman, The Newe Attractive (1581), sig. A iiiv, B 1–iv. Norman’s book was dedicated to William Borough, Controller of the Navy, the younger brother of the Muscovy Company’s chief pilot. William Borough’s Discourse of the Variation of the Compasse, annexed to The Newe Attractive, influenced William Gilbert, and was later used by Gellibrand (see pp. 36, 44 below). Its Preface was directed to ‘the travellers, seamen and mariners of England’. Both Norman and Borough have an honourable place in A. H. W. Robinson’s The History of Marine Cartography in Britain (1962), pp. 27–33. (25) E. Worsop, A Discoverie of sundrie errours and faults daily committed by Lande-meeters, ignorant of Arithmetike and Geometrie (1582), sig. A 2–2v. For the truth of Worsop’s assertion that ‘the common people for the most part are in great fear when survey is made of their land’ (Ibid., sig. K 2) see E. G. R. Taylor, ‘The Surveyor’, Econi. H.R. xvii. 130–2. (26) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 33, 332; The Haven-Finding Art, p. 201; Waters, op. cit., pp. 15, 130–2, 149. (27) Johnson, ‘Thomas Hill: an Elizabethan Huxley’, H.L.Q vii. 329–47; L. B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture, pp. 565–71. Hill had close relations with the Paracelsan John Hester, for whom see pp. 29, 71, 131 below, and may have become acquainted with Bruno while the latter was in England (P. H. Kocher, ‘Paracelsan Medicine in England (c 1570–1600)’, Journal of the History of Medicine, ii. 457–8; D. W. Singer, Giordano Bruno, his Life and Thought, New York, 1950, p. 39).
Page 44 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (28) Waters, op. cit., pp. 83–87; cf. pp. 98–99; Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, p. 195. For Leicester see pp. 28–29 below. Sir Henry Sidney was father of Sir Philip, for whose significance in our story see pp. 119–25 below. There is an interesting parallel radicalism in the architectural taste of the leading figures of Edward’s reign (E. Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, 1962, pp. 60–70). See also p. 241 below. (29) See pp. 17–20 above. Dee was accused of trying to murder Queen Mary, as well as of heresy. (30) Ed. H. Robinson, Zurich Letters, p1558–1602 (Parker Soc., 1865), p. 125; C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckham to Ray (1947), pp. 93–133; C. Singer, History of Biology (2nd ed., 1950), pp. 88–89; A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–1558 (1959), pp. 192–4. (31) Raven, op. cit., pp. 189–90. (32) See Select Poetry Chiefly Devotional of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. E. Farr (Parker Soc, Cambridge U.P., 1865), pp. 197–202. (33) See p. 162 below. (34) F. R. Johnson, ‘Latin versus English in the 16th century debate over scientific terminology’, S.P. xli. 129. (35) W. Fulke, A Goodly Gallery to Behold the Naturall Causes of All Kind of Meteores (1563); A Defence of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue (Parker Soc, 1843), pp. ii–x (first published 1583); P. H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, 1953), pp. 154, 163–5, 202–3, 214; S. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (Duke U.P., 1960), pp. 20–26, 55, 95. For second causes see pp. 162–9 below. (36) K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate’s Team (1962), pp. 31–33. Scot also wrote a treatise on hop-gardens. (37) For Napier see pp. 38–39 below. (38) W. K. Jordan, Social Institutions of Lancashire, 1480–1660 (Chetham Soc, 1962), p. 81; see also pp. 16 above, 279 below. (39) W. Perkins, Workes (1609–12), i. 402, 44, 291; ii. 46–47, 287; iii. 506, 607– 46, 653–67; Kocher, op. cit, pp. 14–16, 42–43; S. J. Knox, Walter Travers (1962), p. 147; H. Baker, The Wars of Truth (1952), pp. 22, 168. For Ward see D.N.B. and p. 280 below. We might add Bishops Hooper and Ponet to the list. (40) Perkins, Workes, ii.49–52; Kocher, op. cit., pp. 88–89, 151–5, 202–3. Page 45 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (41) J. Preston, The Saints Qualification (2nd ed., 1634), p. 45; cf. my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 239–40. For Preston see also p. 25 below. He was a protégé of Fulke Greville, for whom see pp. 120–3, 157 below. (42) J. N. L. Myres, ‘Thomas James and the Painted Frieze’, Bodleian Library Record, iii. 87; iv. 37–40, 51. The frieze emphasizes the heretical pre-Protestant tradition, later so dear to the Levellers, by including Wyclif, Hus, and Savonarola. (43) Ed. N. E. McClure, The Letters of John Chamberlain (American Philosophical Soc, 1939), i. 416. For Hakewill see pp. 158, 178 below. (44) Myres, op. cit, iv. 44; cf. Richard Dugdale, A Narrative of the wicked Plots carried on by Seignior Gondamore (1679), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iii. 326. (45) T. James, A Treatise of the Corruptions of the Scriptures, Councils and Fathers (Parker Soc, 1843), pp. 233–68: first published 1612. (46) Kocher, op. cit., pp. 34–37; W. S. C. Copeman, Doctors and Disease in Tudor Times (1960), pp. 15–17. (47) J. Preston, The New Covenant (5th ed., 1630), p. 46.. Cf. my Society and Puritanism, pp. 245–7; F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), pp. 72–73, 106, 113–16, 140–3, 158, 351–3, 375–6, 388–9, 419–21. (48) T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London (1667), pp. 371–2. (49) R[ichard] B[ostock], The Difference between the auncient…and the latter Phisick (1585), Chapter 19; Bacon, Works, iii. 282–3. (50) See, for example, K. Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (trans. E. G. French, 1961); T. K. Rabb, ‘Puritanism and the Rise of Experimental Science in England’, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, vii. The latter makes his task easier by using a definition of ‘Puritan’ which would exclude Wilkins, Baxter, and Milton. For the evidence which establishes the connexion, see especially A. de Candolle, Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siecles (Geneva, 1873); R. K. Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society in 17th century England’, Osiris, iv; D. Stimson, ‘Puritanism and the New Philosophy’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, iii; J. Pelseneer, ‘L’Origine protestante de la science moderne’, Lychnos (Uppsala, 1946–7), pp. 246–8; S. F. Mason, ‘The Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation’, Annals of Science, ix. 64–87, 154– 75; ‘Science and Religion in 17th century England’, P. and P., no. 3; R. Hooykaas, ‘Science and Reformation’, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, iii. (51) See my Society and Puritanism, passim.
Page 46 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (52) M. N[edham], Medela Medicinae (1665), pp. 22–26; cf. R. Malthauf, ‘Medical Chemistry and “the Paracelsans”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxviii. 110. (53) G. Corfe, The Apothecary, Ancient and Modern (1885), p. 21. (54) J. H. Aveling, The Chamberlens (1882), esp. pp. 8–9, 33; M. James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution (1930), esp. pp. 279–81; J. K. Fuz, Welfare Economics in English Utopias, from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith (The Hagne, 1952), pp. 34–37. (55) For Venice and Padua see pp. 246–8 below. For Calvinism and science in Italy see Aldo Stella, ‘Ricerche sul socinianesimo: il processo di Cornelio Sozzini e Claudio Textor (Barriere)’, Bolletino dell’Istituto di Storia della Societd e dello Stato Veneziano, iii. 77–120. (56) Sir William Osier, The Evolution of Modern Medicine (Yale U.P., 1921), p. 160. For the effect of the counter-Reformation on the Catholic attitude to science see H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’, Historical Studies, iv. 44. (57) A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo (1961), ii. 160, 216–18; M. Barjouet, ‘Ce qui mourrut et ce qui naissait chez Descartes’, La Pensée, New Series, no. 32, pp. 25–26. (58) G. Zilboorg, The Medical Man and the Witch during the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1935), passim; cf. S. E. Morison, ‘The Harvard School of Astronomy in the 17th century’, New England Quarterly, vii. 5–6. (59) C. H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (Yale U.P., 1927), passim; E. Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters, passim; and ‘Giacopo Castelvetro, Italian publisher in Elizabethan London and his patrons’, H.L.Q. vi, passim. The quotation is from John Dolman, translator of Cicero’s Tusculan Discourses (1651), cited by R. P. Stearns, ‘The Scientific Spirit in England’, Isis, xxxiv. 297. H. B. Lathrop, Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman (Madison, 1933), argues against Conley’s thesis (pp. 230–3), on the grounds that in other countries too translators were young, dedicated their works to those in power, opposed rebellion, dealt with the art of war and were anti-medieval; and that Elizabeth’s government anyway did not want to spread liberal principles through a critical study of history. These criticisms ignore Conley’s central point, that Elizabeth’s government was not monolithic, and that Leicester and his followers were by no means certain to survive, still less to triumph.
Page 47 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (60) P. H. Kocher, ‘Paracelsan Medicine in England (c.1570–1600)’, Journal of the History of Medicine, ii. 463, 471–3; cf. C. Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians (1684), pp. 289–472. See pp. 68–70, 73–75 below. (61) Hakewill, An Apologie, ii. 129. (62) Nicholas Culpeper, A Physicall Directory, or A translation of the London Dispensatory (1649), sig. A. 2v. This translation was itself made in defiance of the College. (63) Ed. C. Hilberry, The Poems of John Collop (Wisconsin U.P., 1962), p. 94. (64) Rosenberg, Leicester, pp. 30–35. (65) Dee’s Mathematicall Preface to Billingsley’s Euclide, sig. A iii–iiii. (66) R. Norman, The Newe Attractive, Epistle Dedicatorie to William Borough and Preface to the Reader. See pp. 20–21 above. (67) R[ichard] B[ostock], The Difference betwene the auncient…and the latter Physick, Chapter 19. Observe that Bostock did not sign his full name. The only one of the early Paracelsans who had the courage to do so was John Hester (P. H. Kocher, ‘John Hester, Paracelsan’, Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, Folger Library, 1948, p. 622). See pp. 71, 131 below. Paracelsus also had used the vernacular. For difficulties of translators see also L. Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England (Columbia U.P., 1902), pp. 355–6. (68) Cf. Selected Writings of William Clowes (ed. F. N. L. Poynter, 1948), pp. 161– 7. (69) Conley, op. cit, pp. 84–101 and passim. (70) Waters, op. cit., pp. 98–99, 104; Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, p. 109. (71) Rosenberg, I.eicester, Patron of Letters, pp. 30, 46–62. See pp. 36, 157 below. Cf. also pp. 19–20 above for Leicester’s patronage of Thomas Digges. See also Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. pp. 80–81. (72) Rosenberg, Leicester, passim, esp. pp. xvi–xix, 30–38, 153–4, 180–3, 196–7; cf. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, p. 195. Miss Rosenberg’s emphasis on the genuineness of Leicester’s ‘Puritanism’, if we abandon the nonconformist overtones of that abused word, is strikingly confirmed from an entirely different angle by P. Collinson, Letters of Thomas Wood, Puritan, 1556–1577 (Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Special Supplement no. 5, 1960). Wood’s son was later in Bacon’s household (Ibid., p. iii). The link between radical Protestantism, popular enlightenment, and science—and an anti-Spanish foreign
Page 48 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine policy—was no personal quirk of Leicester’s. We shall often meet it again. See pp. 138–48 below. (73) P. H. Kocher, ‘The Old Cosmos: a Study in Elizabethan Science and Religion’, H.L.Q. xv. 107–8. (74) Conley, op. cit, pp. 97–99. See pp. 123–4 below. (75) R. F. Jones, The Ancients and the Moderns (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, no. 6, 1936), pp. 11, 288, 291. (76) D. Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (Middelburg, 1584), sig. A 2– 2v, quoted in W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England (Princeton, 1956), pp. 219–20. This rationing of knowledge by the purse might be worth investigating. (77) R. MacIlmaine, The Logike of the moste Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus, Martyr (1574), p. 15, quoted in Howell, op. cit., p. 185. (78) Howell, op. cit., p. 232; R[obert] F[age], Peter Ramus, his Logick (1632), sig. A2–Asv. The objection to Ramus’s logic was akin to the objection to translating the classics: thanks to Ramus, Aristoteleans thought, ‘every cobbler can cog a syllogism, every carter crack of propositions. Hereby is logic profaned’ (A. Fraunce, The Lawiers Logicke, 1588, Preface). See pp. 259–60 below. (79) See my Century of Revolution (1961), p. 98; F. S. Fussner, The Historical Revolution (1962), pp. 38–39; and pp. 158–9, 181 below. (80) Pirated Italian editions and manuscript translations circulated; but the Discorsi were not translated until 1636, Il Principe not till 1640 (F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 1964, pp. 52–53, 96, 274–5). (81) For Harvey see my ‘William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy’, P. and P., no. 27, pp. 58–61; for Bacon and Hakewill see pp. 104–7, 178–81 below. (82) For censorship see below pp. 47, 110, 127, 181, 241–2, 255. (83) J. Jacquot, ‘Thomas Hariot’s Reputation for Impiety’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, ix. 167. Cf. the quotation from Chapman on p. 127 below. (84) John Davis, The Seamans Secrets (1594), quoted as epigraph to J. O. Halliwell’s Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England (1841). Davis was a Puritan, very conscious of England’s historical mission. For Hariot see pp. 125–8 below. (85) R. B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (American Geographical Soc, 1928), pp. 135, 172; ed. D. B. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages (Hakluyt Soc, 1955), ii. 570.
Page 49 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (86) Waters, op. cit, p. 357. Sir Arthur Throckmorton engaged Hood to teach him geometry in 1595–6, and bought a globe from him (A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, 1962, pp. 61, 197). Throckmorton also knew Hariot. For globes see p. 40 below. (87) Ed. E. G. R. Taylor, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the two Richard Ha kluyts (Hakluyt Soc, 1935), pp. 179–80, 208–9, 429–32. Alderman Barnes, Governor of the Muscovy Company, and John Wolstenholme (for whom see pp. 44, 63 below) also lent their support. (88) Hood to Burghley, in Halliwell’s Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England, p. 31. (89) Johnson, ‘Thomas Hood’s Inaugural Address’, pp. 94–98; Astronomical Thought, pp. 198–9. (90) An Exact Copy of the Last Will and Testament of Sir Thomas Gresham (1724), p. 36 (91) Ibid., p. 42. (92) An Exact Copy of the Last Will and Testament of Sir Thomas Gresham (1724), pp. 37–38. Cf. J. Ward, Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740), British Museum copy with Ward’s manuscript annotations, pp. iii–viii, 29–30, Appendix, pp. 21, 30. See also Johnson, ‘Gresham College’, passim, and J. S. Burgon, Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham (1839), ii. 517. The first occurrence of the word ‘pathology’ recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1597, in a translation from the French. (93) L. Figard, Un medecin Philosophe au XVV Siecle: etude sur la psychologie de Jean Fernel (Paris, 1903), pp. 65–68, 363–4; Sir Charles Sherrington, The Endeavour of Jean Fernel (1946), p. 17 and passim; J. D. Bernal, Science in History (1954), pp. 277–8; G. Sarton, Six Wings: Men of Science of the Renaissance (1957), pp. 191–6; Copeman, Doctors and Disease in Tudor Times, pp. 73–76. In 1575 William Clowes translated part of Fernel’s Pathologia. Gilbert referred to Fernel in the De Magnete (1600), p. 4. Pp. 25–62 of the anonymous Two Treatises Concerning the Preservation of Eie-sight (1616) draw on Fernel’s work. The egregious Alexander Ross, who attacked every significant thinker of his time, managed to oppose both Fernel and Harveyl (A. R[oss], Arcana Microcosmi, 2nd ed., 1652, pp. 224–6). For Ross see pp. 182, 189 below. (94) A relation of his wrote a eulogy of the Waldenses and Albigensians (Petri Wesenbecii, Oratio de Waldensibus et Albigensibus Christianis, Jena, 1585). (95) R. Stintzing, Geschichte der Deutscher Rechtswissenschaft (1880), i. 352– 66; ii. 250; Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
Page 50 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (96) The hast Will…of Sir Thomas Gresham, pp. 37–38. (97) M. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1568–1642 (1959), p. 250. (98) P. Allen, ‘Medical Education in 17th century England’, Journal of the History of Medicine, i. 118–22; C. R. Thompson, Universities in Tudor England (Folger Library, 1959), p. 20; M. H. Carre, Phases of Thought in England (1949), pp. 202–3, 212–13. (99) Ed. A. Clark, Register of the University of Oxford, ii (1571–1622), Part I (Oxford Historical Soc, 1887), p. 100. (100) There is an excellent brief study by D. M. Hallowes, ‘Henry Briggs, Mathematician’, in the Transactions of the Half ax Antiquarian Soc. (1962), pp. 79–92. (101) R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Cambridge (1937), p. 34s Hallowes, op. cit, pp. 86–87. (102) Rufus Suter, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Dr. William Gilbert of Colchester’, Osiris, x. 377–80; contrast D. H. D. Roller, The De Magnete of William Gilbert (Amsterdam, 1959), p. 91. (103) M. Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the 17th century (1938), p. 22. (104) See pp. 20–21 above. (105) S. P. Thompson, William Gilbert and Terrestrial Magnetism in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (n.d., ?1903), pp. 1, 6–7, 13; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 49. (106) Blundeville’s Exercises (1594), a treatise on the mathematics and astronomy necessary for navigation, went through eight editions in forty-four years. It popularized, among other things, the nautical instruments invented by John Blagrave of Reading, a non-university man who also invented instruments of use for artillery and surveying (Waters, op. cit., pp. 212–15, 165–6; R. T. Gunther, ‘The Uranical Astrolabe and other Instruments of John Blagrave of Reading’, Archaeologia, cxxix. 56–72). Blundeville himself invented many instruments, including the protractor. (107) Waters, op. cit., pp. 217–19, 246–7. For Barlow see p. 60 below. His The Navigators Supply (1597) was dedicated to the Earl of Essex. (108) Christopher Wren, Parentalia (1750), pp. 205–6.
Page 51 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (109) Roller, op. cit, p. 87; J. M. Oppenheim, ‘William Gilbert: Plant Grafting and the Grand Analogy’, Journal of the History of Medicine, viii. 167–82; Taylor, Writings of…the two Richard Hakluyts, i. 45–46. (110) Singer, Giordano Bruno, p. 67; Roller, op. cit., p. 70. Cf. p. 121 below. (111) Roller, op. cit., p. 90; Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, pp. 167–8, 58. (112) Cf. pp. 155–6 below, where I discuss the links between science and history. (113) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, pp. 208–11. Petty too combined anatomy and music—and much else besides. See p. 111 below. (114) Ed. D. B. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages (Hakluyt Soc, 1955), i. 48. (115) Waters, op. cit., pp. 121–2, 211–29, 367, 393; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 45–49; J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (1963), p. 113. For Gunter and Gellibrand see pp. 43–44 below. (116) D. Chilton, ‘Land Measurement in the 16th century’, Transactions of the Newcomen Soc, xxxi. 127. (117) W. Lilly, History of His Life and Times (1715), pp. 105–6; F. Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1894), pp. 164–5; Hallowes, op. cit., pp. 82–83. It has recently been claimed that in calculating his logarithms Briggs used results equivalent to the Binomial Expansion, whose discovery is normally attributed to Newton (T. D. Whiteside, in The Mathematical Gazette, xlv. 9–12, quoted by Hallowes, op. cit., p. 86). (118) H. Briggs, Logarithmorum Chilias Prima (1617). (119) Waters, op. cit., pp. 407–8. (120) See p. 57 below for Wright’s lectures for the East India Company. (121) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 58, 195, 352; Waters, op. cit, p. 403. Speidall (fl 1600–34) was later appointed Professor of Mathematics at Sir Francis Kynaston’s Academy, for which see p. 57 below. He christened his son Euclid. (122) Napier himself was interested in improving industrial processes. He designed a hydraulic screw for pumping water out of mines, and introduced the use of salt as a fertilizer (J. C. Crowther, Founders of British Science, 1960, p. 6). He also invented a burning mirror for the destruction of ships, and an armoured chariot, ‘profitable and necessary in these days for the defence of this island and
Page 52 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine withstanding of [Spanish] enemies of God’s truth and religion’ (quoted in W. T. Sedgwick and H. W. Tyler, A Short History of Science, New York, 1929, p. 242). (123) Compass: [Sir Moth Interest] ’has reduced his thrift To certain principles, and in that method As he will tell you instantly, by logarithms, The utmost profit of a stock employed (The Magnetic Lady, in Ben Jonson, Plays, Everyman ed., ii. 516).
(124) Taylor, ‘The Surveyor’, Econ. H.R. xvii. 124, 132; Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 59, 343, 87, 184. Leybourne too has connexions with Gresham: he edited some of the posthumous works of Samuel Foster (see pp. 44–45 below). (125) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 50–54, 203; Waters, op. cit., pp. 393–401, 590. See pp. 63–4 below. Handson probably also owed something to Wright, Hariot, and Gellibrand, for whom see p. 44 below. (126) Edward Wright dedicated one of his works to Richard Polter, Master of Trinity House, Deptford (The Haven-Finding Art, 1599). Among the Deptford group associated with the Gresham professors we find Henry Goddard, whose son Jonathan was to be Cromwell’s physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. (127) Aubrey, Brief hives, ii. 295. (128) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 203. (129) G. Hakewill, An Apohgie, p. 302. First published in 1627. Cf. Taylor, ‘The Doctrine of Nautical Triangles’, Journal of the Institute of Navigation, i. 137. Hariot had read some of Gilbert’s manuscripts (H. Stevens, Thomas Hariot, 1900, pp. 178–80). For Hariot and Ralegh’s circle see pp. 125–8 below. (130) Sir Edward Sherburne, The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem (1675), Appendix, p. 86; cf. Add. MS. 6197, f. 110. Sherburne had been one of Bacon’s secretaries (Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 355). (131) Waters, op. cit., p. 456. (132) R. Hues, Treatise on Globes (Hakluyt Soc, 1889), p. 16: first published 1594. See also p. 128 below. Thomas Hood’s earlier treatise on The Use of both the globes (1592) was written ‘for the mariners’. Sir Christopher Hatton’s copy of Hues’s Tractatus was in Sir Edward Coke’s library (ed. W. o. Hassall, A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, Yale Law Library Publications, no. 12, 1950, p. 80). (133) Add. MS. 6209, f. 89;Hallowes, op. cit., p. 88. Page 53 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (134) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, p. 337; ed. M. Christy, The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe of Hull, and Captain Thomas James of Bristol (Hakluyt Soc, 1893), i. xi. The Treatise first appeared annexed to the second edition of Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginiia (1622). See also Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), iii. 177–8, 825. The Treatise is reprinted in The Voyages of William Baffin (ed. C. R. Markharn, Hakluyt Soc, 1880), pp. 169–73. In it Briggs stressed the importance of bringing Christianity to the American Indians (Ibid., p. 170; cf. pp. 139–40, 145–6 below). (135) Waters, op. cit, p. 335; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 403. (136) Waters, op. cit., p. 356; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 194, 356; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, p. 246. See pp. 45–47 below for the importance of almanacs. (137) So D.N.B., but there may be some confusion between William Bedwell and his uncle Thomas, also a mathematician and instrument-maker. (138) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 96. (139) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, pp. 120–9. Bedwell recommended the study of Arabic, among other reasons, because of the importance of Arabic science (J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from…1626 to the decline of the Platonist Movement, 1911, pp. 93–94). Cf. Lilly, History of His Life and Times, p. 23, though Lilly confuses Bedwell with William Bedell, for whom see p. 247 below. For Bedwell see also pp. 46, 58 below. (140) Ed. T. Birch, The Court and Times of James I (1848), ii. 110; Lilly, op. cit., p. 106. Lilly, a Puritan by origin, used to attend the divinity lectures of Richard Holdsworth (see pp. 52, 53, 274–5 below) as well as those of William Gouge (Ibid., pp. 4, 20). He was a friend of William Oughtred (see p. 49 below). (141) Hakewill, op. cit., pp. 301–2. (142) See pp. 90–98 below. (143) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 203, 215–16; R. Vaughan, The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (2vols., 1839), passim; R. R. Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. (The Hague, 1962), pp. 30, 46, 53, 97–98, 121, 127. (144) Thomas Smith, Vitae Quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium virorum (1707), Vita Henrici Briggs, p. 3. Letters from Briggs to Ussher are printed in Richard Parr’s Life of…Usher (1686). They deal with mathematics and astronomy among other things. Cf. Hallowes, op. cit, pp. 88–89. (145) P. R. Barnett, ‘Theodore Haak and the Early Years of the Royal Society’, Annals of Science, xiii. 210. Page 54 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (146) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 50, 201, 205; D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics, p. 414; Waters, op. cit., pp. 295–6, 477–9. Wingate retained his connexion with Gresham, publishing two posthumous volumes from the papers of his old friend Samuel Foster, Professor of Astronomy, who died in 1652. (For Foster and Wingate see pp. 44, 65 below.) Wingate, whose mathematical writings appeared in French as well as in English, also published books on law. (147) This was Luke Foxe, a fellow Yorkshireman, whose earliest patron was Briggs, and whom Briggs helped in many ways with the preparations for his voyage of 1631 (The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe, i. lxii–iii). (148) Taylor, op. cit, pp. 50, 57–58. (149) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 276. (150) S. F. Mason, A History of the Sciences (1953), p. 201. Pett was another skilled non-university mathematician. (151) The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe, i. xli, ii. 604–6; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 69; The Haven-Finding Art, pp. 228–9; Waters, op. cit., pp. 358– 92, 416–39, 499, 572–3. Gunter invented the words cosine and cotangent. A John Gunter was an officer in the Parliamentary army, who was later said to be a great favourite of Oliver Cromwell’s (E. Peacock, The Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers, 1874, p. 49; B. Dale, Yorkshire Puritanism and Early Nonconformity, n.d., ?1909, pp. 63–64; W. C. Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Harvard U.P., 1937–47, iii. 682–8; iv. 799). There were later many nonconformist ministers called Gunter (ed. A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised, 1934, pp. 239–40). (152) Ed. D. B. Quinn, The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Hakluyt Soc, 1940), i. 96; ii. 483–8. (153) J. Davis, The Worldes Hydrographicall Description (1595), Dedication to the Privy Council, printed in the 1600 edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations. Cf. p. 63 below. For Smith’s Puritan connexions see H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (1958), pp. 132–5. (154) The original edition of Gellibrand’s Epitome of Navigation, probably published some time in the sixteen-thirties, lias not survived, nor has the first edition of Henry Bond’s Discovery of the true and ififallible way of finding the long hidden secret of longitude. The fact that we know of the existence of these editions, and of many other books, only by accident should teach us caution in bibliographical matters relating to books of this period designed for use (Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 71, 74, 319, 338, 349–50; Waters, op. cit., pp. 15, 127, 191; G. H. Turnbull, ‘Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the Early History of the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, x. 108). Page 55 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (155) Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in 17th century France (Baltimore, 1934), pp. 50–51. (156) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 226–1; J. Needham, History of Embryology (2nd ed., 1959), p. 123; R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby (1956), pp. 107–9, 195–6, 278. Digby quoted Gellibrand (Ibid., p. 341). Digby reverted to Catholicism soon after he had left Gresham College in 1635. For Holdsworth see pp. 52, 53, 274–5 below. (157) J. Wallis, A Defence of the Royal Society (1678), pp. 7–8; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 77–79, 206. Foster was a pupil, friend, and translator of Oughtred. (158) At Wadham—Wilkins’s College, and the centre of the scientific group— even the manciple was an instrument-maker in 1651, a son-in-law of Briggs’s friend William Oughtred. He had probably served at sea for the Parliament under Captain William Baddiley (Taylor, op. cit, pp. 85, 234). For Oughtred see p. 49 below. (159) E. F. Bosanquet, English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications to 1600 (1911), p. 10; Bosanquet, ‘English 17th century almanacs’, The Library, 4th Series, x. 378–9; C. Camden, ‘English Almanacs and Prognostications’, Ibid., 4th Series, vxii. 84–85; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 57–58; Waters, op. cit., p. 239. (160) Bosanquet, English Printed Almanacks, p. 5. See pp. 68–69, 263 below. (161) Waters, op. cit., p. 128. (162) Bosanquet, English Printed Almanacks, p. 67; Camden, op. cit, pp. 92–99; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 176; Waters, op. cit., pp. 96, 127, 143–4, 162. For Grafton see p. 159 below. (163) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, pp. 250–1; Waters, op. cit., p. 318. (164) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 55–56, 337; The Haven-Finding Art, p. 226; Waters, op. cit., pp. 320, 401. (165) Johnson, ‘The Influence of Thomas Digges on the progress of modern astronomy in 16th century England’, Osiris, i. 404; M. Nicolson, ‘English Almanacs and the New Astronomy’, Annals of Science, iv. 14; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 197. (166) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, pp. 250–1. For Bedwell see p. 41 above. (167) See p. 57 below.
Page 56 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (168) R. C. Winthrop, ‘Correspondence of Hartlib, Haak, Oldenburg and others of the Founders of the Royal Society with Governor Winthrop, 1661–72’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc, 1878, p. 40; Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 65 207, 352; The Haven-Finding Art, pp. 232, 247. (169) See pp. 52–53 below. (170) The sneers at almanac-makers of Greene, Ben Jonson, Middleton, and Sir Thomas Overbury, as well as Nashe, contrast with the co-operation of doctors, mathematicians, and Gresham professors (Camden, op. cit., pp. 87–89). (171) Reyce to Winthrop, 1 March 1636–7, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Collections, 4th Series, vi. 410. (172) Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 7–8, 14–17. (173) Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 1911), i. 187. Samuel Foster, Professor of Astronomy, must have been intended, since the Professor of Geometry, John Greaves, was politically unsound, and anyway out of England (see p. 54 below). Booker (1603–67), originally apprenticed to a haberdasher, was himself an almanac-maker. (174) J. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (1954), p. 161. Gwinne encouraged Greville to write Sidney’s life and helped him to edit the 1590 Arcadia (Ibid., p. 176). He was a friend of Sir William Paddy the physician and of John Florio the translator, who in his turn was a friend of Richard Hakluyt. (175) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, pp. 90–105. (176) A. T. Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (1890), p. 334. (177) Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in 17th century France, p. 52. (178) For Dury see pp. 92–93 below. (179) Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Chapter III. (180) E. Brerewood, A Learned Treatise of the Sabbath (1630) and A Second Treatise of the Sabbath (1632), passim. See my Society and Puritanism, pp. 176– 9. A tract of Brerewood’s, reprinted in 1641 as propaganda for episcopacy, was wrongly so used (Certain Briefe Treatises…wherein…the Primitive Institution of Episcopacie is Maintained, 1641, pp. 96–119). Brerewood’s tract argues merely that the Church in England from Constantine onwards was not subject to Rome but had its own bishops.
Page 57 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (181) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors (British Museum annotated edition), p. iii, Appendix, p. 21. (182) Ed. J. P. Collier, Thomas Heywood’s Two Historical Plays of the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1851), pp. 73, 83. Gresham’s cousin Edmond was a Puritan, the founder of a lectureship in Essex (W. K. Jordan, The Charities of Rural England, 1480–1660, 1961, p. 181). See also p. 160 below. (183) P. Allen, ‘Medical Education’, pp. 125, 131. See p. 75 below. (184) Oughtred left evidence about the meetings of Briggs’s group in his rooms at Gresham. Oughtred perfected Gunter’s slide rule. His private pupils included several later Gresham professors, Samuel Foster among them, and Fellows of the Royal Society. Foster remained Oughtred’s friend, and translated some of his writings into English (W. O[ughtred], An Apologeticall Epistle, sig. B 3v–B 4, in The Circles of Proportion, 1632; F. Cajori, William Oughtred, 1916, p. 71). (185) Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 115. (186) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 129–30. There was a proposal in 1604 to found a College at Ripon with some scientific teaching, but it came to nothing (F. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 1779, pp. 284–9). (187) Bacon had hoped to establish lectureships in natural philosophy, with ‘the science in general thereunto belonging’, but did not leave enough money (Mullinger, op. cit, pp. 65–66); cf. pp. 157–8, 276 below. (188) Savile, like Briggs, was a Halifax man, and the two were friends. (189) For Wheare see p. 158 below. (190) By Nathanael Carpenter, for whom see p. 272 below. There were further editions at Oxford in 1636 and 1637. (191) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 153–4, 163. Richard Tomlins of Westminster had founded his lectureship in anatomy in 1622 because ‘down to the present day, in neither of the universities of this kingdom…hath there been any anatomy lecture founded or instituted’, and there were no dissections. The Regius Professor took his money and gave the lectures, but did not dissect (Allen, ‘Medical Education’, p. 118). Petty was later Tomlins lecturer (see p. 111 below). (192) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii.215. It was Sir Henry Savile who refused a fellowship at Merton to Robert Blake, the future admiral, because he was not tall enough. Yet Savile was one of the avant garde at Oxford, with a taste for paradox. In 1572–3 he had defended the rotation of the earth, and democracy as the best
Page 58 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine form of political constitution (J. R. L. Highfield, ‘An Autograph Manuscript of Sir Henry Savile’, The Bodleian Library Record, vii.78). (193) Curtis, op. cit., p. 118. (194) F. Osborn, Advice to a Son (1656), in Miscellaneous Tracts (1722), i. 5. (195) QSeth Wardj, Vindiciae Academiarum, pp. 40–58. (196) See Appendix pp. 268–81 below. (197) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors (British Museum annotated copy), Appendix, pp. 22–24. (198) Add. MS. 6209, f. 10. (199) Ward, op. cit., pp. 40–41. Wotton’s preaching was greatly admired by Nicholas Ferrar as a boy (Add. MS. 6209, f. 89). For Ferrar’s connexion with Gresham College see p. 40 above. (200) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, pp. v, 45–49. Another consideration to which James referred in 1606 was ‘the confluence of numbers of persons of quality, who are commonly of the best sort repairing to that lecture’. (201) Cambridge University Library MS. Add. 44(16); Trinity College MS. 349. I owe these references to Mr. N. Tyacke. Brooke had been chaplain to Prince Henry, who recommended him for the Gresham chair. (202) R. Holdsworth, Praelectiones Theologicae habitae in Collegio Greshamensi (1661), p. 1; Ward, op. cit., p. 57; Curtis, op. cit, pp. 108–13, 131–4; see also pp. 274–5 below. The next holder of the chair, Thomas Horton, was a Presbyterian (Ward, op. cit., pp. 65–69). (203) Ward, op. cit., pp. 238–9. For Cowell see p. 203 below. (204) Lilly, History of His Life and Times, p. 106. (205) Hallowes, op. cit., pp. 89–91; Parr, Life of Usher, ii. 11–36. Crashawe, like Briggs, was a member of and propagandist for the Virginia Company. (206) Laud, Works (1847–60), iv. 261–6; Prynne, Canterburies Doome, pp. 182–3, 513. (207) Prynne, op. cit, p. 182. Gellibrand’s father, Henry, had a living in Kent, where he also practised as a physician (J. H. Raach, A Directory of English Country Physicians (1603–43), 1962, p. 47). It may be only a coincidence that Edward Gellibrand of Kent had been a leader of the classis movement in Oxford in the fifteen-eighties and was later minister of the English church at Page 59 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Middelburg, where he died in 1601 (R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth, Camden Soc, 1905, p. xli; R. Bancroft, Dangerous Positions, 1593, pp. 74–75). His daughter married the Puritan Julines Hering. The professor’s brother, Major Thomas Gellibrand of Bread St., gave evidence against Laud at his trial. A Samuel Gellibrand was a Presbyterian printer in the sixteen-forties. (208) I take the reason for his deprivation on the authority of M. Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 94: she gives no reference. (209) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, British Museum annotated copy, p. 58; J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from…1626 to the decline of the Platonist Movement (1911), p. 145; R. Holdsworth, The Valley of Vision (1651), p. 13. For Holdsworth see Appendix. (210) Richard Norwood, who ran away to sea from his apprenticeship to a fishmonger, taught himself mathematics by reading Recorde’s Arithmetic. For twenty years he taught mathematics in London, publishing a Trigonometric (1631), which owed much to Gunter, Gellibrand, Handson and Wright, and The Seamans Practice in 1637. But he ran into trouble with Archbishop Laud and emigrated to the Bermudas, which he had surveyed for the Bermuda Company twenty years earlier. From there he corresponded with the Royal Society (Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 202, 347; Waters, op. cit., pp. 342–5, 432, 480– 91). (211) Thirty-five out of 1, 000 books which Winthrop brought to Massachusetts in 1631 were scientific, including works by Paracelsus, Dee, Norwood. Letters to him in 1634 and 1640 mention Robert Norton’s The Gunners Dialogue (1628), Wingate’s Logarithms (1626 or 1630), Bed well’s Mesolabium Architectonum (1631), Wilkins’s Discovery of a New World in the Moon (1640), and books by Robert Fludd. Winthrop corresponded with Comenius and probably tried to make him the President of Harvard College. Winthrop later became a Fellow of the Royal Society (S. E. Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, n.d., ?1930, p. 272; Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Soc, 4–th Series, vi. 497, 509–12; cf. pp. 456–7). (212) See p. 33 above. (213) L. Makkai, ‘The Hungarian Protestants and the English Revolution’, Acta Historica (Budapest), v. 22; R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby, p. 108. See p. 91 below for other connexions between Transylvanian Calvinists and English Baconians and Puritans. Banffyhunyadi died soon after his return to Hungary. (214) Clarendon, History of the Rebellion (ed. W. D. Macray, 1888), v. 24; Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, p. xix. See p. 158 below. Page 60 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (215) e.g. An Exact Copy of the Last Will…of Sir Thomas Gresham, pp. 68–69. (216) Add. MSS. 6203, ff. 4, 28. For Holdsworth see Appendix. (217) Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, pp. 134, 156, 293–6; cf. A. R. Hall, Ballistics in the 17th century (1952), p. 65. Greaves was a friend of William Harvey, whose appointment as Warden of Merton Greaves is said to have recommended to Charles I in 1645 (W. Harvey, Works, translated with Life by Robert Willis, 1847, p. xxxi; G. Rolleston, The Harveian Oration, 1873, p. 81). Greaves was also a friend of Archbishop Ussher (Parr, Life of…Usher, ii. 509–10). (218) H. Craig, The Enchanted Glass (2nd ed., 1950), p. 104. (219) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, pp. 129–35. Samuel Turner was a friend of the mathematician Thomas Hariot, for whom see pp. 125–8 below (ed. J. O. Halliwell, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England, 1841, p. 46). (220) Thilopolites’ (Thomas Nash), Quaternio or a Fourefoll Way to a Happie Life (1633), quoted by L. B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture, pp. 600–1. (221) J. Tapp, The Pathway to Knowledge (1613), quoted by Waters, op. cit, p. 320; Allen ‘Medical Education’, p. 134. (222) Their connexions, so far as we know them, were with intellectuals like Selden, Twysden, Harbottle Grimston, Bulstrode Whitelocke, mostly Parliamentarian in sympathy. But Thomas Eden, Law Professor from 1613 to 1640, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Chancellor to Bishop Wren of Ely, and four times M.P. for Cambridge University, was just a career civil lawyer, who survived to take the Covenant in 1643. (223) C. Wren, Parentalia (1750), pp. 205–6. By 1657 ‘the academies’ had been substantially modernized. (224) I. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 93. (225) Add. MSS. 6209, ff. 337–9. For Winston, Professor of Physic 1615–42, 1652–5, see p. 145 below. I cannot place Bainbridge at Gresham. (226) See pp. 67–72 below. In 1636 the Barber-Surgeons’ Company decided to commission Inigo Jones to build them a lecture theatre (Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London, pp. 129, 132, 365–5, 368, 405; cf. J. J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900, i. 1957, p. 215). (227) Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. P. Bliss, 1813–20), iii. 1060–1. Hale later wrote on the vacuum, the magnet, and other scientific topics. He was a friend of Wilkins as well as of Selden. Page 61 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (228) W. Borough, A Discourse of the Variation of the Compasse (1581), sig. iii v. (229) See pp. 32–33 above. (230) Taylor, The Original Writings…of the two Richard Hakluyts, ii. 510. (231) Waters, op. cit, p. 569. For Bond see p. 46 above. (232) Sir F. Kynaston, The Constitutions of the Musaeum Minervae (1636), sig.¶¶, p. 4. For John Speidall, Kynaston’s Professor of Mathematics, see p. 38–9 above. (233) Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), p. 151; Sir George Buc, The Third University of England, appended to the 1631 edition of Stow’s Chronicle. Buc dedicated his essay to Sir Edward Coke, who in 1602 had referred to the legal inns in London as ‘the most famous university…that is in the world’ (3 Reports, sig. D. iv–v). For Buc see M. Eccles, ‘Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels’, in Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans (ed.C. J. Sisson, 1933), pp. 457–506: and p. 155 below. (234) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 58, 203. There were also mathematics teachers, who had mastered Gresham’s modern methods, at Bristol, Hull, Birmingham, Deal, and Dover before 1640; and local almanacs for the first three towns. The Birmingham mathematics lecturer was a master gunner for Parliament during the interregnum (Ibid., pp. 77–80). (235) Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 93. (236) F. W. M. Draper, Four Centuries of Merchant Taylors’ School, 1561–1961 (1962), pp. 5–6, 25–26, 31–35, 57–60. For London science see Dekker, Britannia’s Honor (a Lord Mayor’s pageant, 1628), in Works, iii, esp. pp. 81–88. (237) T. Dekker, Old Fortunatus, Epilogue. (238) J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (1963), p. 123. (239) R. Norton, The Gunner (1628), quoted by A’. R. Hall, Ballistics in the 17th century, p. 34. The opinion had indeed already been expressed that English gunners were too reliant on theory (Ibid., pp. 44–45). (240) B. Jonson, The New Inn (1629), Act II, scene iii: Shakerley Marmion, Hollands Leaguer (1632), in Dramatic Works (1875), p. 91. Cf. Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (acted 1599), for a character who ‘makes congies to his wife in geometrical proportions’ (Act 1, scene i). (241) F. Greville, Poems and Dramas (ed. G. Bullough, n.d., ?1939), i. 183. (242) W. Bedwell, Via Regia ad Geometriam; the Way to Geometry (1636). For Bedwell see p. 41 above. Page 62 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (243) Appendix to the Preface to T. Hearne’s edition of Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle (1725), p. cxlvii. Wallis, having had the benefit of Richard Holdsworth’s encouragement at Emmanuel, made his way to the home of William Oughtred and learned mathematics there. (244) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, p. x. Cf. p, 273 below. (245) See p. 115 below. (246) J. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations…upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), Epistle Dedicatory to the President of the Royal Society. Cf. p. 243 below. (247) John Barclay, Icon Animorum (1614). I quote from The Mirrour of Mindes, Englished by T. M[ay], 1631, p. 117. May was later the historian of the Long Parliament. See also p. 135 below. (248) W. Gilbert, De Magnete, Preface. (249) R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 17–19. ‘Before 1600—I should say by 1570—the scientific spirit…had become a point of view popular with middleclass amateurs’ (Stearns, ‘The Scientific Spirit in England’, Isis, xxxiv. 299). Robert Hues, p. 128 below. (250) Gilbert, De Magnete, p. xli. The argument, Calvin’s, was used by Ralegh in his History of the World (1820), i. 63; by Nathanael Carpenter in his Geographie (1625), p. 96 (for Carpenter see p. 272 below); and by John Wilkins in A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (1640). For Barlow see T. Fuller, Worthies (1840), iii. 249. (251) W. Barlow, A Briefe Discovery of the Idle Animadversions of Marke Ridley, Doctor of Physicke, quoted by Johnson. The Influence of Thomas Digges on the Progress of Modern Astronomy in 16th century England’, Osiris, i. 403. Cf. Cudworth’s later reference to ‘mechanic atheism’, of which he thought ‘an undiscerned tang’ hung about the Cartesians (R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678, quoted by J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th century, 1874, ii. 248– 9). ‘Mechanic atheism’ was the philosophy of rude mechanicals. (252) J. Wilkins, A Discourse concerning a New Planet (1640), pp. 10–14, quoted by G. McColley, ‘The Ross-Wilkins Controversy’, Annals of Science, ii. 159. (253) Waters, op. cit, pp. 196, 247–51, 319, 328, 341–2, 353, 416, 432–5, 496– 500. The commercial sale of telescopes dates from after 1609. Waters notes 1614 as an important turning-point in this revolution (Ibid., pp. 298–9, v341). Cf. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, pp. 195–201.
Page 63 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (254) M. Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1340–1630 (1962), pp. 206–8; cf. A. H. W. Robinson, Marine Cartography in Britain (1962), pp. 27–33. (255) Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 306–12. In 1640 a London clothworker hoped that a school he was endowing in Norfolk would teach navigation (W. K. Jordan, The Rural Charities of England, 1480–1660, 1961, p. 164). (256) Richard Willis, Preface to Richard Eden’s History of Travel (1577), quoted by C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th century (1954), p. 308. (257) P. G. Rogers, The First Englishman in Japan (1956), pp. 1–2, 32. (258) See pp. 42, 44 above, 126 below. Cf. Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in 17th century France, passim. (259) M. Lewis, Armada Guns (1961), p. 204. (260) Waters, op. cit., pp. 463–5, 499. Some by the school, some by the laws do mount, Some by the sword, and some by navigation: so Sir Francis Hubert made Edward II reflect (ed. B. Mellor, The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert, Hong Kong, 1961, p. 45); but the thought was more appropriate to 1629, when Sir Francis published, than to the fourteenth century.
(261) Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, i. 26 n. Cf. p. 187 below for Cromwell’s recommendation of history to his son. (262) D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, p. 18; cf. The Letter Books of Sir Samuel Luke (ed. H. G. Tibbutt, 1963), p. 20; the Duke of Manchester, Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne (1864), i.315. (263) Ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Poems of Richard Corbett (1955), p. 64; P. H. Kocher, ‘The Old Cosmos: A Study in Elizabethan Science and Religion’, H.L.Q. xv. 117–21. See p. 20 above for Englishmen’s unique readiness to entertain the idea of an infinity of worlds. (264) Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, pp. 151–5, 178–9. (265) D. C. Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance (Duke U.P., 1941), p. 143. I have said nothing about the vast flood of vernacular books on popular medicine or popular psychology, from Timothy Bright’s Treatise of ‘Melancholie (1586: three editions by 1613) to Burton’s Anatomy. Scientific literature for ‘men simple and plain’, ‘the sailor and husbandman’, ‘the poorer sort’, ‘the wealth of unlearned persons’, ‘the meanest capacity’, ‘men that are simple and unlearned’, is carefully studied in Professor Wright’s invaluable Middle-Class Culture in
Page 64 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine Elizabethan England, Chapter XV, passim. For Bright see pp. 68, 120, 278–9 below. (266) J. Jones, The Jurors Judges of Law and Fact (1650), pp. 75–76. Jones was arguing that artisan jurors had as much right and ability to try cases as upperclass judges. See p. 232 below. (267) Louis Leroy, Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things in the Whole World (translated by R[obert] A[shley], 1594), Introduction, quoted by Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 296. (268) Cf. the opening of Book II of The Faerie Queene, where we are led from the geographical and astronomical discoveries to contemplate the possible existence of worlds in the moon and stars. (269) G. McColley, ‘Nicholas Hill and the Philosophia Epicurea’, Annals of Science, iv. 390–2, 403–4. (270) Bacon, Works, iv. 81–82. (271) See pp. 32, 44 above. Smith and Wolstenholme were the patrons of Raphe Handson, who dedicated his Trigonometrie to them (see p. 39 above). (272) Waters, op. cit., pp. 190, 197. See pp. 149–50 below. These were the globes to which Robert Hues referred in his Tractatusde Globis of 1592 (see pp. 40 above, 128 below). (273) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 64–65; cf. p. 172; Johnson, ‘Preparation and Innovation in the Progress of Science’, J.H.I, iv. 57. See p. 69 below. (274) Roller, The De Magnete of William Gilbert, p. 79. (275) Waters op. cit., pp. 242–3, 320, 549; ed. M. Oppenheim, The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, iv (Naval Records Series, XLV), 391–6; Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 311–12. (276) P. A. Welsby, George Abbott, the unwanted Archbishop (1962), pp. 7–9, 146. For Abbott see also p. 19 above. (277) Simon Sturtevant, for instance, promised James I and his courtiers eighteen of thirty-three shares in the estimated profits of his scheme for smelting iron with coal (Bernal, Science in History, pp. 285–6; cf. p. 194 below). Cf. also pp. 69–70 below for royal favour to some doctors. (278) J. J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy, i. 1200–1649 (1957), pp. 181–224; ii, 1649–1714 (1958), pp. v, 1–75.
Page 65 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (279) See p. 69 below. (280) C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army (1902), pp. 255–6. (281) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, pp. 89–90, 225–6, 205; W. T. Whitley, ‘The Rev. Paul Hobson’, Baptist Quarterly, New Series, ix. 307–10. See p. 42 above. (282) A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. P. Bliss, 1813–20), iii. 103. I am indebted to Miss Irene Cassidy for drawing my attention to Robartes and Gammon. (283) R. W. Symonds, Thomas Tompion, His Life and Work (1951), pp. 6–8, 244. (284) S. P. Thompson, William Gilbert and Terrestrial Magnetism, pp. 6–7; E. Zilsel, ‘The Origins of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method’, J.H.I ii. 2–32. (285) Bacon, Works, iv. 257. (286) Aubrey, Brief hives, ii. 139–40; W. E. Houghton, ‘The History of Trades: its relation to 17th century Thought’, J.H.I ii. 35–36. (287) Houghton, loc. cit, pp. 35–38. The Historjr of Trades, Mr. Houghton sapiently observed, became superfluous in the later seventeenth century as laboratories replaced workshops as the main sources of scientific information (Ibid., p. 60). Petty, under Hartlib’s encouragement, planned a History of Trades. A great many of Boyle’s works were called ‘histories’ (Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies, p. 42). (288) Mason, A History of the Science, p. 177. (289) Bacon, Works iv. 19. (290) Ibid., viii. 165. (291) See Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), p. 296. (292) N.R.S. vii. 80–85, 326; W. S. C. Copeman, Doctors and Disease in Tudor Times (1960), p. 45. (293) [Anon.], The Copy of a Letter written by E. D. Doctour of Physicke to a Gentleman (1606), Part II, pp. 15–50. This argues that experience without classical learning is useless; books in English are dangerous for those who have not studied Latin grammar and rhetoric; the fact that empirics do many cures is irrelevant. See pp. 27–30 above, and cf. Kocher, Taracelsan Medicine’, pp. 471–4. In Lacy’s play, The Dumb Lady (1669, printed 1672) it is assumed that an
Page 66 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine apothecary will be a Paracelsan, and that doctors will oppose chemistry (J. Lacy, Dramatic Works, 1875, pp. 92, 98). (294) C. E. Raven, Synthetic Philosophy in the 17th century (1945), p. 15. (295) Goodall, op. cit., pp. 367, 376, 384–8, 401, 413–20; cf. my Society and Puritanism, p. 105. In 1587 Timothy Bright (for whom see pp. 120, 278–9 below) was summoned to appear before the College authorities: but he had powerful patrons and evaded punishment (W. J. Carlton, Timothe Bright, 1911, pp. 69, 111). (296) John Halle, An Historiall Expostulation Against the beastlye Abusers, bothe of Chyrurgerie, and Physike in our tyme (Percy Soc, 1844), p. 42; cf. pp. xiv, 38– 39, 44. First published 1565. (297) Copeman, op. cit, pp. 9, 39, 41–43, 75–77, 154. (298) For the City see V. Pearl, The City of London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (1961). (299) Ed. G. Bernard, Life of Sir John Digby, 1605–45 (Camden Miscellany, xii, 1910), pp. 111–12. Shortage of doctors in the royalist armies is confirmed by I. Roy, The Royalist Army in the First Civil war (Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, 1963), pp. 61, 169–70. (300) Goodall, The College of Physicians Vindicated[1616], p. 11. See my ‘William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy’, P. and P., no. 27. (301) See p. 210 below. (302) J. H. Aveling, The Chamberlens (1882), pp. 5–6; cf. p. 19. (303) Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, pp. 359–61; Young, Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London, p. 138; [Anon.], An Historical Account of Proceedings between the College of Physicians and Surgeons (n.d., ? late seventeenth century), pp. 4–6; F. N. L. Poynter, ‘The Influence of Government Legislation’, in The Evolution of Medical Practice in Britian (Poynter ed. Poynter, 1961), p. 10. (304) C. Wan, H. C. Cameron and K. A. Underwood, A History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, i (1963), 283, 287, 302. (305) Young, op. cit, p. 126. In 1624 the Commons denounced the Charter as a grievance. For William Harvey’s insistence on the necessity of subordinating apothecaries see Roberts. The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor England’, Medical History, vi. 378.
Page 67 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (306) G. Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904); M. James, Social Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930), Chapter V. (307) Aveling, The Chamberlens, pp. 34–49. The motives of the Chamberlens may not have been entirely disinterested: it was alleged that by incorporating midwives they wished to establish a monopoly for the use of their family forceps. But Bacon perhaps sympathized with the scheme (Ibid., pp. 21–24, 49–50); and cf. the concern for midwives shown by the very radical Nicholas Culpeper in his Directoryfor Midwives (1651). Cf. also Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, pp. 463–6; P. Chamberlen, A Voice in Rhama (1647), passim. (308) Copeman, op. cit., p. 27; P. Allen, ‘Medical Education’, p. 139; Gunther, Early Science in Cambridge, p. 149. Cf. B. Farrington, ‘Vesalius on the Ruin of Ancient Medicine’, The Modern Quarterly, i (1938), 23–25. (309) Lumley had been one of the sponsors of Hood’s mathematical lecture at Leadenhall (Waters, op. cit., p. 185; see p. 32 above and p. 191 below). (310) R. Holinshed, Chronicles iii (1587), p. 1349, quoted in W. Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy and Surgery (ed. C. D. O’Malley, F. N. L. Poynter, and K. F. Russell, University of California, 1961), pp. 3–4. (311) Allen, op. cit., p. 138; Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters, p. 36; R. P. Stearns, op. cit., p. 298; J. J. Keevil, The Stranger’s Son (1953), p. 111. (312) G. Hakewill, An Apologie, pp. 271–5. None of the anatomists whom Hakewill cites are English, and he goes out of his way to criticize Oxford’s backwardness, until very recently, in this and other sciences. (313) P. H. Kocher, ‘John Hester, Paracelsan (fl. 1576–93)’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Folger Library, 1948), pp. 621–38. (314) Copeman, op. cit., pp. 46–47, 97. Gerarde is also credited with discovering watercress as a remedy against scurvy (Ibid., p. 133). (315) R. Malthauf, ‘Medical Chemistry and “the Paracelsans”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxviii, 110, 124. (316) M. N[edham], Medela Medicine (1665), pp. 7–8; Goodhall, The College of Physicians Vindicated, pp. 13–17. For confirmation see Keevil, The Stranger’s Son, p. 138. (317) e.g. John Cotta, A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers of severall sorts of ignorant and inconsiderate Practisers of Physick in England (1612), pp. 49–71. Cotta was a doctor of physic at Northampton. He quoted Fernel (Ibid., p.
Page 68 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine 23). Cf. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, Chapter VI, passim; and my ‘William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy’, p. 65. (318) Kocher, op. cit, pp. 70, 251–4. (319) Hakewill, Apologie, ii. 135. Goodman, naturally, had attacked Paracelsus, whom Hakewill defended (Ibid., vii. 134). (320) Matthew Mackaile, Moffet-Well (1664), p. 178. (321) This paragraph derives from Mr. R. S. Roberts’s excellent article, ‘The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England’, Medical History, vi. 363–82, passim. I have also benefited by discussions with Mr. Roberts. For Coke see pp. 210–11 below. (322) J. H. Raach, ‘English Medical Learning in the early 17th century’, Tale Journal of Biology and Medicine, xvi. 285–6, quoting F. H[ering]’s translation of Johann Oberndoerffer’s The Anatomyes of the True Physician (1602). (323) [Anon], hex Talionis (1670), p. 13: attributed to Henry Stubbe, for whom see p. 114 below. (324) J. Halle, An Historiall Expostulation, p. 23. (325) Roberts, op. cit., passim. (326) Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, p. 444. (327) Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act v, scene i. (328) Matthew Mackaile, Mqffet-Well, sig. A 2v. Culpeper himself translated Galen’s Art of Physicke, published posthumously in 1657. (329) N. Culpeper, A Physicall Directory (1649), sig. A–AV, pp. 344–5; cf. 1651 ed., sig. A 2–A 2v. Robert Burton for this reason proposed to nationalize medicine in his Utopia (Anatomy of Melancholy, Everyman ed. i. 103). Peter Chamberlen used to charge lower fees to the poor (Diary of the Rev. John Ward, ed. C. Severn, 1839, p. 107). (330) Mercurius Pragmaticus, September 1649, quoted by F. N. L. Poynter, ‘Nicholas Culpeper and his Books’, Journal of the History of Medicine, xvii, 155– 9. (331) A. Huyberts, A Corner-Stone Laid towards the Building of a New Colledge (that is to say, a new Body of Physicians) in London (1675), pp. 4–7; Goodall, The College of Physicians Vindicated, p. 11. See also Keevil, The Stranger’s Son, pp. 74–76.
Page 69 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (332) J. M. Good, The History of Medicine, so far as it relates to the Profession of the Apothecary (1795), pp. 129–36; Keevil, op. cit., pp. 140–1. (333) Huyberts, op. cit., p. 14. Huyberts, an apothecary himself, proposed that the apothecaries of London should be taken under the City’s government, as the best way of training ‘apothecaries indeed, such as may practise with real knowledge, not fill the world with cobwebs of idle speculations and notions, as men of the old way of education arc wont to do’ (Ibid., pp. 27–28, v33). (334) Christopher Merrett, A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses committed by the Apothecaries (1669), p. 42; cf. J. Goddard, A Discourse Setting forth the Unhappy Condition of the Practice of Physick in London (1670), pp. 11–12. (335) Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, sig. A 4 (‘A few men not of academical but mechanic education, who being either actually engaged in the late rebellion, or bred up in some mean and contemptible trades, were never taught the duty they owe to God or their sovereign’); cf. The College of Physicians Vindicated, sig. A 4v–A 5v, pp. 22–23 (‘state-fanatics’); N. Biggs, The Vanity of the Craft of Physick (1651), sig. b 1, p. 3. (336) J. II. Aveling, English Midwives—their History and Prospects (1872), p. 89; V.C.H. Yorkshire, P. 157. (337) Lambeth Palace Library, Diocese of Canterbury, Comperta 1634–6, ff. 111– 260 d. I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. R. S. Roberts. (338) Aveling, The Chamberlens (1882), pp. 34–49. (339) J. H. Raach, ‘English Medical Licensing in the early 17th century’, Tale Journal of Biology and Medicine, xvi. 273–8; Phyllis Allen, ‘Medical Education in 17th century England’, p. 142. Miss Allen caustically remarks that Lambeth medical degrees issued in conjunction with theological studies may have produced men no worse fitted to practise than those who had taken a degree in medicine at Oxford or Cambridge. For the backwardness of medical education in these universities, which drove serious medical students to go abroad, to Leiden or Padua if they could, see also D. C. Dorian, The English Diodatis (Rutgers U.P., 1950), pp. 64–70, and Curtis, op. cit., pp. 153–4, 163. (340) Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, pp. 443–5. (341) J. H. K. Bloom and R. R. James, Medical Practitioners in the Diocese of London (1935), pp. 6, 9–11. (342) Ibid., pp. 7, 27, 43, 69, 72, 81–82: cf. C.J. ii. 26, 137.
Page 70 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
London Science and Medicine (343) R. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 36; cf. John Cotta, A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers of severall sorts of ignorant and unconsiderate Practisers of Physick in England (1612), pp. 86–94. (344) Aveling, English Midwives, p. 89. This is given only on the not very reliable authority of Mrs. Cellier in 1687: but she was writing of events within living memory, and does not seem to have been contradicted. (345) Harleian MSS. 163 f. 623 a. I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. Robin Clifton.
Access brought to you by:
Page 71 of 71
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0003
Abstract and Keywords Francis Bacon lived from 1561 to 1627. He was always near the centre of power, and under James I he rose to be Lord Chancellor. He was a leading figure in the government until in 1621 he was disgraced on a charge of taking bribes. He had hoped to use his influence at court to get his scientific schemes adopted: it may only have had the effect of delaying their recognition by the Parliamentarians. This chapter is concerned with Bacon the thinker and traces his influence on other influential thinkers. A few points may be drawn together in order to justify associating his influence with the English Revolution. Bacon's emphasis on secondary causes and his relegation of direct divine intervention to a long-past historical epoch fortified and gave deeper significance to the Parliamentarian preference for the rule of law as against arbitrariness. Bacon himself attempted to evolve a universal science of jurisprudence. Keywords: Francis Bacon, power, James I, Lord Chancellor, Parliamentarians, English Revolution, rule, law, jurisprudence
Our best and most divine knowledge is intended for action; and those may justly be accounted barren studies which do not conduce to practice as their proper end. JOHN WILKINS, Mathematicall Magick (1648), p. 2. What art or science soever doth not advantage mankind, either to bring him nearer unto God in his soul, or to free him from the bondage of
Page 1 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians corruption in his body, is not at all to be entertained; because at the best it is but a diversion of the mind. A Seasonable Discourse written by Mr. John Dury (1649), pp. 10–11.
I FRANCIS BACON lived from 1561 to 1627. He climbed slowly in Elizabeth’s reign, despite his flying start as the son of a Lord Keeper. But he was always near the centre of power, and under James I he rose to be Lord Chancellor. He was a leading figure in the government until in 1621 he was disgraced on a charge of taking bribes. He had hoped to use his influence at court to get his scientific schemes adopted: it may only have had the effect of delaying their recognition by the Parliamentarians.1 But we are concerned with Bacon the thinker, whom we can now perhaps get into historical perspective. He was doubly related to Sir Thomas Gresham. Bacon’s father married Gresham’s wife’s sister (though she was not Francis’s mother), and Francis’s half-brother married Gresham’s daughter. Bacon’s intellectual relation to Gresham College was very similar: closely connected but not directly descended. Bacon was not an original scientific thinker; he underestimated the achievements of some of his contemporaries, notably Gilbert. Much of what Bacon said in criticism of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, and in favour of co-operation between scientists, his utilitarian assumptions, (p. 78) his belief in state-supported programmes for the relief of man’s estate— much of this had been proclaimed before him by the popular scientific writers whose importance in England we have been considering. Gilbert, in addition to his brilliance as an experimenter, had also criticized scholasticism and speculated about ‘a new style of philosophizing’, for men ‘who look for knowledge not in books only, but in things themselves’. But though Gilbert combined experiment with generalization, he had not yet fused them into a single all-embracing system.2 So there are difficulties in assessing Bacon’s influence. Rather similar difficulties beset those seventeenth-century theologians who worried about the bodily resurrection of a missionary who had had the misfortune to be eaten by cannibals. Bacon incorporated his predecessors as the cannibals incorporated the missionary: it may be unfair that we speak of his influence when we mean the influence of a whole generation: but this sort of historical cannibalism is, I suppose, inevitable.3 Bacon was a social as well as a scientific thinker. With his powerful historical sense, he saw that something new was happening, in society as well as in science: he defined what this was, and showed how it could be consciously utilized for the relief of man’s estate. ‘The industry of artificers maketh some small improvement of things invented: and chance sometimes in experimenting maketh us to stumble upon somewhat which is new: but all the disputation of the Page 2 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians learned men never brought to light one effect of nature before unknown.’ Printing, gunpowder, the compass, the three great inventions of modern craftsmen, had been ‘stumbled upon and lighted upon by chance’: yet they had transformed the world. If all this could be done by the ‘blind and stupid’ method of uncoordinated experiment, more like ‘a kind of hunting by scent than a science’, how much greater the advance would be if experiments were planned and directed, not haphazard as even Gilbert’s had been. When ‘experience has learned to read and write’, a purposeful philosophy of knowledge for action could enable men to escape from the necessities of nature.4 This philosophy was ‘the offspring of time rather than of wit’. It was (p.79) part of God’s plan that ‘the opening of the world by navigation and commerce, and the further discovering of knowledge, should meet in one time’.5 Thus Bacon gave a co–operative programme and sense of purpose to merchants, artisans, and philosophers, each of whom hitherto had seen only in part. This was his first great achievement. Secondly, he settled accounts with religion, and established that scientific investigation not only did not conflict with divinity but was positively virtuous.6 This was very important in winning the support of Puritan Parliamentarians, without whose backing the victory of science in England would have been much longer delayed. Thirdly, whereas previous scientific thinking had been inextricably confused with alchemy and magic in a man like Dee, had been humdrum and practical and middle–class at Gresham College, with Bacon it attained both social dignity and philosophic grasp. It was not unimportant that he wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. Bacon elevated to a coherent intellectual system what had hitherto been the only partially spoken assumptions of practical men. That is what Bacon meant when he claimed to be no more than the articulate spokesman of the inarticulate forces of his age. ‘The true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this, that human life be endowed with new inventions and powers. But of this the great majority have no feeling, but are merely hireling and professorial. Only occasionally it happens that some artisan of unusual wit and covetous of honour applies himself to a new invention, which he mostly does at the expense of his fortunes.’ But in order to make the scientific progress which is now possible for humanity, we must expand our minds to an understanding of the whole universe: for this purpose the philosopher must co–operate with the craftsman.7 ‘The destiny of the human race will supply the issue [of my work], and that issue will perhaps be such as men in the present state of their understandings cannot easily grasp or measure. For what is at stake is not merely a contemplative happiness but the very reality of man’s well–being and all man’s powers of action. Man is the helper and interpreter of Nature. He can only act and understand in so far as by working upon her or observing her he has come to perceive her order…. Nature cannot be conquered but by obeying her.
Page 3 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Accordingly, these twin goods, human knowledge and human power, come in the end to one. To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action.’8 (p.80) Closer contact between scientists and craftsmen had been established in London. Men like Recorde, Dee, Digges, Hood, Gilbert, Briggs had practised new methods and glimpsed some of their possibilities. But Bacon gave men a noble and all–embracing programme of co–operative action, in which the humblest craftsman had a part to play. ‘My way of discovering sciences goes far to level men’s wits; and leaves but little to individual excellence, because it performs everything by the surest rules and demonstrations.’9 We can grasp at something of the difference which Bacon made if we compare Dee’s hope in 1570 that ‘common artificers’ might be able to ‘devise new works, strange engines and instruments’ with Milton’s vision of London in 1644 as ‘a city of refuge, the mansion–house of liberty’, where men were ‘reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement’.10 John Hall five years later saw ‘the highest spirits, pregnant with great matters, and in despite of these tumults and troubles which environ them on every side, labouring with somewhat the greatness of which they themselves cannot tell, and with a wonderful deal of courage attempting the discovery of a new world of knowledge’. Dee wanted craftsmen to have the opportunity of inventing useful gadgets: Milton and Hall thought that the whole community was advancing in knowledge, wisdom, power, and virtue, ‘chasing away…shadows before the break of the great day’.11 Bacon (and the Revolution) had come in between to give this wider audacity, this readiness to test everything, this confidence. The most astonishing aspiration of Bacon’s was that his scientific method would in certain respects liberate mankind from the consequences of the Fall. He hoped for ‘a restitution and reinvigorating (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power…which he had in his first state of creation’.12 The object of The Great Instauration was to restore the commerce of the mind with things to its original perfection, or to something like it. ‘For man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over created things. Both these losses can even in this life be partially repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.’ The Fall had entailed that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’: labour was at once the curse and the salvation of man. For ‘by various labours (not certainly by disputations or idle magical ceremonies, but by various labours)’ nature (p.81) could be ‘at length and in some measure subdued to the…uses of human life’. But for the future, Bacon hopes, ‘we may hand over to men their fortunes, the understanding having been emancipated—having come, so to speak, of age’. Hence ‘there must necessarily ensue an improvement in man’s estate, and an increase of his power over nature’.13
Page 4 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians This breath–taking Utopian vision picks up ideas which long had haunted the Paracelsans and the alchemists.14 But Bacon’s programme was based not on the philosopher’s stone but on the facts of industrial production. He proposed to reverse the whole course of human history as previously understood. When Karl Marx held forth hopes of an egalitarian classless society to the exploited, the idea of progress had already become a commonplace. But Bacon spoke to men for whom, for centuries, the dogma of the helplessness of fallen humanity had been axiomatic. Practice naturally had conflicted with theory. The craftsmen whom we have been considering, and the scientists who wrote for them, were optimists in practice. But Bacon gave them a theory which united a coherent optimism for humanity with a critique of Aristotle and the Schoolmen on grounds not only of their uselessness but also of their wickedness. ‘Such teachings, if they be justly appraised, will be found to tend to nothing less than a wicked effort to curtail human power over nature and to produce a deliberate and artificial despair. This despair in its turn confounds the promptings of hope, cuts the springs and sinews of industry, and makes men unwilling to put anything to the hazard of trial.’15 That went far beyond the criticisms of Aristotle and the scholastic philosophy which had become almost common form among radical Protestants: it turned the tables on the theological opponents of the new science; and yet Bacon rightly claimed only to be giving voice to opinions which were the product of time, not of wit. He wanted to draw up ‘a record of the highest mental and physical attainments of humanity, to balance the miseries of man copiously set forth by philosophers and theologians’.16 So Bacon unfurled the philosophic banner of the Moderns, not only against the Ancients and their defenders in the universities, but also against the theologians. Hakewill followed up Bacon in assuming that ‘the apprehension of [natural] truth helps to repair…the Fall’, and that ‘the first steps to enable a man to the achieving of great designs (p.82) is to be persuaded that by endeavour he is able to achieve it’. To Goodman’s argument that if we disparage the Ancients ‘the country boors may rise in sedition’, Hakewill replied that sedition was more likely if country people ‘be once persuaded that nothing can be improved by industry’.17 And Milton, who spoke up for the right of carpenters, smiths, and weavers to have a voice in the election of ministers, also thought that ‘the end…of learning’ was ‘to repair the ruins of our first parents’.18
II Bacon inherited from his pious parents, and imbibed from the world around him, Calvinist assumptions about the priority of faith over reason (the reason of the Schools—Bacon saw Aristotle as Antichrist)19 as well as about the necessity for strenuous effort. ‘All knowledge is to be limited by religion, and to be referred to use and action.’20 Speculative knowledge is a contradiction. Calvin elevated the power of God, whilst discouraging excessive speculation about his nature and attributes, which are unknowable and on which the authority of the Bible is final. Page 5 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians God is law.21 But the power of God is manifested in his creation. For Bacon ‘the works of God…show his omnipotency and wisdom, but do not partake of the image of the Maker’, and so science can teach us nothing about the divine mysteries.22 ‘If any man shall think, by view and inquiry into these sensible and material things, to attain to any light for the revealing of the nature or will of God; he shall dangerously abuse himself. Approaching and intruding into God’s secrets and mysteries’ was the cause of the Fall. ‘The contemplation of the creatures of God hath for end,…as to the nature of God, no knowledge, but wonder.’23 ‘Let us never…think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word or in the book of God’s works.’ But— and theologically this was a very big but indeed—‘let men beware that they apply both [study of the Bible and study of nature] to (p.83) charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together’.24 ‘The prejudice hath been infinite, that both divine and human knowledge hath received by the intermingling of the one with the other.’ ‘In aspiring to the throne of power, the angels transgressed and fell; in presuming to come within the oracle of knowledge, man transgressed and fell; but in pursuit…of…love…neither man nor spirit ever hath transgressed.’25 To endow the condition and life of man with new powers and works was a religious duty.26 This subsumes a long trend in Protestant thought, from Luther onwards, which equated charity with works done with intent to benefit the commonwealth or mankind:27 and so Bacon’s separation of science from religion, so vital for the future advance of science, was in the best Protestant tradition.28 This helped to free the scientists from not unfounded suspicions of witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, and atheism. When Sir Walter Ralegh said, ‘We have principles in our mathematics’, and wanted to apply them to a discussion of the human soul and the existence of God, he very naturally came under suspicion of atheism.29 Bacon turned the tables and created the mental climate in which John Wilkins could say, ‘Astronomy proves God and a Providence’, and confirms the truth of the Scriptures.30 It is thanks to Bacon that the father of the Royal Society ‘may be termed the English godfather of natural or moral religion’.31 It was not long before Sir William Petty could call an anatomy theatre ‘(without metaphor) a temple of God’.32 So Bacon gave the scientists’ activities a moral sanction more socially acceptable than mere utilitarianism. Although, as we have seen, there were links between Puritanism and the scientific spirit,33 their (p.84) ways had diverged. Bacon justified this separation, and showed to the satisfaction of the next generation that so far from there being any reason to fear science, the scientists glorified God in their calling no less than ministers in theirs. Religion, therefore, instead of opposing science, ‘should dearly protect all increase of natural knowledge’. Only unenlightened superstition or fanatical enthusiasm—popery or anabaptistry—could oppose scientific inquiry.34 Was Boyle writing as a radical Page 6 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Protestant or as a scientist when he called the members of the Invisible College ‘persons that endeavour to put narrow–mindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal good will can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment that they take the whole body of mankind for their care’?35 Puritans and scientists had long had enemies in common. Now they shared a cause and an idealism. It is no accident that Bacon always advocated moderation towards the Puritans, and in 1624 urged Buckingham not ‘to withdraw your favour from such as are honest and religious men’ simply because papists called them ‘Puritans’. ‘For of this kind is the greatest body of the subjects.’36 It is important to realize that this religious element in early Baconianism was genuine, though it lent itself so easily to later secularist developments. Bacon was not separating religion and science because he was a secret atheist who wished to be free to discuss science without interference from ignorant priests. The separation sprang from his Protestant beliefs, and was an inseparable consequence of his whole philosophy. Calvin himself assumed the importance of final and formal causes, and gave unusual significance to material and efficient causes. This was also the starting-point of Ramus’s logic, of which Bacon was well aware.37 What Bacon opposed was ‘controversies of religion’, which, he believed, ‘must hinder the advancement of science’.38 Bacon professed no such narrow utilitarianism as later went under his name. In this respect he was as little a Baconian as Karl Marx was a Marxist. In attacking academic separation of theory and practice he emphasized that ‘in natural philosophy practical results are not only the means to improve human wellbeing. They are also the guarantee of (p.85) truth…. Science too must be known by its works. It is by the witness of works, rather than by logic or even observation, that truth is revealed and established. It follows from this that the improvement of man’s lot and the improvement of man’s mind are one and the same thing.’ Practice, said Bacon over and over again, is the sole test of truth; ‘whether knowledge is possible or not must be settled not by argument, but by trying’.39 But ‘works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life’. All knowledge is corrupt that is not mixed with love. Bacon distinguished between the ‘vulgar and degenerate’ ambition of those who seek only their own power; the more dignified ‘though not less covetous’ ambition of those who laboured to extend the power and dominion of their own country; and on the other hand his own endeavour ‘to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe’.40 Knowledge should not be sought as ‘a couch, whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop for profit and sale’. It should rather be ‘a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Page 7 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Creator, and the relief of man’s estate’. ‘I do not mean, when I speak of use and action…the applying of knowledge to lucre.’ Men should seek knowledge Tor the benefit and use of life; and…perfect and govern it in charity’.41 We have not yet caught up with Bacon. In my first chapter, when I tried to visualize the world into which our self-taught, eager, self-confident artisans and merchants grew up, I distinguished between two generations: that before about 1614 and that after. The date was no doubt arbitrary: but there does seem to me to be a real difference between the turbulent achievement of the generation after the Armada, when Englishmen suddenly realized that they were (p.86) citizens of a nation equal to any other; the period in which virtually all that we call Elizabethan literature was written; and the second period of economic recession, of national humiliation in politics, of doubt and self-searching in literature. This failure of nerve of the traditional intellectuals was reinforced by the increasingly rigorous censorship, ‘this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish’.42 I suggested that in these decades the confident optimism of Bacon (and Hakewill) seemed strangely out of tune with the dominant mood. With the dominant mood of the intellectuals, the wits, the Inns of Court poets, the universities, true: but not, we can now see, with the mood of our inquiring artisans and merchants, so sure of their ability to expand their nation’s wealth, to remould its institutions, to extend its trade to unknown realms—if only the government would not hinder them. It was precisely this confidence in the expansive power of science and industry that Bacon expressed, a confidence which broke forth in ebullient speculation and discussion as soon as the prelatical censorship was overthrown. So now perhaps we can in some sort resolve the paradox from which we started.43 Before Bacon began to write there had been a great development of mathematics and astronomy in England, centred in London, especially around Gresham College. There had been a similar development of alchemy, traditionally associated with the craftsmen, into Paracelsan medicine, stimulated by the new industries and the use of new drugs in medicine. Both of these scientific trends had been expressed in a popular scientific literature which was anti-Aristotelean, utilitarian, and optimistic. There was also a powerful Puritan tradition, which was equally anti-authoritarian, opposed to Aristotle and the Schoolmen, inclined to separate reason and faith. The two scientific traditions and the Puritan tradition seem to have appealed to merchants and artisans, especially in London. What Bacon did was to join the three traditions, and to make of them an intellectual system. By so doing he immeasurably strengthened the scientific movement. But what he strengthened was a body of ideas which had pushed its way up from below. This applies particularly to the ideas of the Paracelsans. The universities were still the preserve of Aristoteleanism. Bacon spoke cautiously but plainly Page 8 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians when ‘in men of a devout policy’ he noted ‘an inclination to have the people depend upon God the more, when they are less acquainted with second causes; and to have no stirring in (p.87) philosophy, lest it may lead to an innovation in divinity, or else should discover matter of further contradiction to divinity’. These opinions are ‘the most effectual hindrance to natural philosophy and invention’.44 Here Bacon was hitting back at those political conservatives and vested interests which were the main opponents of popular science. Oxford and Cambridge, those clerical strongholds, had little use for Bacon until they had been purged. An occasional young radical like Milton might defend Baconianism in the sixteen-twenties; a former Gresham professor like Richard Holdsworth may have recommended some of Bacon’s works to his Cambridge pupils.45 But significant outward evidence of Bacon’s influence dates from after 1640. We still do not know how far this time-lag was the direct result of clerical censorship, how far it was due to the discouraging intellectual climate of the Laudian era.
III So far I have said nothing of Bacon’s political career, though much might be said. For Gardiner he was the Turgot of the English Revolution, the one man who might have averted it, a man whose political thinking was not inferior to his scientific thinking.46 In many respects Bacon’s ideas are closer to those of the Parliamentarians than to those of the kings whom he served. He shared the desire for war with Spain at sea, which many members of Parliament, Ralegh, and Coke expressed: since he was in favour of Tree trade into all parts of both East and West Indies’.47 ‘The wealth of both Indies’, he observed in the Essay ‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates’, ‘seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas.’48 For this reason Bacon shared Ralegh’s ambivalent attitude to the Netherlands: ‘We could not abandon them for our safety, nor keep them for our profit.’49 Nevertheless, like Ralegh, he expressed great admiration for their political and economic organization.50 Especially he approved of the fact that in the Netherlands ‘wealth was dispersed in many hands’; and those the hands ‘where there is likest to be the greatest sparing and increase, and not in those hands, wherein there useth to be greatest expense and consumption’. (p.88) For ‘those states are least able to aid and defray great charge for wars, or other public disbursements, whose wealth resteth chiefly in the hands of the nobility and gentlemen’. Bacon wanted an England where wealth ‘resteth in the hands of the merchants, burghers, tradesmen, freeholders, farmers in the country, and the like’.51 With Bacon’s uncompromising statement of the priority of bourgeois interests went an advocacy of economic liberalism—at least when Bacon was not acting as government spokesman.52 High corn prices, he said in 1592, would be a better inducement to convert land from pasture to tillage than all the penal laws that could be passed.53 He disliked the Cokayne Project, and urged its abandonment insistently.54 His remark to James that ‘trading in companies is most agreeable to the English nature’ as opposed to Tree or loose trade’ must be taken in its Page 9 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians context. Bacon was contrasting England with ‘that same general vein of a republic, which runneth in the Dutch, and serveth to them instead of a company’.55 The implication is that a republic would be better for trade. In view of this liberalism it is ironical that the campaign which led to Bacon’s fall started with an attack on monopolies, and then moved on to an onslaught by Cranfield and Coke on Chancery’s protection of insolvent debtors.56 Bacon did not ‘altogether mislike banks’, but he knew that they were regarded as incompatible with a monarchy: ‘they will hardly be brooked in regard of certain suspicions’.57 ‘Mechanical arts and merchandise’ flourish ‘in the declining age of a state’, Bacon thought; and he quoted without comment the view that Elizabeth’s reign saw ‘the declination of a monarchy’.58 His explanations of and remedies for sedition were almost all economic.59 His own policies aimed at economic self-sufficiency. He wanted the wilds of Scotland to be colonized, Ireland to be civilized, the Netherlands and their empire to be annexed.60 He shared Hakluyt’s view that England’s overpopulation was only relative: a resolute policy of fen drainage, cultivation of the wastes and commons, colonization of Ireland, expansion of the fishing industry, overseas trade, and the carrying trade would soon show that the problem was ‘rather of scarceness, than (p.89) of press of people’.61 This view did not become common in England until the late seventeenth century; but in the New Atlantis the growth of population was looked on with favour.62 Bacon’s defence of the Commons’ privileges in 1593, and his refusal to recant, impeded his career under Elizabeth. He told James in 1612 that, though ‘a perfect and peremptory royalist’, he believed he ‘was never one hour out of credit with the lower house’.63 When in 1614 the Commons decided that no attorney-general should sit in the House, they made an exception for Bacon. Even in 1617 Bacon was ‘ever for a Parliament’.64 In his Proposition touching… amendment of the common law (1616) he recommended that this reform should be entrusted to a commission named by Parliament, not to the one already appointed by James.65 So Bacon was right to think of himself as a good House of Commons man. Yet at an early date he had forebodings of ‘civil wars which seem to me about to spread through many countries—because of certain ways of life not long since introduced’.66 He hoped the advancement of learning might damp down religious passions and so prevent social upheaval. Bacon worked desperately to win royal favour for his scientific schemes, which, he told James without (in this case) flattery, ‘may be to this work [the Novum Organum] as much as an hundred years in time; for I am persuaded the work will gain upon men’s minds in ages, but your gracing it may make it take hold more swiftly’.67 But James, well–trained scholastic intellectual that he was, had no use for Bacon’s book: ‘It is like the peace of God, that passeth all understanding.’68 When in 1608 Bacon drew up a list of probable supporters, they included no one of the highest political standing—Sir Thomas Chaloner, Page 10 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Governor of Prince Henry’s household, through whom the Prince might be interested; Sir Walter Ralegh and the Earl of Northumberland, even then in the Tower, of whom Ralegh was executed in 1618; Thomas Hariot, their protege; Lancelot Andrewes (d. 1626), and Archbishop Abbot, disgraced in 1627.69 And when James failed him, what could a Charles I, a Buckingham, a Laud, make of Bacon’s plans, if indeed they ever tried to read them? (That we are dealing here not with some personal accident (p.90) affecting Bacon, but with social causes, is suggested by the similar fate of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Harvey, the royal physician, was an impeccable King’s man; but his discovery, announced in 1616, published in 1628, was little regarded in England —at least so far as the printed record goes—before 1640. During the interregnum, ironically enough, it was widely acclaimed.) The Baconians were Bishop Williams, Bacon’s literary executor, who was disgraced in 1625; opposition peers like Lord Brooke, who quoted Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo as well as Bacon;70 Sir John Eliot in the Tower. When in the sixteen-thirties Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius tried to give effect to Bacon’s plans, their most enthusiastic supporter was John Pym; backed by the Earls of Bedford, Essex, Leicester, Pembroke, Salisbury, and Warwick, by Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville, Lord Wharton, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Sir Thomas Barrington, Sir Nathaniel Rich, Sir William Waller, Sir Arthur Annesley, Sir John Clotworthy, John Selden, Oliver St. John. It is very nearly a list of members of the Providence Island Company. It is a list of the leaders of the opposition in the Long Parliament.71
IV We must pause for a moment over the Comenian group. Hartlib and Haak were connected with the scheme sponsored by four leading Puritan divines, Thomas Taylor, Richard Sibbes, John Davenport, and William Gouge, asking for financial help for Calvinist refugees from the Palatinate: Briggs seems to have acted as their agent in Oxford. The four divines were reprimanded by the Privy Council.72 George Harwood, merchant and Feoffee for Impropriations, John Bastwick the Independent martyr, and John White the Patriarch of Dorchester were also supporters of Dury and Hartlib.73 In 1634, when Dury went to Sweden in pursuit of Protestant unity, he had the support of a group of thirty-eight outstanding Puritan divines, including Richard Holdsworth,74 who is (p.91) said to have recommended Comenius’s writings to his pupils.75 Hartlib was later in touch with Alexander Henderson, the Scottish Commissioner in London.76 In May 1639 Hartlib was arrested and questioned in connexion with measures for ‘examining Puritan rogues, searching for their seditious papers and discovering their plots and villainies’.77 When the Long Parliament met the roles were reversed, and Hartlib was a witness against Laud in his trial for high treason.78 Hartlib was a friend of John Stoughton, a stalwart Puritan from Emmanuel College, who referred to Bacon as one of the principal pioneers of the new age, and was also a supporter of Comenius.79 Stoughton was under government surveillance in 1634 Page 11 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians because suspected of sedition. He left £25 to Hartlib in his will, the contingent remainder to Emmanuel. He was also a supporter of Dury.80 Hartlib, who originally came to England as a merchant, had useful connections by marriage in the City, and with gentlemen. His associations seem to have been mainly with the Independents. In 1644 he stimulated a reply to Thomas Edwards’s attack on the five Independent divines.81 In the revolutionary period he had a vigorous career as propagandist and pamphleteer, for which he was rewarded by the Commons with grants totalling £400 and a recommendation that he should be given a post in the University of Oxford in recognition of the gratitude owed to him not only by Parliament but by all ‘that are wellwishers for the advancement of learning’.82 Throughout his life Hartlib was passionately interested in mathematics and science. His friend Hezekiah Woodward issued a number of Baconian and Comenian pamphlets in (p.92) 1640–1. Hartlib knew Samuel Foster, probably as early as 1639,83 and was also a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, Robert Boyle, Seth Ward, and John Wallis; an admirer of Dee’s Preface to Billingsley’s Euclide, and of Jeremiah Horrocks’s work in astronomy.84 In 1649 Hartlib touted for Sir Balthazar Gerbier’s Academy, which included ‘experimental natural philosophy’ in its curriculum.85 John Dury was an hereditary rebel, whose Scottish father had been pastor at Leiden to the Presbyterian congregation of English and Scottish refugees. Dury was himself educated at Leiden University.86 He had early associations with Gresham College, to which in 1639 he was urging a learned Swede to leave his books and manuscripts.87 In 1642 he suggested that chairs of practical divinity should be established at the two universities, and in London at either Sion or Gresham College; and that there should be a popular lectureship in London ‘to teach the common people’ how to make use of Scripture.88 Parliament appointed him tutor of the King’s younger children, who were under the care of the tenth Earl of Northumberland, the son of Ralegh’s associate.89 In 1648 Dury was snubbed by the Assembly of Divines (of which he was a member) for co– operating with the radical John Goodwin in the publication of Acontius’s Satans Stratagems, favouring religious toleration.90 After the execution of Charles I, Dury acted as propagandist on behalf of the Commonwealth, to which he urged submission. He translated Milton’s Eikonoklastes into French. Dury was appointed to take charge of what had been Prince Henry’s library.91 He ‘practically started the first agitation in favour of admitting the Jews to England.92 He corresponded on the subject with Menasseh ben Israel, an old friend of Robert Boyle (Dury’s uncle by marriage) who later became a friend of Henry Oldenburg (Dury’s son–in–law).93 In 1653 Dury accompanied Whitelocke to Sweden. (p.93) He had considerable influence on Cromwell’s foreign policy, and acted as unofficial diplomatic agent for the Protector in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands.94 He thought that foreign missions should accompany merchants as they expanded the frontiers of English trade.95 Dury’s emphasis on practical divinity, on morals, and ethics to the exclusion of Page 12 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians theological controversy makes him with John Wilkins a forerunner of the latitudinarian thought of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.96 The programme on which Comenius, Dury, and Hartlib had been working throughout the thirties fused religious and Baconian aims. Dury in 1631 announced that the purposes of his travels included the observation of ‘all inventions and feats of practice in all sciences,…such as may be profitable to the health of the body, to the preservation and increase of wealth by trades and mechanical industries…’; and of all ‘arts and sciences philosophical, chemical and mechanical; whereby not only the secrets of disciplines are harmonically and compendiously delivered, but also the secrets of nature are thought to be unfolded’.97 He hoped to find out the ‘best experiments of industrial practices in husbandry and manufactures, and in other inventions…tending to the good of this nation’. Comenius thought Bacon’s Instauratio Magna ‘the most instructive philosophical work of the century now beginning’. To Bacon ‘we owe the first suggestion and opportunity for common counsels with regard to the universal reform of the sciences’.98 The Comenians advocated a system of universal education, though socially graded, together with a revolution in educational methods which would shift the emphasis from words to things, from learning by rote to the use of experiment, observation, and practice in the teaching of languages and science.99 Dury called for the establishment of an agency for the advancement of universal learning, which should be at once an institute of educational research with its own printing press, a ministry of education which would oversee all schools and schoolmasters, and an international correspondence centre ‘for the beating out of matters not yet elaborated in sciences’.100 In a sermon preached to the House of Commons in the first month of (p.94) the Long Parliament’s existence, John Gauden, chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, urged that Dury and Comenius should be invited to England. Eight months later, in July 1641, the invitation was issued, under the patronage of Williams, now Archbishop of York; of Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, soon to be invited to join the Westminster Assembly of Divines;101 of Lord Brooke, John Selden, and John Pym, now leader of the House of Commons. Dury and Comenius were to reform English education. Already religious tests had been abolished at the universities. On 15 June 1641 the Commons resolved that all the lands confiscated from deans and chapters should be devoted to the ‘advancement of learning and piety’.102 The Baconian phrase speaks for itself: so does the Baconian conception of state intervention to promote education. Comenius himself believed that Parliament would finance ‘the plan of the great Verulam respecting the opening somewhere of a universal college wholly devoted to the advancement of the sciences’.103 Macaria, by Hartlib’s protege Gabriel Plattes, was dedicated to Parliament in October 1641, in the hope that that ‘honourable court will lay the
Page 13 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians cornerstone of the world’s happiness’. Among other Baconian schemes, Macaria advocated medical research. Comenius was given the plans and inventories of several colleges to look over, with a view to one being assigned to him and his collaborators as the universal college which would make England the centre of European learning. Chelsea College was the favourite choice, the building in fact given to the Royal Society by Charles II in 1667. In a pamphlet dedicated to the Royal Society in 1668 Comenius referred to this when he said ‘the territory offered to us for the search for light has passed into your keeping, according to the great Word of Christ (applicable in its proper sense on this occasion), “Others have laboured and you have entered into their labours”’. The pamphlet which this dedication introduced, the Via Lucis, had been written in England in 1641–2 for private circulation: when Comenius published it he thought that the Royal Society’s work would be ‘the fairest part of those forecasts’ made in the Via Lucis.104 Hartlib similarly claimed in December 1660 that the Royal Society then in process of formation was a realization of ‘the grand design’ for which he had so often pleaded.105 (p.95) So we may accept the claim that the Comenian group in 1641 sowed the seeds from which the Royal Society was ultimately to grow. It was Hartlib’s protege, Theodore Haak, friend of Briggs,106 Greaves and other Gresham professors, as well as of Hunneades, Oughtred and Thomas Allen, who took the initiative in 1645 in calling together a scientific group deriving from the Gresham circle. Wallis, Wilkins, and many other later Fellows of the Royal Society participated in this group, which met in the rooms of Hartlib’s friend Samuel Foster at Gresham College. It was distinct both from Boyle’s Invisible College and from the many other interlocking groups discussing science and social reform in the mid-forties to which Hartlib was, in Boyle’s words, ‘midwife and nurse’. But Haak almost certainly saw his initiative as part of his Comenian activities.107 Haak had been a member of the Comenian group since at least 1638: in 1639–40 he corresponded on scientific and other subjects, on behalf of this group, with Mersenne. In the later sixteen-forties he acted as corresponding secretary for the Gresham group. In 1643–4 Haak was Parliament’s emissary to Denmark, anxious, as he said, to ‘do what I can in so good a cause as the Parliament’s’. He had a pension from the Long Parliament Tor the advancement of arts and learning’, and—like Dury’s—his allegiance did not weaken after the execution of Charles I. Haak gave paid service as correspondent and translator to both the Commonwealth and the Protectorate.108 In 1645 the Westminster Assembly of Divines (whose assistant clerk was John Wallis, also a member of the Gresham group and later Fellow of the Royal Society) asked Haak to translate the Dutch Bible and its marginal notes into English: this was ultimately published in 1657.109 Haak too became a Fellow of the Royal Society. At every stage his Page 14 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians career illustrates the connection between Puritanism, Parliamentarianism and science.110 Correspondence with (p.96) foreign scientists, to which Bacon and the Comenians had attached such importance, was taken over for the Royal Society by Henry Oldenburg, ‘the direct heir of the Comenius-Hartlib tradition in England’. Oldenburg was another German Protestant, who came to England in the sixteen-forties. He was associated with Hartlib then, with Petty and Boyle in Oxford in 1654–6. He became Dury’s secretary, later his son-in-law.111 Further evidence of Comenius’s influence on the founders of the Royal Society and their associates is to be found in the interest of Wilkins, Ward, Petty, Hartlib, Haak, Pell, Webster, and others in Comenius’s scheme for a ‘real character’. The Royal Society was later to support similar projects.112 Given this significance of the Comenian group in the origins of the Royal Society, the relations of its members with Gresham College on the one hand, and with Pym and the Parliamentary opposition on the other, acquire new importance. It is too often assumed that the appeal of Comenius’s plans for the Parliamentary leaders was primarily religious, but this will hardly bear investigation. The religious and scientific aspects of the programme of the Comenians were closely linked; and Hartlib himself, in one of his many unpublished papers showing preoccupation with Gresham College, called for abolition of the lectures in divinity, law, and rhetoric there and the substitution of lectures on technology.113 Neither of the standard biographies of Pym, nor the books of A. P. Newton or Professor Hexter, mention Pym’s interest in science or even his connexion with the Comenian group. Indeed his full correspondence with Hartlib still remains to be published. But since 1947 enough has been in print to show that reconsideration of this aspect of Pym’s career is called for. Pym subscribed money to Dury’s scheme for Protestant union (together with the Eastland and Mercers’ Companies); he also contributed generously to the support of Hartlib, his ‘intimate and familiar acquaintance’.114 Pym told Hartlib in 1636 that he would be glad to be ‘an instrument of any encouragement to that worthy man Comenius in those works and designs which he hath for the public good. As soon as it shall please God to restore to us liberty of commerce and intercourse, I (p. 97) shall be very desirous to consult with you how it may be done.’ Only his anxiety about the possibility of his letter being intercepted prevented Pym being more specific. He was ‘so affected’ to Comenius’s ‘undertakings’, he assured Hartlib two years later, ‘that if I were able I would support them alone, and I pray God to stir up those to be as forward who can do it with ease’.115 Pym’s interest was in the scientific and educational as well as the religious aspects of Comenius’s work. Pym was a great admirer of Bacon, especially of the Novum Organum.116 In 1637 he endowed a school for the parish of Brill, Buckinghamshire.117 In 1638–9 he was corresponding eagerly with Hartlib about a scheme for draining coal mines.118 The day before Comenius finally left England in June 1642, Pym found time, at the height of military and financial preparations for civil war, to write to Hartlib asking him ‘to consult with Mr. Page 15 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Comenius if he be not gone, as I hope he is not’ about the astronomical discoveries of Captain Marmaduke Nielson and his design to make a small model of the solar system ‘without all those chimaeras of epicycles and eccentrics by which the minds of young students are rather terrified than taught’.119 If we see the Comenians, together with Gresham College, as active agents in bringing together the group which later formed the Royal Society, as I think we must, then we should also see John Pym as one of the founding foster-fathers of the Royal Society. Comenius left England only when the threat of civil war had clearly postponed realization of the hopes of the Baconians. In 1641 the Commons resolved to appoint a Committee for the Advancement of Learning, but none seems in fact to have existed until 1653, when Jonathan Goddard was one of its members.120 In 1643 the Westminster Assembly, of which Dury was a member and Wallis the assistant clerk, supported the idea of a university in London. Anthony Burges, formerly Wallis’s tutor at Emmanuel, added the hope that ‘some collops might be cut out of deaneries and chapters for the cherishing of young scholars’.121 In (p. 98) 1641 the citizens of Manchester, with Fairfax’s support, had petitioned for a university, ‘many ripe and hopeful wits being utterly lost for want of education’. There were similar petitions from York, in 1641 and 1648. Universities were also proposed for Wales, Norwich, and Durham. Only at Durham was a College Tor all the sciences and literature’ established, with Hartlib on its committee. It lasted from 1657 to 1660.122 In 1658 there was a renewal of the project for an institution of learning or philosophical college, in which Hartlib, Dury, Boyle, and ‘our special friend’ Benjamin Worsley were involved, and towards which Richard Cromwell was said to be favourable.123 Next year a college was proposed for Westminster, which would teach (inter alia) optics, mechanics, physic, anatomy, chemistry, and the philosophies of Descartes and Gassendi.124 But the Restoration put a stop to all that.
V Bacon had hoped to ‘ring the bell which called the wits together’. Books could be and are written on his influence: we have already indicated some of it. But a few points may be drawn together in order to justify associating his influence with the English Revolution. Bacon’s emphasis on secondary causes and his relegation of direct divine intervention to a long-past historical epoch—this fortified and gave deeper significance to the Parliamentarian preference for the rule of law as against arbitrariness. Bacon himself attempted to evolve a universal science of jurisprudence. A similar emphasis on the law-abiding nature of the universe can be seen in the dominant school of Puritan theologians under Charles I, Preston and Ames. The new science, moreover, combined respect for law with a willingness to innovate that must have helped the radicals to shake off the dead (p.99) weight of tradition and precedent which hamstrung early Parliamentarian political Page 16 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians thinking. Robert Norman’s The Newe Attractive, Gilbert’s (unpublished) Physiologia Nova, and Bacon’s Novum Organum were only three examples of an emphasis on novelty from many that might be given.125 In his Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638) John Wilkins said it was the Devil who had persuaded mankind to believe that novelty was a sign of error.126 The association of Wilkins’s book with political radicalism is made clear by Heath’s lines, Nothing but fair Utopian worlds i’ the moon Must be new form’d by revolution.127
Bacon’s scientific method is the trial and error of the craftsmen raised to a principle. His theories suggested that reality could be changed by human effort. He drew men’s attention to the real world in which they lived, made them sceptical of armchair theorizing. Mere intellectual activity divorced from practice is a form of laziness and escapism: ‘to spend too much time in studies is sloth’.128 Here again the parallel with the Puritan effort to realize God’s kingdom on earth is valid. The Baconian attitude of mind would be hostile to all mere authority which would not submit to the test of use and experience. Bacon, like Nicholas Hill, insisted that men should reexamine the things that they took for granted, the apparently obvious and self-evident: with minds cleared of all prepossessions. A man steeped in Baconianism would, if he applied the method to politics at all, not be an unquestioning supporter of the status quo. He would be sceptical of most things except the test of practice—by their works ye shall know them. ‘I am certain of my way but not certain of my position’, Bacon said; as Cromwell was to say that he could tell what he would not have, though he could not what he would.129 Bacon’s principles would supply no political dogmas, but they might offer a guide to action. Even his errors had an historical significance. He grossly underestimated the complexity of the tasks he was setting humanity. The invention of all causes and sciences would be the labour of but a few years.’130 Marx made a similar mistake in thinking (p.100) that world revolution was just round the corner, Lenin in thinking that the classless society could be be realized in the lifetime of men who made the Russian Revolution: but in all three cases the apocalyptic vision acted as a stimulant to action which was its own justification. If Professor Butterfield is right to regard the emergence. of a new scientific civilization in the later seventeenth century as the greatest landmark since the rise of Christianity,131 then so far as England is concerned Bacon is clearly the decisive figure, and was recognized to be so in the seventeenth century (as he was for France in the eighteenth century).132 His ideas became widely influential during what used to be called the Puritan Revolution; yet their ultimate tendency was towards ‘a colossal secularization of thought in every possible realm of ideas’.133 The paradox is more apparent than real. I have already tried Page 17 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians to suggest the congruence of some of Bacon’s central ideas with the Protestant orthodoxy in which he grew up. The obverse of this would be to point out that the body of ideas which we call ‘Puritan’ was in fact far more complex and far more concerned with this-worldly matters than it has been usual to suppose.134 We must think not of scientists who happen to be Puritans (or for that matter, though much more rarely, Catholics), nor of Puritans whose theology looks forward to deism’, as we helplessly say: we must become aware of a single society in which Bacon really believed that science ‘is a singular help and preservative against unbelief and error’.135 An ardent Baconian of the sixteenfifties, the Rev. John Webster, thought that divinity should not be taught in schools, for religious truths came only through the spirit of God.136 Copernicus’s theory had ‘democratized the universe’ by shattering the hierarchical structure of the heavens; Harvey ‘democratized’ the human body by dethroning the heart.137 In the social sphere, Bacon’s method went ‘far to level men’s wits, and leaves but little to individual excellence’.138 (It is of interest that Nicholas Hill approved of ‘government by assemblies’.)139 The new experimental philosophy, of Robert (p.101) Norman no less than of Bacon, made all men equal, as Hobbes was soon to proclaim. One researcher was as good as another, and better than any mere speculative scholar. Every man could be his own expert. In just the same way the radicals used the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to justify preaching by laymen, and not merely by university-trained specialists. Bacon was in favour of careers open to the talents, recommending to the youthful Sir George Villiers ‘that which I think was never done since I was born,…which is that you countenance and encourage and advance able men, in all kinds, degrees, and professions’.140 It was a lesson which the Duke of Buckingham never learnt; but Oliver Cromwell did, ‘who carried the reputation of England higher than it ever was’ at any other time.141 Bacon’s method is based on personal observation, personal experience, as against the authority of books or learned men. ‘We have experience for our infallible and uncontrollable tutor’, wrote Captain Saltonstall in 1636, ‘which did not dwell all his days within the confines of a quiet closet.’142 ‘By your opinion’, Bishop Goodman exploded to Hakewill, ‘a man’s own experience is the best part of learning.’143 This is highly individualistic doctrine, and compares strictly with the Puritan demand for first-hand religious experience against the traditions of men. University divines preached ‘a dead doctrine’, said William Dell, ‘which other men have spoken, but themselves have no experience of’.144 ‘Men must speak their own experienced words, and must not speak thoughts’, Winstanley agreed.145 ‘Everyone who speaks of any herb, plant, art, or nature of mankind iś required to speak nothing by imagination, but what he hath found out by his own industry and observation in trial.’146
Page 18 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Science, like religion, is a co-operative activity: the test of the truth of experiment is social, in the sectarian congregations no less than in the community of scientists. ‘Faithfulness to experiment is not so different a discipline from faithfulness to experience’, said a professor of chemistry recently.147 Consider the following passage, written in 1582: (p.102) All their logic is in names and words, without any use…. But translate them into English, and you need not go to Cambridge to learn them…. You take away their wisdom if you speak so plain English. O ye merchants, strengthen your hands unto merchandise by this logic…. This is deep cookery, not to know how to dress and make ready all meats, but to know…what is a species and what is genus…. Their logic hath held them so long in learning what they should do that they have done little or nothing at all. That is not by a scientist; it is by Robert Browne, the father of Congregationalism.148 Such passages remind us of what Walwyn was to write in 1644: ‘The party who are now in arms to make us slaves consists…chiefly of such as have had esteem for the most learned arts men in the kingdom.’149 Consider again the advice given in 1604 by the Puritan Hugh Broughton to James I about translating the Bible: It was very needful that many others (mechanics and artificers) should be likewise at such a work;…geometricians, carpenters, masons, [should help for terms] about the temple of Solomon, gardeners, for all the boughs and branches of Ezekiel’s tree. Lectures should be given at Gresham College ‘upon the places of difficulty,…to be judged of all men’.150 Rather naturally, James did not accept the advice. John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers in Holland, said that ministers should not in anything ‘be obeyed for the authority of the commander, but for the reason of the commandment’.151 This reminds us of Harvey’s dictum, ‘I propose both to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature’152 ‘True knowledge of Christ’, wrote Thomas Taylor, ‘is experimental.’ It is acquired ‘not…by reading, not out of books or relations, as the physician knows the virtue of books by reading; but by experience of himself’.153 ‘Knowledge (p.103) without practice is no knowledge’, wrote the author of the marginal headings to Greenham’s Workes.154 To the converted, said Thomas Hooker, ‘things appear as they be…. Such judge not by outward appearance, as is the guise of men of corrupt minds, but upon experience, that which they have found and felt in their own hearts.’155 It should not surprise us that in New England ‘the Puritan clergy…were the chief patrons and promoters of the new astronomy, and of other scientific discoveries’.156 Page 19 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Here is a scientist again, John Wilkins: ‘It would be much better for the commonwealth of learning if we would ground our principles rather upon the frequent experience of our own than the bare authority of others.’157 This is from a religious politician, George Wither: Nor unto this assurance am I come By any apophthegms gathered from Our old and much-admired philosophers. My sayings are mine own as well as theirs: For whatsoe’er account of them is made, I have as good experience of them had.158
And here again is a religious merchant, Nicholas Ferrar, with the tone of disapproval to be expected after his conversion to a religion of ceremonies: ‘Our age verily hath taken it for a main principle of wisdom to give no credit to anything which is…without the compass of personal experience.’159 Finally, Gerrard Winstanley the Digger, most radical of political and religious thinkers: ‘All that I have writ concerning the matter of digging, I never read it in any book, nor received it from any mouth…before I saw the light of it rise up within myself.’160 When Milton in a noble passage of Areopagitica denounced the wealthy man who resolves ‘to find himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs’ and resign ‘the whole warehouse of his religion’, he was echoing Bacon, whether (p.104) consciously or not. ‘When men have once made over their judgement to others’ keeping’, Bacon had written, ‘and…have agreed to support some one person’s opinion, from that time they make no enlargement of the sciences themselves, but fall to the servile office of embellishing certain individual authors and increasing their retinue.’161 We can trace the influence of Bacon (or of the scientific spirit which Bacon summed up) on such influential thinkers as George Hakewill,162 John Robinson,163 Richard Sibbes,164 William Ames,165 Henry Jacie,166 Hugh Peter,167 William Dell,168 Thomas Goodwin,169 Samuel Gott,170 Richard Baxter,171 as well as on more obviously political figures like Sir Walter Ralegh,172 George Wither,173 Sir John Eliot,174 Lord Brooke,175 John Milton,176 William Walwyn,177 Richard Overton,178 Gerrard Winstanley,179 John Saltmarsh,180 Anthony Burges,181 William Petty,182 James Harrington.183 Even more significant perhaps are the Baconian assumptions which pervade the writings of popular Interregnum journalists like Marchamont Nedham and of essayists like Francis Osborn. In the popularization of Baconian and scientific ideas in England the forties and fifties seem to have been the decisive decades. More of Bacon’s works were published in England in 1640–1 than in all the 14 (p.105) years since his death.184 Most of them were on political and religious rather than on scientific subjects, but their tone would help to establish Bacon’s bona fides with the Page 20 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Parliamentarians. Hitherto his political record and his close association with the court must have cut him off from those who were to be his natural audience. The Essays, of which there had been seventeen editions by 1639, would not alter the picture of a cynical, worldly man. Bacon’s name frequently appears in almanacs after 1640; rarely before. This was at a time when almanacs themselves were beginning to appeal to a wider public, and to take up a more decidedly political attitude. Wilkins seems to have been the man who did most to popularize Bacon (and Galileo too).185 By 1649 Dury was able to say that ‘the advancement of learning hath been oftener, and in a more public way, at least mentioned in this nation of late than in former times, partly by the publication of those excellent works of the Lord Verulam’.186 Sir William Temple, at some date between 1690 and 1696, said that ‘the new philosophy had gotten ground in these parts of the world’ in the past fifty or sixty years.187 It was only after 1650 that Thomas Bushell, former servant, friend, and disciple of Bacon, thought it to his advantage to claim that his master had instructed him in ‘the theory of the mineral profession’. But the claim henceforth loomed large in his selfadvertisement.188 In his Britannia Baconica (1661) Joshua (p.106) Childrey confessed that ‘(Secundum Deum) he owes all this new knowledge to the Lord Bacon’.189 Few popular almanac writers before 1640 cared to commit themselves to the Copernican system;190 but the collapse of the censorship gave them a new confidence and willingness to speculate. By the sixteen-fifties the Ptolemaic system was dead. Henceforth the only question was whether Copernicus or Tycho Brahe was to succeed. Both Aubrey and Sir William Temple dated the end of belief in ‘fairies, sprites, witchcraft and enchantments’ to the revolutionary decades.191 ‘Till about the year 1649’, Aubrey tell us precisely, ‘’twas held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning.’ Civil wars, he added, ‘do not only extinguish religion and laws, but superstition’.192 In 1651 Harvey first clearly challenged the traditional belief in spontaneous generation (which even Bacon had stressed) with his omnia ex oυo.193 Three years later Thomas Washbourne, D. D., could assume that ‘surely Copernicus’s opinion’s true’, in a poem addressed to a lady.194 The Epicurean Walter Charleton, later Fellow of the Royal Society, spoke in 1657 of ‘those heroical wits among our countrymen, who have addicted themselves to the reformation and augmentation of arts and sciences, and made a greater progress in that glorious design than many ages before them could aspire to’. Great advances in natural philosophy, medicine, optics, astronomy, geometry, and chemistry had been made ‘by the ingeny and labours of men now living in England and as yet in the prime of their strength and years’.195 There had also been a change in intellectual habits. ‘Our late wars and schisms having almost wholly discouraged men from the study of theology, and brought the civil law into contempt, the major part of young scholars in our universities addict themselves to physic.’196 Marchamont Nedham agreed that more (p.107) Page 21 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians progress had been made in the profession of medicine since Bacon’s Advancement of Learning ‘than ever was done in the world before’, when men just commented on the Greek and Arab doctors. ‘Look but twenty years back’— this is 1665—’and you will say, never had any other science or art in the world such an advance and alteration in so short a time.’197 1642 was ‘the year of discoveries’.198 Just as the sectaries came up from underground and met publicly as soon as the hierarchy collapsed: so, as soon as the Laudian censorship broke down, the works of Bacon, Coke, Ralegh, and many more were freely published, discussed and commented on. London citizens and the ‘middling sort’ who formed the backbone of the Parliamentary armies had for nearly a century been discussing the new scientific ideas as well as claiming the right to elect ministers. They had learnt to reject the authority of Aristotle as well as of bishops, to rely on religious and scientific experiment, the test of their own independent critical senses. ‘They believe nothing except what they see’, said Dury of the Independents.199 It was the Duchess of Newcastle, wife of the beau idéal Cavalier, who preferred ‘rational arguments’ to ‘deluding experiments’.200
VI We might indeed suggest very tentatively a link between kinds of interest in science and degrees of political and religious radicalism. One of the earliest Baconians was John Robinson, pastor in the Netherlands to the Pilgrim Fathers.201 Hugh Peter, chaplain in Cromwell’s army, in 1646 told Parliament that the state should further ‘the new experimental philosophy’.202 Webster, who in the sixteen-fifties urged the introduction of chemistry into the universities, was also an army chaplain and advocate of religious toleration: other adherents of iatromechanism were Dell and James Harrington.203 Culpeper was as radical in politics as in medicine. He hoped in 1649 that English liberty would ‘within a few years’ be grasped at by ‘all the nations in Europe’. ‘Do you think times of knowledge will not come?’ he thundered at the College of (p.108) Physicians.204 The regicide John Cook suggested free medical treatment for the poor, the Baptist Samuel Hering a state-salaried free medical service.205 Chamberlen, another medical radical, observed that ‘rich men are none of the greatest enemies to monarchy’, and called for public works to relieve unemployment.206 It is perhaps no accident that the three men whom Margaret James singled out as really anxious to improve the lot of the poor during the Revolution—Hartlib, Chamberlen, and Gerbier—all have a place in our story.207 The Commonwealth’s Council of State said in September 1650 that it was ready to receive, and give all possible furtherance to, propositions for the reforming of schools.208 The Barebones Parliament had its Committee for the Advancement of Learning. The Independent army tried to stop the Scottish Kirk persecuting witches, and Cromwellian rule led to increased revenues for Scottish universities and to the setting up of a College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The salaries of Page 22 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Professors of Astronomy and Physic at Oxford were augmented.209 The first article on flying to appear in an English newspaper was in the Leveller Moderate. The story (from Warsaw) of a proposed flying machine was presented seriously as ‘a matter of delight and pleasure’, especially to those who ‘have studied the mathematics’. The conclusion was appropriately Baconian, when we recall that the Moderates readers would be mainly London artisans: ‘Experience daily shows us that nothing is impossible unto man, but that through labour and industry the most difficult things at length may be obtained.’210 The Leveller Richard Overton, who had read Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Ambrose Pare, suggested (not very seriously) an experiment to test the immortality of the soul.211 The Leveller William Walwyn explained religious experience in psycho-physical terms: excessive fasting might (p.109) lead to visions and ecstasies.212 The Quakers Edward Burrough and George Fox called for a laboratory analysis to see whether bread and wine really could be transformed into body and blood.213 The troops who guarded Charles I called him ‘Stroker’, ‘in relation to that gift which God had given him in curing the [King’s] evil’.214, Winstanley, the most radical of all politically, wanted Gresham– type lectures on natural science to replace the Sunday sermon in all parishes.215 If we recall the analogy which has been drawn between the sermons of seventeenth-century lecturers and an adult education course today,216 we can see Winstanley’s idea as a logical development of radical puritanism. Under the Commonwealth the ‘mechanicians’ saw with delight the purge of royalists and drones from the universities; the former bastion of clericalism and royalist stronghold, Oxford, became for a few years a centre of Baconian science. We can understand the deep historical roots of the contempt which many radicals felt for Oxford and Cambridge. The dons tried to pretend that this was mere levelling, the hostility of the ignorant vulgar towards learning as such; but it was rather hostility to the maintenance of vested interests which opposed new ideas, and to the emphasis on formal education, rather than experience, in training ministers. Nor was it dictated merely by religious fanaticism: it drew much more on the Paracelsan and utilitarian traditions of popular London science. ‘Who are our jailors?’ Nicholas Culpeper asked in 1651. ‘I say scholars.’217 Similar considerations apply to Bacon’s apparent distrust of reason in devising theories, and his insistence on the primacy of experiment and direct observation of material things. ‘Reason’ had become so inextricably associated with scholasticism that the distinction was as natural and necessary as it had been in the Reformation.218 Bacon would no doubt have agreed with Milton’s ‘Down Reason then, at least vain reasonings down’. (p.110) Much of the denigration of the interregnum Baconians by the defenders of the universities stemmed from this. Historians have accepted too easily the contention that men like Hartlib and his friend John Hall, George Snell, John Webster, Noah Biggs, William Dell, Page 23 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Nicholas Culpeper, John Saltmarsh, George Stanley, William Sprigge, Hugh Peter, William Walwyn, and Gerrard Winstanley were mere religious fanatics. Yet there are distinctions to be drawn, which I suggested when I associated mathematics and astronomy with London merchants and Gresham College, chemistry with artisans and religious radicals.219 There was no chair of chemistry at Gresham. On the contrary: John Argent, Gresham Professor of Physic from 1615 to 1655, was also President of the College of Physicians. The Parliamentarian scientists who ‘Gresham-ized’ Oxford had no thought of introducing chemistry there. Ward thought ‘agriculture, mechanic chemistry, and the like’ unsuitable for the sons of the nobility and gentry.220 The supercilious Sir William Temple ‘always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose’.221 Chemistry, excluded from the universities, did not succeed in shaking off either its lower-class subversive aura, or its alchemical and magical fancies.222 Many of the critics of the universities were moderate men. John Hall was a friend of Hobbes as well as of Hartlib. The title of his An Humble Motion to the Parliament of England concerning the Advancement of Learning and Reformation of the Universities (1649) demonstrates his Baconian approach. Hall wanted new chairs in chemistry and anatomy, and the endowment of research, especially in mathematics, science, and medicine.223 (The bishops had opposed research in the universities,224 and even Bacon had thought of Solomon’s House as a separate research institute.) Hall was also critical of the universities’ neglect of history, and himself wrote Of the Advantageous reading of History (1657).225 He opposed censorship, and wanted England to imitate the Dutch by importing learned foreigners. He was an admirer of Samuel Ward and other Cambridge Puritans.226 Hall acted as contact man between Hartlib and (p.111) the Cambridge Platonists.227 He himself translated some of Comenius’s works. Under the Commonwealth he was an official government pamphleteer, at a salary of, £100 a year. In 1649 he employed the astrologer William Lilly to run the government paper Mercurius Rusticus.228 Webster quoted Dee’s Preface to Billingsley’s Euclide, and praised Briggs, Napier, Gilbert, Harvey and Hobbes, as well as Bacon and Comenius.229 He wanted universities to provide laboratories as well as libraries, and work in the fire as well as building castles in the air’. Later he defended the Royal Society and attacked belief in witches.230 Dell hoped to see universal education, with new state-maintained universities in London, York, Bristol, Exeter, Norwich, and the like. At these universities intellectual should be combined with manual labour.231 His main concern was, and was recognized by his enemies to be, the provision of better educational opportunities for ‘townsmen’s children’.232 In 1648 Petty, who later became Commonwealth Surveyor of Ireland and Professor of Anatomy in purged Oxford, proposed (to Hartlib) a university in London. He Page 24 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians also recommended literary workhouses’ for poochildren and ‘colleges of tradesmen’, where able mechanicians should be subsidized whilst performing experiments. He wanted more vocational training.233 Hartlib in his turn hoped Petty would be seconded to Gresham College to advance experimental science there. He became Gresham Professor of Music in 1650. When Bacon attacked theologians who dwelt on the irresistible power of sin, he had been interested primarily in clearing the decks for scientific and industrial advance. He drew no political conclusions. But his successors did, when in the freer atmosphere of the revolutionary decades sin became the great deterrent of conservative preachers. ‘It is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers-on’, Bacon wrote in criticism of Aristotle’s emphasis on contemplation. Milton no doubt recalled the passage when at the height of the civil war he refused to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue that held men back from political struggle.234’ To (p.112) look for a first cause beyond the chain of natural causes is to abandon the principle of causation, Bacon had thought, and to fly from solid knowledge into a realm of fantasy.235 Winstanley carried the idea rather further: To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what He will be to a man after the man is dead, if any otherwise than to scatter him into his essences of fire, water, earth, and air of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body.236 Bacon’s Utopian vision of undoing the consequences of the Fall was restricted to scientific activity. But Winstanley asked ‘Why may not we have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too?’237
VII It was only natural that when the scientists were ejected from Oxford in 1660 they should regroup round Gresham College, and that four of the twelve founding members of the Royal Society should be Gresham professors. The Society’s meetings were symbolically held in the building ‘once the mansionhouse of one of the greatest merchants that ever was in England’.238 Natural philosophy, Hobbes observed, is ‘removed from Oxford and Cambridge to Gresham College in London, and to be learned out of their gazettes’.239 Samuel Butler referred to Sprat as ‘the historian of Gresham College’, and many others spoke of Gresham College when they meant the Royal Society.240 Once Gresham College had given birth to the Royal Society it decayed as an independent institution—as though its task was completed. So the radicals were defeated, but science survived. ‘All before 1650 is ancient’, the historian of technology declares, ‘all after modern.’241 Charles II, wiser than his father and grandfather, became the patron of science. So far from bishops continuing to oppose the onward march of science, the leading scientists— Page 25 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians Cromwell’s brother-in-law included (p.113) —now became bishops: ‘to get his former errors forgot’, said Burnet, explaining Seth Ward’s ‘high-flown notions of a severe conformity’ after 1660; Tor prevention of those panic causeless terrors’, said Joseph Glanvill, thinking of the need to reassure old-fashioned men that science was now respectable.242 In 1663 a bishop could still reject the Copernican hypothesis;243 but by the end of the century the Archbishop of Canterbury was a Baconian.244 Robert Boyle told gentlemen scientists that they must ‘converse with tradesmen in their workhouses and shops’. It was ‘childish and…unworthy of a philosopher’ to refuse to learn from craftsmen.245 ‘By the beginning of the third quarter of the century’ Bacon ‘was not unjustly dubbed by his opponents a “dictator” of philosophy.’ With Locke, ‘Bacon’s most considerable philosophical disciple’, Baconianism bore down all its rivals.246 John Ray, who had been born in 1627, said in 1690 that it was within his lifetime that vain and empty scholasticism had been replaced by a new and solid philosophy based on experiment.247 Intellectual life in England was freer after and because of the Revolution than it had been before. Take the Marquis of Halifax as a witness: The liberty of the late times gave men so much light, and diffused it so universally among the people, that they are not now to be dealt with as they might have been in an age of less inquiry…. Under-standings…are grown less humble than they were in former times, when the men in black had made learning such a sin for the laity, that for fear of offending they made a conscience of being able to read. But now the world is grown saucy, and expecteth reasons, and good ones too, before they give up their own opinions to other men’s dictates, though never so magisterially delivered to them.248 And yet—not all of Baconianism had triumphed. The Royal Society was a private body: Bacon’s House of Solomon had controlled the economy and the whole social order.249 The educational enthusiasm of (p.114) the Baconians achieved great things during the Revolution, though not as much as they had hoped. Hartlib by 1650 had come to despair of changing the mental attitude of adult Englishmen, and put all his hope in educating the younger generation.250 But at the Restoration all the Parliamentarian reforms in this sphere were swept away, and the Royal Society had little to say about their master’s educational programme. After 1660 it falls into the background.251 Oxford and Cambridge survived virtually unchanged, and freed themselves from the scientists. Scientific radicals like Webster were driven into the nonconformist underworld. The Hon. Robert Boyle dropped Hartlib at the Restoration because of his radical associations, and neither Hartlib nor Dury became Fellows of the Royal Society.252 A vigorous attack was mounted against the scientists, specifically because of their Parliamentarian connexions. Their opponents were apt to attribute to the revolt from traditional thought all the religious and political Page 26 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians manifestations of revolution. Bacon, said the renegade Henry Stubbe, created ‘in the breasts of Englishmen such a desire of novelty as rose up to a contempt of the ancient ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction and the old government, as well as the governors of the realm; and the root of all our present distractions was planted by his hand’.253 Robert South, former panegyrist of Oliver Cromwell, used the occasion of the dedication of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford (built by a F.R.S.) for satirical invectives ‘against Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal Society, and new philosophy’.254 ‘Plebeians and mechanics’, said Bishop Parker, ‘have philosophized themselves into principles of impiety, and read their lectures of atheism in the streets and high ways.’255 Royal, aristocratic, and episcopal patronage were necessary before the Society’s position was secure: the propaganda of Sprat’s History, playing down the Greshamite and Parliamentarian origins of the Society, was a necessary part of the campaign, bewildering though historians have found the discrepancies between it and other accounts, either less (p.115) official or published when the danger was over.256 But the price paid was a high one. Sprat had to emphasize that experimental science embodied no threat to the Church of England, to the nobility and gentry; he hushed up the educational aspirations of the Baconians during the Revolution, and even argued that the scientists saved Oxford from Puritan destruction.257 The gentry were lured into the Royal Society, which needed them for financial as well as social reasons. Anyone of the rank of baron was automatically accepted if he wished to honour the Society by becoming a Fellow. Some of the Fellows—Sir John Berkenhead for instance— would seem more conspicious for their opposition to than for their interest in science.258 The Society became more utilitarian than Bacon would have wished, pushing to its extreme the attitude implied in Boyle’s remark about his Comenian associates: ‘Our College values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency to use.’259 But at the same time the Royal Society became more dilettante too. The narrowly patriotic note which is struck in Sprat’s History contrasts oddly with Bacon’s theory (if not his practice) and with Comenius’s internationalist and anti-imperialist Angelus Pads, published in the same year 1667.260 And as the century advanced, so—perhaps in reaction to the utilitarianism and dilettantism of the amateurs—the science of the professionals became increasingly dominated by abstract mathematics. This too was a very different emphasis from that of Bacon, with its unified vision of science working for the glory of God and the relief of man’s estate. The Royal Society brought together some great scientists in the later seventeenth century, with benefit to all of (p.116) them: but it did not establish the Utopia of which Bacon, Milton, and Comenius had dreamed, still less that of Winstanley. It was the dissenting academies rather than the Royal Society that carried the radical Baconian tradition on to the Industrial Revolution which Bacon had in part foreseen.
Page 27 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians But one aspect of the pre-Baconian scientific inheritance the Royal Society did take over more effectively than Bacon himself. Sprat defined the Society’s ideal of prose as ‘mathematical plainness…, the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants.’261 This hardly describes Bacon’s terse but pregnant style— though Sprat spoke of it with approval. But it is a literal description of the prose of the popular scientists, who wrote plainly and straightforwardly because they were writing for ‘men that are simple and unlearned’.262 It describes too some of the best prose assembled by Richard Hakluyt in his epic, prose written again by plain merchants and navigators for their fellows. The connection between science and the new prose was noted by Earle as early as 1628. His ‘selfconceited man’ ‘prefers Ramus before Aristotle and Paracelsus before Galen, and Lipsius his hopping style before either Tully or Quintilian’.263 The Puritan divines, and later the sectarian, Leveller and Digger pamphleteers, similarly had to master the style of merchants and artisans, because it was for them that they wrote. Richard Holdsworth, who taught his pupils a ‘plain, easy, and familiar style’ stands at the junction of the Puritan and Gresham trends towards a simpler prose. Wilkins similarly personifies the fusion of Puritan and scientific influences. His Ecclesiastes (1646) was a popular handbook to plain preaching; and his scientific treatises set an example which many followed.264 Professor Bush remarked that it might be taken as allegorical that this father of the Royal Society was father-in-law of Tillotson.265 The allegory is the more complete if we reflect that Wilkins was also the grandson of the (p.117) great Puritan preacher and pamphleteer Decalogue Dod, great-grandson of the Sabbatarian Nicholas Bownde—and Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law as well. Here too the triumph of science saw the triumph of the standards of the common man over those of his social superiors; and English became a language in which Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift could write. Notes:
(1) See p. 105 below. (2) W. Gilbert, De Magnete, Preface. A reaction has recently set in against attempts to discount Bacon’s original contribution to scientific thinking. See J. R. Partington, ‘Chemistry as Rationalized Alchemy’, Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science, i. 131–2; History of Chemistry, ii (1961), 389–414. (3) Cf. H. P. Bayon, ‘William Gilbert (1544–1603), Robert Fludd (1576–1637) and William Harvey (1578–1657) as Medical Exponents of Baconian Doctrine’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, xxxii. 39. (4) Bacon In Praise of Knowledge, in Works (1826), ii. 118–21. On the inadequacy of medieval academic science because of its divorce from technology, see A. C. Crombie, ‘Quantification in Mediaeval Physics’, lsis, lii. 154, 159–60. (5) Bacon, Works, iv. 11, 77; iii. 221. Page 28 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (6) See pp. 82–85 below. (7) Bacon, Works, iv. 79. Here and elsewhere I have sometimes made use of the translation of Professor B. Farrington (Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Industrial Science, 1951, p. 91). (8) Bacon, Works, iv. 32. (9) Bacon, Works, iii. 221. (10) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), ii. 553–4. (11) J. Hall, An Humble Motion to the Parliament of England concerning the Advancement of Learning and the Reformation of the Universities (ed. A. K. Croston), 1953, p. 21. First published 1649. (12) Valerius Terminus, passim, in Works, iii 217–52 (13) Works, iv. 21, 247–8. (14) Haydn, The Counter–Renaissance, pp. 191, 250–1, 516–19. See also G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 375–7, 857, for ‘restitutionism’ in Anabaptist thought. See pp. 86–87, 265 below. (15) Bacon, Works, iii 592–4; cf. iv. 90; v. 317–18. (16) Ibid. iv. ii, 77, 314–35. (17) Hakewill, Apologie, p. 17, sig. a 3, ii. 132; cf. pp. 20–23, ii. 319. The view sometimes expressed, that Hakewill owes little to Bacon, will not bear examination, I think. Direct quotations are relatively few (e.g. pp. 42, 221, 261, 302); but as in the above passages, the Baconian spirit is everywhere. (18) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), i. 934; ii. 366–7. (19) Bacon, Works, iii 567 See p. 109 below. (20) Ibid. iii 218 (21) J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. H. Beveridge, 1949), i. 57, 235–7; ii. 227, 577. Cf. Luther: ‘A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned; not by thinking, reading or speculating’ (M. Luther, Werke, Weimar, 1883, v. 163, quoted by E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 1959, p. 245; cf. p. 222). (22) F. H. Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago U.P., 1948), pp. 153, 212, and references there cited. (23) Bacon, Works, iii 218. Page 29 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (24) Anderson, op. cit., pp. 54–55, and references there cited. (25) Bacon, Works, iii 217. (26) Ibid iii. 298; iv. 24, 104, 114. (27) See my ‘Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism’, in Essays in the Social and Economic History of Tudor and Early Stuart England, presented to R. H. Tawney (1961), pp. 15–39. (28) It was not peculiar to Bacon. Nicholas Hill in his Philosophia Epicurea (1601) was convinced that organized religion was unfriendly to scientific investigation. Men should ‘accept angelic revelation, but spit back ecclesiastical traditions’ (quoted by G. McColley, ‘’Nicholas Hill and the Philosophia Epicurea’, Annals of Science, iv. 400). This is one of the many passages that make one doubtful of Hill’s alleged Roman Catholicism. See p. 130 below. (29) Ed.G. B. Harrison, Willobie His Avisa (1594) (1926), p. 267. Cf. pp. 152–3 below. (30) J. Wilkins, A Discourse concerning a New Planet (1640), pp. 237–40, quoted by G. McColley, ‘The Ross–Wilkins Controversy’, Annals of Science, iii 161. As we saw above (p. 60), Wilkins was less sure of the literal truth of the Bible. (31) McColley, op. cit., pp. 155, 186. Wilkins became a bishop, and his posthumous Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion was published in 1675 by the future Archbishop Tillotson. It ran to six editions in thirty–five years. (32) Ed.Lansdowne Petty Papers (1927), ii. 172. (33) See pp. 22–27 above. (34) Anderson, op. cit, p. 95. (35) R. Boyle, letter of 1647, in Works (1744), i. 20. (36) Bacon, Works, xiv. 448–9. (37) For an early example of the religious uses of Baconianism, see a letter from Dr. William Gilbert to Archbishop Ussher (1638), in Parr, Life of…Usher, ii. 493– 4. (38) Letter of 10 October 1609 to Tobie Mathew, in Works, xi. 138. (39) Farrington, op. cit, pp. 68, 97–98. (40) Ibid., pp. 45, 148, 7.
Page 30 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (41) Anderson, op. cit., p. 96, and references there cited. In this religious utilitarianism Bacon recalls Fulke Greville, who wrote: Use therefore must stand higher than delight, The active hate a fruitless instrument: So must the world those busie idle fools That serve no other market than the Schools… I wish all curious sciences let blood.
(F. Greville, A Treatie of Humane Learning, in Poems and Dramas, ed. G. Bullough, i. 170.) Cf. G. Bullough, ‘Bacon and the Defence of Learning’, in 17th Century Studies presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1938): ‘Musophilus worthily anticipates The Advancement of Learning’ (p. 13). For Greville see pp. 120–23, 157 below. (42) Milton, complete Prose Works (yale ed.), i.820. (43) See pp. 15–16 above. (44) Bacon, Works, iii 500. See p. 166 below. (45) Milton, the second and third Prolusions; Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, p. 133. See Appendix. (46) D.N.B., Bacon. (47) Bacon, Works, xiv. 22–28, 446, 460–5, 469–505. For Ralegh and Coke see pp. 138–48, 208–10 below. (48) Ibid. vi. 451. Cf. Ralegh, quoted on p. 150 below. (49) Ibid. vii. 177. See p. 144 below. (50) Ibid, vi, p. 405, 410. See pp. 144, 150, 249 below. (51) Bacon, Works, vii. 60–61; vi. 406, 446–7; viii. 172–4. Cf. the well–known passage in The History of King Henry VII on the yeomanry with Ralegh’s views on the subject (pp. 174–5 below). ‘And yet’, Bacon observed, ‘where men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry, it multiplieth riches exceedingly’ (Bacon, Works, vi. 461). (52) Contrast Bacon, Works, xi. 97–104, with x. 308, 346–61. (53) W. H. R. Curtler, Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land (1929), p. 123. (54) Bacon, Works, xii. 171–2, 236–8, 256–9; xiii. 171. (55) Bacon, Works, xii. 259. My italics. Page 31 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (56) R. C. Johnson, ‘Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield’, H.L.Q. xxiii. 311–12. (57) Bacon, Works, vi. 476. (58) Ibid. vi. 517. (59) Ibid. vi. 409–10, 430. (60) Ibid. iii 144; xi. 74. The Rump did its best to carry out this programme. (61) Ibid. x. 312–13. See pp. 138–9, 266 below. (62) Ibid. iii. 149. See M. Campbell, ‘Of People either too few or too many’, in Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in honour of Wallace Notestein (ed. W. A. Aiken and B. D. Henning, 1960), pp. 169–202. (63) Bacon, Works, xi. 280. (64) Ibid. xii. 31–33; xiii. 233. (65) Ibid. xiii. 61 ff. (66) Anderson op. cit, p. 11. My italics. (67) Bacon, Works, xiv. 120. (68) Ed.N. E. McClure, Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 339. (69) Bacon, Works, xi. 23. For Chaloner, Northumberland, and Hariot see pp. 191, 125–30 below. (70) Bush, English literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (2nd ed., 1962), p. 358. (71) R. F. Young, Comenius in England (1932), pp. 6, 41–46, 59–60; cf. Young, Comenius and the Indians of New England (1929), pp. 6–10, 23; G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (1947), passim. Dury married a connexion of Sir John Clotworthy’s. Leicester was Sir Philip Sidney’s nephew. (72) Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib (1920), p. 34; cf. pp. 77, 128, for Hartlib’s links with Puritan ministers; J. M. Batten, John Dury (Chicago U.P., 1944), p. 52, for Dury’s. (73) Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, pp. 20, 128, 187; F. Rose–Troup, John White, the Patriarch of Dorchester (New York, 1930), p. 47. (74) G. Westin, Negotiations about Church Unity, 1628–34 (Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift, 1932, Band I), p. 207; cf. Massachusetts Hist. Soc. Collections, vii. 504.
Page 32 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (75) Curtis op. cit., p. 132; see pp. 274–5 below. (76) D. Masson, Life of John Milton (1859–94), iii. 219–20. (77) Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, p. 16. (78) Prynne, Canterburies Doome, pp. 539–42. (79) J. Stoughton, Felicitas Ultimi Saeculi (1640), p. 34 and passim, a letter to Tolnai, published after Stoughton’s death by Hartlib, with dedication to George Rakosi. See pp. 53–54 above. (80) J. C. Whitebrook, ‘Dr. John Stoughton the Elder’, Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc, vi. 96, 105–7, 182–5. Stoughton was also associated with John White of Dorchester in handling funds for suppressed ministers, including those in New England. Stoughton’s brother emigrated to New England, returned in 1643 and served as a lieutenant–colonel in the Parliamentary army. Stoughton himself was the stepfather of Ralph Cudworth, and took great pains with his education. Another stepson of Stoughton’s, James Cudworth, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1632 (Ibid., pp. 92–99, 179–84). Ralph Cudworth, a marked Puritan under Charles I, preached before the House of Commons in 1647 and remained closely associated with Cromwell and Thurloe in the sixteen–fifties. He was keenly interested in science and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Like the other Cambridge Platonists he aspired to create a philosophy which could accept the findings of modern science. He had links with Locke and Newton (Tulloch, op. cit., ii. 203–10; J. A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, 1951, pp. 2, 79). For Hartlib’s relations with Cudworth and More see also The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worihington, ed. J. Crossley, i (Chetham Soc, 1847), passim; Tulloch, op. cit., ii. 90, 427. (81) Masson, Life of Milton, iii. 193, 230–1. (82) C.J. iv. 588; v. 131. Hartlib was appointed to no position in Oxford. (83) Turnbull, ‘Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the early history of the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, x. 108. (84) R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby, p. 259; Worthington, Diary, i. 59–60, 124– 5, 130–1; ii. 226; Bush, op. cit, pp. 18–20. The early Fellows of the Royal Society shared Hartlib’s interest in Horrocks (Add. MSS. 6193, ff. 114–15). Horrocks’s posthumous works were published by Wallis in 1673. (85) H. R. Williamson, Four Stuart Portraits (1949), p. 52. (86) Batten, John Dury, pp. 12–14. (87) Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, p. 196. Page 33 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (88) Dury, A Motion Tending to the Publick Good of This Age and of Posteritie (published by S. Hartlib, 1642), sig. C 3–3v. (89) Batten, op. cit., p. 113. See p. 128 below. (90) Ibid., pp. 110–11. See p. 157 below. (91) See p. 192 below. (92) L. Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (Jewish Historical Soc, 1901), pp. xxii–xxviii, xliii; Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), vii. 240–4—a letter form Dury to Hartlib. (93) Batten, op. cit., pp. 140–1; C. Roth, The Resettlement of the Jews in England in 1656 (Jewish Historical Soc, 1960, pp. 12, 23). In 1659 Dury and the Baptist Henry Jacie were working together to collect money for Jews endangered by the war between Sweden and Poland (Anon., The Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 1671, pp. 75–77). (94) Batten, op. cit., Chapters VII–VIII, passim. (95) Ibid., p. 139. (96) Ibid., pp. 92, 132. See p. 83 above for Wilkins. (97) Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, pp. 10–13. (98) S. S. Laurie, John Amos Comenius (1899), pp. 69, 92; R. H. Syfret, ‘The Origins of the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, v. 103–4, 112–13. (99) Dury, A Seasonable Discourse (1649), p. 8; Batten, op. cit., pp. 92–93, 112– 13, 136–7. (100) Dury, The Reformed Library Keeper (ed. R. S. Granniss, Boston, 1906), p. 49 (first published 1650); A Seasonable Discourse, sig. D–D 4v. (101) For Ussher’s interest in the Comenians’ schemes see Parr, Life of Usher, ii. 546, 557, 623–4. For the ‘Puritan’ bishops, including Bedell, who supported them, see C.S.P.D., 1640, pp. 568–70; Turnbull, ‘Letters written by John Dury in Sweden, 1636–38,’ Kyrkohislorisk Arsskrifi, 1949, pp. 225 ff. (102) C.J. ii. 176. There were several other resolutions to the same effect. (103) Young, Comenius in England, pp. 53–55. (104) Syfret, op. cit., pp. 116–17, I have drawn heavily on this admirable article for this and the four following paragraphs.
Page 34 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (105) Worthington, Diary, i. 248–9; cf. p. 342. (106) Briggs’s MSS. commentaries on Ramus’s Geometry were in Haak’s possession (Barnett, Theodore Haak, The Hague, 1962, p. 79). (107) Turnbull, ‘Samuel Hartlib’s Influence’, passim; Syfret, op. cit, pp. 120–37; Barnett, Theodore Haak and the early years of the Royal Society’, Annals of Science, xiii. 212; Johnson, ‘Gresham College’, J.H.I. i, passim; Batten, op. cit., p. 134; Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in 17th century France, p. 274. (108) P. R. Barnett, Theodore Haak, passim, esp. pp. 52–53, 65, 91–93, 107–11. In the early stages of the Revolution indeed, before Parliament developed its own civil service, it was greatly dependent on foreigners. Haak in Denmark reported back to his friend the German poet Weckherlin, Secretary to the Committee of Both Kingdoms and Latin Secretary—a post in which he preceded and succeeded Milton. Weckherlin was also a friend of Hartlib’s. See p. 157 below for another example—Dorislaus. This international aspect of the English Revolution might repay further investigation. (109) Haak had translated English religious works into German before the civil war; he also translated at least the first three books of Paradise Lost into the same language (Barnett, op. cit., pp. 13, 71–72, 115, Chapters XHI–XV passim). (110) Cf. also Syfret op. cit., pp. 89, 129; Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib pp. 48–51; ‘Samuel Hartlib’s influence’, p. 105. (111) Harcourt Brown, op. cit., p. 96; Syfret op. cit, pp. 129–37; Barnett, Annals of Science, xiii. 213. (112) B. DeMott, ‘Comenius and the Real Character in England’, P.M.L.A. lxx. 1074–8; Carre, Phases of Thought in England, p. 278; Barnett, Theodore Haak, pp. 108–9, 138. At least for Webster, this interest was linked with magical theories about Egyptian hieroglyphics (Academiarum Examen, 1654, p. 24). (113) Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, p. 49. Hartlib tried in 1649 to get Petty appointed to advance experimental and mechanical knowledge at Gresham College. (114) Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, pp. 20, 27. The words are Dury’s. For Hartlib’s papers see Ibid., pp. v–vii. (115) Hartlib’s Ephemerides, of which Professor Trevor–Roper was so kind as to give me a transcript, quoted by permission of Lord Delamere. Printed in part in Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, pp. 187, 342, 346. (116) Ephemerides.
Page 35 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (117) Jordan, The Rural Charities of England, p. 57. (118) Ephemerides, Pym to Hartlib, 14 and 22 November 1639. (119) Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, p. 365. The last words are from a petition which Nielson submitted to Parliament through Pym. Nielson claimed to have discovered a method of finding longitude at sea. An earlier petition of 1636 had been referred to a commission including Selden, Gellibrand, and Oughtred, but nothing seems to have come of it. (120) C.J. vii. 287. (121) Quoted by W. H. G. Armytage, ‘Prejudice and Promise, 1600–60’, The Universities Revies, xxiii. 114. (122) G. W. Johnson, Fairfax Correspondence, (1848), ii. 271–80; M. James, Social Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930), pp. 324–5; V.C.H., York, p. 199; Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, p. 63; Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ii. 397. (123) R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 171–2, 317–18. Benjamin Worsley, possible author of the 1651 Navigation Act, Surveyor of Ireland, and Secretary to Cromwell’s and to Charles II’s Councils of Trade, was a friend of Hartlib and of John Hall. In 1661 he ‘hath much the ear of the Lord Chancellor’. Hartlib told John Winthrop that Worsley was in favour of ‘any public good, just liberty of conscience, and any sort of ingenious kind of improvements’. If his scheme to get himself sent over as ‘agent or resident of all the plantations’ had come off after the Restoration, ‘great numbers of honest people’ would have emigrated (R. C. Winthrop, Correspondence of Hartlib, Haak, Oldenburg and others of the Founders of the Royal Society with Governor Winthrop, 1661–72, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Soc, 1878, pp. 12–13; Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, passim; ‘John Hall’s Letters to Samuel Hartlib’, Review of English Studies, New Series, iv. 228–9; G. L. Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–88, New York, 1912, i. 244, 248). (124) G. B. Tatham, The Puritans in Power (1913), pp. 190–1. (125) See Lynn Thorndike, ‘Newness in 17th century Science’, J.H.I. xi. 585–98, for many other examples. The fact that the Novum Organum was part of the Instauraiio Magna shows how Bacon combined the backward and the forward look. ‘Froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as innovation’, he said in his Essay On Innovations (Works, vi. 433). (126) Op. cit. (3rd impression, 1640), p. 2. (127) Robert Health, Clarastella, 1650, quoted by Marjorie Nicolson, ‘English Almanacs and the “New Astronomy”’, Annals of Science, iv. 21. Page 36 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (128) Bacon, Works, vi. 497. (129) Ibid. v. 559; Sir Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles the First (1813), p. 194. (130) Quoted in H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949), p. 90. (131) Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, supra, n. 130, p. 174. Professor Butterfield is careful to point out that this was a social as well as an intellectual revolution: ‘the changes which took place in the history of thought in this period…are not more remarkable than the changes in life and society’ (Ibid., p. 169). Cf. Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the 17th century, pp. 3–20. (132) J. G. Crowther, Francis Bacon (1960), p. 4. (133) Butterfield, op. cit, p. 166. (134) I argue this point at length in my Society and Puritanism. (135) Bacon, Works, iii. 221. (136) Webster, Academiarum Examen (1654). (137) See my ‘William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy’, passim. Harvey was aware of a parallel between astronomical and anatomical discoveries. (138) Bacon, Works, iii. 221. Cf. Locke, The common man can see the truth at least as clearly as the specialist’ (quoted by Mazzeo, Reason and Imagination, p. 262). (139) McColley, ‘Nicholas Hill and the Philosophia Epicured’, Annals of Science, iv. 403–4. (140) Cabala (1654), ii. 71. (141) As Dr. Harrison observes, in Henry Fielding, Amelia (1906), p. 511; first published 1751. (142) C. Saltonstall, The Navigator (1636), quoted by Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 77. (143) Hakewill, Apologie, ii.129. (144) W. Dell, Several Sermons and Discourses (1709), p. 640. First published 1652. (145) G. Winstanley, Truth Lifting up its Head above Scandals (1649), in G. H. Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Cornell U.P., 1941), p. 125.
Page 37 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (146) Ibid., p. 564; cf. pp. 579–80. The instructions are for Sunday lecturers on the sciences in Winstanley’s ideal commonwealth: see p. 109 below. (147) H. C. Longuet–Higgins, in The Times Literary Supplement, 25 October 1963. (148) A. Peel and L. H. Carlson, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne (1953), pp. 177, 18. Cf. the deposition of John Gray, arrested in connexion with the first English conventicle in 1550: ‘All errors were brought in by learned men’ (C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters, 1912, ii. 2). (149) W. Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritan (1644), p. 35, in W. Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, iii. 82. (150) J. Strype, Life of Whitgifi (1822), ii. 529. For Broughton see p. 153 below. (151) Quoted in P. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard U.P. 1956), p. 21; cf. Bunyan’s first Baptist pastor, holy Mr. Gitford, who urged him to take no truth on trust, but to await personal conviction from the Holy Spirit speaking through the Scriptures (Grace Abounding, in Works, 1860, i. 20). (152) W. Harvey, Works (1847), p. 7. (153) T. Taylor, Works (1653), p. 411. (154) R. Greenham, Works (1612), p. 196; cf. p. 343. (155) T. Hooker, The Application of Redemption (1657), p. 557, quoted in P. Miller and T. H. Johnson, The Puritans (New York, 1938), pp. 39–40. (156) S. E. Morison, ‘Astronomy at Colonial Harvard’, New England Quarterly, vii. 13. (157) Quoted by J. G. Crowther, Founders of British Science (1960), p. 27. (158) Wither, Juvenilia (Spenser Soc), i. 444. (159) B. Blackstone, Ferrar Papers (1938), p. 191. (160) G. Winstanley, Religious Works (1649), Introduction, dated 20 December 1649, p. 4. The introduction to this volume, not printed by Sabine, may be found in The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Pelican Classic, 1973). (161) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), ii. 544; Bacon, Works, iv. 14. Milton had in fact quoted Bacon a page or two earlier. It is no doubt a coincidence that Milton’s metaphor is as flatly bourgeois as Bacon’s is feudal. (162) See pp. 178–81 below.
Page 38 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (163) A. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto U.P., 1942), pp. 86, 358. (164) Sibbes, Works, ii, p. 194. (165) See passages quoted by P. Miller, The New England Mind: from Colony to Province (Harvard U.P., 1953), pp. 12–13. (166) Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Soc, vi. 456–7: Jacie’s interest in astronomy. (167) H. Peter, Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651), passim; and see p. 107 below. (168) See pp. 107, 111 below. (169) T. Goodwin, Works (1861–3), iv. 541: ‘that great and excellently learned man, Sir Francis Bacon’. (170) [S. Gott], Nova Solyma (trans. W. Begley, 1902), i. 162–73, and passim. Published 1648. (171) Quoted by R. K. Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society in 17th century England’, Osiris, iv. 435, 453. (172) See pp. 130–4, 198–9 below. (173) G. Wither, Juvenilia (Spenser Soc), i. 252–3: knowledge to reverse the effects of the Fall. (174) Sir J. Eliot, The Monarchic of Man (ed. A. B. Grosart, 1879), ii. 224–7. (175) Lord Brooke, The Nature of Truth (1640), pp. 28–29, 125–7, 142–3; A Discourse…of…Episcopacie (1641), pp. 1 –2. (176) Milton, Third, Fifth and Seventh Prolusions. (177) W. Walwyn, A Whisper in the Eare of Mr. Thomas Edwards (1646), p. 6; and see pp. 108, 112 below. (178) See p. 108 below. (179) Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, pp. 563–8, 580. (180) J. Saltmarsh, Examinations, or a Discovery of some Dangerous Positions (1643). (181) A. Burges, The Doctrine of Original Sin (1659), p. 201.
Page 39 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (182) Sir W. Petty, Economic Writings (ed. Hull), i. xii–lxiv. (183) J. Harrington, The Art of Lawgiving (1659), in The Oceana and other Works (1137), pp. 429–34; cf. p. 107 below. Bacon, Grotius, and Machiavelli are the three names that occur most often in the writings of Harrington (R. W. Gibson, Supplement to a Bacon Bibliography, 1959, p. 9). I found S. B. L. Penrose, The Reputation and Influence of Francis Bacon in the 17th Century (New York, 1934), of little use for my present purposes. (184) H. R. Trevor–Roper, ‘Francis Bacon’, Encounter, No. 101, p. 76. The following dates of publication are relevant: (1640) Certain Considerations touching the Church (reprinted 1642). The Advancement of Learning (English translation, two issues). (1641) A Discourse concerning Church Affairs (two issues). Advertisement concerning the Controversies of the Church of England. The History of Henry VII. Three Speeches concerning Union with Scotland. Cases of Treason. Confession of Faith (three editions 1641–2). (1642) The Office of Constable. Reading on the Statute of Uses. (1643) Nova Atlantis (English translation 1659). It was especially to those of Bacon’s works published after 1640 that Milton referred in his pamphlets—Certain Considerations, Advertisement, New Atlantis.
(185) M. Nicolson, ‘English Almanacs and the “New Astronomy”’, Annals of Science, iv. 7–8, 16–17, 32–33. (186) Dury, A Seasonable Discourse, sig. D–D 2. My italics. (187) Temple, ‘Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Five Miscellaneous Essays (ed. S. H. Monk, Michigan U.P., 1963), p. 72. (188) J. W. Gough, The Superlative Prodigalh a Life of Thomas Bushell (1932), pp. 87–88; cf. pp. 117–21. Cf. Farrington, Francis Bacon, pp. 10–12, who takes Bushell’s claims more seriously. Whether true or not, they were worth making after the civil war. Bushell had supported the King, as he could scarcely avoid doing, since he farmed lead mines in Cavalier–occupied Wales. But he was Puritan in outlook (see his The Miners Contemplative Prayers), and made no difficulty about accepting the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Cromwell renewed his lease. (189) J. Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or The Natural Rarities of England, Scotland and Wales (1661), sig. B 7.
Page 40 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (190) Nicolson, ‘English Almanacs’, esp. pp. 16–17, 20–23, 32–33; cf. G. McColley, ‘The Ross–Wilkins Controversy’, Annals of Science, iii. 183. (191) Temple’s essay ‘Of Poetry’, written at some period between 1681 and its publication in the second part of his Miscellanea (1690, p. 285), dates it thirty or forty years earlier; Aubrey, Brief hives, ii. 318. Charles Edwards, of Jesus College and Llanrhaiadr, attributed the silencing of elves and ghosts to the arrival of newer knowledge (T. Richards, Religious Developments in Wales (1654–62), 1923, p. 297). (192) J. Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire (1847), p. 5; Remaines qf’Gentilisme and Judaisme (1881), p. 21. (193) Harvey, Works (1847), pp. 454–66; frontispiece to De Generatione Animalium (1651). (194) ‘To his truly honoured lady, the Lady R—’, in The Poems of Thomas Washbourne (ed. A. B. Grosart, 1868), pp. 215–16. (195) W. Charleton, The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), pp. 32–46. Charleton was a pupil of Wilkins at Magdalen Hall, but seems to have been a neutral with royalist sympathies during the civil war. His dialogue is set among English royalist émigrés in Paris. Charleton himself speaks through the character Athanasius, who wishes to convince the exiles of the advances made by revolutionary England. He refers especially to scientists in Oxford. (196) Ibid., p. 49. (197) M. N[edham], Medela Medicinae, p. 215; cf. Keevil, The Stranger’s Son, p. 138. (198) Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), vi. 119. (199) Quoted by Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society in 17th century England’, Osiris, iv. 453. ‘Knowing is seeing’, Locke was soon to say. (200) Carre, Phases of Thought in England, p. 231. (201) See p. 104 above. (202) H. Peter, Gods Doitigs and Mans Duty, a sermon preached before both Houses of Parliament, the Westminster Assembly, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, 2 April 1646; cf. Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651), esp. pp. 74–78. (203) J. Harrington, The Mechanics of Nature, in Oceana and Other Works (1737), pp. xlii–xliv. I am indebted to Mr. D. Nandy for drawing my attention to this. Page 41 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (204) A Physicall Directory, or A translation of the London Dispensatory (translated by N. Culpeper, 1649), sig. A.; 3rd ed., 1651, sig. A–Av. (205) J. Cook, Unum Necessarium (1648), passim; J. Nickolls, Original Letters… addressed to Oliver Cromwell (1743), p. 101. (206) P. Chamberlen, The Poore Mans Advocate (1649), p. 21. (207) M. James, Social Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930), pp. 279–81. A fourth name might perhaps be added—Peter Cornelius Plockhoy, whom Hartlib patronized (L.+M. Harder, Plockhoy from Zurik–Zee, Mennonite Historical Series, No. 2, Newton, Kansas, 1952, pp. 37–41). (208) W. A. L. Vincent, The Stale and School Education, 1640–60, in England and Wales (1950), p. 80, and passim. (209) J. Simon, ‘Educational Policies and Programmes’, The Modern Quarterly, iv (1949), 165. H. R. Trevor–Roper, ‘Scotland and the Puritan Revolution’, in Historical Essays, 1600–1750, presented to David Ogg (H. E. Bell and R. L. OUard, 1963), pp. 107–8, 127, 114–15; C.S.P.D., 1658–9, pp. 66, 243, 263–4. (210) The Moderate, 12–19 December 1648, pp. 207 ff., quoted in J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–60 (Harvard U.P., 1961), pp. 158–60. (211) R. Overton, Mans Mortalitie (Amsterdam, 1643), pp. 11–13, 18, 33. (212) W. Walwyn, The Vanitie of the present Churches (1649), in W. Haller and G. Davies, The Leveller Tracts, 1647–53 (Columbia U.P., 1944), p. 259. Cf. p. 104 above. Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, arrived at similar conclusions in the sixteen–sixties (H. C. Foxcroft, A Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time, 1902, p. 474). (213) W.+T. Evans, Edward Burrough (1851), pp. 251–2; G. Fox, Gospel Truth Demonstrated (1706), p. 1088. Fox was much interested in natural science, and left property in Philadelphia to be used as a botanical garden. Penn spoke of him as ‘a divine and a naturalist’ (R. B. Schlatter, Social Ideas of Religious headers, 1660–88, 1940, p. 241). The most famous watchmakers of the later seventeenth century were Quakers (A. Raistrick, Quakers in Science and Industry, 1950, pp. 223–41). (214) Mercurius Elencticus, 7 February 1649. (215) Sabine, op. cit., pp. 564–6. (216) G. R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution (1957), pp. 210, 165; cf. my Society and Puritanism, pp. 86–87. (217) N. Culpeper, A Directory for Mid–wives (1651), Epistle to the Reader. Page 42 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (218) For similar difficulties with ‘reason’ and law see pp. 223–8 below. (219) For connections between radical Protestantism and alchemy, see A. Stella, ‘Ricerche sul socini–anesimo’, Bolletino dell’ Istituto di Storia Veneziano, iii. 77– 120. Cf. M. West, ‘Notes on the Importance of Alchemy to Medical Science in the Writings of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle’, Ambix, ix. 102–14. (220) See p. 51 above. (221) Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, p. 87. (222) See p. 265 below. (223) J. Hall, An Humble Motion (ed. A. K. Croston, 1953), pp. 27, 29, 39–43. (224) See p. 278 below. (225) Cf. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, p. 74. (226) See his poems to them in G. Saintsbury, Caroline Poets (1905–21), ii. 203, 209. For Ward’s interest in mathematics see p. 279 below. (227) G. H. Turnbull, ‘John Hall’s Letters to Samuel Hartlib’, Review of English Studies, New Series, iv. 221–30. (228) Hall, An Humble Motion, p. vii. For Lilly see p. 41 above. (229) Webster, Academiarum Examen, pp. 20, 41, 44, 51–52, 74, 9.9. Cf. Noah Biggs, The Vanity of the Craft oj’Physick (1651), sig. b, pp. 230–1. (230) Webster, op. cit, pp. 106–8; The Display of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), pp. 4, 14, and passim (231) Dell, Several Sermons and Discourses (1709), pp. 645–8. See p. 98 above. (232) Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum, pp. 62–64. (233) The Advice of William Petty to Samuel Hartlib (1648), passim. (234) Bacon, Works, v. 8. Milton may not have been echoing Bacon: his is an application to politics of the sense of athletic purpose which Calvinist Puritanism gave to its adherents. Bacon is ultimately drawing on the same attitude in his critique of a contemplative non–active philosophy. Here we are at the roots of Protestantism’s contribution to science, as well as to the Parliamentarian cause. (235) Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, p. 291. (236) Sabine, op. cit, p. 565.
Page 43 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (237) Ibid., p. 409. Walwyn too thought the Fall could be retrieved on earth (W. Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, Columbia U.P., 1934, i. 40, 62). (238) Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 93. (239) T. Hobbes, Behemoth (1679), in Works (ed. Molesworth), vi. 348. (240) S. Butler, Characters and Passages from Notebooks (ed. A. R. Waller, 1908), pp. 406, 424. Cf. Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), pp. 83, 149 (‘the Royal Society at Gresham’); ed. Lansdowne, The Petty–Southwell Correspondence 1676–87 (1928), pp. 11, 26, 87; Sir W. Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, p. 73. Cf. J. G. Crowther, Founders of British Science (1960), p. 15. (241) C. Singer, Technology and History (L. T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture, 1952), p. 16. (242) G. Burnet, History of his own Time (ed. O. Airy, 1897), Part I, i. 343; J. Glanville, Plus Ultra (1668), Preface. (243) W. Lucy, Observations, Censures and Confutations of…Mr. Hobbes (1663), p. 49, quoted by S. I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962), p. 65. (244) T[homas] T[enisorf], Baconiana (1679), pp. 3–5. (245) Quoted by Crowther, Founders of British Science, pp. 54–55. (246) Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, pp. 293, 299, 302–3. (247) J. Ray, Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum (1690), Praefatio, sig. A 4v; cf. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 48–49, 65, 122. (248) H. C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, Bart, First Marquess of Halifax (1898), ii. 308; cf. Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, pp. 67–68. (249) Crowther, Francis Bacon, p. 3. (250) Hartlib, Preface to Dury’s The Reformed School’ (1650). (251) Apart from occasional remarks by Petty, e.g. in Economic Writings (ed. Hull), i. 20. Cf. Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England (1914): ‘Probably no event in English history has had so far–reaching and disastrous an effect upon education as the Restoration’ (p. 43). (252) Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 181, 322.
Page 44 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (253) H. Stubbe, The Lord Bacon’s Relation of the Sweating–sickness examined (1671), Preface. Stubbe was said to have been paid by a leading member of the College of Physicians to attack the Royal Society (Keevil, The Stranger’s Son, pp. 138–9, 178–80): cf. H. Stubbe, A Reply unto the Letter of Dr. Henry More (Oxford U.P., 1671). See now J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge U.P., 1983). (254) Wallis to Boyle, 17 July 1669, in Boyle, #WM (1744), v. 514. (255) S. Parker, A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion (1681), pp. iii–iv. (I owe this reference to Mr. D. Nandy.) Parker was Andrew Marvell’s rival and butt. (256) For this reason the lateness of Wallis’s testimony, often urged against accepting it when it appears to conflict with Sprat, may in fact be a reason for giving it greater weight. Cf. The Diary of the Rev. John Ward, p. 116. (257) Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 54. (258) P. W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead, 1617–1679 (Oxford U.P., 1969), pp. 233–4. Cf. Sprat, op. cit., pp. 72–73. (259) Quoted by Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 84. Cf. the dedication to Charles II of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1662), with its blatant emphasis on the profit motive. See M. ‘Espinasse, The Decline and Fall of Restoration Science’, P. and P., no. 14, pp. 71–89. For the contribution of the Royal Society to the Industrial Revolution, see W. H. B. Court, The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford U.P., 1938), pp. 226–32; cf. Anon, Cornu Copia, Harleian Miscellany (1744–6), vi, pp. 26–34. (260) Comenius in this pamphlet called for an end to all war, on economic grounds (‘Is it worth while to catch fish with a golden hook?’) and on moral grounds, hoping ‘that in the entire human race there will finally be one voice on all matters, that there will be agreement in desires, and that there will be accord in efforts made for the common weal’. He was sure that ‘these voyages of Europeans to foreign lands have brought evil to Europeans no less than to those peoples from which we obtain worldly goods’ (J. A. Comenius, Angelus Pads, Prague, 1926, pp. 132–49). ‘We are all fellow citizens of one world, all of one blood, all of us human beings. Who shall prevent us from uniting in one republic? Before our eyes there is only one aim: the good of humanity, and we will put aside all considerations of self, of nationality, of sectarianism’ (Comenius, Panegersia, quoted in The Teacher of Nations, ed. J. Needham, 1941, p. 6). (261) Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 113.
Page 45 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians (262) Cf. R. K. Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society’, Osiris, iv. 378–9; Johnson, Astronomical Thought, pp. 292–3. Gilbert in De Magnete (1600) had attacked the use oflearned jargon by academic philosophers (pp. 47–49). He said he had not ‘brought into this work any graces of rhetoric, any verbal ornateness’: he used only ‘such terms as are needed to make what is said clearly intelligible’ (Preface). Even though he wrote in Latin, these are similar views of the function of prose. (263) J. Earle, Microcosmographie, ‘A Self–conceited Man’. (264) Sir E. Gosse, History of 18th century Literature (1889), pp. 75–76, was one of the first to stress Wilkins’s share in pioneering the new prose. Cf. W. T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculium at early 17th century Cambridge (Harvard U.P., 1958), p. 57; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, pp. 117– 18, 385–91. Professor Howell notes the influence of Ramus in simplifying prose. Webster also advocated plain prose (Academiarius Examen, p. 88). (265) Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (second ed., 1962), p. 329. Tillotson, like Briggs and Sir Henry Savile, was a Halifax man. Additional Note. Cowley’s Ode to the Royal Society is remarkable for the way in which the royalist poet stresses Bacon’s revolutionary role: all the more remarkable if the metaphors are unconscious: Some few exalted spirits this latter age has shown That labour’d to assert the liberty… Of…captiv’d Philosophy; But ‘twas rebellion call’d to fight For such a long–oppressed right. Bacon at last, a mighty man, arose… Authority…he chas’d out of our sight,… Bacon has broke that scare–crow deity
and restored humanity to the pre–lapsarian state. No longer would men try to see good and evil ‘without the senses’ aid within ourselves’. For Bacon has directed our study ‘the mechanic way’, to things not words. In the Preface to his Poems (l 656) Cowley said that the royalists must dismantle their cause ‘of all the works and fortifications of wit and reason by which we defended it’ (Poems, ed. A. R. Waller, 1905, pp. 448–50, 455). His Propositions for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661) are pure Baconianism; in his Essay of Agriculture he praised the industry and public spirit of Hartlib. John Houghton similarly attributed agricultural improvement in England to ‘the industry and indefatigable pains of Mr. Hartlib and some others’ (Husbandry and Trade Improv’d, 1728, iv. 56, 85).
Page 46 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Francis Bacon and the Parliamentarians
Access brought to you by:
Page 47 of 47
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0004
Abstract and Keywords Sir Walter Ralegh founded the first English colony in America, in Virginia, though it failed to survive. He wrote The Discovery of Guiana, a first-rate travel book as well as a classic of empire. However, within a year of James I's accession the great proponent of anti-Spanish policies was condemned to death on a highly dubious charge of conspiring with Spain. At first sight Ralegh would seem an unsuitable Parliamentarian and Puritan hero: the unpopular favourite at Queen Elizabeth's court, with the reputation of an atheist; the man who was made to blush in the Parliament of 1601 when his monopoly of playing cards was attacked. There are many other reasons why Ralegh's name carried weight with the seventeenth-century revolutionaries. This chapter explores the main changes which the political revolutions of the century brought about and the changes Ralegh contributed significantly to science, history, and politics. Keywords: Walter Ralegh, Virginia, empire, James I, Spain, Queen Elizabeth, science, history, politics
Raleigh…was gradually transformed, by their common misfortunes, into the idol of earnest, conventional, parsimonious, provincial, puritan, inland squires…. When in the Great Rebellion they rose at last and swept away… the last Renaissance court in Europe, they did it in the name of the greatest of all courtiers and virtuosi, Sir Walter Raleigh. H. R. TREVOR-ROPER, Historical Essays (1957), p. 107. SIR WALTER RALEGH was born in 1554,1 so he was not fifty when Elizabeth died and his career as a royal favourite came to an end. But Ralegh had been no Page 1 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics mere courtier. He founded the first English colony in America, in Virginia, though it failed to survive. He wrote The Discovery of Guiana, a first-rate travel book as well as a classic of empire. But within a year of James I’s accession the great proponent of anti-Spanish policies was condemned to death on a highly dubious charge of conspiring with Spain. He was imprisoned in the Tower, where he wrote the History of the World. In 1616 he was released to sail to Guiana, whence he promised to bring back gold for the King without fighting the Spaniards. He brought no gold, and he did fight the Spaniards: in 1618 he was executed, at the demand of the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar. At first sight Ralegh would seem an unsuitable Parliamentarian and Puritan hero: the unpopular favourite at Queen Elizabeth’s court,2 with the reputation of an atheist; the man who was made to blush in the Parliament of 1601 when his monopoly of playing cards was attacked, and whose ‛sharp speech’ in defence of his office as Lord Warden of the Stannaries caused a ‛great silence’ in the House.3 But ‛the country hath constantly a blessing for those for whom the court hath a curse’;4 to be (p.119) publicly tried and executed for treason was a sure way to popularity under the old monarchy, a posthumous popularity that the Earl of Essex5 shared with Ralegh. And his two trials dramatized Ralegh’s antiSpanish position. There are many other reasons why Ralegh’s name carried weight with the seventeenth-century revolutionaries. If we ask ourselves what were the main changes which the political revolutions of the century brought about, I suppose we should say (i) a decline in the power of the crown vis-à-vis Parliament; (ii) the adoption of an aggressive imperialist foreign policy; (iii) an extension of economic liberalism; (iv) the redistribution of taxation; (v) the beginnings of religious toleration; and I should like to add (vi) the triumph of modern science. To all these changes Ralegh contributed significantly. Let us look at each of them in turn, starting with science. In her work, Leicester, Patron of Letters, Miss Rosenberg has established Ralegh as the heir of Leicester’s patronage. After what she modestly described as a fairly thorough survey of the field, she concluded that ‘the writers and scientists associated with the patriotic cause of establishing England’s empire in the western world dedicated their works by common consent to its acknowledged leader Sir Walter Ralegh and to those openly associated with his plans for exploring and colonizing America’. I shall return to this ‘clearly defined propaganda campaign’ later.6 At the moment I wish only to draw attention to Ralegh’s inheritance of Leicester’s influence. Ralegh, we are told, hired Thomas Churchyard to write a play in the cause of Leicester’s foreign policy.7 Ralegh was in many ways the heir of Sir Philip Sidney and his group, as well as of Sidney’s uncle Leicester—not least in his patronage of science. Sidney and his friend Sir Edward Dyer (Leicester’s secretary) at one time took lessons in Page 2 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics chemistry from John Dee.8 Before and after Sidney’s death Dyer acted as patron to Dee, as well as to Thomas Digges, Humphrey Cole the instrument-maker, and John Frampton, the merchant who had been racked in the Spanish Inquisition and who was a translator of scientific books and a propagandist for overseas (p. 120) expansion.9 The younger Hakluyt had been a protégé of Dyer and the Sidney group: his Divers Voyages of 1582 was dedicated to Sidney. Michael Lok dedicated to Sidney his map designed to show English priority in the exploration of North America.10 Timothy Bright, the inventor of shorthand, dedicated more than one of his books to Sidney, with whom in 1572 he had taken refuge from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in the English Embassy. Bright was the author of a popular treatise on melancholy in which he compared the human mind to a clock or a windmill: Shakespeare and Robert Burton both probably studied this treatise. Bright was also a supporter of chemical medicine, and published an abridgement of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham.11 Bright was an enthusiastic Ramist, as were most members of the Sidney group. De Banos’s life of his master was dedicated to Sidney in 1576 because of Ramus’s affection and respect for him. Sidney’s tutor, Nathaniel Baxter, was a supporter of Cartwright, a translator of Calvin, and commentator on Ramus, whom he venerated. His commentary on Ramus’s Dialectics contained a foreword to Fulke Greville.12 Sidney paid for the education of Abraham Fraunce, who became a noted Cambridge Ramist and Puritan. Fraunce dedicated several unpublished Ramist treatises to ‘his very good master and patron Mr. Philip Sidney’. He compared Caiaphas to a prelate or a bishop in the Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuell (1871; first published 1591). This may be evidence of Puritanism; or it may be a memory of the similar comparisons made in the 15thcentury mystery plays.13 William Temple, the most important English Ramist, dedicated his edition of Ramus’s Dialectics to Sidney in (p.121) 1584, and in consequence became his secretary.14 Milton’s Preface to the Art of Logic cites Sidney for the view (which Milton shared) that Ramus was the best writer on the subject. Sidney, in recommending arithmetic and geometry to his brother Robert in 1580, added that Ciceronianism was the worst abuse of Oxford men, ‘qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt’.15 ‘All is but lip-wisdom, which wants experience’, cried Musidorus in Arcadia.16 And Fulke Greville observed that Sciences from Nature should be drawn As arts from practice, never out of books.17
Sidney’s friend Daniel Rogers wrote a poem In Indignissimum Petri Rami fatum on Ramus’s death in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.18 When Bruno visited England in 1582 he found the scholastic atmosphere of Oxford uncongenial: he hastened to London to enjoy the company of Sidney and Greville. Bruno dedicated two of his books to Sidney. ‘Why turn to vain fancies’, he asked, ‘when there is experience itself to teach us?’19 The Sidney group was almost unique in Page 3 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics England in welcoming Buchanan’s criticisms of the Ancients in his Rerum Scoticorum Historia.20 Ralegh was a friend of Sidney’s, whom he quoted in The History of the World, and on whom he wrote a noble epitaph: his cousin and intimate friend, Sir Arthur Gorges, wrote two.21 Ralegh took over some of Sidney’s patronage, notably that of Hakluyt. The Faerie Queene, which (p.122) began under Sidney’s patronage, was published with Ralegh’s.22 Michael Lok translated The Mexican History in Pictures (1591) for Ralegh, at Hakluyt’s instance.23 Richard Carew, a Cambridge contemporary and friend of Sidney’s, dedicated his Survey of Cornwall to Ralegh in 1602. When Sidney’s father, Sir Henry, died in 1586, Ralegh took over the patronage of John Hooker’s Irish Historic24 Sidney, devout Protestant though he was, was little more backward than Ralegh in plundering the Church. The Sidney circle shared Ralegh’s hostility to Spain and desire for a Dutch alliance, as well as ‛that heroical design of invading and possessing America’.25 Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney was one of the most powerful expressions of this policy.26 Greville attributed to Sidney the view (shared by Ralegh) that the Spanish empire by its cruelty had flouted divine law and so was doomed.27 Greville, both in his own person and in Sidney’s, spoke, like Ralegh, of the importance of freedom for the commercial classes, and especially for free access to the Spanish empire; and in favour of the yeomanry.28 Many of Greville’s ideas, as has often been pointed out, anticipate or echo those of his friend Bacon: but his political speculations are much more daring.29 His scepticism compares with that of George Gascoigne and Ralegh.30 The Life of Sidney was first published in 1652, under the Commonwealth. There are links between the political thought of the Sidney group and Ralegh, as well as in attitudes towards foreign policy. The Sidney circle admired the political theory of George Buchanan, and Greville showed lasting traces of his influence, as well as of that of his friend Duplessis-Mornay.31 So did Ralegh. Like Ralegh, Greville accepted the (p.123) fact of rebellion, though both were anxious to deny it as a right.32 There are passages in the Life of Sidney which are closely parallel to The Prerogative of Parliaments.33 Most interesting of all is the literary connection. The Sidney group has been described as the workshop of the New Poetry; it is remarkable how often and how closely Ralegh’s name is associated with them. Both in printed and manuscript collections his poems occur alongside those of Sidney, Greville, and Dyer;34 and his name is mentioned together with theirs in the main contemporary works of criticism.35 Between Spenser and Ralegh the links are obviously close, of ideas as well as in politics. The Preface and Conclusion to Ralegh’s History seem to echo the Mutability Cantos. And Nature’s reply to Mutabilitie in these cantos, it has been argued, anticipates the position which Hakewill took up against Goodman in denying the decay of the world.36 Change
Page 4 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics for Spenser is the fate of everything, and this change is both cyclical and not cyclical. All things By their change their being do dilate, And turning to themselves at length again Do work their own perfection so by fate: Then over them Change doth not rule and reign, But they reign over Change, and do their states maintain.37
It is not without reason that Marvell (or whoever wrote Britannia and Rawleigh) quoted Spenser as well as Ralegh. We first hear of Ralegh as a literary figure when he contributed a laudatory poem to George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass in 1576. Gascoigne was a friend and associate of Ralegh’s half-brother, Sir Humphrey (p.124) Gilbert.38 He was also one of the early translators of the classics who had suffered persecution.39 In The Steel Glass Ralegh no doubt approved of Gascoigne’ social attitudes in criticizing officials, soldiers, lawyers, and exalting Piers Plowman: but it is notable too that the poem is written in blank verse, which Gascoigne himself claimed in his preface was a more exalted form, more effective for satire. Now we know that Sidney himself in the Defence of Poesie opposed ‛the tinkling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason’; and it appears to have been a settled conviction of his group, shared by Dyer and the puritanically-minded Thomas Drant.40 A line of poets could be traced from Sidney and Spenser through Sylvester and Browne41 to Wither—not, admittedly, of a rising quality, but of a consistent political attitude. We might find that Milton bore more relation to this group than has been realized. We might also with profit reflect more, as Edward Thompson suggested, on the influence of Ralegh’s prose on Milton’s writings.42 After the deaths of Sidney and Leicester, Ralegh continued their patronage of scientists and navigators. He helped Dee. Ralegh and Humphrey Gilbert planned to found a teaching and research academy in London, which would bring modern and practical subjects to royal wards and other sons of nobles and gentlemen—mathematics, cosmography, astronomy, naval and military training, navigation, shipbuilding, engineering, medicine, cartography, languages, and above all history. The teaching would be in English. The object of the academy was to teach ‛matters of action meet for present practice’: the doctor of physic would lecture alternately on physic and surgery.43 Elizabeth, however, was as unwilling to finance this academy as James I was to finance Bacon’s schemes. As with many similar projects which lacked the capital (p.125) backing of a merchant prince like Gresham, nothing came of it. Bacon, however, expected Ralegh’s support for a scientific college.44 Ralegh’s relative and ally Sir Arthur
Page 5 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Gorges translated Bacon’s De Sapientia Veteruminto English, and his Essays into French, both in 1619.
II Thomas Hariot, one of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians of his day, is another link between Ralegh and the Sidney circle. Hariot was successively mathematics tutor to Philip Sidney’s younger brother Robert, to Ralegh, and to his son. As Viscount Lisle Robert Sidney was Hariot’s executor when he died in 1621. Ralegh fully appreciated the importance of mathematics and astronomy for the art of navigation. In his lessons to Sir Walter and his sea-captains Hariot always contrived to link theory and practice, not without almost incredible results’. The words are Hakluyt’s.45 Hariot remained a protege of Ralegh’s— some said a deistic or atheistic influence on him.46 In fact there is no doubt of Hariot’s faith, which he told his doctor was threefold—‛in God Almighty, in medicine as being ordained by Him’, and in ‛the doctor as his minister’. ‛I have learnt of you’, one of Hariot’s correspondents told him, ‛to settle and submit my desires to the will of God.’47 Ralegh, who made each of his voyages a scientific expedition, in 1585 sent Hariot as surveyor to Virginia with Sir Richard Grenville’s expedition. Hariot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) was much admired by Hakluyt, who reprinted it.48 It is one of the earliest examples of a large-scale economic and statistical survey, including ‛marketable commodities’ as well as a very sympathetic account of native religion and customs. (Hariot learnt the Indians’ language and preached to them). The first edition was illustrated by John White, another of Ralegh’s protégés. The edition of 1590 included engravings of Picts, which showed that they had been as savage as the natives of Virginia: a notable contribution to historical imagination, which was used by Vico.49 Hariot was later an adviser to the Virginia Company.50 (p.126) He acted as agent for Ralegh during the latter’s absence at sea.51 He was one of Ralegh’s constant associates during his imprisonment in the Tower, and the ‛true and loving friend’ of Sir Arthur Gorges.52 Hariot was in close and friendly touch with Dee and Hakluyt, knew Gilbert and his work, corresponded with Kepler on optics, and was using the telescope for astronomical purposes at about the same time as Galileo.53 Hariot produced telescopes for sale in the last twelve years of his life (1609–21). He first observed what we know as Halley’s Comet, and is said to have predicted seven of the nine comets he saw.54 Hariot determined specific gravities by weighing in air and in water, though he did not publish his results.55 He was also ‛one of the founders of algebra as we know the science to-day’, and made advances towards its application to geometry.56 He believed in the existence of a North-Western Passage, and like Briggs wrote a treatise to prove it.57 He was held in the highest esteem by Briggs and by the early members of the Royal Society.58 Wall is thought that Hariot laid ‛the foundation…without which that whole Page 6 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics superstructure of Descartes (I doubt) had never been’.59 Descartes, we now know, had in fact read Hariot’s Artis Analyticae Praxis, published posthumously in 1631.60 The Royal Society conducted a diligent but unsuccessful search for Hariotgent’s papers in 1662–3. Some of them have been discovered recently, and historians of mathematics are astonished at the way in which ‛deep Hariots mind, In which there is no dross but all’s refined’61 had apparently solved some of the most complicated problems in navigational mathematics a whole generation before Napier, Briggs, and Gunter. But his tables, instruments, and rules for making charts were reserved for the use of Ralegh and his associates.62 (p.127) Hariot clearly felt constrained by the censorship, felt ‛stuck in the mud’.63 In 1598 his friend George Chapman suggested that Hariot’s writings could not be published ‛now error’s night chokes earth with mists’, ‛this scornful…world…her stings and quills darting at worths divine’.64 Hariot leads us to consider the connexions between Ralegh and Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, ‘the wizard Earl’. They had been intimate since at least 1586, and political associates from about 1600. Northumberland, Essex’s brother-in-law, protested vigorously against Ralegh’s condemnation in 1603. But after Gunpowder Plot the Earl himself was sentenced to a fine of £ 11, 000 and perpetual imprisonment for misprision of treason, on evidence not much stronger than that which had led to Ralegh’s conviction. In the early fifteennineties, when Ralegh was in disgrace, a number of his followers, including Hariot and Robert Hues, passed from his service to Northumberland’s, though Ralegh retained their close friendship.65 About this time George Peele apostrophized Northumberland That artisans and scholars dost embrace And clothest Mathesis in rich ornaments, That admirable mathematic skill, Familiar with the stars and zodiac.66
Hariot drew a pension of £80, later £100, from Northumberland from 1598 to 1621. Whilst the Earl was in the Tower, Hariot seems to have acted as supervisor of his affairs and tutor to his children. He was Librarian at Sion, Northumberland’s house, and had a laboratory there.67 It seems to have been Hariot who first roused the Earl’s interest in mathematics and astronomy.68 Northumberland was also interested in anatomy, medicine, geography, and cosmography: he had books by Napier, William Gilbert, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Bruno, and Hakluyt in (p.128) his library, and many others on chemistry, mathematics, and medicine.69 He advised his son to study—inter alia— arithmetic, geometry, the doctrine of motion, optics, astronomy, the doctrines of generation and corruption (alchemy and/or biology?), cosmography, and navigation.70
Page 7 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Around Ralegh and Northumberland we can distinguish a literary and scientific group. This consisted of the Earl’s ‘three Magi’—Hariot, Robert Hues, and William Warner—together with the poet, mathematician, and Hermeticist, Matthew Roydon, a former friend of Sidney’s, who may have written Willobie His Avisa as a defence of the Ralegh group,71 and George Chapman, who dedicated books to Ralegh and Bacon. Chapman spoke warmly of Hariot and Hues in the Preface to his translation of Homer.72 Hues had been an undergraduate at Brasenose College and then went to sea. He dedicated the first (Latin) edition of his Treatise on Globes to Ralegh in 1592. The dedication attacked the ‘great ignorance’ of the Ancients, and pleaded for more mathematical knowledge among navigators. Praised by Hakewill, it remained the standard work throughout the seventeenth century. There were thirteen editions before 1663. Hues was one of Ralegh’s executors.73 He also acted as tutor to Northumberland’s eldest son, the later Parliamentarian,74 and received a pension of £40 from the Earl.75 He is said to have had connexions with Gresham College.76 Warner, pensioner of Northumberland’s, friend of Hakluyt and Gorges, continued Briggs’s work on logarithms, and claimed to have given Harvey the idea which led to his discovery of the circulation of the blood.77 He was later alleged to have taught (p.129) Thomas Hobbes all the mathematics he knew. Hobbes certainly had mathematical manuscripts of Warner’s in his possession in 1634.78 To these we must add Marlowe until his death in 1593—Marlowe who was once described as Ralegh’s ‘man’, who ‘read the atheist lecture to Ralegh and others’, whose Passionate Shepherd Ralegh answered, whose Hero and Leander Chapman completed. Marlowe held discussions on Biblical criticism and comparative religion with Hariot, Warner, and Roydon, of a kind which scandalized the government’s informers and helped to create the legend of Ralegh’s ‘school of atheism’.79 Marlowe is interesting for our purposes because he was very much aware of the potential political implications of the new science. This is the subject of Doctor Faustus: but the theme was also touched upon by Tamburlaine when he said Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, The perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.80
The very personal individualism of Tamburlaine’s conclusion would not be shared by all those who appreciated his statement of the problem created by the
Page 8 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics new lust for knowledge and power over things. And Marlowe’s own interest in the republican Lucan suggests that he too may have had more general ideas.81 Giacopo Castelvetro, a radical Italian Protestant refugee, was probably in Northumberland’s service from 1597 to 1607: he had previously been a protégé of Ralegh’s. He published books on medicine and cryptography, and seems to have helped Hakluyt in his propaganda campaign on behalf of overseas exploration. In Italy Castelvetro was in trouble with the Inquisition as a relapsed Calvinist heretic, who believed in nothing; in England he was regarded as an Arian.82 Northumberland (p.130) also gave a pension of £40 to the mathematician and astronomer Nathaniel Torporley (1564–1632), literary executor under Hariot’s will.83 Among the other Atlantes of the mathematical world’ who frequented Northumberland’s household was Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall, friend of Dee and Hariot, whom the Earl of Leicester had consulted as an astrologer.84 In some ways the most interesting member of the group was Nicholas Hill, the first Modern to defend actively the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus. Hill was an intimate acquaintance of Ralegh’s, and was in Northumberland’s service. He helped the Earl with his alchemical and astrological experiments. Although Hill rejected all aristocratic patronage on principle, he dedicated his Philosophia Epicurea to the Earl’s eldest son.85 Hariot appears to have considered atomism a plausible hypothesis, basing himself on Gilbert.86 Hill accepted the idea of a heliocentric and infinite universe, and of a plurality of worlds. He was discussed by Robert Burton, quoted by Wilkins, and looks forward to Hobbes and Locke in his mechanist philosophy.87 Hill is often described as a papist, apparently on the authority of John Aubrey.88 A Catholic who chose to live much of his life at Rotterdam, and whose books were published at Geneva, would have been something of an oddity. I suspect Hill was no more a Catholic than his patron the Earl of Northumberland.89 Finally, Richard Lilburne, father of the future Leveller leader, was probably serving in the Earl’s household when he married in 1599.90
III Ralegh, ‘whose reading made him skilled in all the seas’, was praised as early as 1586 as a patron of the sciences connected with navigation and exploration.91 He had a detailed knowledge of scientific and technological developments as they affected navigation, at a time when such a (p.131) knowledge was regarded as lower-class and ‘mechanical’ rather than respectable and ‘martial’. He was noted for his own experiments and innovations in shipbuilding, and appreciated the importance of having the most up-to-date style of pump in order to reduce dampness on board ship.92 He was a pioneer in naval medicine, dietetics, and hygiene. His orders for his voyage of 1617, stressing cleanliness, absence of litter between decks, and the precautions to be taken by landing parties in eating fruit, fish, and hogs, were well ahead of contemporary practice. Page 9 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics He tried, though unsuccessfully, to discover from the Guianan Indians their remedy for the wounds made by poisoned arrows.93 The apothecary John Hester, whose running battle with the surgeons and physicians helped to establish Paracelsanism in England, dedicated A Hundred and Foureteene Experiments of Paracelsus to Ralegh in the early fifteen-eighties: in it Hester pleaded for liberty of research.94 The surgeon John Gerarde dedicated his Herbal to Ralegh in 1597. He may have been a subscriber to Ralegh’s 1589 scheme for planting Virginia, as Thomas Hood certainly was.95 During his imprisonment in the Tower Ralegh (like Northumberland) conducted chemical and medical experiments with the aid of the Puritan Lady Apsley, Lucy Hutchinson’s mother. Bacon recorded this activity in his private notebook as a good omen for the future reception of his own philosophy of works. Among other things, Ralegh tried to distil fresh from salt water, to find ways of keeping meat fresh at sea, and to devise remedies against scurvy. He supplied medicines to many of his friends.96 His ‘cordial’ cured Queen Anne, and was cited in 1664 to prove ‘the great advantages that the modern pharmacy carrieth legitimately above the ancient, by reason that it is enlightened with the glorious light of chemistry’.97 It was still used by Robert Boyle to cure fevers, (p.132) and in 1712 Swift discussed it with Stella.98 Boyle’s father, the great Earl of Cork, used to recommend his friend Ralegh’s remedy for the spleen and the gravel.99 In his History Ralegh praised Galileo, as Milton did in Paradise Lost100 Ralegh accepted diurnal rotation of the earth, and owned a copy of Copernicus as well as of Machiavelli.101 Ralegh’s opposition to the verbal doctrine’ of Aristotle must have delighted Bacon, as his refusal to defer to the authority of the early Christian Fathers would delight Milton.102 Despite occasional professions of belief in the decay of the world, Ralegh normally spoke up for the Moderns against the Ancients. The whole emphasis of the History, after a few preliminary genuflections, is on law as against chance.103 Even Ralegh’s interest in magic links up with his interest in chemistry and medicine. Magic is ‘the wisdom of Nature’. Referring specifically to ‘the chemists’, Ralegh said: ‘The third kind of magic containeth the whole philosophy of nature; not the brabblings of the Aristoteleans, but that which bringeth to light the inmost virtues, and draweth them out of nature’s hidden bosom to human use.’104 Magic he defined as ‘the investigation of those virtues and hidden properties which God hath given to his creatures, and how fitly to apply things that work to things that suffer’. Magic, like science for Bacon, could be used for ‘the help and comfort of mankind’.105 Bacon had thought that there was a core of physical knowledge in alchemy, magic, and astrology, which was worthy of scientific investigation.106 Sir Thomas Browne also believed that ‘traditional magic’ proceeded upon ‘principles of nature’; ‘at first a great part of philosophy was witchcraft’.107 Boyle later attempted the investigation which Bacon had proposed.108
Page 10 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics There is as yet no agreement among historians about the exact contribution of alchemy to the origins of scientific thinking. Paracelsus had boasted that natural magic and alchemy were ‘firmly based on experience,…by (p.133) which all arts should be proved’.109 For our purposes it is notable that Recorde, Dee, Thomas Digges, Gilbert, John Woodall, Napier, Matthew Roydon, and Nicholas Hill, as well as Copernicus, Bruno, and Kepler, were interested in magic; and that John Hester, the leading English exponent of Paracelsus’s doctrine, had links with Ralegh.110 Dee defined ‘archemistrie’ as ‘scientia experirnentalis’.111 There was certainly an underground alchemical tradition which had long been handed on verbally: Richard Bostock in 1585 argued that Paracelsus was no more the inventor of chemistry than Wyclif, Luther, and Calvin were the inventors of the Gospel when they restored religion to its primitive purity. So long as Scotus and Aquinas were ‘maintained, defended and privileged by princes and potentates, it was hard for truth to show his face abroad openly’. A reformation was as necessary in science now as it had formerly been in religion, to overthrow Aristotle, Galen, ‘and other heathen and their followers’, and allow ‘the chemical doctrine agreeing with God’s word, experience, and nature’ to ‘come into the schools and cities’, relying on ‘due trial by labour and work of fire and other requisite experiments’.112 Dee’s Preface, as Professor Haydn pointed out, was in the Paracelsan alchemical tradition: it looked back as well as forwards. Marlowe’s Faustus, the magician par excellence, defended Ramus against Aristotle as well as Paracelsus against Galen.113 In science, as in religion, the sixteenth century saw the break-through to respectability of ideas which had long seethed underground among the craftsmen. It is noteworthy how often the intellectual spokesmen of the plebeian religious radical moveménts were men with a medical background—from Paracelsus and Servetus to Chamberlen and Culpeper. The combination of chemistry with magic and radical religious convictions was repeated by John Webster in the sixteen-fifties: he quoted Dee’s Preface.114 (p.134) We should beware of thinking that, because in the long run science shed alchemy and astrology, therefore every scientist who took these subjects seriously was a charlatan. Recorde, Dee, Digges, Napier, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon are not so lightly to be dismissed. ‘In those dark times’, said Aubrey apropos Thomas Allen, ‘astrologer, mathematician, and conjurer were accounted the same things.’115 So cool and level-headed a sceptic as John Selden was at once a supporter of the new astronomy and a great admirer of Robert Fludd the Rosicrucian, who thought chemistry was the search for God. Selden himself used often to dive into the books of alchemists, astrologers, and soothsayers.116 If Ralegh believed in sympathetic medicines—and the evidence is dubious—so did Bacon and Fellows of the Royal Society, including Sir Kenelm Digby and John Locke, much later in the seventeenth century.117 What is interesting for us is Ralegh’s defence of the alchemical tradition, which, from Paracelsus to Webster, was more than once associated with religious and political radicalism. Page 11 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics IV ‘As theory, Ralegh’s political writings have no importance whatsoever. He thought of nothing new.’118 Mr. Stapleton’s first sentence does not seem to me to be proved by the second. It is true that Ralegh was not a Bodin, a Hobbes, or a Harrington. It is true that the Cabinet Council, the Maxims of State, and other works attributed to him are compilations with commentary, not original works. But these very compilations introduced some of the ideas of writers like Machiavelli and Bodin119 under the respectable shadow of Ralegh’s name: and in the Prerogative of Parliaments he put forward a programme which opponents of the court in the sixteen-twenties found useful. Without claiming too much for the originality of Ralegh’s political ideas, we may see some importance in (p. 135) the fact that they were collected together and systematized by the victim of Spain and James I. We need not take too seriously the story, which Aubrey repeats, that Ralegh advocated a republic in 1603.120 But it is significant that during the years 1600– 28 three English translations of Lucan—regarded as the republican poet par excellence—were published. The first was by Marlowe, a member of Ralegh’s circle. The second was by Ralegh’s cousin and close associate, Sir Arthur Gorges, with a congratulatory sonnet by Ralegh. The third was by Tom May, the future historian of the Long Parliament and the friend of the republican Henry Marten.121 Republican opinions were attributed to Ralegh in Marvell’s Britannia and Rawleigh (if it is Marvell’s); in 1683 there was a eulogistic biography of Shaftesbury called Rawleigh Redivivus—not Hampden or Pym or Vane or Cromwell, but Ralegh. Ralegh’s political thought ruthlessly emphasizes expediency, utility, in a way that anticipates Hobbes. In civil wars ‘all former compacts and agreements for securing of liberty and property are dissolved, and become void: for flying to arms is a state of war, which is the mere state of nature, of men out of community, where all have an equal right to all things: and I shall enjoy my life, my subsistence, or whatever is dear to me no longer than he that has more cunning, or is stronger than I, will give me leave’. ‘That any particular government is now Jure Divino is hard to affirm, and of no great use to mankind. For let the government of any country where I am a subject be by divine institution or by compact, I am equally bound to observe its laws and endeavour its prosperity.’122 James would not like that very much. The very title of The Prerogative of Parliaments must have sounded like a manifesto to the king who exalted his own royal prerogative, who thought that Parliament’s liberties were derived from him by grace, and who considered that Ralegh’s History had been ‘too saucy in censuring princes’.123 But it is difficult to extract a consistent political philosophy from Ralegh’s writings. His account in the History of the origin of political society appears to derive from Buchanan, Sidney’s favourite. Yet Ralegh But it is difficult to extract Page 12 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics a consistent political philosophy from Ralegh’s writings. His account in the History of the origin of political society appears to derive from Buchanan, Sidney’s favourite. Yet Ralegh (p.136) also declared that the sovereign, the prince, is exempt from human laws;124 elsewhere he advocates an ultimate right of resistance, ‘since no prince can shew a patriarchal right, and a community is under conditions’.125 In particular ‘the common people of England’ have often been persuaded to fight ‘for such a liberty as their leaders never intended they should have’—hence their reputation abroad for ‘a turbulent and disquiet spirit’. But the greatest liberty is good government, and this England has, at least potentially.126 Ralegh never suggested that monarchy was more acceptable to God. He had no use for theories of paternal government derived from God’s grant to Adam of ‘dominion over…every living thing that moveth upon the earth’. The rule of a king, on the contrary, is the rule of one freeman over others.127 In the Preface to the History Ralegh distinguished between a ‘Turk-like’ monarchy, such as Philip II tried to establish over the Netherlands, and the absolute monarchies of England and France.128 Asiatic despotism, with the consequent ‘general want of liberty among the people’, makes a foreign conquest ‘easy and sure’.129 Whereas it was traditional to regard Nimrod as a subverter of liberty, Ralegh collected authorities who regarded him as a colonizer rather than a tyrant. Nimrod was a de facto ruler, elevated for sound Hobbist reasons, which Ralegh is at pains to make clear.130 With his accustomed slide from first to second causes,131 Ralegh argued that God first made men see the necessity of kingship, which he had ordained by his eternal providence; but ‘(speaking humanly), the beginning of empire may be ascribed to reason and necessity’; laws were soon established ‘for direction and restraint of royal power’.132 Ralegh in fact had a very Harringtonian view of the evolution of the English constitution. He approvingly quoted Bacon for the view that ‘monarchs need not fear any curbing of their absoluteness by mighty (p.137) subjects, as long as by wisdom they keep the hearts of the people…. Every sheriff and constable being sooner able to use the multitude, in the king’s behalf, than any overweening rebel, how mighty soever, can against him/133 Ralegh was still thinking in traditional Tudor terms, of feudal revolt as the greatest danger, and of the middling sort as the natural supporters of sovereignty. He had after all helped to suppress Essex’s revolt in 1601. Most of the laws of England, like Magna Carta, are Acts of Parliament, ‘to the obedience of which all men are therefore bound, because they are acts of choice and self-desire’.134 It is only when we come to The Prerogative of Parliaments that we see how far Ralegh would have limited kingly power. With an appearance of great objectivity, the Justice in Ralegh’s dialogue makes out a case for political opposition to the crown—even violent opposition—in every historical instance which the Councillor brings forward. Ralegh’s argument urges the King to abandon those councillors—including, though he is too wise even to hint this, the Spanish ambassador—who advise him to dispense with Parliaments.135 Ralegh’s aim is to Page 13 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics convince James that Parliament cannot be wished out of existence, because those whom it represents cannot be wished out of existence. Therefore the King would be prudent and well advised to co-operate with Parliament. For, Ralegh says in a Carlylean passage, ‘that policy hath never yet prevailed (though it hath served for a short season) where the counterfeit hath been sold for the natural, and the outward show and formality for the substance’.136 ‘Shall the head yield to the feet? certainly it ought, when they are grieved’, as they are, for example, by monopolies, impositions, arbitrary imprisonment, and refusal of free speech in Parliament.137 The remedy for the financial difficulties of the Crown ‘doth chiefly consist in the love of the people’, which ‘is lost by nothing more than by the defence of others in wrong-doing—the only motives of mischances that ever came to kings of this land since the Conquest’.138 The tone is mild and persuasive, but the implied threat is clear. When the J.P. (who represents Ralegh’s point of view in the dialogue) mentioned digging ‘out of the dust the long buried memory of the subjects’ former contentions with the king’, the Councillor asked sharply (p.138) ‘What mean you by that?’ ‘I will tell your Lordship, when I dare’, was the reply. To say that his Majesty knows and cares not, that, my Lord, were but to despair all his faithful subjects/139 ‘It cannot be called a dishonour, for the King is to believe the general Council of the kingdom, and to prefer it before his affection.’140 James will do himself no good by kicking against the pricks: even kings are subject to historical necessity. This doctrine would not be unacceptable to Parliamentarians who could not counter the traditional royal arguments, but felt that they had a stronger case than they could establish in terms of mere legalism.141
V Ralegh’s condemnation in 1603 was, among other things, part of the price paid for the Spanish peace of 1604. For, though Ralegh was accused of plotting with Spain, in fact he was leader of the bellicose anti-Spanish party, and many of the judges who condemned him soon accepted Spanish pensions.142 In 1618, it was generally held, Ralegh was betrayed to execution by the Spanish faction, ‘then absolute at court’; he was ‘sacrificed to advance the matrimonial treaty’ with Spain, said Howell.143 In this case popular legend was entirely justified, except that it underestimated the complicity of James I, who was personally responsible for betraying to Spain all the details of Ralegh’s Guiana expedition of 1617, so ensuring its failure and Ralegh’s execution. Of the relation of his execution to James’s foreign policy there can be no doubt. Secretary Winwood, Ralegh’s backer, whose son supported Parliament in the civil war, died towards the end of 1617; and for the next seven years James pursued a pro-Spanish policy with as much vigour as he was capable of. But, as a contemporary shrewdly observed in 1618, Ralegh’s ‘death will do more harm to the faction that procured it than ever he did in his life’.144
Page 14 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Ralegh’s foreign policy was not his private affair, but was the policy of a whole group, whose main publicists were the two Richard Hakluyts. Ralegh was intimately connected with them. The younger Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting was written in 1584 ‘at the request and (p.139) direction of Ralegh’, to whom most of Hakluyt’s works were dedicated.145 The policy of the Hakluyts was at once patriotic and imperialist. England had got left behind in the grab for the New World by Spain and Portugal, whose empires were menacingly united in 1580. After a rapid expansion of English cloth exports in the first half of the sixteenth century, relative stagnation followed. Unemployment created social, political and national dangers, as Ralegh and many other observers noted.146 But the younger Hakluyt was shrewd enough to realize that England’s overpopulation was only relative. The colonization of North America would not only get rid of England’s immediate surplus population: it would also provide raw materials for home industries, and so prepare for a long-term solution.147 The object of economic policy should be to make England self-sufficient, an exporter of highly finished manufactured goods. North America would yield dye-stuffs for the clothing industry, the naval stores for which England was dependent on Baltic supplies, and timber to relieve England’s fuel shortage. The reduction of the Indians ‘to civility, both in manners and garments’ would provide a new market. Given an economically self-sufficient Empire, England need not bother about capturing markets in Europe.148 But England’s road was blocked by Spain, on whose empire, in Bacon’s phrase, ‘the sun never sets’.149 Spain closed the whole American continent to English settlers, English goods, and English religion. So this policy, as Sidney and Hakluyt saw, involved war with Spain.150 Colonization was thus strategically vital. Occupation of North America could command the Newfoundland fishing banks and the Spanish homeward route from the Indies. ‘Traffic followeth conquest.’151 But with this base in the New World, war against Spain could be made to pay for itself: ‘we must not look to maintain war upon the revenues of England’, Ralegh warned Cecil in 1595.152 Privateering could enrich individual merchants and gentlemen: gold and silver could be diverted from Spain (p.140) to England.153 Such a war had religious as well as patriotic overtones. Foxe had traced the sufferings and struggles of God’s people down to the Marian martyrs: Hakluyt’s book also started with the beginning of the Christian epoch; but his Englishmen have passed over to the offensive against Antichrist, bringing the Gospel to parts of the world which had never yet heard it. If the worst came to the worst—and this illustrates the anxieties still felt by Elizabethan Englishmen, which we are too apt to forget because we know the end of the story—’a place of safety might there be found, if change of religion or civil wars should happen in this realm’.154 War against Spain was necessary, the Hakluyts thought, not only to preserve England’s national independence, but also to bring salvation to millions of American Indians, who had within living memory been subjugated to popery and Page 15 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Spanish cruelty. Puritan ministers, dangerously unemployed and restless at home, could be sent abroad to convert the heathen.155 ‘God hath reserved’ North America ‘to be reduced unto Christian civility by the English nation’.156 Because of Spanish cruelty the Indians—’a poor and harmless people created of God’157—would offer willing allies against Spain, as Ralegh often found.158 Ralegh’s imperial policy envisaged the export of English arts and English women to Peru, the arming and training of the Indians, who were to be used to establish Peruvian independence of Spain, under allegiance to England.159 Ralegh’s good treatment of the Indians at Trinidad in 1595 was remembered in 1605 and 1626, when they ‘did unanimously own the protection of the English’ against Spain. In Guiana ‘he left so good and so great a name behind him…that the English have often been obliged to remember him with honour’.160 ‘Most of his contemporaries’, Professor Quinn (p.141) sums up, ‘regarded the Spanish empire as something to be robbed: Ralegh thought of it as something to be replaced by an English empire. He therefore considered seriously the problems of English rule over a native population.’161 This underlines the tragedy that Ralegh could interest James only in robbery. Hakluyt and Ralegh, then, put forward a national policy which offered something to all sections of the community. From the unemployed to Puritan ministers anxious to extend true religion, from City merchants to discontented younger sons of the landed class, all, it seemed, had something to gain.162 In 1596 Ralegh’s devoted adherent Lawrence Kemyis, a Balliol geographer and mathematician who like Wright had thrown up his fellowship to go to sea,163 published a Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana. To this George Chapman, member of Ralegh’s circle and friend of Hariot, prefixed a poem. Chapman urged ‘patrician spirits’, ‘that know death lives where power lies unused’ no longer to be content like horse to hold A threadbare beaten way to home affairs.
They should scorn to let your bodies choke your souls In the rude breath and prison’d life of beasts. You that herein renounce the course of earth And lift your eyes for guidance to the stars, That live not for yourselves, but to possess Your honour’d country of a general store; In pity of the spoil rude self-love makes Of those whose lives and years one aim doth feed, One soil doth nourish, and one strength combine; You that are blest with sense of all things noble, In this attempt your complete worths redouble.
Page 16 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Once Elizabeth blessed (p.142) with her wonted graces Th’industrious knight, the soul of this exploit [Ralegh]
she would create A golden world in this our iron age…. A world of savages fall tame before them, Storing their theft-free treasuries with gold; And there doth plenty crown their wealthy fields, There Learning eats no more his thriftless books, Nor Valour, estridge-like, his iron arms…. There makes society adamantine chains, And joins their hearts with wealth whom wealth disjoin’d.164
Hakluyt and Ralegh, like Bacon, synthesized and gave organized form to the thinking of large numbers of less articulate Englishmen. John Hawkins saw himself as the successor of Foxe’s martyrs when he was frustrated in his attempt to sell bootleg negro slaves in Spanish America.165 Martin Frobisher prayed in 1577 for a safe return to England so that his discoveries ‘might redound to the more honour of [God’s] holy name, and consequently to the advancement of our commonwealth’.166 Lawrence Kemyis thought it had ‘pleased God of his infinite goodness, in his will and purpose to appoint and reserve this empire [of Guiana] for us’.167 Hakluyt was the spokesman of this newly self-conscious nationalism. A full-scale policy of imperial conquest could not be carried out without government support, without a powerful navy. In 1577 Ralegh’s friend John Dee, who appears to have originated the phrase ‘the British Empire’, had advocated a standing royal navy to police the seas against pirates, and so protect merchants and the fishing industry.168 Under James and Charles this became a crying need, when the Algiers pirates mastered up-to-date techniques of navigation.169 But, apart from Mansell’s abortive expedition of 1620–1, it was not until the sixteenfifties that Blake’s fleet bombarded Algiers and Cromwell’s troops captured Jamaica (p.143) and Dunkirk. For two generations the advocates of the Hakluyt-Ralegh policy laboured to convince governments of its desirability and feasibility: but in vain. Elizabeth ‘did all by halves’, as Ralegh said.170 ‘Neither James I nor Charles I…ever sent a ship across the Atlantic.’171 There were serious limits to the effectiveness of colonization by private enterprise, as the early colonists found to their cost. After the defeat of the Armada had first shaken the fixed belief of Englishmen in the omnipotence of Spain, a massive propaganda campaign was undertaken to convince a sufficient: number of influential people that England’s destiny lay in grandiose exploits across the ocean. The younger Hakluyt decided to embark on his magnum opus, a careful collection and publication of facts on Baconian lines, a few months after the Armada’s defeat had opened up dazzling new Page 17 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics prospects.172 Hariot’s Brief and True Report on Virginia appeared in 1588; Ralegh’s Discovery of Guiana in 1591;173 and Hakluyt’s Voyages, reprinting both of them, rounded off the campaign. In merchant circles, at least, it was very successful. The East India Company supplied as reading matter to its ships the Bible, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Perkins’s Works, and Hakluyt.174 The combination is significant. Hakluyt acted as Ralegh’s publicity agent in the campaign, and seems deliberately to have worked to get books dedicated to Ralegh, often dictating the content of the dedication so as to stress Ralegh’s international reputation.175 Throughout the History of the World the over-riding importance of exhorting his readers against Spain is never far from Ralegh’s mind. Spanish America would be as easy to conquer as Syria under the sons of Aram.176 Xerxes reminded Ralegh of Philip II.177 Alexander’s tactics against Bessus led Ralegh to urge future invaders of Guiana or the West Indies always to ‘burn down the grass and sedge to the east of them’.178 (p.144) The wars between Rome and Carthage gave rise to a long digression on sea power and naval strategy, and to warnings against the dangers of trading with Spain.179 A discussion of tyranny prompted the improbable reflection that under a king like James ‘it is likely, by God’s blessing, that a land shall flourish with increase of trade in countries before unknown; that civility and religion shall be propagated into barbarous and heathen countries; and that the happiness of his subjects shall cause the nations far removed to wish him their sovereign’.180 In the ‘Conclusion to the whole work’ Ralegh noted that Spanish power was the greatest that had been seen in western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire; still this power could easily and cheaply be restrained if England, France, and the Netherlands went over to the offensive.181 ‘The obediv even of the Turk is easy and a liberty in respect of the slavery and tyranny of Spain’, Ralegh had written in 1591.182 For Hakluyt and Ralegh an alliance with the Netherlands was the necessary concomitant of their anti-Spanish policy. For this there were ideological reasons (‘after my duty to mine own sovereign’, wrote Ralegh, ‘and the love of my country, I honour them most’).183 The Netherlands also provided a model of economic behaviour.184 But a Dutch alliance was also a practical necessity, even if the Dutch proved ungrateful competitors. For ‘this long calm’ after the peace of 1604 ‘will shortly break out in some terrible tempest’,185 as it did in the year of Ralegh’s execution. Yet Ralegh’s interest in the shipping industry led him to advocate its encouragement and something very like a Navigation Act against Dutch competition.186 Like many English merchants, Ralegh was ambivalent in his attitude towards the Netherlands. Dutch merchants monopolized the carrying trade, and insisted on continuing to trade with Spain even in time of war. Ralegh ‘was the first which made public the growth (p.145) by sea of the Dutch, and the riches they derived from their fishing upon the coasts of England and Scotland, and the consequences which would necessarily follow, not only to the loss of the King’s sovereignty of the British seas, but to the trade and Page 18 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics navigation of England otherwise’. The cry was taken up by Tobias Gentleman and other pamphleteers, and echoed by Hakewill. But James ‘stopped his ears to Sir Walter’s advice concerning the Dutch fishing’ and only opened them when Ralegh promised him gold from Guiana.187 To the Dutch alliance Ralegh came to add an alliance with the Palatinate and the maintenance of the Protestant interest in France and Switzerland—an object dear to Oliver Cromwell’s heart.188 Neither Elizabeth,189 James, nor Charles190 had any use for this foreign policy. They regarded the Dutch as rebels and Spain as the greatest monarchy in àl’ Christendom, with whom it would be folly for England to engage in war à l’ outrance. Nor had any of them much sympathy with the commercial or religious ideals which underlay Hakluyt’s and Ralegh’s schemes. But to many merchants and ministers, and to a large group in every House of Commons, the policy was very attractive. From 1612 the Virginia Company tried to carry it out. Hakluyt, a founder-member, may have organized the Company’s propaganda campaign.191 Bacon, Coke, Fulke Greville, Viscount Lisle, Hariot, and Briggs were members, together with Theodore Gulston, Thomas Winston, and Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle of the Protector. All the great London livery companies subscribed.192 A list of the motives of the Virginia Adventurers, drafted in 1612, is a summary of Hakluyt’s policy: (i) convert the Indians; (ii) export surplus population, ‘the rank multitude’; (in) supply England with naval stores and (iv) minerals; (v) provide a base for Atlantic shipping and (vi) explorations to reveal a north-west passage to the Far East.193 The Virginia Company was supported by a propaganda campaign conducted by ministers (mainly Puritan, but including Donne). Thus William Crashawe (p.146) spoke in 1613 of ‘a work so honourable to God, our religion, our King and our country; so comfortable to the souls of the poor savages, and so profitable to the Adventures…as the like…hath not been attempted in the Christian world these many ages’.194. Propaganda against Spain and for American colonization was continued by Samuel Purchas, whose Pilgrimage ran to four editions between 1613 and 1626, and together with his Hakluytus Posthumus had a great influence195 Sir Edwin Sandys, who was Treasurer of the Virginia Company in 1619–20, consciously aimed at carrying out Hakluyt’s policy.196 He was a friend of Selden’s and a leading opposition figure in the House of Commons. In the Parliament of 1614 he supported Sir Roger Owen’s view that all kings had originally been elected, ‘with reciprocal conditions between king and people’. A king by conquest might be forcibly overthrown.197 Sandys introduced secret balloting at the Company’s elections, a procedure which Charles I was to forbid to all companies, but which the Pilgrim Fathers and the Royal Society alike used in elections.198 In the 1621 Parliament Sandys said ‘Let us not palliate with the King, but with the people’, and even went so far as to ask ‘What is the bill of the Sabbath…to a man in want?’199 In 1620 James intervened to force Sandys’s Page 19 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics replacement as Treasurer of the Virginia Company: ‘Choose the devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys.’200 Gondomar asserted that the Company ‘was but a seminary to a seditious Parliament’.201 But Sandys remained a force until the Company was dissolved in 1624. He attacked Gondomar as an enemy of the Company in the (p.147) 1624 Parliament, where ‘there was above one hundred Parliament men that were of the Virginia Company’.202 Sandys, son of a Marian exile, was a patron of the Pilgrim Fathers. His Europae Speculum was often associated with Ralegh’s History as a source of general information.203 There is thus clear continuity of the imperial theme in cementing the alliance between merchants and a section of the gentry. A paper of 1623, ‘Reasons showing the benefit of planting in New England’, in addition to the conventional themes of converting the heathen, finding cloth markets, exporting the unemployed, providing work for those of the poor who remained in England, added that ‘if he be a gentleman, or person of more eminency who hath no great stock to continue his reputation here at home’, and if he could raise £100 or £200 capital, by emigrating he would ‘not only be able to live without scorn of his maligners but in a plentiful and worthy manner’.204 Ralegh’s associate, the third Earl of Cumberland, had attempted in 1598–9 to capture Porto Rico as a base against Spain.205 This looks forward to Pym’s Providence Island Company and Cromwell’s Western Design, linked by the voyages of Captain William Jackson in 1642–5. Jackson, who had the backing both of the Providence Island Company and of Maurice Thompson, later Cromwell’s leading financier, seized Jamaica in 1643 and so (Jackson echoes Ralegh’s words) ‘the veil is now drawn aside, and their weakness detected by a handful of men, furnished and set out upon the expense of one private man’. What could not the English state do?206 Cromwell soon showed. For the continuity of policy we have to look from Hakluyt and Ralegh through the Virginia and Providence Island Companies and Captain Jackson, on to Hugh Peter, who in 1645 told the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, the two Houses of Parliament, and the divines of the Westminster Assembly, that England had a double interest: first the maintenance of the Protestant cause on the Continent; secondly war with Spain for the West Indies.207 When Cromwell resumed Ralegh’s policy, he found that his problem was exactly that which Ralegh had explained to James: ‘how to free your people from the Inquisition of Spain, enlarge (p.148) their trades, and be secured not to have your ships stayed in his ports at his pleasure’.208 The manifesto which Milton drafted in 1655 to justify war on Spain dwelt, as Ralegh would have done, on Spanish illtreatment of the Indians as crying for retribution.209 After the Restoration Sprat in his History of the Royal Society again echoed Ralegh (and Bacon) when he said: ‘the English greatness will never be supported or increased in this age by
Page 20 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics any other wars but those at sea’:210 though now he spoke from experience, not speculatively.
VI Ralegh himself made no mean contribution to the future English economy if it is true that he and Hariot introduced potatoes and the fashion of smoking tobacco to these islands. Marlowe and Thomas Allen were early smokers. Possibly because King James notoriously disliked smoking, the habit was popular in Puritan circles, even though tobacco was a monopoly attacked in the Parliament of 1628–9. But more important was Ralegh’s contribution to economic theory, or rather to the popularization of theory. In an age when it was still often denounced as morally wrong for men of property to ‘do what they would with their own’, Ralegh was an early and outspoken exponent of economic liberalism —so much so that Charles Kingsley thought his ideas worthy of the nineteenth century.211 Ralegh wanted to repeal the statute of tillage, Tor many poor men are not able to find seed to sow so much as they are bound to plough’. In any case it would be easy for England to import corn, like ‘the Hollander, which never soweth corn’, yet ‘hath by his industry such plenty that they will serve other nations…. And therefore I think the best course is to set it at liberty, and leave every man free, which is the desire of a true Englishman.’212 In the next Parliament Ralegh secured the defeat of a bill ‘touching the sowing of hemp’. ‘I do not like this constraining of men to manure their grounds at our wills,’ he said, ‘but rather let every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for, and therein use his (p. 149) discretion.’213 Despite his own practice, he attacked monopolies on more than one occasion.214 His jurisdiction over the Stannaries under Elizabeth marked an era of reform, and the rules which he laid down continued long in force. He claimed that the tinners’ wages doubled.215 As Governor of Jersey (1600–3) Ralegh adopted a scheme which had been recommended for forty years, but which no one hitherto had bothered to carry out: he established a public register of title for real property, which still survives.216 Such a land register was to be the nostrum of English legal reformers during and after the Revolution; but Cromwell in this did not emulate Ralegh. It was left to James II, in the desperation of 1688, to propose a general register of lands and land sales, in the hope of winning Whig support. ‘Take heed that thou love God, thy country, thy prince, and thine own estate, before all others…. Be not made an ass to carry the burdens of other men…. Money in thy purse will ever be in fashion.’217 Such conventionally cynical passages occur not only in the Advice to his Son: Ralegh interrupted an eloquent passage on vanity in the Preface to his History to ask, ‘Shall we therefore value honour and riches at nothing, and neglect them as unnecessary and vain?’ And he answered, ‘Certainly no.’ For God had distinguished even the angels by degrees: it would be foolishness to condemn care for worldly goods. Monarchy Page 21 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics originated to defend property, Ralegh declared in the History, traditionally enough.218 Ralegh had backers in the City. William Sanderson, Merchant Adventurer and generous patron of popular science, married Ralegh’s niece and acted as his banker, man of business, and go-between.219 Sir Thomas Smith lent him money.220 Sir Thomas Myddelton financed some of his voyages.221 Sir Arthur Ingram was interested in Guiana, though unkindly (p.150) spoken of by Ralegh.222 In many ways Ralegh made himself the spokesman of the merchants’ interests. Against the still prevalent snobbery of the landed class, he pointed out that ‘all the nobility and gentry in Europe trade their grass and corn and cattle, their vines and their fruits…. The King of Spain is now the greatest merchant.’223 Ralegh noted the absence of a rich nobility in the Netherlands.224 Dutch merchants ‘more fully obtained there their purposes by their convenient privileges and settled constitutions’ than in England; and he listed the reforms needed to bring commercial advantages to England—lower customs (which would increase total royal revenue),225 free access for foreign merchants, stimulus to home manufactures and fishing, ending of the privileges of the Merchant Adventurers, a Navigation Act, taking regular and constant advice from merchants. It is an economic programme which the next two generations carried out.226 Like Mun, Ralegh praised the low customs and ‘great and pleasing privileges’ of merchants at Leghorn.227 He urged the use of state power to protect merchants’ interests.228 Ralegh wanted governments ‘to allure and encourage the people for their private gain to be all workers and erectors of a commonwealth’.229 Above all Ralegh had grasped the commercial importance of sea power. ‘Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade,’ he proclaimed; ‘whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.’230 ‘The very binding cause of amity between all kings, princes, and states is their trade and intercourse of their subjects.’231 It is not surprising that it was a rich City merchant who after Ralegh’s execution said that his head would do better on the shoulders of Secretary Naunton.232 On many occasions Ralegh noted passages disapproving of arbitrary taxes.233 He spoke for a rationalization of the English system of taxation, with its absurd under-assessment of the aristocracy. In 1593 he had opposed a survey of men’s taxable wealth, on the characteristic (p.151) ground that it might damage men’s credits.234 Yet in 1601, when Francis Bacon made a smug reference to the excellence of the English system of taxation, Ralegh retorted ‘call you this parjugum, when a poor man pays as much as a rich? And peradventure his estate is no better than it is set at, or but little better? When our estates that are three or four pounds in the Queen’s book, it is not the hundredth part of our Page 22 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics wealth.’235 On this and other occasions Ralegh made himself the spokesman not only of the merchants, but of the middling sort in general. The criticism of gentlemen sea-captains attributed to him was quoted by Samuel Pepys in 1681.236 Not Caesar’s birth made Caesar to survive But Caesar’s virtues, which are yet alive.237
This impeccable Protestant sentiment, rather secularized in the application to Caesar, appears frequently in Ralegh’s writings.238 Even a poem like The Lie embodies an economic attitude which might commend itself to Puritan business men. For Ralegh, in stressing the differences between principles and practice, said Tell them that brave it most They buy far more by spending.
Men spent large sums in conspicious consumption at court, in the hope of acquiring office or favour. The money might have been more profitably invested, and the apparent glamour surrounding the monarch was a sham: Say to the Court it glows And shines like rotten wood.
Ralegh often went out of his way to pay tribute to labour.239 A vagabond is ‘a man without protection, and cast out from the favour of God’: here Ralegh agreed with William Perkins.240 With vagabonds are to be (p.152) contrasted ‘the needy and labouring souls’ who have Ralegh’s sympathy. Ralegh indeed thought poverty a deplorable state, ‘a vexation of every worthy spirit’.241 He urged his son to ‘strive…to make good thy station in the upper deck; those that live under hatches are ordained to be drudges and slaves’.242 But he was not without sympathy for ‘the meanest sort of people’, who formed the rank and file of armies, and ‘must either die for 8d. wages or if he live with many wounds, perchance beg all his life after’. Ralegh put words into such a man’s mouth not unlike those which Winstanley was to use in 1649: ‘Let the rich fight for themselves. What have we to do, who lived miserably in peace, and must now also die for those that have [Turnished] themselves with plenty?’243 Indeed Ralegh had a powerful, if not original, sense of the corrupting power of gold, worthy of Spenser’s picture of Mammon or Timon himself. Spanish gold ‘purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into councils, and setteth bound loyalty at liberty in the greatest monarchies of Europe’.244 The man who ruined himself in the search for gold came ultimately to long for Heaven’s bribeless hall, Where no corrupted voices brawl; Page 23 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics No conscience molten into gold, No forged accuser bought and sold.245
Despite his cynical advice to his son, Ralegh himself married for love.
VII The confusion about Ralegh’s ‘atheism’ has been cleared up by Professor Strathmann, as it was for Ralegh’s contemporaries by the History of the World. But I believe Professor Strathmann rather overstates the case, as Ralegh himself did.246 Ralegh was certainly no atheist: his contemporary reputation as such began in Jesuit propaganda, seizing on Ralegh’s known interest in science, his anti-Aristoteleanism, his open questioning mind, his pleasure in shocking the conventionally pious. It is the sort of smear that was normally put upon daringly original thinkers like Ralegh and Hariot and Marlowe. In 1595 Ralegh went (p. 153) ‘daily to hear sermons’,247 and the Rev. Richard Hakluyt always assumed that he was a good Christian.248 He was given a testimony of orthodoxy by the clergyman who attended him in his last hours. He patronized the Puritan Hugh Broughton, whom in 1596 he tried to get appointed Bishop of Lismore.249 Ralegh liked to shock parsons. ‘But we have principles in our mathematics’, he snapped at the Rev. Ralph Ironside when the latter became circular in his attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul.250 Clearly Ralegh had no strong feelings about dogma. In company with Essex he intervened in 1591 to save John Udall, who had been sentenced to death in the government’s terror campaign against religious radicals. Udall appealed to Elizabeth for clemency through Ralegh, and received a pardon in 1592. He died in prison a year later, whilst proposals that he should be allowed to go to Syria for the Turkey merchants were being debated.251 Ralegh’s action in this case showed considerable courage, since Udall was no ordinary religious radical: he was believed to be linked with the authors of the seditious Marprelate Tracts. In the Parliament of 1593 Ralegh spoke up for the Brownists, whose numbers he estimated at 20, 000. His opposition was to condemning men for their opinions. ‘What danger may grow to ourselves if this law pass, it were fit to be considered’, he said, especially when a jury ‘shall be judges what another man means’.252 Ralegh likewise opposed ‘giving authority to a mere churchwarden to compel men to corne to church’.253 Ralegh indeed hunted down papists in the fifteen-nineties, but this was for political reasons: he regarded them as agents of his main enemy, Spain. He spent a night amicably discussing theology with at least one Jesuit, and offered to intervene on his behalf; but he prevented the same Jesuit from speaking to the crowd which came to witness his execution.254 He had at one time a secretary who was a papist.
Page 24 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (p.154) Ralegh, in short, seems to have had the sort of tolerance born of indifference which finally triumphed in 1689. We may compare Bacon’s erastian tolerance. Despite, or because of, Ralegh’s own participation in the French religious wars between 1569 and 1575, he abhorred ‘war, massacres, and murders for religion’, by which ‘we are all in effect become comedians in religion’.255 Allegations that he was an atheist may have been put about in the fifteen-nineties in order to discredit a man who had close connexions with the Puritans.256 Even in the History of the World Ralegh still thought it necessary to rebut the charge that he was a Puritan.257’ He vindicated his orthodoxy against those ‘mad dogs’ who ‘condemn all such in the pride of their zeal, as atheists and infidels, that are not transported with the like intemperate ignorance’. Hardly better were those who, ‘when they themselves cannot touch a man in open and generous opposition, will wound him secretly by the malicious virtue of an hypocrite’.258 Nevertheless, the fact remains that some of Ralegh’s writings—notably the Instructions to his Son—are more compatible with deism than Christianity. There are few references to Christ in the History.259 The Ten Commandments define the necessary bonds of society, which would have to be observed for reasons of Hobbist expediency, ‘if there were not any religion nor judgement to come’.260 Ralegh indulged in textual criticism of the Bible, if of rather an elementary kind; and discouraged excessive literalism of interpretation.261 He condemned the Romish practice of blindly maintaining ‘whatsoever they have been formerly known to hold and believe’.262 Many Catholic practices, like image-worship, had been borrowed from the pagans.263 Hariot’s and Ralegh’s reports of the New World may have done something to stimulate interest in comparative religion, and also primitivist ideas. ‘We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age’, said Ralegh.264 Hariot’s Brief and True Report on Virginia contained a serious account of native religion and customs. We might well follow the (p.155) example of their healthful moderation in eating. They are untroubled by the desire to pile up riches for their children, and live in perfect contentment with each other, sharing all those things which God hath so bountifully provided them. Yet’, Hariot continued, not surely entirely innocently, ‘they do not render Him the thanks which His providence deserves.’ Whether or not their priests use religion as a deliberate instrument of policy, the fact remains that ‘the belief in heaven and the fiery pit makes the simple folk give strict obedience to their governors, and behave with great care, so that they may avoid torment after death and enjoy bliss’.265
Page 25 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics ‘Certain hellish verses devised by that atheist and traitor Rawley’, in the Bath MSS., contain an account of the simultaneous origin of the family, private property, and the state, and of the deliberate invention of religion as bugbears to keep the world in fear And make them quietly the yoke to bear, So that religion of itself a fable Was only found to make that peaceable.266
But the lines in fact come from Selimus, attributed to Robert Greene.267
VIII Ralegh illustrates the intimate connexion between early science and historical studies. Dee in 1556 tried to persuade Queen Mary to take action ‘to discover and preserve ancient writings and monuments’, and to found a national library to house them. He tried again with Cecil in 1574, equally unsuccessfully.268 Robert Recorde edited Fabyan’s Chronicles and had a large collection of historical manuscripts; Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Henry Billingsley, Lord Lumley, Sir George Buc, and Edward Brerewood, Gresham Professor of Astronomy, were all members of the Society of Antiquaries.269 The Oxford mathematician Thomas Allen was also an antiquary. Sir Henry Savile, founder of chairs of geometry and (p.156) astronomy at Oxford, translated Tacitus and edited St. John Chrysostom. The combination of scientific and antiquarian interests was repeated in John Hall, would-be scientific reformer of the universities, who wanted to have a library of historical manuscripts created,270 in Sir Thomas Browne and many of the early Fellows of the Royal Society, like Pepys, Evelyn, and Aubrey. Anthony Wood took lessons in chemistry from a protege of Boyle’s, and gave the title Britannia Baconica to his collection of rarities.271 Sir Edward Coke, the main proponent of Parliamentarian historical theory, had an astonishing number of scientific books in his library—Billingsley’s Euclide, works by Boorde, Recorde, Dee, Digges, Gilbert, Hues, Blundeville, Bacon, and others.272 The historical method of Sir Henry Spelman, we are told by the chronicler of The Historical Revolution, is that of the natural sciences.273 Ralegh and Selden274 were historians keenly interested in science, Bacon one of the greatest of our early historians as well as the prophet of the scientific movement. Shakespeare himself was much possessed by history, and in this as in so many other respects he was typical of his age, or responding to it. One play in five in the two decades after the Armada was drawn from English history: such plays were produced exclusively at the popular theatres.275 The vogue for books on history seems to have reached a peak in the fifteen-nineties.276 There are two main reasons for the importance of history in our period. First, by the early seventeenth century the crisis in intellectual life had penetrated the writing of history. The easy patriotism of the Elizabethans, of Foxe and Holinshed, had worn thin. The contrast between the monarch as symbol of the independent English commonwealth, and the actual occupants of the throne, Page 26 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics was too marked. Already in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and Edward II, in Shakespeare’s Histories and some of his Tragedies, we note a divergence between the divinity that doth hedge a king and the all too human attributes of some monarchs. Translations of Greek and Roman historians had brought (p. 157) about a shift in readers’ assumptions about the nature of the state:’277 the influence of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and other Italian historians worked in the same direction. Many of the translations from the Italian which Leicester patronized were of historical writings. Leicester himself, we are told, was a devoted reader of history, and relied on historians for help in solving problems of government.278 By the time of Ralegh and Bacon historians had to meet a new sophistication in their readers, and could no longer afford to shirk fundamental moral problems. The patriotic and theological assumptions of Tudor historians were not openly repudiated; but they were now qualified by sceptical acceptance of the tendency of all government to become corrupt.279 Secondly, history was an issue in the universities, where it played a role similar to that of sociology today—-popular with most undergraduates and some dons, suspected by the established authorities. Sidney recommended the study of history to his brother Robert in 1580.280 Bacon tried in his will to set up lectureships at Cambridge, but did not leave enough money. His friend Fulke Greville did establish a history lectureship in 1628, and Bacon’s influence is clear in the instructions which he drew up. No one in holy orders was to be eligible. No Englishman was thought competent to hold it, and Isaac Dorislaus, a doctor of civil law from Leiden University, was appointed the first lecturer. He at once ran into political trouble for assuming that ‘what they hear with applause’ in the republican Netherlands ‘might as freely be spoken’ in England.281 After Dorislaus’s first lecture the course was suppressed by (p.158) the efforts of the Laudians, because of Dorislaus’s alleged hostility to monarchy.282 Twenty-one years later he was assassinated by royalists for the same reason. In between he had won the friendship of Selden and Lord Wharton as well as of Lord Brooke, had been employed in the diplomatic service of Parliament, was Judge-Advocate of the Earl of Essex’s army during the civil war, judge of the Court of Admiralty (1648), and had taken part in the trial of Charles I. Although Clarendon was wrong to say that Dorislaus was a Gresham professor,283 his son became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dorislaus’s one lecture, and his silencing, seem to have made a strong impression on at least one young Cambridge man—John Milton.284 In Oxford the struggles were less exciting. In 1622 Camden endowed a readership. The first reader, at Camden’s suggestion, was Degory Wheare, a friend of the third Earl of Pembroke, of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, and of Francis Rous (later Speaker of the Barebones Parliament) as well as the tutor and friend of John Pym.285 Wheare, who preferred Ralegh ‘before all other historians’, was a staunch Calvinist, a supporter of Hakewill, and Principal of Gloucester Hall from 1626 to 1647.286 Against the wishes of the university, Camden persevered Page 27 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics in his original intention that his reader should lecture on civil history: nevertheless there were squabbles about this between Wheare and the university authorities.287 In view of this and of Cambridge’s experience, it is hardly surprising to find the Laudian statutes of 1636 insisting that the history reader is to lecture ‘in historians of ancient date and repute’.288 History was still a subject in which, as Ralegh ruefully put it, it was dangerous ‘to follow truth too near the heels’.289 Leicester had protected historians, but towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign Sir John Hayward got into trouble for his Life of Henry IF, and Sir Francis Hubert’s verse (p.159) Historie of Edward the Second was ‘by supremest authority forbidden to be printed’. From 1599 all English histories had to be authorized by a Privy Councillor: Drayton removed from Englands Heroicall Epistles any passages which could have been interpreted to refer to contemporary events.290 Under James I the Society of Antiquaries fell into disfavour and ceased to meet. Attempts to revive it (under George Hakewill’s lawyer brother) were ‘misliked’ by the King, even though assurances were given that no matters of state or religion would be discussed.291 Under Charles, Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Edward Coke, as well as Dorislaus, suffered for saying the wrong things about the past. Even Viscount Falkland, Lord Deputy of Ireland, left his History of…Edward II, written about 1627, unpublished.292 The History of…Richard III, written by Sir George Buc, friend of Selden, Camden, and Coke, was published posthumously in 1646.293 Samuel Daniel, who had been in trouble at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, was wise to profess in 1627 his anxiety to avoid ‘Laesa Majestas, even against dead princes’.294 In a sense the Parliamentary opposition’s case against the first two Stuarts was wholly based on history, even if this history was not always very accurate. A full consideration of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution could not omit the middle-class historians patronized by Leicester—Grafton, a printer who dedicated his Abridgement of the Chronicles of England to Leicester in. 1562, and his Manuell of the Chronicles of ‘England to the Stationers’ Company in 1565, and Stow, a tailor, who dedicated his Summaries of the English Chronicles (1566) to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, the Merchant Taylors’ Company, and ‘all the commons’ of London, and his Chronicles of England (1580) to Leicester. The second edition of Holinshed was dedicated, inter alios, to Leicester and Ralegh. Stow had a pension from the Merchant Taylors; Speed was also a tailor. Fulke Greville succeeded to Leicester’s patronage of Speed and Camden.295 Nor could such a consideration omit the legal antiquarianism of Sir Edward Coke.296 I have tried to discuss one (p.160) aspect of the historical approach to politics in the seventeenth century elsewhere.297 Leaving the antiquarians aside, we come to an even more influential book—John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. There were nine editions of this massive work between 1563 and 1641, and two more before 1684. Three abridgements were Page 28 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics published before 1615, one by Sidney’s protégé, the popular scientific writer Timothy Bright, another dedicated to Archbishop Abbott and Coke.298 Though Elizabeth thought Foxe too radical to receive ecclesiastical promotion, she and her archbishops encouraged churches and parsons to buy either the Acts and Monuments or Bright’s ultra-patriotic abridgement.299 Foxe did much to form the mythology which saw Englishmen as God’s chosen people courageously defending His truth through the centuries. Foxe was extensively used by Hakluyt; and we saw above300 how Gellibrand suffered for following him. There are plenty of echoes of Foxe in men as different as William Prynne and John Milton.301 In the sixteenth century Foxe saw Antichrist personified in Spain, and it was the anti-Spanish aspect of his patriotism which was most useful to the officially encouraged legend. The sermons which Houses of Commons in the seventeenth century used to order for 5 November drew on a hatred of Spanish and popish cruelty which Foxe had made familiar to all Englishmen. No wonder Laud disparaged him and refused to allow his works to be reprinted.302 Yet Foxe’s is no narrow patriotism. The English Church was part of the international Church, even though in most other countries that Church was oppressed. Englishmen had international as well as patriotic duties.303 In addition to its patriotic appeal, the Acts and Monuments had radical overtones. The godly remnant who defended Christ’s truth at the cost of their own lives were shown in Foxe’s book—as they had been in reality—as mostly springing from the humblest of the people. For Shakespeare the original sin which led to the tribulations of the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses was the deposition of Richard II: for Foxe it was the rejection of Wyclif and the Lollards. Yet the story ended happily with the triumph of Protestantism. This point was noted by (p.161) radical English revolutionaries, and it did much to fortify them. Governor Bradford and Winstanley quoted Foxe.304 Lilburne, Walwyn, and Overton looked back to Marian martyrs and medieval heretics as their direct ancestors. Cromwell at Naseby saw his troops as ‘a company of poor ignorant men’, but he had ‘assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to nought the things that are’.305 Cromwell may have got that assurance from his schoolmaster, Doctor Thomas Beard: but Beard’s Theatre of Gods Judgments…specially against the most eminent Persons in the World whose exorbitant power had broke through the barres of Divine and Human Law (1597) was in the Foxe tradition.306 The appeal of Beard’s book was to a relatively unsophisticated popular audience, and its political lesson was clear and specific. If you be mighty, puissant and fearful, know that the Lord is greater than you, for he is almighty, all-terrible, and all-fearful: in what place soever you are, he is always above you, ready to hurl you down and overturn you, to break, quash, and crush you in pieces as pots of earth.’307 Yet, though it is a much more subtle and sophisticated work, not dissimilar lessons could be drawn from Ralegh’s History of the World. Ralegh must have known his Foxe well, since the martyrologist tells a story of Sir Page 29 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Walter’s mother. Like Foxe and Shakespeare, Ralegh drew lessons from English history: and the severity of his judgements on kings from Henry I to Henry VIII amply justified James I’s remark that Ralegh was ‘too saucy in censuring princes’.308
IX Yet, though history is for Ralegh too the theatre of God’s judgements, it is much more than that. God represents the principle of law in history. Unlike Beard, Ralegh does not show God directly intervening to smite (p.162) the sinner: he shows the ineluctable working out of cause and effect at the human level, so that evil actions ultimately but inevitably produce evil consequences for the doer. Already in 1591 Ralegh had seen the defeat of the Armada as God’s verdict ‘against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the Spaniard, who seeking to devour all nations, are themselves devoured’.309 Bacon separated science from theology by pushing God upstairs after he had established the laws of motion for the universe. In exactly the same way Ralegh’s emphasis on law looks forward to the Newtonians: Ralegh even used the metaphor of winding up a clock to describe God’s relation to his universe.310 Ralegh secularized history not by denying God the first cause,311 but by concentrating his vision on secondary causes and insisting that they are sufficient in themselves for historical explanation. ‘To say that God was pleased to have it so, were a true but an idle answer (for His secret will is the cause of all things)…. Wherefore we may boldly look into the second causes’, which Ralegh proceeded to do in respect of the development of Jewish history.312 The emphasis on second causes was suspect and sometimes led to accusations of atheism—e.g. against doctors who emphasized dirt rather than God’s wrath as the explanation of plague; or those who looked for natural causes in illnesses which were more easily diagnosed as diabolic possession. Throughout the period with which we are dealing many members of the medical profession were slowly but perseveringly striving to eject the supernatural from medicine. Lip service still had to be done to the first cause, and may have been meant; but in practice it was second causes that mattered. ‘All Christian men must pray to God to be their defence’, said William Bullein in listing the remedies against plague; ‘then one must make a fire in every chimney within the house.’313 A Puritan divine, William Fulke, wrote a treatise to demonstrate ‘the natural causes of all kind of meteors’, so often treated as supernatural events. Thomas Twyne insisted that ‘God worketh evermore by second causes unless He worketh miracles which are against the common course (p.163) of nature’.314 In 1609 Robert Gray complained that ‘amongst us at this day, if any strange accidents do happen, either in the air, or in the earth, or in the waters,…we refer them to some material cause or other, being unwilling (as it were) to acknowledge God to have a hand in this’.315 Yet the battle was by no means won. As late as 1654 an opponent of the new science condemned the ‘presumption, if not impiety, in
Page 30 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics taking men off from [God], the first, to ascribe all or too much to Nature and second causes’.316 He was, of course, opposing reform of the universities. As soon as theocentric history is replaced by a history which stresses second causes, consequences follow. It becomes important to ascertain how, at the human level, effects follow causes. Time and experience teach us these lessons, and they are accessible to all. ‘The cheese-wife knoweth, as well as the philosopher, that sour rennet doth coagulate her milk into a curd.’ Nevertheless, there are ‘fundamental laws of human knowledge’, and these can be ascertained and tested by reason.317 Ralegh’s emphasis here on the de facto knowledge of the practitioners, and the duty of learning from them, is exactly parallel to Bacon’s emphasis on the duty of scientists to learn from craftsmen: and when Ralegh claims to be ‘not altogether ignorant in the laws of history’, he adds that they have been taught by none better than Bacon.318 In history as in science, the laws which reason discovers may conflict with those traditionally accepted by authority, custom, and precedent. Ralegh attacked Aristotle and his Verbal doctrine’ as vigorously as Bacon did.319 He was equally critical of those who preferred ‘rather to follow old errors than to examine them’, and of ‘princes and governors’ who do not adapt their policies to changing circumstances.320 It is ‘the end and scope of all history, to teach by example of times past such wisdom as may guide our desires and actions’.321 ‘We may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal, by the comparison and application of other men’s forepassed (p.164) miseries, with our own like errors and ill-deservings.’322 We arrive at useful knowledge by experience, not by scholastic disputation. Therefore progress and improvement are possible by the use of human reason. Time ‘(after the Creator of all things) hath by degrees taught all mankind’.323 Down to Ralegh’s time cyclical theories of history had been fashionable: the men of the Renaissance prided themselves on returning to the standards and values of antiquity, the reformers on returning to the primitive church. Foxe breathes an air of optimism, because he saw his century on the upward swing of the cycle. Bodin in 1566 was one of the first to introduce the idea that change might be possible if human beings willed it.324 But for most of the intellectuals among Ralegh’s contemporaries the cyclical theory was a pessimistic one: it put inevitable limits to the possibilities of human advance. (Cyclical theories, Mr. Carr recently suggested, are ‘the characteristic ideology of a society in decline’.)325 Ralegh, like Bacon, was on the side of the Moderns against the Ancients. ‘The age of Time hath brought forth stranger and more incredible things than the infancy’—though not all of them were good.326 The idea that Ralegh himself held a consistently cyclical theory of history is based on the incorrect attribution to him of The Cabinet Council, which in fact consists of extracts from other writers. True, Ralegh thought that in certain respects mankind had deteriorated, and he was shaken by the conclusions of modern astronomy; he shocked Hakewill by some of his remarks; but he also Page 31 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics gave that great propagandist for the Moderns against the Ancients many points to quote on the other side,327 as well as the fact that Ralegh’s own historical achievement could be matched against the best of the ancient historians.328 Ralegh refused to look for a Golden Age in the past. ‘He that governs by (p.165) discourse of former times, shall but take counsel of the dead; for the natures of all things under the sun are subject to change, but the nature of reason only. And it is certain that, in the times of alteration, the wisdom of nature is better than of books.’329 Humanity may not be able to control the laws which human reason extracts from history. ‘God…hath given unto man the knowledge of those ways by which kingdoms rise and fall, yet hath left him subject unto the affections which draw on these fatal changes in their times appointed/330 But men can, and indeed must (consciously or unconsciously), execute God’s sentence, as when L. Aemilius Paulus ‘brought the kingdom of Macedon to that end for which God had appointed over it a king so foolish and so cowardly’.331 ‘The judgements of God are for ever unchangeable’, Ralegh tells us, and therefore ‘those that are wise, or whose wisdom, if it be not great, yet is true and well-grounded, will be able to discern’ these laws of history; by the use of a reason not restricted to the ‘wise’, they will be able consciously to co-operate with them.332 Milton, Ralegh’s great admirer, might have appealed specifically to the example of L. Aemilius Paulus when he said that though it was for God to punish wicked princes, yet God might choose to act through human agents: as He had done on 30 January 1649.333 Certainly Milton’s lines on the endowment of human beings with reason by the Creator—‘And Reason He made right’—are in Ralegh’s spirit. Above all, when we contrast Ralegh’s attitude with, say, Calvin’s, we are conscious of a great advance in historical sense. For Calvin the Jews of the Old Testament do not exist as living individuals: they are characters in an allegorical play which only makes sense because of the morals which the audience reads into it.334 This humanization of history was not, of course, original with Ralegh: he found it in Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and many others; he found it in the philosophy of Ramus. Nearer home, Ralegh could have found a (p.166) plausible atheistic argument based on the independence of second causes elaborated by the wicked Cecropia in Sidney’s Arcadia.335 Bacon in 1603 had attacked those who supposed that ‘the ignorance of a second cause doth make men more devoutly to depend upon the providence of God, as supposing the effects to come immediately from His hand’. Bacon suggested that the search for final causes had distracted too many scientists away from their real business.336 Bacon, like Ralegh, admired Machiavelli, and was convinced of the importance of history. ‘Knowledges’, he wrote, ‘are as pyramids, whereof history is the basis.’337 ‘By integrating history into the scientific movement of his day’, Professor Fussner writes, ‘Bacon lent the weight of his authority to progressive historical practice.’ But he ‘contributed to the advancement of history by telling historians what and how they ought to write’, rather than by his own practice as an historian.338 Page 32 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Bacon’s attachment to second causes seems more firm than Ralegh’s, yet Bacon called in ‘the secret providence of God’, no less than Ralegh, as soon as he began to write history. Bacon thought that comets, ‘out of question’, had ‘power and effect over the gross and issue of things’. Camden, whom Professor Fussner regards as ‘a true Baconian’, looked to the conjunction of the stars for historical explanation.339 Even Clarendon had a belief in the working of divine law in history which was very similar to Ralegh’s: ‘if God would suffer a lasting union in any notorious wickedness, which He never doth, the world itself would be shaken.’340 Ralegh had a knowledge of up-to-date continental sceptical trends, as is shown by his translation of Sextus Empiricus’s The Sceptic341 The distinction between first and second causes was indeed the only way in which Ralegh could keep his fundamental scepticism within bounds. He had a healthy distrust of the evidence he had to use: ‘informations (p.167) are often false, records not always true’; the version that happens to survive may well be one-sided. Even when the facts are well established, motives remain obscure. Historians weary, and lack imagination. The historian then is forced to conjecture; only he must distinguish clearly between conjectures and facts.342 It could hardly be better put. Ralegh’s scepticism of the possibility of arriving at historical truth made him cling to the Biblical certainties. But to put the age of miracles firmly into the past, as Ralegh and so many Protestant historians did, was a great advance: credulity about the past, where one was dependent on authorities, did not exclude a scientific attitude towards the present, where one trusted one’s own experience. Matthew Arnold was quite wrong, for the sixteenth century at least, to say that ‘the mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam’s ass spoke in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked’.343 Ralegh thought it was the historian’s job ‘to illustrate and make good in human reason those things which [Biblical] authority alone, without further circumstance, ought to have confirmed in every man’s belief’.344 But he strained as hard as he dared within the strait-jacket in which historical thought had been strapped for over a thousand years. We can always feel the pull between the old and the new. Whether for prudential reasons or because of genuine unclarity, Ralegh never resolved the tension in the grand theoretical passages of his History. But whenever he gets down to detail he has in fact resolved it; and in The Prerogative of Parliaments he resolved it in theory too. What is important for our purposes is Ralegh’s freedom within his self-imposed limits, limits which Bacon accepted and which very few indeed crossed in the earlier seventeenth century except Hobbes and Harrington; and Harrington, I shall suggest, with Ralegh’s help.345 Hobbes in effect discarded the first cause altogether, and listed ‘ignorance of second causes’ as one of the seeds of religion.346 Yet even Hobbes arrived at such devastating conclusions—in print at Page 33 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics all events—very late. In 1629 he defined ‘the principal and proper work of history’ in words as traditional as any Ralegh ever used—’to instruct and enable (p.168) men by the knowledge of actions past to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future’.347 Ralegh’s importance is that he employed a secular and critical approach to a study of world history which was in very large part a study of Biblical history; and that he did this in English, in a work which was a best-seller. So he contributed, perhaps more than has been recognized, to that segregation of the spiritual from the secular which was the achievement of the seventeenth century, and which the radical revolutionaries of the sixteen-forties and fifties carried to its furthest extent. Those wealthy merchants whose wills Professor Jordan has studied with such effect, who prudently and cautiously applied their doubtless ill-gotten wealth to the endowment of scholarships, apprenticeships, almshouses, &c.—what were they doing but looking to second causes for the reconstruction of English society? Their popish predecessors, who had distributed their equally ill-gotten wealth in the form of indiscriminate largesse, left it to God to solve society’s problems. The emphasis on second causes stimulates self-help.348 ‘Moses well knew that he went out with a mighty hand, and that God guided his understanding in all his enterprises; so he lay not still in the ditch crying for help, but using the understanding which God had given him, he left nothing unperformed, becoming a wise man, and a valiant and skilful conductor.’349 We may compare Thomas Hariot’s words: ‘We must act earnestly, fight strenuously, but in His name, and we shall vanquish.’350 ‘Well we know’, Ralegh observed, ‘that God worketh all things here amongst us mediately by a secondary means, the which means of our defence and safety (being shipping and sea-forces) are to be esteemed as His gifts, and then only available and beneficial when He withal vouchsafeth His grace to use them aright.’351 What is ‘Trust in God and keep your powder dry’ but a recognition of the fact that, at the level of second causes, human action is all-important? ‘Fate will be overcome, if thou resist it; if thou neglect, it conquereth.’ Such is Ralegh’s conclusion to a consideration of the power of the stars over human actions.352 ‘After seeking the advancement of the kingdom of Christ’, (p.169) said the younger Hakluyt in his Discourse of Western Planting, ‘the second chief and principal end of the same is traffic.’353 The principle was of wide application. In another respect Ralegh’s History can be associated with the new science. The great intellectural stimulus of the sixteenth century had been its absorption of the existence of the New World, with all that this implied for relativity of standards. Ralegh brought to bear on the history of the ancient world a lively mind full of the marvels of the New World. He discussed the location of the earthly Paradise in the light of ‘those places which I myself have seen, near the line and under it’.354 He decided that there was nothing beyond the normal Page 34 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics course of nature in the Flood, comparing the torrential rainfall of the West Indies.355 The movements of the ark were in accordance with the laws of navigation, and its capacity was assessed in relation to Ralegh’s experience in stocking a ship for a voyage.356 In addition to his careful examination of the available geographical literature, Ralegh also studied the best botanical writings of his time.357 His recognition of climatic and geographical influences, of the pressure of population—all this had the effect of reducing (while not denying) the area of divine intervention in history.358 He knew that Indian communities had ‘devised laws without any grounds had from the Scriptures, or from Aristotle’s Politics, whereby they are governed’. He saw religion (except the true one) as an historical phenomenon. ‘The fire, which the Chaldeans worshipped for a God, is crept into every man’s chimney.’359 He noted that similar stories recur in different religions, though he believed ‘that Homer had read over all the books of Moses’, and ‘by places stolen thence almost word for word’.360 A growing pre-occupation with the problem of time in our period (p.170) is very important for our purposes, since it links the activities of the Copernican scientists (concerned with the philosophical notion in general) with those of the instrument-makers (concerned with the accurate measurement of short intervals, for nautical purposes, among others),361 and of the historians, from the future Leiden professor Scaliger’s De Emendatione Temporum (158S) to Ussher’s chronology of the Bible. (We may note the basis of these scientific preoccupations in clock-making, a typically Protestant industry.)362 Ralegh occupies an important position in this sequence. He very carefully studied the many contemporary experts on chronology (of whom Hariot was one of the chief) but arrived at his own conclusions, ones which deservedly won him a considerable reputation in the seventeenth century.363 When John Preston deduced the reliability of Scripture from the fact that its chronology was corroborated by heathen historians, he might well have been reading Ralegh.364 Scholars who read only the Preface to the History of the World are apt to exaggerate the orthodoxy of Ralegh’s outlook. The Preface has reasonably been described as ‘the culminating document of Renaissance historiography in England’, which did for historiography what Sidney’s Defence of Poesie did for literary criticism.365 Yet when we get into the body of the work, what impresses is not so much Ralegh’s conventional acceptance of, say, the Biblical story, as his extraordinary freedom within the limits which he accepted.366 Since one object in writing and publishing the History was to rehabilitate himself with James I, and in particular to clear his name of the stigma of atheism, naturally Ralegh emphasized his orthodoxy whenever possible. That he was successful (except with James) is clear if we compare Coke’s ‘damnable atheist’ of 1603 and C. J. Popham’s ‘the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions’ with C. J. Montague’s remark in 1618: 1 am resolved you are a good Christian, for The History of the World, which is an admirable work, doth testify as much.’367 Page 35 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (p.171) In Jewish history the first cause intervenes regularly: outside it second causes prevail, and Ralegh applied his sceptical-critical method to all human authorities. He turned to writing history only in his old age, and he is alleged (not very reliably) to have had many assistants, including Sir Robert Cotton, Bedwell, and Ben Jonson. As some 660 authors are quoted in the History, this would not have been unreasonable for a man in the Tower.368 He was to a great extent at the mercy of his sources. Yet he could show considerable independence of judgement. ‘It behoveth me to give reason for my own opinion’, he said once, ‘and with so much the greater care and circumspection because I walk aside, in a way apart from the multitude.’369 So, though it is right to praise Ralegh for ‘realizing the need for geographical study in connexion with history’, and for his ‘chronological exactness’,370 there is rather more to be said than that. It was through Ralegh that much of the most advanced continental thought was popularized in England—Machiavelli, Bodin, scepticism. The spirit of free inquiry had not yet won the day, even in the restricted area in which Ralegh applied it.371 His onslaught on Aristotle (‘I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the Ianthorn of Aristotle’s brains’),372 and his insistence on the right of reason to decide when authorities differed, the ‘private conjectures’ which Ralegh carefully distinguished from what he believed to be facts,373 his rational-critical approach (as in his rejection of the Brutus legend), all helped the new attitude to triumph, thanks very largely to the popularity of the History. ‘Every human proposition’, said Ralegh, quoting Charron, ‘hath equal authority, if reason make not the difference.’374 Francis Osborn observed gratefully that ‘Sir Walter Ralegh was the first (as I have heard) that ventured to tack about and sail aloof from the beaten track of the Schools: who upon the discovery of so apparent an error as a Torrid Zone intended to proceed in an inquisition after more solid truths.’ This gave him the reputation of being an atheist, ‘though a known asserter of (p.172) God and providence. A like censure fell to the share of Venerable Bacon and Selden.’375 ‘This is the reward I look for, that my labours may but receive an allowance suspended, until such time as this description of mine be reproved by a better.’376 It was thanks, among others, to Ralegh that ideas like those expressed in Spelman’s History of Sacrilege had already become old-fashioned when Wentworth appealed to them in 1634, suggesting to Laud that Ralegh had come to a bad end because he ‘laid his unhallowed hands’ upon Church property; and hoping that the Earl of Cork, who had built upon Ralegh’s ‘rotten sacrilegious foundation’, would similarly fail to prosper.377 Strathmann’s otherwise admirable Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Scepticism. Professor Strathmann tends to use the History as a touchstone by which to test Ralegh’s views expressed elsewhere, or views attributed to him. Naturally, given this procedure, he concludes that Ralegh grew more orthodox
Page 36 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics as he grew older. This comforting conclusion may be true; but it is hardly proven. Cf. p. 152 above.
X Turning now to the reasons for and nature of the influence of the History of the World, we may note first that Ralegh’s patriotism was as burning as that of Foxe or Hakluyt. His boast that the English were better warriors than the Romans or Macedonians is famous.378 Throughout his writings the anti-Spanish note is also a deeply patriotic note.379 Like Bacon, Ralegh held out a vision of the future greatness of England which was more novel, more clear-cut, and probably more influential than his theory of history. Insufficient attention has perhaps been paid to the anti-aristocratic overtones of the patriotic motif in Elizabethan literature. Foxe identified Englishmen with the chosen people, but most of his examples came from men and women of humble rank: he intended his book to be of ‘utility and profit’ to the multitude, to every man.380 The theory of the Norman Yoke was both a patriotic and a class theory. The sixteenth century was the epoch in which foreign merchants ceased to dominate English trade, in which English craftsmen began to catch up with their foreign rivals.381 It was the epoch in which the vernacular finally established itself against the Latin of the scholars: Sidney’s Defence of Poesie,382 Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the middle-class historians (p.173) patronized by Leicester, historical and descriptive poems like Albion’s England, Polyolbion, Britannia’s Pastorals—all testify to a new pride in England and its civilization. Thanks to the circumstances in which the Reformation took place, this patriotism at first centred round the monarchy.383 But as the aspirations of merchants and sea-dogs, Protestants, pirates, and patriots expanded, the monarchy proved incapable of realizing them. And under James I the monarchy came to be associated with alien favourites—Scots and Gondomar. From Ralegh and Hakluyt onwards the forward-looking party was calling for the use of state power to further the cause of God, profit, and national prestige.384 In the sixteen-twenties and thirties Puritans and advocates of an aggressive antiSpanish policy seemed the staunchest patriots. The royal cause was undoubtedly much weakened by the ability of its opponents to draw on this new popular nationalism.385 We may compare the simultaneous development in the constitutional sphere of a distinction between loyalty to the King and loyalty to the Commonwealth.386 For Spenser and Ralegh Elizabeth symbolized England: few spoke in such terms of James or Charles. Milton saw England as the English people, Cromwell the English as God’s chosen people. There is an important silent revolution in this transition. In Ralegh as in Foxe there is a feeling especially for those of humble station. Ralegh’s main indictment of the great princes and conquerors is their senseless cruelty, ‘giving in spoil the innocent and labouring soul to the idle and insolent’.387 In discussing the Eighth Commandment he sharply contrasted ‘the Page 37 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics poor and miserable souls, whom hunger and extreme necessity enforceth’ to steal, with ‘those detested thieves who, to maintain themselves lordlike, assault, rob, and wound the merchant, artificer, and labouring man,…and spend in bravery, drunkenness, and upon harlots, in one day, what other men sometimes have laboured for all their lives’. These aristocratic ruffians behave in this way only because they rely upon a royal pardon for their offences.388 Social rank is (p.174) ‘but as the change of garments’ in a play. When ‘every man wears but his own skin, the players are all alike’.389 So for Ralegh history is only in appearance an aristocratic subject. The marks set on private men are with their bodies cast into the earth.’ ‘God’s judgements upon the greater and greatest have been left to posterity.’390 Hence the history of the great has a significance for all of us. In one of his longest digressions Ralegh attacked duelling and the feudal conception of ‘honour’.391 He thought courage a quality not much to be admired, even in Alexander the Great. ‘If adventurous natures were to be commended simply, we should confound that virtue with the hardiness of thieves, ruffians, and mastiff dogs.’ It is the cause in which courage is shown that determines its quality.392 It may well have been from Aristotle that Ralegh learnt that ‘that man which prizeth virtue for itself must ‘content himself with…a mean and free estate’.393 But his application of the principle in the History is entirely English. ‘The husbandman and the yeoman of England are the freest of all the world.’ This explains England’s military prowess, for ‘it is the freeman, and not the slave, that hath courage and the sense of shame deserved by cowardice’. This wholly traditional reflection leads Ralegh on to his famous anticipation of Harrington. The husbandmen and yeomen ‘are more free now than ever, and our nobility and gentry more servile; for since the excessive bravery and vain expense of our grandees hath taught them to raise their rents; since the enclosures and dismembering of manors, the court-baron and the court-leet, the principalities of the gentry of England have been dissolved; the tenants having paid unto their lords their rack-rent, owe them now no service at all, and (perchance) as little love’. ‘The strength of England doth consist of the people and yeomanry’—as opposed to France, where the peasantry ‘have no courage nor arms’.394 Ralegh thus foreshadowed Harrington’s concept that in England the balance of property, and therefore of military power, had been altered in the decades before he wrote. ‘By such maintenance of their dependants, many noblemen, in all forms of government and within every man’s memory, have kept themselves in greatness, with little help of any other virtue.’395 But feudal armies no longer exist. ‘The justices of peace in (p.175) England have opposed the injustices of war in England; the King’s writ runs over all, and the Great Seal of England, with that of the next constable, will serve the turn to affront the greatest lords in England that shall move against the King.’396 Since monastic lands—which Page 38 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics might have made the King of England richer than the King of Spain—have been dissipated ‘but to make a number of pettifoggers and others gentlemen’,397 this economic change inevitably draws political consequences with it. ‘The kings of England, to lessen the power of the nobility, and balance them, have yielded to the growing greatness and privileges of the commons, and what effect that will have time can only show.’398 His readers can hardly have failed to notice that in the Netherlands, which Ralegh praised so lavishly, ‘the States have…banished and put from them all their nobility, but a very few poor ones’, and shared their property.399 ‘The power of the nobility being now withered, and the power of the people in flower’, the King will neglect the latter at his peril. To attempt to reverse the historical trend of a century would be fatal folly. The gentry are now ‘the garrisons of good order throughout the realm’.400 ‘The people therefore in these latter ages are no less to be pleased than the peers/‘It cannot be called a dishonour for the King to believe the general council of the kingdom, and to prefer it before his affection.’401 Here, in The Prerogative of Parliaments, Ralegh is urging on James the lesson of the History: history is a law-abiding process. We must remember ‘this terrible sentence, that God will not be mocked’. Princes can flout God’s will; but in the long run it will do them no good. They should not be subjected to force; yet they are subject to historical necessity. Where change has taken place, it is prudent to recognize it. We can see the laws of history becoming almost Hobbist as well as Harringtonian in Ralegh’s insistence that though there can be no right of revolution, still if men are pushed too far they will in fact revolt. It is this combination of philosophical depth with the conventional attitudes of M.Ps.—though expressed with a systematic rationalism found nowhere else before 1640—that made Ralegh the hero of men like Eliot and Oliver Cromwell. The alternative to co-operation with Parliament could only be rule (p.176) through a standing army: on this point Ralegh clearly anticipated what Harrington was to say.402 Already in the History Ralegh had warned ‘that these are not dreams; though some Englishmen, perhaps, that were unacquainted with history’, might not realize ‘how tyranny grows to stand in need of mercenary soldiers’.403 At the very end of the History, when Ralegh is exerting all his eloquence, he sounded the warning note again. ‘The greatest oppressors’, he wrote, for all their ‘wantonness of sovereignty’, saying ‘I will do what shall please myself, are still subject to divine law. ‘For who sees not that a prince, by racking his sovereign authority to the utmost extent’, only brings evil on his progeny?404 Ralegh’s ‘Harringtonian’ passages suggest an appeal to the middling sort; and he prized virtue more than birth. A younger son himself, he noted that the genealogy of Christ given by St. Matthew ran through ‘those whom God had chosen and blessed, without respect of the firstborn, who have hereby the Page 39 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics prerogative in estates, worldly and transitory only’.405 God’s favours frequently went not to ‘the eldest in years but in virtue’.406 The middling sort, and men who believed themselves to be ‘those whom God hath chosen’ formed the backbone of Parliament’s support in the civil war. Ralegh’s work then helped to establish the rule of law in history, as against the more arbitrarily providential and moralizing chronicles of Foxe and his like; and yet Ralegh also helped to break the merely cyclical theories with which a conception of historical law had hitherto usually been associated. He thus prepared the way for the more modern sociological history of Harrington. As long as history is cyclical, or politics is thought of as a branch of morals, men cannot conceive of political progress or of improving very greatly on the past: for we cannot learn by our fathers’ mistakes, as Ralegh realized.407 But once cyclical assumptions are questioned, and politics is thought of as an art or a science related to changing social and economic circumstances, then politics can be separated from morals. Hence the importance of Ralegh’s incipient Harringtonianism, his realization that it will not do just to repeat past specifics in new circumstances. He trembled on the edge of (p.177) a science of politics, which would be dominated by history. We must study historical change in order to adapt our political ideas. Ralegh never really mastered this idea in the History: but it is there clearly enough in The Prerogative of Parliaments, and was vital for the action of the Parliamentarians. History is not just a bran-tub, waiting for us to pick our precedent, nor yet a story of degeneration from a golden past. It is a story of adaptation to change which may be for the better. Thus political skill is not identical with moral virtue: it is knowledge of necessity, and so can be learnt. Even if it is not learnt, necessity will assert itself. So it is important even for those not in the seats of power to study history. It is therefore appropriate that Harrington alluded to Ralegh’s The Prerogative of Parliaments in the title of his The Prerogative of Popular Government, and that he should have been buried next to Ralegh at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Harrington, like Bacon, like Ralegh, wanted to use history as raw material for human reason to play upon. His economic theories were an attempt to state what Ralegh would have called secondary laws, Bacon axioms of the middle sort. Though Harrington carried the argument a stage further than Ralegh, the principle of applying reason to the assembled phenomena is both Baconian and not inimical to Ralegh’s mode of thought. But because of his optimistic Baconian belief in the possibilities of rational science (and because of the changed political circumstances), Harrington abandoned Ralegh’s pessimism, as Hakewill had done, and hoped by reason to establish a commonwealth which would survive. This further stage, Professor Macpherson and the late Dr. Raab have suggested, relates to Harrington’s anxiety (which he shared with Hobbes) to give politics the certainty of natural science. He fused the scientific tradition with Ralegh, in fact.408 Page 40 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Pre-Baconian scientists had emphasized experience as against authority. Bacon himself protested against the worship of precedents.409 Ralegh’s History taught that precedents were not to be followed simply because they were old, but to be studied and learnt from, as Bacon said all evidence produced by the practitioners should be learnt from. In Bacon’s theory, Parliament played the role of practitioner, the King advised by his Council the role of political experts who analysed, diagnosed, (p.178) and acted.410 For Ralegh historical evidence was the raw material for political judgement, for adjusting institutions to suit changing circumstances; but Ralegh had a less narrow view of who constituted a political expert.
XI The three Hakewill brothers are a symbolic trio. The second stayed at home to become Mayor of Exeter.411 The third, William, was a common lawyer, the moving spirit in the revived Society of Antiquaries which roused James I’s wrath in 1607–8. He was a friend of Sir Thomas Bodley and John Hampden, a critical member of Parliament whose speech on Bate’s Case in 1610 was reprinted in 1641. George, the eldest, became chaplain to Prince Charles at the age of 34. But his outspoken opposition to the Spanish marriage,412 and his failure to accept the fashionable Arminianism, prevented his rising higher than the Archdeaconry of Surrey which he obtained in 1617. Only in 1642, in very different political circumstances, was he elected Rector of Exeter College. He resided away from royalist Oxford during the civil war, but returned to cooperate with the Parliamentary Visitors. George Hakewill, who admired and frequently quoted Ralegh in his panegyric of the Moderns, thought that to establish the law-abidingness of the universe was scarcely less important than to combat the theory of decay.413 Nature, he held, is governed by constant laws. So far from physical nature having been corrupted by the Fall, it is the corruption in fallen man’s mind that leads him to attribute decay to nature. Science can redeem us from this error: Hakewill believed with Bacon that ‘the apprehension of [natural] truth helps to repair that image of God’ which was partially lost at the Fall.414 ‘Like Spenser Hakewill sees behind mutability a divine order and constancy.’415 For unless we can expect effects to follow causes in a rational and predictable way, leaving room for human freedom, there is no stimulus to that moral effort to which Hakewill (and the Puritans) attached such importance. ‘The first step to (p.179) enable a man to the achieving of great designs is to be persuaded that by endeavour he is able to achieve it.’416 Hakewill’s was one of the most widely read books of the century, for it combined Baconian optimism with a providential view of history: on both counts it relieved men of the sense of hopelessness. Milton read Hakewill with profit, and within a year of the publication of the Apologie reproduced the idea of law in the universe in his undergraduate Naturam non pati senium.417 But Hakewill’s major influence, like that of Bacon and Harvey, came after 1640.418
Page 41 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Hakewill was in many ways astonishingly modern. He knew better than most of his contemporaries that what most sharply distinguished the age in which he lived was the rapid development of trade and industry.419 He cited mathematics, navigation, anatomy, chemistry, and medicine among the evidences of human advance. He had no more use than Ralegh for the idea of a golden age in the past. He regarded himself as ‘a citizen of the world’.420 In the concluding section of his book he passed severe strictures on courtiers who allowed themselves to be bought by projectors; on judges who passed sentence for fear or favour; on lords and gentlemen who made merchandise of church livings, who ‘strip the backs of the poor, that they may apparel their walls’, and ‘snatch their meat from their mouths, that they may give it to their hawks and dogs’.421 Bishop Goodman was careful to point out where the logic, not only of a rather conventional passage like this, but of Hakewill’s whole argument, was leading: If we be so meanly and basely persuaded of the Ancients, how apt shall we be for innovation, what danger of a mutiny; the country boors may rise in sedition, and not without cause; for by your opinion all things may be improved.’422 Hakewill, like Ralegh, did not quite break out of cyclical theories. But he thought that there was no age ‘but hath exceeded all others in some respects, and again in other respects hath been exceeded by others’.423 Like Ralegh, he saw in all things ‘a kind of circular progress: they have (p.180) their birth, their growth, their flourishing, their failing, their fading, and within a while after, their resurrection and reflourishing again’.424 This reminds us of Harvey’s remarks on ‘the round which makes the race of common fowl eternal; now pullet, now egg, the series is continued in perpetuity; from frail and perishing individuals an immortal species is engendered. By these, and means like to these, do we see many inferior and terrestrial things brought to emulate the perpetuity of superior or celestial things.’425 And both passages recall a famous speech by Pym: ‘Time must needs bring some alterations, and every alteration is a step and a degree towards a dissolution; those things only are eternal which are constant and uniform: therefore it is observed by the best writers upon this subject, that those commonwealths have been most durable and perpetual which have often reformed and recomposed themselves according to their first institution and ordinance; for by this means they repair the breaches and counterwork the ordinary and natural effects of time.’426 Pym, like Ralegh, thought that human beings by understanding the cycle could perhaps intervene to restore a desirable state of affairs. This idea, again, was developed by Harrington. The seventeenth-century emphasis on history, I suggest, witnesses to a sense of change, of crisis. Some men looked backwards for solutions—Protestants to the primitive Church, Lilburne to the medieval heretics and the Marian martyrs, lawyers and politicians to the free Anglo-Saxons. The pre-revolutionary idea of the historical process, dominated by the dogma of the Fall of man, was one of degeneration: we could hope to stop the degeneration only by going back to purer origins. Spenser, Ralegh, Pym were all struggling to assert the power of Page 42 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics humanity to escape by the use of reason from an ineluctable cyclical decline. Those who looked most brashly forward were the Chiliasts, those irrational lower-class optimists-of-desperation who hoped for the intervention of Christ here and now to bring about the rule of his Elect, the lowly remnant. Here again we see the importance of Bacon. He not only made a scientific philosophy out of the practice of artisans: he also secularized their age-old chiliastic dreams, and suggested the possibility of getting back behind the Fall on earth before the millennium. This made possible a new attitude towards history—progress without chiliasm, change without apocalypse, reformation without tarrying for the Second Coming. (p.181) The battle of the Moderns against the Ancients was a battle of optimism against pessimism. Ralegh as well as Bacon and Hakewill helped to take arbitrariness out of history, to replace God’s direct intervention by the idea of historical law. When Cromwell asked, ‘What are all our histories and other traditions of actions in former times but God manifesting Himself that He hath shaken and tumbled down and trampled upon everything that He hath not planted?’427 he was expressing Ralegh’s view of history. None knew better than Cromwell that in recent years God had acted through human agents. And so Ralegh’s and Bacon’s view of history, plus the experience of the Revolution, made the idea of controlled change conceivable—change that should not be an act of God in the sense either of a disaster or of doomsday. Just as, after the Revolution, Bacon’s former secretary Thomas Hobbes could say that politics was a science because men made the state, so Harrington could conceive of history as a science because men could control it. This was the high point of historical thinking in seventeenth-century England, a point not to be surpassed until the rise of the Scottish school. As with chemistry, so with history, the advanced ideas thrown up during the revolutionary decades were not developed until a century later, when their revival coincided with a resurgence of political radicalism.428
XII The only work which Ralegh published legally under James I was the History of the World; and James made a determined effort to suppress this.429 But too many copies had already been distributed for this attempt to do more than advertise the work (there were at least three separate issues of the first edition); and the King compromised by allowing it to appear without Ralegh’s name attached to it.430 Six editions of the massive folio appeared between 1614 and 1634, and at least five more before (p.182) the end of the century. This is nearly three times as many editions as Shakespeare’s Works had. Ralegh’s was also the most popular of all histories by an Englishman in seventeenth-century America. An abridgment, a continuation, and a volume of commentary (each by Alexander Ross) all appeared in England in the freedom of the sixteen-fifties; two more abridgements and another continuation in the next sixty years.431 Two historical works were fathered on to Ralegh in the sixteen-thirties.432 The popularity of such of his writings as were allowed to be printed is shown by the Page 43 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics five editions (at least) of his politically harmless Instructions to his Son, published between 1632 and 1636. Ralegh’s main political work was The Prerogative of Parliaments, written in 1615. This could not be legally published before 1640, though it circulated extensively in manuscript, one copy having been read and carefully annotated by Sir John Eliot.433 The first edition was stated to be printed at Middelburg in 1628, though this may conceal an illegal English publication. No less than three editions appeared in that year. As soon as the collapse of royal government set the press free there was an astonishing flow of work attributed to Ralegh. Maxims of State was first published in 1642, Toland says by Milton;434 Ralegh’s last letter to his wife in 1644; an extract from Book V of the History, dealing with ‘the cruel War between the Carthaginians and their own Mercenaries’, was published in 1647, presumably as a tract against the New Model Army. Selected Essays and Observations appeared in 1650, reprinted 1667. At least ten collections of Ralegh’s Remains under various titles were published between 1651 and 1681. Two variants of Observations touching Trade and Commerce with the Hollander (attributed to Ralegh) were published, and two more before the end of the century. Oldys noted that ‘there are several manuscripts of this treatise in the libraries of our nobility and gentry (more ancient than the earliest edition in print)’.435 The Cabinet Council was attributed to Ralegh when it was published by Milton in 1658 (two issues), from a manuscript which he had possessed for many years; there were new editions in 1661, 1664, 1692, and 1697. In 1651 a prophecy was fathered on Ralegh which foretold the landing of an English army in France that year, leading to the capture (p.183) of Rome.436 Epitaphs on Ralegh began to appear in print from 1640 onwards.437 There were also a number of ballads and broadsheets at the time of Ralegh’s execution, most of which have disappeared. The first printed version of what later became The Golden Vanity was about Ralegh’s ship The Sweet Trinity. Ralegh appears as a character in the two parts of Heywood’s play about Sir Thomas Gresham, If You Know Not Me, you Know Nobody. Significant evidence of Ralegh’s popularity was the habit of fathering works upon him. (But it is also evidence of Ralegh’s industry, since he probably translated, copied out, or summarized most of the works attributed to him.) The Sceptic is a translation from the fashionable Sextus Empiricus; The Causes of the Magnificence and Opulency of Cities is extracted from Botero; The Cabinet Council and Maxims of State are compilations from Aristotle, Machiavelli, Francesco Sansovino, Bodin, and Justus Lipsius, though they have been newly synthesized.438 The Discourse of Tenures is copied from an unprinted work by Sir Roger Owen, which was often quoted by opposition M.Ps.439 The Breviary of the History of England is a version of part of Samuel Daniel’s History of Page 44 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics England.440 Observations…concerning the Royall Navye appears to be, at least in part, Sir Arthur Gorges’s.441 Observations touching Trade and Commerce with the Hollander was also probably not by Ralegh but by John Keymer.442 Further evidence of the popularity of Ralegh’s name is provided by the existence of no less than four Ralegh’s Ghosts between 1620 and (p.184) 1631, either published abroad or circulating in manuscript. One tract called Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost (1626) was by Thomas Scott, whose part in the pre-history of the English Revolution has never been fully studied. He was a Puritan divine, minister successively in the Puritan cities of Norwich and Ipswich, chaplain both to James I and to the anti-Spanish Earl of Pembroke. Compelled to emigrate to the Netherlands, he was a preacher to merchants at Utrecht and to the English garrison at Gorcham. From there he poured forth a spate of anti-Spanish propaganda aimed at securing English intervention in the Thirty Years War. He was assassinated for his pains in 1626. He wrote at least twenty-five pamphlets against James’s Spanish policy, some of which went through several editions.443 In Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost, as in many of Scott’s writings, Ralegh is the victim of Gondomar’s intrigues; if Ralegh had not been cut off in time, the Spanish Ambassador boasted, he ‘had near made a new conquest of the West Indies’.444 In Vox Populi, of which there were five editions between 1620 and 1623, Scott described the pro-Spanish party in England as consisting of ‘divers courtiers who were hungry and gaped for Spanish gold’, and most of the great landowners, who rig Parliamentary elections through their control over their tenants. Plain people hated the Spanish match.445 In 1623 Scott called on ministers and freeholders to take care to get godly men elected to Parliament.446 A year later he declared that the common people cannot be restrained from hostility to Spain, but many influential nobles and gentlemen, for their own ends, will be easily persuaded to betray their country.447 Prerogative rule without Parliament, Scott argued, is a Spanish policy. So is the silencing of ministers who preached against the Spanish marriage.448 The King is cut off from his true friends by the guards around him, and cannot be approached except in print.449 This was a very extreme form of the conventional plea that opposition was only to the King’s evil counsellors, not to the King himself, which was to do duty right down to the (p.185) civil war, and beyond. Scott even suggested that the Prince of Wales could not marry without Parliament’s consent.450 He favoured an alliance with the Netherlands, and held up the Dutch as models of industry and thrift. He wanted to ‘raise another England to withstand…new Spain in America’.451 Scott thus both expressed and helped to popularize a class analysis of English politics. Vox Populi, Sir Simonds D’Ewes tells us, was ‘generally approved of, not only by the meaner sort that were zealous for the cause of religion, but also by all men of judgement that were loyally affected to the truth of the Gospel and the crown’. But the King was ‘much incensed’.452 The Grand Remonstrance with Page 45 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics its reference to ‘such councillors as for private ends have engaged themselves to further the interests of some foreign princes or states’453 echoed Scott’s line of propaganda; so, more clearly, did the Declaration of the Lords and Commons issued on 9 August 1642, against ‘papists, the prelatical clergy, delinquents, and that part of the nobility and gentry which either fears reform or seeks preferment by betraying their country’.454 Rawleighs Ghost and Scott’s other vigorous, illegal, and widely distributed pamphlets reflected and stirred up the patriotic and Protestant feelings of those middling men who wanted an anti-Spanish policy, and carefully fanned their resentment against the court and the allegedly pro-Spanish aristocracy. For Scott Ralegh is the symbol of English patriotism. Yet it seems possible that Scott was converted to approval of Ralegh only by the History of the World455 This may well have been true of many Puritans; and Ralegh’s death would reinforce the new image. Rushworth, who began his Collections with 1618, printed a letter from ‘a great minister of state’ to the English representative in Spain, stating that Ralegh’s death had ‘moved the common sort of people to much remorse, who all attributed his death to the desire his Majesty had to satisfy Spain’. The writer of the letter clearly shared this popular assumption.456 ‘It grows very questionable’, said the odious Sir Lewis Stukeley in 1618, ‘whether this man did more hurt by his life or by his death.’457 We may compare a letter from Toby Matthew to Bacon in (p.186) August of the same year, where he speaks of ‘Ralegh and the prentices’ in one breath as anti-Spanish.458 But, popular as his stand against Spain was, Ralegh’s main influence was with men of the class which sat in Parliament. The fact that he had been a good House of Commons man no doubt helped. The Parliament of 1624 passed a Bill reversing Ralegh’s attainder: James refused his assent. Led by Eliot, the Commons tried again in 1626, and succeeded in 1628, though Charles drove a hard bargain.459 Eliot, distantly related to Ralegh, was probably on the scaffold at the latter’s execution, by which he was profoundly influenced. He possessed, read, and carefully annotated a manuscript copy of The Prerogative of Parliaments. The tract seems to have been the source of Eliot’s tactics in 1626, when his aim was to limit the crown’s freedom to the ultimate benefit of the crown. All the precedents which Eliot cited in this Parliament, and his comments and recommendations, are to be found in Ralegh’s treatise.460 During his last imprisonment Eliot’s mind reverted to the memory of Ralegh, with whom Eliot’s Monarchy of Man is permeated. Hampden was another who possessed large quantities of Ralegh’s manuscript treatises. No less than 3, 452 sheets of them, we are told, were transcribed for him at considerable expense ‘a little before the wars’.461 Pym was also probably present at Ralegh’s execution, which he recorded in his notebook. We can frequently hear echoes of Ralegh in Pym’s majestic historical generalizations.462 Page 46 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Among other prominent Parliamentary figures we may mention John Hoskyns and Sir Robert Cotton, friends of Ralegh’s who probably helped with the History of the World;463 Sir Edward Coke, who had The Discoveries of Guiana and two copies of The History of the World in his library;464 John Selden, a friend to whom Ralegh lent manuscripts;465 Sir Benjamin Rudyerd.466 The first Earl of Clare was a firm friend of Ralegh’s. He tried hard to save Ralegh’s life, and wrote after his execution: (p.187) His soul is gone To inhabit many, too much for one.467
The later political attitude of his son Denzil Holies is sufficient comment. Most famous of all is Cromwell, who recommended the History of the World to his eldest son Richard as a much-needed remedy for ‘an unactive vain spirit’. The virtue that Oliver singled out for praise in Ralegh’s work was that it comprised ‘a body of history’, and so would ‘add much more to your understanding than fragments of story’.468 It was in his speech to the Barebones Parliament that Cromwell distinguished between ‘stories that…give you narratives of matters of fact’ and ‘those things where the life and power of them lay, those strange windings and turnings of Providence’.469 Cromwell, we recall, was a pupil of Thomas Beard, and may have found the latter’s philosophy of history as indistinguishable from that of Ralegh as some historians have done. William Prynne linked Beard and Ralegh together as sources for God’s judgements against kings.470’ Lilburne—who seems to have read little except legal writings—quoted Foxe and Ralegh’s History471 Adam Eyre read both writers in 1647.472 Another Leveller pamphlet, Vox Plebis, quoted Ralegh three times.473 The radical law reformer John Jones cited him against the clergy.474 John Lewis, protagonist of the Parliamentary cause in Wales, also quoted him.475 Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, cited Ralegh with approval alongside Bacon.476 Milton, in addition to publishing The Cabinet Council, made extracts from the History in his commonplace book, echoed Ralegh in a sonnet, and showed admiration for him again and again.477 So we (p.188) could extend the list— Archbishop Ussher,478 Joseph Hall,479 William Drummond,480 James Harrington,481 James Howell,482 Francis Osborn,483 Nathaniel Bacon,484 Captain Baddiley,485 Andrew Marvell,486 John Bunyan,487 William Penn,488 the Earl of Shaftesbury,489 the Marquis of Halifax,490 John Locke,491 Ambrose Barnes,492 Daniel Defoe.493 Ralegh’s History was cited as a model as early as 1618; it was quoted in the standard works on geography and history by Nathanael Carpenter and Degory Wheare.494 Edward Harley wanted to buy a copy of the History in 1639; Tom Verney wanted to have one bought for him in 1654.495 Dr. Johnson admired Ralegh as an historian,496 and Gibbon thought The History of the World the best which had till that time appeared. He contemplated at one time writing
Page 47 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics a life of Ralegh.497 George Crabbe in his teens wrote ‘an Address to the Muse, in the Manner of Sir Walter Raleigh’.498 (p.189) Not that Ralegh was read and approved only by Parliamentarians. But it is worth noting those on the other side who read him with a difference. Despite Ralegh’s efforts to please him, James I thought he saw himself in Ralegh’s portrait of Ninias, the effeminate successor of Queen Semiramis, and rather naturally disliked Sir Walter’s writings.499 It was Princess Elizabeth, the toast of the Puritans, who carried a copy of The History of the World with her to Prague.500 John Donne wrote an early attack on the History.501 Alexander Ross, chaplain to Charles I and protégé of Laud, not only epitomized the History but also presumed to correct it—together, significantly, with Hobbes’s Leviathan.502 Ross denounced almost every thinker who mattered—Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Servetus, Fernel, Harvey, Comenius, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Thomas Browne, Wilkins, Hobbes, and Nathanael Carpenter. Laud read the illegally published Prerogative of Parliaments, quoted it in the House of Lords in the year of publication, and wanted to use it again at his trial. But he cited the Councillor’s opinion of Magna Carta (it ‘had an obscure birth from usurpation, and was…fostered and shewed to the world by rebellion’); whereas the J. P. in the dialogue represents Ralegh’s point of view.503 Sir Robert Filmer and Judge Jenkins similarly quoted Ralegh as an authority who will impress their opponents: ‘as Sir Walter Raleigh confesseth’, ‘if we believe Sir Walter Raleigh’. Filmer too cited the Councillor in the Prerogative of Parliaments as though he expressed Ralegh’s own opinion.504 Sir John Oglander, who possessed the History of the World, thought James I’s attitude towards Ralegh in 1603 showed that the King was ‘exceeding merciful’.505 Laud’s friend, Lord Scudamore, disapproved of Ralegh.506 Bishop Goodman thought Sir Walter was ‘a man of a great but of a dangerous wit’, and held him in high esteem, but believed that he had been justly executed.507 The Tory North family, Aubrey tells us, ‘speaks not well of Sir Walter (p.190) Ralegh, that Sir Walter designed to break with the Spaniard and to make himself popular in England’.508 Enmity to Spain and a relatively democratic outlook: this adequately sums up the image of Ralegh which remained influential throughout the seventeenth century.
XIII Ralegh’s History was written for Prince Henry: so were the Discourses on the marriages of the royal children. So, it is said, was the Discourse on the Invention of Ships. The Maxims of State were probably presented to the Prince.509 Henry’s enthusiastic support for Ralegh, and the high hopes which his favour gave the latter, are well known. Sir Arthur Gorges, Ralegh’s ally, Hariot’s friend, translator of Lucan and Bacon, held ‘a place of right good trust’ in the Prince’s service, as well as being a copyholder of Henry’s manor of Richmond. Gorges dedicated his Relation of the…Island Voyages to Prince Henry in 1607, as well as the Observations and Overtures concerning the Royal Navy, probably written in Page 48 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics collaboration with Ralegh, in 1610. The same year also saw Gorges’s Breefe Discourse tending to the wealth and strength of this Kingedome, written to… Henry, Prince of Wales, which criticized court extravagance, the inflation of honours, and neglect of trade. Like all Gorges’s writings, this is pervaded with Ralegh’s spirit and policies.510 Gorges wrote two poems on the Prince, and on his death composed not only a sonnet but also a full-dress poem, The Olympian Catastrophe, which incorporated lines previously used in Gorges’s elegy on Sidney.511 Again there are implicit criticisms of court flattery, faction, and parasitism.512 Arts grew faint when this sweet prince was dead That in his life time them with bounty fed.513
So Gorges: for Henry had been seen as the new Maecenas of science and the arts. The Prince’s household, its Governor believed, ‘was intended by the King for a courtly college or a collegiate court’.514. It lived up to this aspiration. ‘Without offence to either of the famous universities’, said (p.191) John Cleland in 1607, ‘for all sorts of good learning I recommend in particular the Academy of our noble prince,…the true pantheon of Great Britain/515 The household was indeed a very remarkable collection of persons. Sir Thomas Chaloner (1561–1615), Governor of the Household, was the son of a translator of Chrysostom and Erasmus who was also a contributor to The Mirror for Magistrates (Sir Thomas Chaloner the elder, 1521–65). The younger Sir Thomas was a naturalist and chemist, whom Bacon thought of as a possible supporter for his scientific schemes.516 He was the father of a regicide (Thomas Chaloner, 1595–1661). Adam Newton, secretary and tutor to the Prince, had previously studied and taught in Protestant schools in France. Though a layman he was appointed Dean of Durham in 1605, an office which he sold in 1620 to buy a baronetcy. He employed his leisure in translating Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent into Latin, in co-operation with his friend William Bedell.517 Giacopo Castelvetro, a former protege of Ralegh and Northumberland, ended his days in Newton’s household. In 1614 Castelvetro wrote a treatise to persuade the English to imitate the wholesome Italian habit of eating fruit and vegetables, which he dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, sister of Prince Henry’s most intimate friend, Sir John Harrington of Exton (1592–1614). Castelvetro had taught the latter Italian.518 Sir Charles Cornwallis (d. 1629), Treasurer of Henry’s household, was imprisoned for his opposition activities in the 1614 Parliament. He was the father of Sir William Cornwallis, the Baconian essayist. Richard Holdsworth was chaplain to and protege of Sir Henry Hobart, Henry’s Chancellor.519 Another of the Prince’s tutors was Lord Lumley, a patron of scholars and founder of the Lumleian lectures on anatomy at the College of Physicians. Lumley, who Page 49 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics was a Roman Catholic, was a member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, and had the best library in England, except perhaps for that of Sir Robert Cotton. On Lumley’s death in 1609 Henry purchased this library out of his privy purse, and made Edward Wright, another of his tutors, its Librarian.520 (In 1648 this (p.192) library is said to have owed its preservation to Hugh Peter. In 1649 the Commonwealth appointed Bulstrode Whitelocke its Librarian, with John Dury as his deputy. Dury’s The Reformed Library Keeper of 1650 resulted.)521 The appointment of Wright, one of the leading scientists of his day, as Henry’s tutor, is remarkable enough. Wright caused a large sphere to be made for the Prince, which not only represented the motions of the heavens but likewise the positions of the sun and moon, and demonstrated the possibility of eclipses. Henry could hardly help being a Copernican or having an interest in mathematics, as well as in cosmography and fortifications.522 Wright dedicated the second edition of his Certaine Errours to the Prince. Another of Henry’s tutors was William Barlow.523 Thomas Lydiat, friend and correspondent of Henry Briggs, and friend of the Puritan William Crashawe, was chronographer and cosmographer to the Prince’s household.524’ Joshua Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas, was Groom of Henry’s Chamber.525 George Chapman was Sewer-inOrdinary to the Household.526 Inigo Jones was Henry’s Surveyor of Works, John Bull, Gresham Professor of Music, one of his Musicians.527 The Household also perhaps included Tom Coryate the traveller, as well as Sir Arthur Gorges in some place of trust.528 Even Henry’s nurse has a place in our story, since she was the mother of Ralph Cudworth and subsequently became the wife of Hartlib’s friend John Stoughton.529 Henry is said to have intended to found an academy for the English nobility and gentry, and especially the King’s wards, on the lines of Ralegh’s and Gilbert’s ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Academy’:530 particular (p.193) emphasis would have been laid on mathematics and languages. In the Parliament of 1621 Buckingham brought forward such a plan, attributing it to Henry.531 Henry VIII pulled down monks and their cells, Henry IX should pull down bishops and their bells’.
In addition to the scientific atmosphere of Henry’s household, there seem to have been powerful influences in the Prince’s entourage which favoured Puritanism. Sir John Harrington of Kelston (1561–1612), another of Henry’s tutors, wrote his Briefe View of the State of the Church of England Tor the private use of Prince Henry, upon occasion of that proverb, It was not published until 1653. Sir Robert Darcy, the Prince’s Gentleman Usher (whose widow was later a great patron of Puritan ministers), Lord Harrington of Exton (d. 1613, Governor to the Princess Elizabeth), and James Montague, Bishop of Winchester, brought some remarkable men to the Prince’s attention, like Arthur Hildersham, the Puritan divine, and Henry Jacob, later an Independent. They designed John Burges to be Henry’s chaplain, until he preached a sermon before James I which Page 50 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics was so radical in its Puritanism that Burges had to emigrate to Leiden, where he took a medical degree. They then cast their eyes on Theodore Gulston’s friend Thomas Gataker, another Puritan divine: but he proved too modest.532 Joseph Hall the satirist, whom Bishop Montague denounced as a Puritan, became Henry’s chaplain in 1608.533 Prince Henry’s household, in which servants were fined for swearing, thus gives physical confirmation of the congruence of Puritanism and science.534 Bacon dedicated his 1612 edition of his Essays to the Prince; four years earlier he had hoped to find him a better patron for his scientific (p.194) projects than James I.535 William Gilbert dedicated his Philosophia Nova to Henry some time before his death in 1603; it was not published until 1651. In 1607 Matthew Gwinne, Gresham Professor of Physic, dedicated his play Vertumnus to Henry, before whom it had been performed two years earlier. George Hakewill presented his treatise against regicide to the Prince. Thomas James dedicated the 1605 catalogue of the Bodleian Library to him.536 Many other examples could be given. Henry supported Ralegh’s foreign policy, and would gladly have become ‘in person the executor of that noble attempt for the West Indies’.537 He obtained a patent for Robert Harcourt to revive Ralegh’s Guiana schemes. The Prince was convinced of the importance of the North-West Passage, and in 1612 sent Thomas Button to discover it.538 Phineas Pett, who made model ships for Henry, was sworn his servant in 1604, and was supported against Northampton in 1609. (Consistently with his general outlook, the Prince disliked the Howards.) He was also a patron of the East India Company.539 In 1611 Henry held shares (along with his father and brother) in Simon Sturtevant’s patent for smelting iron with coal. This precocious patent was subsequently transferred to a protege of Henry’s, John Rovenzon.540 So we can perhaps understand something of the despondency which Henry’s premature death in 1612 caused. Elegies were written by William Browne, George Chapman, Donne, Drayton, Drummond, John Davies, Sir Arthur Gorges, Thomas Heywood, Henry Peacham, Ralegh, John Taylor, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, George Wither, and very many others. Some of these names have figured in our story.541 But not only men of letters had cause to grieve. Thomas Button’s explorations ceased on his return after Henry’s death, though Button remained convinced of the existence of the North-West Passage, and confided this belief to Henry Briggs.542 Thomas Scott looked back in 1624 to (p.195) Elizabeth and Henry as champions of aggressive Protestantism and a strong navy.543 Already legends were forming round his name, as they were to form round Ralegh’s.
Page 51 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Henry’s apparent interest in and patronage of science and Puritanism no doubt derives from the group which surrounded him. Although these men were originally selected by James I, by the time of the Prince’s death there was a rivalry between the royal court and that of the Prince of Wales which almost anticipates the eighteenth century: and the nature of Henry’s court gave to this personal rivalry political and ideological overtones. We need not exaggerate Henry’s precocity if we note (as contemporaries noted) the striking contrast between his personality and interests and those of his younger brother. Whether if Henry had come to the throne he would have realized the high hopes held of him is conjectural, as Sir Arthur Gorges seems delicately to hint.544 But at the time his death seemed to presage the end of an epoch. There was no more hope henceforth that Baconianism would receive government support than that exploration or a Protestant foreign policy would. Ralegh’s cordial rallied the Prince but could not revive him; his grief rings out at the conclusion of the History and of its Preface. Ralegh is said to have burnt his notes for the second part of the History.545 Coinciding as it did with real decline, Henry’s death in many ways marks a turning-point between the glorious Elizabethan age and the age of melancholy and despair.546 Many threads of our story lead forward from Henry’s court: it is highly appropriate that the Prince’s best biographer, Thomas Birch, should have been a Secretary of the Royal Society.
XIV Finally, Ralegh was not only a sea-dog, a scientist, and an historian: far more important, even for our purposes, he was a great poet, an important figure in the history of English culture. He is supposed to have founded the Mermaid Club at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Chapman, Drayton and Ben Jonson as well as Spenser and Marlowe and perhaps William Warner were closely associated with him.547 Ralegh helped a (p.196) company of English players to obtain permission to go to Sweden in 1591–2.548 The frontispiece to his History of the World and the explanatory verses attached (probably by Jonson) have their place in the history of emblem literature in England.549 Set to music by Ferrabosco, Ralegh’s ‘Like to a hermit poor’ was a popular song, very hackneyed by the sixteen-sixties.550 Ralegh’s lines, ‘Even such is time’, are inscribed on many seventeenth-century tombstones.551 In his architecture too Ralegh was a forward-looking influence on the gentry: Sherborne Castle was a very early example of the non-courtier type of gentleman’s house.552 The nature of Ralegh’s poetry is relevant. Miss Bradbrook has reminded us of the uniqueness of Cynthia, in that the whole of its 500 lines have only one subject—Ralegh’s state of mind.553 Ralegh’s place in the history of introspection, of the evolution of poetry from public to personal, of reflective poetry generally, still deserves consideration.554 Cynthia, his longest poem, we are told, ‘is the poem of a man blocked, a man conscious of exceptional powers which have been at the service of Cynthia-Elizabeth-England, and which are now wasting for want of use; a proud man, who cannot contemplate his fall, and yet has to’.555 When Page 52 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics we think of Ralegh in conjunction with Bacon and Coke, and indeed with the whole tone of Jacobean literature, we may suggest that the frustration was social as well as individual; and see the concern with law in the History as part of Ralegh’s attempt to ‘assert eternal Providence’ and justify the ways of God to man. Here, no less than in his proposals in the sphere of foreign policy, economics, and the constitution, Ralegh had something to say to the prerevolutionary generation. Think of the typical lines in which Ralegh expressed ‘those inmost and soulpiercing wounds, which are ever aching while uncured’: And past return are all my dandled days. [Love] is won with a world of despair And is lost with a toy. (p.197) The broken monuments of my great desires. From fruitful trees I gather withered leaves And glean the broken ears with miser’s hands, Who sometime did enjoy the weighty sheaves I seek fair flowers amid the brinish sand. Of all which past the sorrow only stays. What I possess is but the same I sought; My love was false, my labours were deceit. The grief remaining of the joy it had.556
And in prose the famous apostrophe to Death: ‘Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet’557 ‘When you have travailed and wearied your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations,’ Ralegh wrote to his wife in 1603, when he was expecting execution, ‘you shall sit down by sorrow in the end.’558 Professor Bush pointed out that nearly all the greatest meditations on death in English literature come from the early seventeenth century—the Bible, Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, Drummond, Bacon, Henry King, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, &c, &c.559 Their concentration in this period would suggest social causes: so would the apparently exaggerated symbolic significance which contemporaries gave to the death of Prince Henry. Ralegh’s writings were as full of paradoxes as his life. He had tremendous vigour, energy, lust for life: ‘he can toil terribly’ said the deformed Robert Cecil enviously.560 On the one hand he demanded unlimited human freedom; on the other he expressed a sense of utter impermanence, a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of human actions: ‘the sorrow only stays’. ‘Even his love-songs could at will supply an epitaph’, Miss Latham noted.561 In a heightened form it is the paradox of all the Jacobeans. The whole framework of the History is similarly Page 53 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics paradoxical. Ralegh proclaims law in the universe—’this terrible sentence, that God (p.198) will not be mocked’—and yet ‘to what end do we lay before the eyes of the living the fall and fortunes of the dead, seeing the world is the same that it hath been, and the children of the present time will still obey their parents?’562 Ralegh had at this stage a deep pessimism about the ability of human beings to learn the obvious lessons of history, to adjust their desires to what they know to be reasonable—a difficulty Ralegh himself shared to the full. He stated but did not solve the problem, though in The Prerogative of Parliaments he came near to it. Solutions were, however, at hand, since the problem was not personal to Ralegh. One was the Puritan doctrine of predestination, which combined Ralegh’s belief in an historical law with confidence in the ability of the Elect to carry God’s historical purposes into effect. Ralegh was a Puritan without a sense of election. He believed in the abstract in the existence of the Elect: he did not feel on his pulses the power, confidence, and optimism which the conviction of salvation gave to many men of lesser intellectual stature. What a tremendous book the History of the World must have seemed to Cromwell when he read it after his conversion! The lessons—God’s judgements on the pride, ambition, and cruelty of princes—were clear to all; but Cromwell had a confidence in the ability of men like himself to be the agents of God’s will on earth. It is a matter of temperament, of inner conviction, not a difference in intellectual outlook. At Naseby Cromwell had assurance of victory with his ‘company of poor, ignorant men’. ‘And God did it.’563 To men with that inner spirit, Ralegh’s pessimism played its part in undermining what they fought against: they simply did not share his doubts about human ability to build any more lasting mansion. Ralegh’s scepticism is perhaps more sympathetic to our generation: but the Puritans got things done. Another solution, of wider application, was that of Bacon. Separating—like Ralegh—first and second causes, and concentrating almost exclusively on the latter, Bacon virtually excluded God from the universe: the universe thus confronted man as nature. God was still not mocked, but nature was controllable. Man could master his circumstances by amassing and improving knowledge: he could conquer nature by obeying her. If in the past ‘the road itself has been mistaken, and men’s labour spent on unfit objects, it follows that the difficulty has its rise not in things themselves, which are not in our power, but in the human understanding, (p.199) and the use and application thereof, which admits of remedy and medicine’.564 Bacon’s thesis is not unlike Ralegh’s: he differs in his psychological confidence that enough men could learn the lessons of history, could throw off the frustrating traditions of the past, could sufficiently understand and follow God’s and nature’s laws to be able to remould the material world to the relief of man’s estate: could get back behind the Fall in at least this respect.
Page 54 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics ‘My system levels men’s wits’, said Bacon. This democratic appeal was an essential part of the Baconian optimism which rang out so sharply in the age when men found themselves stuck in the mud of melancholy and despair. ‘I am now therefore to speak touching Hope…. And therefore it is fit that I publish and set forth these conjectures of mine which make hope in this matter reasonable; just as Columbus did, before that wonderful voyage of his across the Atlantic… which reasons, though rejected at first, were afterwards made good by experience, and were the cause and beginnings of great events.’565 The call, the challenge, and the promise would not be lost on men brought up in the assumption that God’s Elect were always a small remnant, and that they would nevertheless always win. Bacon and the Puritan Elect lacked the pessimism through which Ralegh and so many of his contemporaries expressed their frustrations, personal and social. Yet Ralegh too helped by his writings to build up the confidence which in the next generation saw George Hakewill fight the battle of the Moderns against the Ancients, and combat the theory of cosmic decay in order to establish the lawabidingness of the universe. And by his life and death, even more than by his writings, Ralegh helped to brace Englishmen to the effort needed for carrying out the programme which he and Hakluyt had set before them. We must never forget how suddenly the possibilities opened up for England in Ralegh’s own lifetime, how tenaciously he had to struggle to overcome the deeply ingrained conviction of Spanish invincibility. He never overcame it in James and his courtiers. But in preaching to the merchants and craftsmen, the sailors, instrument-makers and scientists who were revolutionizing English navigation, Ralegh was going with the tide. In the end it went faster and further than he had perhaps dared to hope. Even Ralegh’s obsession with death was relevant for the pre-revolutionary generation. The History concludes with Death the Avenger, (p.200) who humbles the proud and insolent. ‘O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised.’566 Did no one apply those words to the first two Stuarts, whom none could advise and whom all the world flattered? What none had dared, the men of 1649 did; and called in Death the Leveller to cast kingship out of the world.567 Notes:
(1) A. M. C. Latham, ‛A Birth-date for Sir Walter Ralegh’, Etudes Anglaises, 1956, pp. 243–5. (2) In May 1587 Ralegh was described by Sir Anthony Bagot as ‛the best-hated man of the world, in Court, City, and country’ (E. Thompson, Sir Walter Ralegh, 1935, p. 31). Page 55 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (3) H. Townshend, Historical Collections (1680), pp. 232, 235. (4) T. Fuller, The Church History of Britain (1842), iii. 350. (5) D.N.B. (6) Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters, p. xix. Leicester himself was heir to the patronage of science and especially navigation exercised by the Duke of Northumberland (Ibid., p. 31). See pp. 138–48 below. Hakluyt was a distant cousin (by marriage) of Leicester—bar sinister. (7) E. G. Clarke, Ralegh and Marlowe (New York, 1941), p. 390. Cf. Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iii. 249–55 for Ralegh’s patronage of Churchyard. (8) J. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (1954), p. 87. Sidney had studied astronomy and geometry during his stay at Padua. (9) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 169. For Cole see p. 16 above. (10) Buxton, op. cit, p. 143. Leicester had been a great collector of maps. (11) W. J. Carlton, Timothe Bright (1911), esp. pp. 13, 48–49, 111; Sir G. Keynes, Dr. Timothie Bright, 1550–1615 (1962), pp. 3–5, 9–13. Bright’s treatise on shorthand was published in 1588, the year of the Armada. The same printer issued a treatise on book-keeping by double-entry in the same year (Carlton, op. cit., p. 81). Shorthand was one of the discoveries which Hakewill noted (wrongly) to the credit of the Moderns (Apologie, p. 298). For Bright see also pp. 62–68 above, 278–9 below. (12) Berta Siebeck, Das Bild Sir Philip Sidneys in der englischen Renaissance (Schriften der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Neue Folge, Weimar, 1939), pp. 55–56; D. Nathanaelis Baxteri Colcestrensis quaestiones et responsa in Petri Rami dialecticam (1585). Baxter (of Colchester, like William Gilbert) was Warden of St. Mary’s College, Youghal. In the fifteen-nineties Ralegh rented the Warden’s house from the College and lived in it when he visited his Youghal estates. (13) Siebeck, op. cit., pp. 182–3; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500– 1700, pp. 222–3. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) illustrates its Ramist points from Sidney and Spenser. Fraunce later published The Lawiers Logike, a Ramist treatise on law. For Caiaphas see York Mystery Plays (ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, Oxford U.P., 1885), pp. 262–9, 281, 288–9, 309; The Towneley Plays (ed. A. W. Pollard, Early English Text Soc, 1897), pp. 233–7, 307; The Chester Plays, Part 2 (Early English Text Soc, 1959), pp. 280, 290, 313, 354. See also pp. 30–31 above.
Page 56 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (14) Sidney left Temple an annuity of £30. Temple was later secretary to the Earl of Essex, and Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. For Trinity College see p. 247 below. (15) Sidney, Works (ed. A. Feuillerat, 1912–26), iii. 132. Sidney was a friend of Sir Henry Savile, for whose attempts to reform Oxford see pp. 49–50 above. (16) Quoted by Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, p. 8. (17) Ed. Bullough, Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, i. 172. Greville interested himself in the election of at least one Gresham professor (H.M.C., Salisbury, xvi. 176). (18) J. A. van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons and Professors (Leiden, 1962), p. 29: see Part I, passim, for Rogers. (19) Buxton, op. cit, p. 160–7; Johnson, Astronomical Thought, p. 169; M. H. Carré, Phases of Thought in England, pp. 214–16; Van Dorsten, op. cit., pp. 41– 42. The influence of Bruno in England has never been properly investigated. But he clearly affected many of the men with whom this book deals. He influenced Sidney (F. A. Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour Lost, 1936, pp. 111–12; Siebeck, op. cit., pp. 58–62, 182), Bacon, Gilbert, Hariot, Nicholas Hill, Ralegh, Northumberland, and the Ralegh group generally (Singer, Giordano Bruno, pp. 36–37, 45, 67–68, 72, 181–2; Yates, op. cit., 92–94). Northumberland had Bruno’s books in his library and carefully annotated them (J. W. Shirley, ‛The Scientific Experiments of Sir Walter Raleigh, the Wizard Earl and the three Magi in the Tower, 1603–17’, Ambix, iv. 64–66; G. R. Batho, The Library of the “Wizard” Earl’, The Library, 5th Series, xv. 259–60). Alexander Dicson, Bruno’s disciple, dedicated his books to Leicester (Singer, op. cit., p. 38). See also G. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity (trans. J. Lindsay, 1962), pp. 7, 42, 158, for Bruno’s influence on Sidney, Spenser, and Ralegh. For Northumberland and the Ralegh group see pp. 127–30 below. (20) J. E. Phillips, ‛George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle’, H.L.Q. xii. 49–55. (21) Ralegh, History of the World (1820), iii. 262; Poems (ed. A. M. C. Latham, Muses Lib., 1951), p. 5; Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges (ed. H. E. Sandison, 1953), pp. 117–18. (22) The Shepheardes Calender had an introductory sonnet to Leicester. (23) For Lok and Sidney see p. 120 above. (24) E. Rosenberg, ‛Giacopo Castelvetro’, H.L.Q. vi. 128–9. (25) F. Greville, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1907), p. 77.
Page 57 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (26) Ibid., pp. 110–19, 215, 219–20; cf. p. 156. (27) Ibid., pp. 116–17. Greville intended to illustrate these divine laws by his tragedies (Ibid., p. 221) See p. 165 n. below. (28) F. Greville, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1907), pp. 56, 113, 203; 189–90. See p. 174 below. (29) H. Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955), pp. 31–33; R. W. Gibson, Supplement to a Bacon Bibliography (1959), p. 9; Greville’s Poems and Dramas, i. 54; cf. pp. 171–2. Even in Charles II’s reign Richard Baxter thought Greville’s Inquisition upon fame and honour ‛a poem…for subjects’ liberty, which I greatly wonder this age would bear’ (quoted Ibid. i. 27). (30) Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 55. (31) Hotman was also an intimate of the Leicester-Sidney circle (Van Dorsten, op. cit, p. 84). It has been plausibly argued that there are echoes of Huguenot political theory in Arcadia (W. D. Briggs, ‛Political Ideas in Sidney’s Arcadia, S.P. xxviii, and ‛Sidney’s Political Ideas’, Ibid., xxix). I am not convinced by Mr. Ribner’s criticisms of this thesis in ‛Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection’, J.H.I, xiii. 259–63 Professor Zeeveld’s argument seems more plausible—that the revised Arcadia is more orthodox and less democratic in its political theory because Sidney was trying to recover court favour (W. G. Zeeveld, ‛The Uprising of the Commons in Sidney’s Arcadia, M.L.N. xlviii, 209–17). For Arcadia as political allegory see p. 13 above. Buchanan influenced Milton, and is alleged to have impressed Oliver Cromwell (G. Burnet, A History of My own Time, 1724, i. 76). (32) J. E. Phillips, ‛George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle’, pp. 23–56; H. N. MacLear, ‛Fulke Greville, Kingship and Sovereignty’, H.L.Q. xvi. 239–64. For Ralegh’s political ideas see pp. 134–8 below. (33) e.g. Life, pp. 62, 98, 173–4. (34) Ed. Latham, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh (1951), p. 96; ed. W. A. Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (1962), pp. 554, 559; Buxton, op. cit, p. 112. (35) George Puttenham (1589) and Francis Meres (1598) each name Ralegh between Sidney and Dyer, though their lists are not identical; Gabriel Harvey (1598–1601) linked Ralegh’s name closely with Dyer’s; Edward Bolton (1618) with Greville’s. (All these are conveniently reprinted in Miss Latham’s edition of Ralegh’s Poems pp. lix-lx). Ralegh’s name is also associated with Sidney’s (and Sir Thomas Smith’s) in Ben Jonson’s list of eloquent prose writers (G. Williamson, The Senecan Amble, 1951, p. 89). For Smith see pp. 240–1 below.
Page 58 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (36) G. Williamson, ‛Mutability, Decay and 17th century Melancholy’, Journal of English Literary History, ii. 126. See pp. 178–80 below. (37) Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book VII canto vii, stanza 58. (38) Gascoigne, a kinsman of Frobisher, wrote an Epistle to the Reader for Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discoverie for a new passage to Cataia (1576), in which he quoted Dee’s Preface to Billingsley’s Euclide. This Epistle was omitted when Hakluyt reprinted the treatise (ed. D. B. Quinn, The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hakluyt Soc, 1940, i. 129–33, 166–7). (39) Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics, pp. 97–99. Cf. p. 30 above. (40) Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays (ed. G. G. Smith, 1904), i. 196. I owe this point to Mr. Leo Miller. Thomas Drant, whose rules for versification Sidney adopted and enlarged, paid tribute to Ramus in 1572 (Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, pp. 55–56). (41) Cf. the reference to Ralegh in Britannia’s Pastorals, Book I, Song 4, lines 67–82; and Browne’s epitaph on ‛Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother’. (42) E. Thompson, Sir Walter Ralegh (1935), pp. 236–7, 239. On Sidney’s place in the evolution of plain prose see Williamson, The Senecan Amble, p. 89. (43) D. Stimson, Scientists and Amateurs (New York, 1948), pp. 9–10. Another of Ralegh’s half-brothers, Adrian Gilbert, was a patron of John Dee, and later had a chemical laboratory in the Countess of Pembroke’s house at Wilton (Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 262, 311). The academy derived from an earlier project of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Francis’s father. (44) See p. 89 above. (45) Ed. D. B. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages (Hakluyt Soc, 1955), i. 36. (46) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 287. (47) H. Stevens, Thomas Hariot (1900), pp, 148, 124. (48) R. Hakluyt, Virginia Richly Valued (1609), sig. A 3. (49) Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova (third ed., 1744), Book I, section iii, para. 337. John Speed used four of these engravings to illustrate ‛Ancient Britaines’ in his Historie of Great Britanie (1611), (T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 1950, pp. 123–5). (50) Stevens, op. cit, p. 15; Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, p. 162. Page 59 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (51) E. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh (1868), ii. 420; cf. A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons (1962), p. 248. (52) H. E. Sandison, ‛Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s Alcyon and Ralegh’s friend’, P.M.L.A. xliii. 669. (53) S. P. Rigaud, Supplement to Dr. Bradley’s Miscellaneous Works, with an Account of Hariot’s Astronomical Papers (1833), pp. 20, 42–43. (54) Stevens, op. cit., pp. 113–15, 178–80, 197–8; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 285. (55) J. R. Partington, History of Chemistry, ii (1961), pp. 397–8. (56) D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics (1923–5), i. 388. (57) Taylor, op. cit., pp. 236–8; Taylor, ‛The Doctrine of Nautical Triangles Compendious’, Journal of the Institute of Navigation, vi. 137. (58) Hakewill, op. cit., p. 302; [Seth Ward], Vindiciae Academiarum, p. 20; PettySouthwell Correspondence, p. 322. (59) J. Wallis, A Treatise of Algebra (1685), p. 126. (60) Ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Correspondance de Descartes (1897–1903), ii. 456–61. (61) The Poems of Richard Corbett (ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper, 1955), p. 64. (62) Waters, The Art of Navigation, pp. 194, 359, 373, 546–7, 582–91; Taylor, ‘Hariot’s Instructions for Ralegh’s Voyage to Guiana, 1595’, Journal of the Institute of Navigation, v. 345; ‘The Doctrine of Nautical Triangles Compendious’, Ibid. vvi. pp. 134–5; D. H. Sadler, ‛Calculating the Meridional Points’, Ibid. vvi. 147. Hariot also left papers on fortifications (N. L. Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh, 1962, pp. 57, 83). (63) See p. 31 above. (64) G. Chapman, ‘To my admired and soul-loved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge, M. Harriots’, in Poems and Minor Translations (1875), pp. 53–55. (65) Rosenberg, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro’, H.L.Q. vi. 139. (66) Quoted by F. A. Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour Lost, p. 95. Note the close association of artisans and scholars, typical of the early development of English science (see pp. 78–80 above)—though Peele’s ‘mathesis’ is presumably magic.
Page 60 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Cf. Alexander Read’s description of Northumberland as ‘the favourer of all good learning and Maecenas of learned men’ (A. Read, Works, 1650, p. 248). (67) Stevens, op. cit, pp. 93–94, 98–99; ed. G. R. Batho, The Household Papers of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632) (Camden Soc, 1962), p. 154; Shirley, ‘The Scientific Experiments of Sir Walter Ralegh…’, p. 58. (68) Yates, op. cit., pp. 138–40, 206–11. (69) Shirley, op. cit., pp. 63–66; Batho, ‘The Library of the “Wizard” Earl’, The Library, fifth series, xv. 254–60. (70) Ed. G. B. Harrison, Advice to His Son by Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1609) (1930), pp. 67–71. But the Earl disparaged alchemy as ‘a mere mechanical broiling trade’. (71) Ed. G. B. Harrison, Willobie His Avisa (1594) (1926), pp. 184–5, 226–7. Despite its suppression in 1599, there had been six editions of this work by 1635. (72) Chapman (like Marlowe, who also had associations with Ralegh’s circle) was very up to date in his technical meteorological knowledge: he evidently read the almanacs. He used virtually no religious imagery (S. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, Duke U.P., 1960, pp. 183, 192, 195). (73) Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 311–12. Hues’s Treatise was reprinted by the Hakluyt Soc. in 1889 (ed. C. R. Markham). It described the globes made by Emery Molyneux, to whom Ralegh and Hakluyt had furnished information (see p. 40 above). The Fifth Part of the Treatise was an essay by Hariot on rhumb lines. In the English translation of 1638 the name of Ralegh was omitted from the dedication, together with its opening lines (see Markham’s Introduction, passim). (74) Ibid., p. xxxvi. Though a moderate manj the tenth Earl sided with the Independents over the Self-Denying Ordinance and in the crisis of July 1647. His sister was the famous Countess of Carlisle, Pym’s friend. For the tenth Earl see also p. 92 above. (75) Batho, Household Papers, p. 155. (76) See p. 40 above. (77) A story to this effect was circulating in the early sixteen-forties (Shirley, op. cit, p. 55). Cf. G. Rolleston, The Harveian Oration (1873), pp. 50–62. For Gorges see H. E. Sandison, ‘Arthur Gorges’, P.M.L.A. xliii. 645 ff.
Page 61 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (78) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 16, 291–3; ed. J. O. Halliwell, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science, pp. 65–69. Warner had been Leicester’s protégé. (79) Willobie His Avisa, pp. 206–11; J. Bakeless, Christopher Marlowe (1938), pp. 199–202. (80) C. Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part I, Act 11, scene vii. (81) See p. 135 below. (82) S. E. Dimsey, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro’, Modern Language Review, xxiii. 424– 31; Rosenberg, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro, Italian publisher in London and his Patrons’, H.L.Q. vi. 122–39; C.S.P.Ven., 1610–13, pp. 219–20. See p. 191 below. (83) Shirley, op. cit, pp. 56, 59;Batho, Household Papers, p. 163. (84) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 27; Curtis, op. cit., p. 236. See also p. 277 below. The Earl’s younger brother, George Percy, led the 1607 expedition to Virginia. (85) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 192; G. McColley, ‘Nicholas Hill and the Philosophia Epicurea’, Annals of Science, iv. 392. (86) Stevens, op. cit., pp. 180–2. Both Hill and Hariot knew and valued the writings of Bruno. Walter Warner was another atomist. (87) McColley, op. cit., pp. 390–2, 403–4. (88) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 321. (89) The mistaken idea that Northumberland was a papist has been corrected by Mr. Batho (Household Papers, p. xx). For Hill’s religion see also pp. 6, 83 above. (90) P. Gregg, Freeborn John (1961), pp. 16, 363. (91) M. Drayton, Complete Works (1816), iii. 12; Rosenberg, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro’, p. 122. (92) Ralegih, Works, ii. 78; cf. Greville, Life of Sidney, p. 71. (93) J. J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy, i. 1200–1649 (1957), pp. 115–23. (94) Hester, op. cit. (1596 ed.), sig. A 2, quoted by E. A. Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Scepticism (Columbia U.P., 1951), pp. 240–1; cf. Kocher, ‘John Hester, Paracelsan’, Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Folger Library, 1948), pp. 621–38. (95) Ed. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, ii. 570. See p. 71 above.
Page 62 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (96) Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, p. 259; cf. p. 332; L. Hutchinson, Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson (1885, i. 21). Hutchinson was later a regicide. (97) N. Le Febure, A Discourse Upon Sir Walter Rawleighs Great Cordial (1664), pp. 5, 91–102, sig. A 4. Le Febure increases our respect for Ralegh when he tells us that he had by ‘the counsel and approbation of Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir Alexander Francis, his Majesty’s chief physician’, added the flesh, heart, and liver of a viper to the comparatively simple ingredients of the cordial in Ralegh’s prescription (Ibid., p. 14; cf. J. Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer, iii. 336). The Paracelsan chemist Le Febure was author of‘the true ancestor of the modern textbook of practical chemistry’, translated into English in 1663 as A Compleat Body of Chymistry, with dedication to the English apothecaries (M. Boas, Robert Boyle and 17th century Chemistry, 1958, p. 56; R. J. Forbes and E. J. Dijksterhuis, A History of Science and Technology, Penguin Books, 1963, i. 219). (98) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 182; J. Swift, Works (1814), iii. 89. (99) Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), p. 498. (100) Ralegh, History, i. 210. (101) Ibid. vi. 25–27; W. F. Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet (1960), p. 119.I do not associate myself with the claim that Ralegh anticipated Darwin’s theory of the origin of species because he said that Noah did not need to take into the ark all the animals that now exist, but only those from which the present species are descended (J. Bonar, Theories of Population from Ralegh to Arthur Young, 1931, p. 21). (102) Ralegh, History, i. p. xli, iii. 205. (103) See pp. 163–7 below. (104) Ralegh, History, ii. 154–5, 159–60, 165–6, 400–1, 404; Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 175–81; Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, pp. 195, 280, 515– 16, 535. (105) Ralegh, History, i, p. xi. (106) Bacon, Works, iii. 289, iv. 34–57, 365–9; cf. J. R. Partington, History of Chemistry ii (1961), pp. 389–414. (107) Sir T. Browne, Religio Medici (1642), in Works (Bohn ed.), ii. 367. (108) Mason, A History of the Sciences, pp. 188–9; W. Pagel, ‘Religious Motives in Medical Biology of the 17th century’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, iii. 305.
Page 63 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (109) Haydn, op. cit., p. 190. See above p. 81 for the alchemists’ hope of getting back behind the Fall: cf. Haydn, op. cit, pp. 191, 464, 516–19; Pagel, loc. cit., passim; Mason, ‘The Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation’, Annals of Science, ix. 154–75. (110) Haydn, op. cit., pp. 177–8, 193–6, 248; Kocher, ‘Paracelsan Medicine in England’, pp. 458–73; M. Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1450–1630, pp. 185, 190. For Woodall see pp. 63–65 above. Bruno, says Mr. Lindsay, used the term ‘magic’ to cover the scientific effort to grapple with the unknown (Cause, Principle and Unity, pp. 10, 34–35). (111) Dee, Preface to Billingsley’s Euclide, sig. A ii-iiiv. (112) R[ichard] B[ostock], The Difference between the auncient…and the latter Phisick (1585), Chapter 19. (113) Haydn, op. cit., pp. 186–9. Ramus was associated with Paracelsus by the future bishop, John Earle (p. 129 above), and by Bishop Goodman; both were defended by Hakewill (Apologie, ii. 130, 134). (114) J. Webster, Academiarum Examen, pp. 20, 27, 51–52, 68–69, 105–6, and passim; Metallographia (1671), pp. 8, 34. (115) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 27. (116) Johnson, Astronomical Thought, pp. 253–4; Reliquiae Hearnianae (ed. P. Bliss, 1869), ii. 197–8, iii. 181–2. Webster also praised Fludd. (117) Robert Fludd said in 1631 that Lady Ralegh had told him that her husband ‘would suddenly stop the bleeding of any person (albeit he were far and remote from the party) if he had a handkerchief or some other piece of linen dipped in some of the blood of the party sent unto him’ (Doctor Fludds answer unto M. Foster, 1631, quoted by J. B. Craven, Dr. Robert Fludd, 1902, p. 212). Cf. R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby, pp. 261–74. (118) L. Stapleton, ‘Halifax and Ralegh’, J.H.I, ii. 211. (119) Bodin was translated into English in 1606. Machiavelli’s Art of War had been translated in 1563, the Florentine History in 1595. But there was no English version of the Discorsi until 1636, of Il Principe until 1640. Ralegh himself was called a Machiavellian both in contemporary songs and by Coke at his trial (N. L. Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 172, 177). (120) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 186. Cf. Lucy Hutchinson, op. cit., i. 109. (121) I owe this point to Mr. Charles Hobday. For Gorges see pp. 121, 125, 126, 128 above, 194–5 below. For May see p. 59 above. Page 64 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (122) Ralegh, Works, ii. 50. Compare a fascinating passage in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha (Poems and Dramas, ii. 130–1). Cf. P. Lefranc, ‘Un inedit de Ralegh sur la succession’, Études Anglaises, 1960, pp. 40–46. (123) Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 568. Cf. the reference to ‘the prerogative of the Parliament’, in a letter from Richard James to Sir Robert Cotton, quoted in F. S. Fussner, The Historical Revolution (1962), p. 138. For James see p. 172 below. (124) Ralegh, History, ii. 342–4. Cf. The Prerogative of Parliaments: ‘the immortal policy of a state cannot admit any law of privilege whatsoever but in some particular or other, the same is necessarily broken’ (Works, i. 223; cf. p. 241). What interests Ralegh is sovereignty. (125) Works, ii. 51–52. Ralegh only mentions this ‘as the utmost the most zealous advocates can urge for the power of the people’, which can be exercised only when ‘the person or persons possessing the supreme power are incurably defective’. The passage in the Cabinet Council urging passive obedience is not Ralegh’s (Ibid. i. 97–98). (126) Ibid. ii. 67–68. (127) History, v. 107–12. (128) Ibid. i. xxvi; cf. Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 62, 98, 173–8, 190–9, 203–5. (129) History, iv. 453–4; The Prerogative of Parliaments, passim (130) History, ii. 119–35. (131) See pp. 162–72 below. (132) History, ii. 107. I do not understand how Mr. A. Williams can see Ralegh as in the patriarchal royalist tradition which leads from Overall to Filmer (A. Williams, ‘Politics and Economics in Renaissance Commentaries on Genesis’, H.L.Q. vii. 213–14). Cf. C. H. K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton, 1961), p. 204; Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), iii. 466 n. (133) History, iii. 219. (134) History, ii. 340–1. Contrast this view of Magna Carta with that expressed by the Councillor in the Prerogative of Parliaments (Works, i. 180–2), so often quoted out of context by Ralegh’s opponents. (See p. 189 below.) For Ralegh’s own views see Works, i, pp. 179, 183, 240–2. (135) Ralegh always very sharply draws the traditional distinction between the King and his evil councillors (Works, i. 200–2, 208–9, 211–13, 216–17, 233–5, 240–8). Page 65 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (136) Ibid. ii. 318. (137) It is in the History that sale of honours is denounced (ii. 117). (138) Works, i. 175–6. (139) Works, i. 242, 246–7. (140) Ibid. i. 212. (141) I discuss Ralegh’s ‘Harringtonianism’ further at pp. 174–7, 181 below. (142) Cf. Bishop Goodman: ‘Now suppose King James had intended to continue the wars, how should lie then have been able to have given the Scots as much as he did?’ (G. Goodman, The Court of King James I, 1839, i. 61). Goodman exaggerates: but he only exaggerates what may have seemed to many courtiers a self-evident point. (143) Osborn, Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History of the Court of King James, i. 157–64; J. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae (Temple Classics), ii. 232: first published 1645–55. (144) C.S.P.D., 1611–18, pp. 588–9; cf. pp. 181–8 below. (145) Ed. E. G. R. Taylor, The Writings…of the two Richard Hakluyts, passim. (146) e.g. Robert Hitchcock, A Politic Plat (1580), passim, written in collaboration with John Dee; cf. Ralegh, History, v. 109. Over-population is a major cause of wars, Ralegh thought (Works, ii. 26–28). (147) These points were made in a plea for reviving Ralegh’s scheme for conquering Guiana, by Col. Thomas Modyford in 1652 (C.S.P. Col, 1574–60, pp. 373–4). (148) R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Everyman ed.), vi. 61; cf. Taylor, Original Writings, passim: K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (1957), p. 168. The Hakluyts evolved this theory before the export of the New Draperies to European markets began to expand in the early seventeenth century. See also Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Hakluyt Soc, 1935), i, pp. 132–5, 149, 158, 182, 185–95; ii, pp. 223, 232, 238–9, 253, 289–92, 315. (149) Bacon, Works, vii. 21. (150) Cf. F. Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 110–19. (151) Taylor, Original Writings, i. 37. Page 66 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (152) Edwards, Life of Raleigh, ii. 111. (153) There was from the start considerable potential tension between the merchants who financed and planned the colonizing expeditions, and the gentlemen sea-dogs who could rarely resist combining them with piracy and the hunt for gold (cf. Taylor, Original Writings, i. 135). This dichotomy looks forward to the rivalry between the aristocratic planters whom the first two Stuarts encouraged, and the merchants and settlers who strove to outwit them. (154) Taylor, Original Writings, i. 119–20. In a sense the ‘revolution by evasion’ of the emigration of the sixteen-twenties and thirties was thus foreseen by Hakluyt, though hardly the enemy from which God’s people had to flee. He had hoped indeed, as Ralegh did, that colonization would prevent civil wars (Ibid. vii. 457–8; cf. Ralegh, Works, i. 26–28). But Hakluyt did realize that ‘the English there would aspire to the government of themselves’ (Taylor, Original Writings, i. 143). (155) Taylor, op. cit. ii. 217. (156) Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (Everyman ed.), vi. 3. (157) Ralegh, The Last Fight of ‘The Revenge (Hakluyt, op. cit. v. 13). Hakluyt’s attitude towards the native population was rather more robust (Taylor, op. cit. ii. 503). (158) Cf. (Ralegh’s Discover) of Guiana and Fight about the Islands of Azores, passim. (159) N. L. Williams, op. cit., p. 137, quoting The Discovery of Guiana (ed. V. T. Harlow, 1928), Appendix C. (160) Ed. Harlow, Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623– 1667 (Hakluyt Soc, 1925), pp. lxiii, 141. Cf. R. Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana (1613), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), vi. 460. (161) D. B. Quinn, Raleigh and the British Empire (1947), p. 270. (162) Cf. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vii. 393. Sir Thomas Smith’s scheme for a joint-stock venture to settle Ulster in 1571, ‘the first printed publicity for an English colonial project’, remarkably anticipates the Hakluyts and Ralegh. The reasons which Smith gave for overseas expansion included the over-population of England, and the need to provide for younger sons of the gentry now that the monasteries had been dissolved (D. B. Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77) and the beginning of English colonial theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Soc, lxxxix. 550–2, 560). For Smith see pp. 240–1 below. (163) Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, i. 433; see pp. 271–2 below. Page 67 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (164) G. Chapman, Poems and Minor Translations (1875), pp. 50–52; cf. pp. 53– 55. (165) Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vii. 62. (166) Ibid. v. 210. My italics. (167) Ibid. vii. 400. (168) J. Dee, The Petty Navy Royal, in General and Rare Memorials (1577). There was a vast literature on the importance of encouraging the fishing industry, extending in Ralegh’s lifetime from Dee and Hitchcock’s Politic Plat of 1580 to Tobias Gentleman’s The Way to Wealth of 1614. (169) Waters, The Art of Navigation, p. 253. In 1588, as Ralegh pointed out, Spain was buying English guns (M. Lewis, Armada Guns, 1961, p. 137). Dee too had protested in The Petty Navy Royal against the export of armaments. (170) Edwards, Life of Raleigh, i. 245; Ralegh, Works, i. 273–4. (171) J. A. Williamson, The English Channel (1959), p. 243. (172) Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, p. 14; Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, p. 183. (173) ‘I have…laboured all my life, both according to my small power and persuasion, to advance all those attempts that might either promise return or profit to ourselves, or at least be a let or impeachment to the quiet course and plentiful trades of the Spanish nation’ (Discovery of Guiana, To the Reader, printed with Ralegh’s History, vi. 14). Cf. Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 310–14. (174) L. B. Wright, Religion and Empire (North Carolina U.P., 1943), pp. 53, 71, 176; ed. E. Lynam, Richard Hakluyt and his Successors (Hakluyt Soc, 1946), p. 39. But the Principal Navigations was not used only for light reading. It also did service as a ruttier, and on one occasion saved the Company £20, 000 when it helped the ships to make Sierra Leone harbour (Waters, op. cit, p. 236). (175) Rosenberg, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro’, H.L.Q. vi. 122–32. For dedications to Ralegh see L. Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England (New York, 1902), p. 359; Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, pp. 217–18. (176) Ralegh, History, ii. 91–92. (177) Ibid. iv. 42. (178) Ibid. iv. 315. (179) Ralegh, History, v. 37–38, 54–63, 199. Page 68 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (180) Ibid. v. 1ll; cf. vi. 242–3—an equally improbable hope that James would prove less mean to military men than Elizabeth had been. (181) Ibid. vi. 369. Cf. A Discovery of Guiana, To the Reader, and A Discourse touching War with Spain (Works, ii. 1–20), for the decline and poverty of Spain. (182) The Last Fight of The Revenge (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, v. 13). (183) Ralegh, Works, ii. 88. See pp. 150, 183–6, 249–52 below. (184) Ibid. ii. 109–36; cf. T. Mun, Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade, in Early English Tracts on Commerce (ed. J. R. McCulloch, 1856), pp. 193–204. Written probably in the early sixteen-twenties; first published 1664. (185) Ralegh, Works, i. 278, 253, 275–6; ii. 8–9. Among many others who echoed the call for a Dutch alliance was Dr. Alexander Leighton, Zions Plea against the Prelacie (1628),. 163 and passim. Probably printed in the Netherlands. (186) Ralegh, Works, ii. 89–90, 130–1. Ralegh made a remarkably accurate prophecy when he observed that whichever of the three powers, England, France, or Spain, secured a permanent Dutch alliance, ‘will become the greatest and give the law to the rest’ (Ibid. vi. 276). The prophecy was realized after 1688. (187) R. Coke, A Detection of the Court and State of England (1694), i. 92–93; Hakewill, Apologie, ii. 135. (188) Ralegh, Works, i. 264, 273–5. (189) Cf. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (1957), pp. 429–30. (190) Chamberlen, ii. 62. (191) Lynam, Hakluyt and his Successors, p. 177. (192) W. F. Craven, The Virginia Company of London, 1606–24 (1957), p. 18; T. H. O’Brien, ‘The London Livery Companies and the Virginia Company’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, lxviii. 148. See pp. 41–42, 56, 71 above, 193 below. (193) W. Strachey, For the Colony of Virginia Britannia (1612), quoted by Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, p. 163. Cf. T. Morton, The New England Canaan (1637): ‘If our beggars of England should with so much ease as [the Red Indians] furnish themselves with food at all seasons, there would not be so many starved in the streets, neither would so many gaols be stuffed or gallows
Page 69 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics furnished with poor wretches, as I have seen them’ (quoted in Taylor, op. cit., p. 168). Cf. p. 44 above. (194) W. Crashawe, Good Newes from Virginia (1613), Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Thomas Smith. Crashawe was not attached to Smith’s faction in the Company. In his will eight years later he left £ 105 to some honest merchant of London, ‘whom Sir Edwin Sandys shall like’, ‘to better the stipend of the preachers of St. Antolin’s.’ Crashawe was a friend of Briggs, Selden, and Thomas James: a protege of Coke (P. J. Wallis, William Crashawe, 1963, passim). for more about clerical ‘demonstrations of Virginia’s role in the scheme of providence’, see Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard U.P., 1956), pp. 99–140. Cf. also R. Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (1609), sig. B 2–C: over-population in England necessitates emigration. (195) Purchas was chaplain to and enjoyed the patronage of Archbishop Abbott, for whom see pp. 19, 64 above. Purchas was helped by Sir Dudley Digges and Sir Thomas Smith (Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, p. 57). Dury recommended the study of Purchas, and according to Hartlib (quoting Haak) Milton in 1648 started the very necessary task of epitomizing Purchas’s work (Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, p. 40). Cf. Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. pp. 368, 382–3. (196) Craven, op. cit, pp. 48–49. (197) C.J. i. 493; T. L. Moir, The Addled Parliament of 1614 (1958), p 115. For Owen and Ralegh see p. 183 below. (198) W. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Massachusetts Historical Soc. Collections, 4th Series, iii), p. 266; Sprat, History of hie Royal Society, p. 93. (199) N.R.S. ii. 416; v. 190. Sandys advocated the abolition of feudal tenures. (200) Craven, op. cit., p. 143; ed. S. M. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company of London (1906–35), iv. 194. The tax on Virginia tobacco was doubled. (201) H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (1940), p. 99. (202) John Ferrar, B. Blackstone, Ferrar Papers (1938), p. 22. (203) E. Sandys, Europae Speculum, or a View of the State of Religion in the westerne part of the world. A pirated edition was published in 1605 and suppressed, it is said with the connivance of the author. It was reprinted at The Hague in 1629 and circulated in England, where the first legal edition appeared in 1638. Fra Paolo Sarpi may have helped Sandys to prepare the work, and certainly co-operated in the Italian translation. For Sarpi see pp. 246–7 below. (204) City of Exeter MSS. (H.M.C.), pp. 167–9. Page 70 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (205) G. C. Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberiand (1920), pp. 186, 223. (206) Ed. V. T. Harlow, ‘The Voyages of Captain William Jackson’, Camden Miscellany, xiii, passim. (207) H. Peter, Gods Doings and Mans Duty (1646), p. 30. (208) Ralegh, Works, ii. 17. Ralegh thought a Dutch alliance essential for achieving those objectives: the Protectorate was strong enough for this no longer to be vital. But Cromwell still found that to ask for freedom of conscience and freedom of trade in the West Indies for English merchants was to ask for the King of Spain’s two eyes. (209) J. Milton, Prose Works (Bohn ed.), ii. 335–6. (210) T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 404. For the whole of this section see A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (Yale U.P., 1914), passim. (211) C. Kingsley, Plays and Puritans and other Historical Essays (1879), p. 151. (212) Sir S. D’Ewes, Journals of all the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682), p. 674. Fulke Greville attributed a belief in freedom of trade to Sidney (Life, pp. 113, 203). (213) H. Townshend, Historical Collections (1680), p. 188. Cf. Ralegh, Works, ii. 5, on the profit motive. Serjeant Hoskyns, Ralegh’s friend, defended liberty to buy and sell in the Parliaments of 1610 and 1614 (L. B. Osborn, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns, Yale U.P., 1937, p. 37). (214) Ralegh, Works, i. 174–6, 237–41; cf. p. 17. (215) G. R. Lewis, The Stannaries (Harvard U.P., 1924), p. 217. (216) A. J. Eagleston, The Channel Islands under Tudor Government, 1485–1642 (1949), p. 98. Cf. the suggestion that Sir Arthur Gorges’s Publique Register for Generall Commerce (1611) ‘may owe something to the practical mind’ of Ralegh, ‘reaching out towards the coming era of business and banking’ (ed. H. E. Sandison, The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, 1953, p. xxvi). In its turn, Gorges’s scheme may have influenced Hartlib’s office of addresses. (217) Ralegh, Works, ii. 343, 351, 353. (218) Ralegh, History, i, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv; cf. p. 67; ii. 134–5; Works, i. 125; ii. 319. (219) D. B. Quinn, ‘Ralegh’s American Colonies’, in Essays in Honour of J. E. Todd, ed. H. A. Cronne, T. W. Moody, and D. B. Quinn (1949), p. 76; Waters, Art of Navigation in England, pp. 190, 197. Sanderson gave financial assistance to Page 71 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics Ralegh’s protégé Hues, as well as to Robert Hood and Ernery Molyneux. See p. 40 above. (220) Ed. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, ii. 544. (221) E. D. Jones, ‘An Account Book of Sir Thomas Myddelton, 1583–1603’, National Library of Wales Journal, i. 83; G. M. Griffiths, ‘An Account Book of Ralegh’s Voyage, 1592’, Ibid. vii. 352. (222) A. F. Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram (1961), p. 5; Ralegh, Works, i. 234 (223) Ibid. i. 276–7. (224) Ibid. ii. 15. (225) This point was repeated by Sir John Eliot in the Commons in 1624 (J. Forster, Sir John Eliot, 1865, i. 168–70). (226) Ralegh, Works, ii. 112–36; cf. pp. 89–90, 317–20. (227) Ibid ii 119; Mun, Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade, in Early English Tracts on Commerce (ed. J. R. McCulloch, 1856), p. 139; cf. Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (1641), Ibid., pp. 91–92. (228) Ralegh, Works, ii. 31–32 (229) Ibid. ii. 135. (230) Ralegh, Works, ii. 80. Cf. the very similar opinion expressed by Bacon in his Essay ‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates’, and in Considerations touching a War with Spain (Works, xiv. 499–500). (231) Ralegh, Works, i. 263. (232) Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 178; Osborn, Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History of the Court of James I, i. 162 (233) Ralegh, works, i. 232–5, 238–41; cf. pp. 14, 55–56, 71, 96. (234) D’Ewes, Journals, p. 492. (235) Townshend, Historical Collections, p. 204. Cf. Fulke Greville in 1593: ‘The poor are grieved by being over-charged; this must be helped by increasing our own burthen; for otherwise the weak feet will complain of too heavy a body: that is to be feared. If the feet knew their strength as well as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do’ (Parliamentary History of England, 1806, i. 822).
Page 72 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (236) A. Bryant, Samuel Pepys: the Tears of Peril (1952), p. 284; Ralegh, Works, ii. 92. (237) Ralegh, Poems (ed. A. M. C. Latham), p. 53. (238) Ralegh, History, i, p. xxi; ii. 16–17. Cf. pp. 237–9 below. (239) Ibid. vi. 98; Works, ii. 319, cf. p. 326. (240) History, i. 154; cf. W. Perkins, Workes (1609–13), i. 755, iii. 92, 191, 539; and see my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 227–8. (241) Ralegh, Works, ii. 352–4. (242) Quoted by A. M. C. Latham, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s Instructions to his Son, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies presented to F. P. Wilson (1959), p. 208. (243) Pierre Lefranc, ‘Un inédit de Ralegh’, Études Anglaises, viii. 205–6; cf. G. Winstanley, An Appeale to all Englishmen (1650), in Sabine, op. cit., p. 414. (244) Ralegh, Works, ii. 149. (245) Ralegh, Poems, p. 50. (246) Cf. p. 170 below. (247) MS. Lord de l’lsle and Dudley (H.M.C.), ii. 173. (248) Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 21–26. We do not know how close was Ralegh’s association with Marlowe, of which Miss Bradbrook makes much in The School of Night (1936); nor is there much positive evidence that Marlowe was anything more than a perpetrator of rash phrases to shock the respectable. That Francis Kett, who may have been Marlowe’s tutor, was burnt on a charge of atheism in 1589 hardly convicts Marlowe, still less Ralegh. Fear of atheism seems to have been at its height in the early fifteen-nineties, when the government’s campaign against the sectaries was under way (see M. Maclure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons, Toronto, 1958, pp. 79–80). By 1633 Ralegh himself could be quoted in a sermon at Paul’s Cross Ibid (p. 150) (249) For Broughton see p. 102 above. (250) Ed. Harrison, Willobie His Avisa, p. 267. All the relevant documents on Ralegh’s ‘school of atheism’ are collected here. (251) H.M.C., Second Report, Appendix, p. 43; Strype, Life of Whitgifi (1822), ii. 98–102. (252) D’Ewes, Journals, p. 517.
Page 73 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (253) H. Townshend, Historical Collections (1680), pp. 320–1. (254) Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1878), iii. 462; Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 35–39. Another example of Ralegh trying to save a priest is in Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 103–4. (255) Ralegh, History, i, pp. xxix-xxx; cf. Works, ii. 34, 39, 55. It may have been in France that Ralegh first became acquainted with the daring and fashionable speculations of Pomponazzi’s schoool of atheism (G. T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance, 1932, pp. 151–2). (256) Strathmann, op. cit, pp. 35–39. (257) History, vi. 97. Cf. Ralegh’s criticisms of Familists, Anabaptists, and Brownists, Ibid. ii. 352. (258) Ibid. ii. 505 (259) Strathmann, op. cit., p. 137. (260) History, ii. 331–4. (261) Ibid. ii. 63, 75–79, 85–89, 158, 231, 257, &c. (262) Ibid. ii. 206. Ralegh showed his independence in his attitude to the Geneva Bible, whose versions he sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected (History, i. 132, 225; ii. 4, 371). (263) Ibid. ii. 143. (264) Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vi. 128. (265) Hariot, A Brief and True Report, in The New World (ed. S. Lorant, 1954), pp. 250, 268. (266) Bath MSS. (H.M.C.), ii. 52–53. (267) I owe this point to the kindness of Mr. Charles Hobday. (268) Ed. J. Crossley, Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee (Chetham Miscellany, i. 1851), pp. 46–49; Fussner, The Historical Revolution, p. 90. Dee lived long enough to correspond with Sir Robert Cotton (C. Fell Smith, John Dee, 1909, p. 265). (269) See pp. 119–25, 18, 71, 57, 47–48 above. For Sidney’s friend Daniel Rogers, antiquarian geographer, see p. 121 above. (270) J. Hall, An Humble Motion, p. 36; cf. pp. 80, 110–11 above.
Page 74 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (271) Ed. P. Bliss, Life of Wood (1848), pp. 134–6; Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the 17 th century, p. 42. (272) Hassall, Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke (Yale Law Library Publications no. 12, 1950), pp. 46–85. Some of these books may have come from Sir Christopher Hatton’s library when Coke married his son’s widow. See also Hassall, The Books of Sir Christopher Hatton at Holksham (1950), p. 3. (273) Fussner, op. cit., pp. 100–2, 116, 305–21; cf. pp. 94, 105–6. (274) For Selden see Ibid., Chapter XI, passim. (275) F. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 1558–1642 (New York, 1908), i. 251–2; Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, pp. 85, 260. (276) E. L. Klotz, ‘A Subject Analysis of English Imprints for every tenth year 1480–1640’, H.L.Q. i. 418. (277) Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics, pp. 62–63. (278) T. Blundeville, The True order and Methode of writing and reading Hystorie (1574), sig. A 2, quoted by H. G. Dick, Thomas Blundeville’s The True order…’, H.L.Q iii. 154–5. Blundeville’s book was an adaptation and abridgement of Francesco Patrizzi’s Delia Historia Died Dialoghi (Venice, 1560), and of an unpublished work on history presented by Acontius to Leicester (Dick, op. cit., pp. 149–50); see also Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England, pp. 309–13, for the importance of Blundeville’s book in the development of English theories of history. It may well have influenced Ralegh). Blundeville (see p. 36 above) was a friend of Acontius, who is of considerable significance in the history of religious toleration in England (W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, i. 1932, 3O3–65). Acontius’s Sathanae Stratagemata, translated into English in 1648 under the auspices of John Goodwin, Hartlib, and Dury, had a good deal of influence on the Independents (B. Gustafsson, The Five Dissenting Brethren, Lund, 1955, pp. 103–12). Acontius was a skilled engineer, land drainer, and inventor, as well as an anti-Aristotelean. His thesis of preliminary doubt is interestingly close to the positions of Bacon and Descartes: Patrizzi was ‘one of Bacon’s forerunners in the method of experimental research’ and an opponent of Aristotle (Einstein, op. cit., p. 309). (279) The above paragraph draws upon ideas contained in W. M. Merchant’s ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury and seventeenth century historical writing’, Trans, of the Hon. Soc. of Cymmrodorion, 1956, pp. 52–55. Cf. Fussner, The Historical Revolution, esp. pp. xxii, 17–19, 55–59, 99–100, 213. Mr. Fussner emphasizes especially the new middle-class reading public for history. (280) Sidney, Complete Works (ed. Feuillerat), iii. 130–2.
Page 75 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (281) J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from…7 626 to the decline of the Platonist Movement (1911), pp. 88–89. (282) R. Parr, Life of…Usher, pp. 393–4. Brooke continued to pay Dorislaus’s stipend and clearly hoped that the lectures might one day be resumed. (283) See p. 54 above. (284) In Milton’s Fifth Prolusion a series of historical examples is followed by an attack on suppression of truth; in the Seventh Prolusion, by a criticism of ‘our bad methods of teaching the arts’. Cf. the Third Prolusion. (285) W. H. Allison, ‘The first endowed Professorship of History and its first Incumbent’, American Historical Review, xxvii, 733–7; H. S. Jones, ‘The Foundation and History of the Camden Chair’, Oxoniensia, vii. 169–79. (286) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 191; Hakewill, Apologie, sig. C1-C2. The success of Wheare’s Method and Order of Reading History testifies to public interest in the subject (five Latin editions between 1623 and 1684, three English translations before the end of the century). It was still in use as a texbook at Cambridge at the beginning of the eighteenth century. History, Wheare thought, was ‘moral philosophy clothed in examples’. In his lectures he drew parallels between events in Roman history and those of modern times. (Cf. Fussner op. cit, pp. 165, 169–70.) For Wheare and Ralegh see p. 188 below. (287) Curtis, op. cit., p. 117. (288) F. Watson, The Beginnings of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England, p. 52. (289) Ralegh, History, i, p. lviii. (290) Ed. B. Mellor, The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert (Hong Kong, 1961), pp. xxxxi, 301. (291) Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (1956), p. 13; ed. L. Fox, English Historical Scholarship in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1956), p. 52. Whether Ralegh was or was not a member of the Society is disputed (Evans, op. cit, p. 10). For William Hakewill see p. 178 below. (292) It was published in 1680. Falkland’s approach suggests the influence of Ralegh. (293) Eccles, ‘Sir George Buc’, in Thomas Lodge and other Elizabethans (ed. Sisson), pp. 474–5, 505. See pp. 57, 155 above. (294) C. H. Firth, Essays, Historical and Literary (1938), pp. 57, 59.
Page 76 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (295) Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters, pp. 64, 72; cf. pp. 81–92 for other historical works dedicated to or patronized by Leicester. (296) Books on history were acquired by Coke more steadily throughout his life than on any other subject (Hassall, Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, p. xx). See also W. Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963), pp. 144–9. (297) See The Norman Yoke in my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 50–122. (298) Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, pp. 333–4. For Bright see pp. 62, 68, 120 above. Foxe was a friend of Sir Thomas Gresham. (299) J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (1940), p. 147; ed. H. R. Wilton Hall, Records of the Old Archdeaconry of St. Albans (St. Albans and Herts. Architectural and Archaeological Soc, 1908), p. 72. (300) See pp. 52–53 above. (301) W. M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, pp. 16, 31, 47; Milton, Areopagitica, passim. (302) Laud, Works (1847–60), iv. 226. Cf. p. 189 below. (303) W. Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963), passim. (304) W. Bradford, History of Plynnouth Plantation (Massachusetts Historical Soc. Collections, 4th Series, iii), p. 3; Winstanley, The Breaking of the Day of God (1649), p. 133. (305) W. C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Harvard U.P. 1937–47), i. 365. Cf. Rushworth, ‘this poor condemned army’, ‘this despised army’ (ed. H. G. Tibbutt, The Letter-Books of Sir Samuel Luke, 1644–5, 1963, pp. 566, 571). (306) Title-page of the 1648 edition, the fourth since 1597. This edition contains a second part by Thomas Taylor, the Puritan. (307) Op. cit., p. 412. Cf. pp. 9–10, and Chapter XLIX passim, ‘How rare and geason good Princes have been at all times’. (308) History, i. viii-xv, xxviii-xxxviii. Though the History stops with the second Macedonian War, there is a great deal of medieval history, especially English, in the Preface, in the Prerogative of Parliaments, A Discourse touching a War with Spain, A Discourse of the Origin…of…War and in the two Discourses touching royal marriages.
Page 77 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (309) The Last fight of The Revenge, in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, v. 11; cf. Laurence Kemyis, The Second Voyage of Guiana, Ibid. vii. 388. (310) Ralegh, History, i. 28. (311) Indeed at the beginning of the History he goes out of his way to say the opposite, to the confusion of commentators who have read little further than Book I (Ibid., pp. 28–29). (312) Ibid. ii. 214; cf; p. 587: ‘If we seek the material and politic causes….’ Cf. i. 33–35, iii. 205–7, 261–7, iv. 343. An early example of the phrase ‘second cause’ is in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (J. C. Maxwell, Notes and Queries, June 1962, pp. 218–19. I am indebted to Mr. Maxwell for drawing my attention to this note). Although written about 1580, the Defence, of Poesie was not published until 1595. For use of the phrase see p. 166. (313) W. Bullein, The Government of Health (1595), p. 30v, quoted in Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 275; cf. pp. 109–13. This paragraph is largely drawn from Professor Kocher’s book. (314) W. Fulke, A Godly Gallery (1563, reprinted 1571, 1601, 1602), quoted in Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p. 21; T. Twyne, A Shorte Discourse of All Earthquakes in Generall (1580), quoted by Kocher, op. cit, p. 113. Gabriel Harvey also insisted on the natural origin of earthquakes (Heninger, op. cit., p. 26). (315) Robert Gray, An Alarum to England (1609), sig. C 1, quoted by E. A. Strathmann, ‘Ralegh on Natural Philosophy’, Modern Language Quarterly, i. 53. (316) Thomas Hall, Histrio-Mastix (1654), printed in his Vindiciae Literarum (1655), pp. 238–9. (317) Ralegh, History, i, pp. xli-xlii. (318) History, i, p. lvii. Ralegh quotes Bacon on such laws (Ibid. viii. 219, v. 354s cf. iv. 353, v. 399–401). Bacon quoted Ralegh in his Apophthegms. (319) History, i, pp. xli-xliii, 1. (320) Ibid. v. 226, vi. 141–2. See pp. 137–8 above. (321) Quoted by Firth, Essays Literary and Historical, p. 41. Up to a point this is traditional Tudor historical doctrine. But ‘no one has more abundantly declared the value of history as a teacher of political morals’ than Ralegh (L. B. Campbell, ‘The Use of Historical Patterns in the Reign of Elizabeth’, H.L.Q. ii. 138).
Page 78 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (322) History, i, p. v. Hakluyt’s attitude to history was the same, when he criticized Ralegh’s stepbrother Sir Humphrey Gilbert for trying to found a colony on a carelessly chosen site and with too little capital behind him. ‘Putting all to God and good fortune’, ‘presuming the cause pretended on God’s behalf would carry him to the desired end’. This was an ‘intemperate humour’ (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vi. 48). (323) Ralegh, History, iv. 573; cf. v. 63. (324) Cf. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920), pp. 39–43. (325) E. H. Carr, What is History? (1961), p. 37. (326) Ralegh, History, v. 572–3. (327) Ralegh, History, ii. 113–15, vi. 551; contrast i. 163–6, 176, 204. Hakewill quoted at length Ralegh’s rejection of traditional authorities concerning the Flood, and his argument that English soldiers are better than those of Rome or Macedon (Apologie, pp. 52, 4, 286, 518; cf. pp. 161, 184, where Ralegh is cited). (328) In 1648 a royalist newspaper sneered at certain Independent M.P.s as men who despised rhetoric and logic, and preferred Holinshed to Livy. Ralegh would have been a fairer and probably more accurate name to use: but the association of Independents with the Moderns is interesting (Mercurius Bellicus, 11–18 April 1648, quoted in J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, Harvard U.P., 1961, p. 144). (329) Ralegh, Works, ii. 8; cf. History, ii. 113–15, 141, 182, iv. 544–52. (330) History, v. 335. (331) Ibid. vi. 319. (332) Ibid, vi, pp. vii-viii. Ralegh went on to give other examples drawn from the history of English, Scottish, and other kings. In The Cabinet Council the first cause of civil war is destiny, God’s providence, about which we can do nothing; but ‘touching the second causes of civil war, some remedies may be used’, and many are then listed (Works, ii. 94). Cf. Fulke Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 116– 17, where the laws of history lead us to expect that England will oust the cruel Spaniards from the New World (and cf. p. 221). This philosophy echoes Foxe: see his Acts and Monuments (4th ed., n.d.), ii. 189–258, 319–42. 666–7, 806; iii. 3, 216–17. (333) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), iii. 211. We may compare Dury’s argument in the same year, that the Commonwealth government should be accepted since it had manifestly been God’s will that the Parliamentary army
Page 79 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics should conquer (quoted by P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, 1954, p. 68). Cf. p. 181 below. (334) Cf. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. H. Beveridge, 1949), Book II, Chapters I–IV, VI–VII, IX–XI. (335) Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), Book 3, Chapter 10. On second causes cf. F. Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 100, 141. (336) Bacon, Works, iii. 219, 499–503. Cf. William Perkins: God’s decree does not jeopardize the ‘nature and property of second causes, but only brings them into a certain order; that is, it directeth them to the determinate end’ (A Golden Chaine, translated by Robert Hill, 1621, p. 31, quoted in H. Baker, The Wars of Truth, 1952, p. 22). (337) Bacon, Works, iii. 356. (338) Fussner, The Historical Revolution, pp. 263–4; cf. p. 274. See p. 181 below. (339) Fussner, op. cit, pp. 261–2, 269, 239, 243; Bacon, Works, vi. 513. Cf. p. 132 above for Bacon and magic. (340) Clarendon, Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms of David, in A Compleat Collection of Tracts (1747), pp. 738–9. (341) On the importance for sixteenth-century thought of Sextus Empiricus, see R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960), pp. 17–18, 66, 128. Professor Popkin does not mention Ralegh’s translation (see p. 183 below). Fulke Greville was also influenced by Sextus Empiricus (Margaret L. Wiley, The Subtle Knot: Creative Scepticism in Seventeenth-century England, 1952, Chapter II, passim). (342) Ralegh, History, iii. 262–7, v. 266–7. Cf. Professor Fussner on Camden’s use of conjecture (Op. cit., p. 236). (343) M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (the Nelson Library, n.d.), p. 256; cf. Literature and Dogma (Nelson Library, n.d.), pp. 170, 274. (344) Ralegh, History, iii. 266. (345) See pp. 174–8, 181 below. (346) Hobbes, De Corpore, p. 132, quoted by S. I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962), p. 66; Leviathan (Everyman ed.), pp. 55–56. It was in Charles II’s reign that Petty coolly proposed ‘to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature’ (Economic Writings, i. 244).
Page 80 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (347) Hobbes, translation of Thucydides, in English Works (ed. Sir W. Molesworth, 1839–45), viii, p. vii. (348) Ralegh himself, in his Instructions to his Son, condemned indiscriminate charity to vagabonds and beggars (Works, ii. 354). (349) Ralegh, History, ii. 262. (350) H. Stevens, Thomas Hariot (1900), p. 148. (351) Ralegh, Works, ii. 107. This work (Observations concerning the Royal Navy) is probably not wholly Ralegh’s. (352) Ralegh, History, i. 34, quoting a Latin tag which he attributes to Quintilian. Hence, Ralegh adds, the importance of education. (353) Ed.Ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Original Writings…of the…Hakluyts, ii. 274. Cf. ‘Mr. Cushman’s Reasons and Considerations touching the lawfulness of removing out of England into the parts of America’ (1622): ‘We must consider whether there be not some ordinary means and course for us to take to convert them, or whether prayer for them be only referred to God’s extraordinary work from heaven. Now it seemeth unto me that we ought also to endeavour and use the means to convert them, and the means cannot be used unless we go to them, or they come to us. To us they cannot come, our land is full. To them we may go, their land is empty.’ Q.E.D. (G. B. Cheever, The Pilgrim Fathers, n. d., p. 79). (354) Ralegh, History, i. 97; cf. pp. 120–1, 138–9, 146. Cf. The Times of 29 November 1952 for Ralegh’s discussion of Dee’s views on the location of Ophir, and for evidence that he worked these problems out for himself. (355) History, i. 223. (356) Ibid. i. 228, 236; cf. pp. 233–4, 246, 257; ii. 13–16, 56. (357) Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, pp. 34–35. (358) Ralegh, History, ii. 369; cf. Fussner, op. cit, p. 204. Even Ralegh’s notorious account in The Discovery of Guiana of ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’ may be rationally explained as an accurate report of the disguises of medicine men (C. Kingsley, Plays and Puritans, 1879, pp. 133–4). Ralegh was right about the equally improbable oyster trees and tree-living men. (359) History, i. 201; cf. pp. 180–1. Cf. Hariot’s use of engravings of Picts to illustrate the savages of Virginia (p. 125 above). (360) Ibid. i. 195; cf. pp. 167, 182, 193, 226; iv.752–3. (361) Cf. L. Pearsall Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907), ii. 396. Page 81 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (362) A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain, i (Leiden, 1962), 37–38. (363) Fussner, op. cit, pp. 105, 201–2. Cf. Selden’s insistence on the importance of exact chronology (Ibid., p. 292); and see p. 192 below for Lydiat’s Emendatio Temporum. (364) Preston, Life Eternal (fourth ed., 1634), p. 55. (365) L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories (1947), pp. 79–84. (366) Cf. for example the History, ii. 222–3: after saying that the text of the Bible must be accepted, Ralegh proceeds to conjecture how it might nevertheless be explained away. Cf. Ibid i. 15: (367) Ed. T. B. Howell, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, i. 221, ii. 340. His neglect of the propaganda purposes of Ralegh’s History seems to me the only serious criticism to be made of E. A. Strathmann’s otherwise admirable Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Scepticism. Professor Strathmann tends to use the History as a touchstone by which to test Ralegh’s views expressed elsewhere, or views attributed to him. Naturally, given this procedure, he concludes that Ralegh grew more orthodox as he grew older. This comforting conclusion may be true; but it is hardly proven. Cf. p. 152 above. (368) T. N. Brushfield, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and his History of the World’, in Trans, of the Devon Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, 1887, p. 399. Ralegh did not quote them all at first hand. (369) Ralegh, History, ii. 187; cf. pp. 103, 130, 182, 222–3, 278–82; iii. 266. (370) J. W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing (New York, 1942), i. 611. (371) Strathmann, op. cit., p. 238. (372) Ralegh, History, i. p. xlii. (373) Ralegh Ibid. iii. 553. (374) Ralegh Ibid, vi, pp. xli-xlii. Ralegh quoted Charron’s De La Sagesse (1601) in French, though an English translation by S. Lennard had been published in 1606, reprinted 1612. (375) F. Osborn, A Miscellany of sundry Essayes, Paradoxes and Problematicall Discourses, Letters and Characters (1659), sig. (a) 2. Osborn was writing about Ralegh’s reputation under Elizabeth, not about the History. One wonders if Milton had read this sentence about Ralegh as an asserter of divine Providence. (376) Ralegh, History, i. 140. Page 82 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (377) Quoted by T. O. Ranger, ‘The Career of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, in Ireland, 1588–1643’, Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1958, p. 292. (378) History, iv. 544–51. It was referred to, inter alios, by Richard James in his Iter Lancastrense (Chetham Soc, 1845, p. 3). James was a friend of Cotton, Selden, Eliot, and of Richard Holdsworth, Gresham professor (Richard James Ibid., p. lii; Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Autobiography and Correspondence, 1845, ii. 42). (379) Ralegh, History, vi. 368. (380) Foxe, Acts and Monuments, Preface to the 1563 edition. (381) H. Kohn, The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism’, J.H.I. i. 73. (382) Cf. Sidney’s own views on history, in a letter to his brother Robert, written on 18 October 1580 (Complete Works, iii. 130–2). (383) Ralegh’s The Last Fight of The Revenge is a good example (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, v. esp. pp. 13–14). (384) The word ‘forward-looking’ is not intended to convey moral approval. Nor do I want to imply that all English merchants did support or would have been well advised to support anti-Spanish policies in the earlier seventeenth century, anti-French policies in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were of course divergent interests among different groups of merchants. But considerations of colonial expansion played a greater part in the formation of foreign policy as merchants became more influential in the state, after 1640 and especially after 1688. In this merely temporal sense Hakluyt and Ralegh were ‘forward-looking’ and expressed commercial interests. (385) Cf. pp. 181–90 below. (386) I have discussed this point in my Century of Revolution (1961), pp. 63–66. (387) Ralegh, History, vi. 368. (388) Ibid. ii. 328. (389) Ralegh, History, i, p. xl. (390) Ralegh Ibid. i. p. vi. (391) Ralegh Ibid. v. 366–74. Cf. C. L. Barber, The Idea of Honour in the English Drama, 1591–1700 (Goteborg, 1957), passim (392) Ralegh, History, iv. 344. (393) Ralegh Ibid. i 47; cf. Works, i. 9. Page 83 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (394) Ralegh, History, iv. 554; Works, i. 183. On the yeomanry cf. Latimer (Everyman), Sermons (Everyman ed.), p. 58; cf. also Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 189–90. (395) Ralegh, Works, ii. 28–29. (396) Cf. Selden, Table Talk (1847), pp. 105–6. (397) Ralegh, Works, i. 227–8. (398) Ralegh Ibid. ii. 68. Cf. R. H. Tawney, Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age (1941), passim, for Harrington’s debt to Ralegh. (399) Ralegh, Works, ii. 15. (400) Ralegh Ibid. ii. 320. Ralegh, like everyone else who discussed the subject in the early seventeenth century, excluded ‘the rascal and beggarly sort’ from ‘the people’ Ralegh Ibid. i. 9; cf. pp. 196–8, 206–7, 242; ix. p. 216. (401) Ibid. ii. 68, i. 212. (402) Ralegh, Works, i. 183; cf. J. Harrington, Oceana and Other Works (1737), p. 70. (403) Ralegh, History, v. 93. (404) Ibid. vi. 356. Lest the reference to James should be too obvious, Ralegh covered himself by quoting the Trew Law of Free Monarchies against tyranny. (405) Ibid. i. 161. Cf. Ralegh’s economic analysis of the causes of civil war: ‘Where many younger sons of younger brothers have neither lands nor means to uphold themselves; and where many men of trade, or useful professions, know not how to bestow themselves for lack of employ’, a revolutionary situation is likely to develop (Works, ii. 26). (406) History, ii. 4; cf. p. 200. (407) History, i, p. xxviii. Cf. p. 198 below. (408) C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), pp. 30, 77–78, 101, and Chapter 4, passim; F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), Chapter VI. Dr. Raab suggested plausibly that Harrington’s scientific method derived from Harvey (op. cit, pp. 198–201, 219). Harrington used evidence from Ralegh’s History to justify his theory of balance, but criticized Ralegh for not drawing the appropriate conclusions (Harrington, Oceana and Other Works, pp. 77, 389). (409) Bacon, Works, v. 66, 71, 93–94. Page 84 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (410) G. P. Gooch, Political Thought in England from Bacon to Halifax (1915), p. 32. (411) W. T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 1640–1640 (Harvard U.P., 1958), p. 262. (412) Both George William Hakewill were in trouble in 1622 for this reason (C.S.P.D., 1619–23, pp. 279, 284–5, 333; Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 393). It is interesting that the correspondent who told Dudley Carleton a bout George Hakewill’s memorandum against the Spanish match should have called him ‘Hakluyf’ (C.S.P.D., 1619–23, p. 284). (413) Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 4, 52, 161, 182, 184, 286, 295–6, 308, 320, 518; ii. 148. (414) Ibid., p. 17. (415) D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier 17th Century (1962), p. 294. (416) Hakewill, op. cit., sig. a3; cf. pp. 20–23, and the remark of Hariot quoted on p. 168 above. Cf. also R. W. Hepburn, ‘Hakewill: the Virility of Nature’, J.H.I, xvi. 150. See p. 259 below. (417) Cf. H. Baker’s valuable The Wars of Truth, pp. 84–86. Mr. Baker gives examples of men influenced by Hakewill: to these we might add Francis Osborn and Joseph Glanvill. Comenius also opposed the idea of decay in his Synopsis Physicae (English translation 1651) (V. Harris, All Coherence Gone, Chicago, 1949, p. 164). Hobbes, Bacon’s secretary, naturally supported the Moderns; Izaak Walton, equally naturally, thought he lived in ‘this weak and declining age of the world’ (Life of Hooker, 1655, in I. Walton, Lives, World’s Classics, p. 220). (418) See p. 12 above. (419) Hakewill, op. cit, pp. 20–25, 163–4, 312, 316–17, 323; ii. 135. Contrast Goodman, who had cited the economic malaise of the age (high prices, enclosures, decay of housekeeping and charity) as evidence of decline. (420) Ibid., Preface. (421) Ibid., pp. 604–5. (422) Ibid. ii. 132. Hakewill’s defence against this charge is weaker than usual. (423) Ibid. ii. 192. (424) Hakewill, op. cit, p. 259. (425) W. Harvey, Works (1847), p. 285.
Page 85 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (426) J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), i. 596. The ‘best writers’ may include Machiavelli: see his Discorsi, lib. Ill, Chapter 1. (427) Abbot, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iii. 590. The divine right of facts, after doing duty for each successive government after 1640, had a final revival to reassure churchmen of the respectability of William and Mary after 1688: anything that happened was God’s providence and resistance to it was consequently wrong (G. Straka, ‘The Final Phase of Divine Right Theory in England, 1688–1702’, E.H.R. lxxvii, 638–58). This was poor stuff compared to Ralegh, but it shows the tenacity of the body of ideas which he expressed and transcended. (428) See p. 265 below. (429) letters of John Chamberlain, i. 568; Firth, Essays Historical and Literary, pp. 53–55; T. N. Brushfield, ‘Raleghana IV’, Trans. Devon Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art (1904), pp. 184–5. (430) In 1617 Ralegh’s name was allowed to appear on the title-page. Cf. Gazetto in Decker’s Match Me in London (1630), Act III, scene i: ‘like a book call’d in, she’ll sell better than ever she did.’ (431) All this bibliographical information comes from T. N. Brushfield, A Bibliography of Sir Waller Ralegh (second ed., 1908), pp. 88–100. (432) Tubus Historicus (1636) and The Life and Death of Mahomet (1637). (433) See p. 186 below. (434) Ed. Helen Darbishire, Early Liven of Milton (1932), p. 188. (435) W. Oldys, ‘Life of Sir Walter Raleigh’, in Works of Sir Walter Raleigh (1829), i. 442. (436) Brushfield, A Bibliography of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 66. (437) e.g. Witts Recreations, in Musarum Deliciae (1640–63), ii. 280–2. (438) L. Stapleton, ‘Halifax and Ralegh’, J.H.I., ii. 213; Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 12, 164–5; N. Kempner, Raleghs Staatstheoretische Schriften (Leipzig, 1928). In the Times Literary Supplement of 13 April 1956, Professor Strathmann argued that The Cabinet Council was not by Ralegh but by T. B.’, who may be Thomas Bedingfield, the translator of Machiavelli’s History of Florence. (439) Strathmann, ‘Ralegh’s Discourse of Tenures and Sir Roger Owen’, H.L.Q. xx. 223–5.
Page 86 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (440) Ibid., p. 229; R. B. Gottfried, ‘The Authorship of A Breviary of the History of England’, S.P. liii. (441) Ed. P. W. Long, Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), p. 242, and The Mariner’s Mirror, xx. 323, quoted in Gorges, Poems, p. xxvii. (442) Macvey Napier, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh (1853), p. 230; T. W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Seas (1911), p. 127, quoted by Sir G. N. Clark, The Birth of the Dutch Republic (Raleigh Lecture, 1946), p. 1. As late as 1696 an economic tract was published as Select Observations of the Incomparable Sir Walter Raleigh. It is surely time we had a full critical edition of Ralegh’s works? Since 1829 a great deal has been rejected from the canon, and some items have been added. Yet some of the works whose rejection has been suggested need careful sifting to ascertain how much original matter is contained alongside the wholesale copying. How far did Ralegh act as a channel for transmitting the most advanced continental thought to England? How early was his translation of Sextus Empiricus, for instance? How many people before Ralegh had quoted Charron? (See pp. 166, 171 above.) There has never been a critical edition of The History of the World, though Brushfield long ago indicated divergences between the various editions of 1614, one of them of some interest (Brushfield, ‘Raleghana IV, p. 189; cf. Adolphe Buff, ‘Uber drei Ralegh’sche Schriften’, Englische Studien, ii, Heilbron, 1879, 392–416). (443) L. B. Wright, ‘Propaganda against James I’s “Appeasement” of Spain’, H.L.Q. vi. 160–1. (444) Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), v. 56 (445) Vox Populi (Utrecht, 1624), sig. C. (446) The High-Waies of the King (1623), p. 86. (447) The Second Part of Vox Populi (1624). For confirmation of Scott’s allegations see C.S.P. Ven., 1615–17, p. 37. The calling of Parliaments, the Venetian ambassador said, was opposed by ‘those who are dependent on the Spaniards and receive pensions from them, who are very numerous’. Scott’s class analysis was also confirmed by James Howell in a letter from Madrid of December 1622. In England, he said, ‘the people are averse to the match, and the nobility with most part of the gentry inclinable’ (Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae, Temple Classics, i. 168). Cf. R. Dugdale, A Narrative of the wicked Plots carried on by Seignior Gondamore (1679), in Harleian Miscellany (1744– 56), iii. 318–19, 321–2; Cowper MSS. (H.M.C.), p. 108. (448) Vox Populi, sig. C 3. Page 87 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (449) Vox Regis (1624), p. 2. (450) Ibid., p. 14. (451) Vox Populi, sig. B 4–4v. (452) D’Ewes, Autobiography, i.159. (453) Ed. S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (1906), p. 207. (454) L. J. v. 258. For an example of Scott’s influence see Jordan, Social Institutions in Kent, 1480–1660 (Archaeologia Cantiana, 1961), p. 87. (455) If he was the author of verses sent by Mr. Thomas Scott to Sir Walter Ralegh, printed by Professor Harlow in his edition of The Discoverie of Guiana (1928), p. xxiv. (456) Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 9. (457) The Humble Petition and Information of Sir Lewis Stukeley (1618), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iii. 63; cf. p. 138 above. (458) Bacon, Works (1826), vi. 265. (459) Forster, Sir John Eliot, i. 512. (460) J. N. Ball, ‘The Parliamentary Career of Sir John Eliot, 1624–9’ (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1953), pp. 135–40. I am very grateful to Dr. Ball for permission to quote from this valuable work. (461) D. Lloyd, Slate-Worthies (1766), i. 565. A Sir John Hampden had accompanied Ralegh to Guiana in 1616. (462) H.M.C., Tenth Report, Appendix, Part VI, p. 85; Governor Winthrop’s father transcribed into his commonplace book The Confession and Execution of Sir Walter Raleigh (ed. R. C. Winthrop, Massachusetts Hist. Soc, 1873). (463) Forster, Sir John Eliot, i. 411. Ralegh certainly used Cotton’s library. (464) Hassall, A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, pp. 46, 76. (465) Oldys, ‘Life of Raleigh’, in Works (1829), i. 453, 456; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 192. (466) Aubrey, op. cit., ii. 185. (467) G. Holies, Memorials of the Holies Family, 1493–1656 (Camden Soc, 1937), pp. 101–2; Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, ii. 231. Page 88 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (468) Abbot, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ii. 236. (469) Ibid. Hi. 53. (470) Ed. J. Bruce and S. R. Gardiner, Documents relating to the Proceedings against William Prynne (Camden Soc., 1877), p. 47: cf. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, p. 223. (471) Ed. W. Haller and G. Davies, Leveller Manifestoes (Columbia U.P., 1944), pp. 41, 445. (472) Ed. H. J. Morehouse, Diary of Adam Eyre, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies of the 17th and 18th centuries (Surtees Soc, 1877), pp. 68, 79. (473) Fox Plebis (1646), pp. 63, 65, 68. The pamphlet has been variously assigned to Overton, Lilburne, and Henry Marten. Does the title recall Thomas Scott? (474) J. Jones, The New Returna Brevium (1650), p. 44. Jones see pp. 232–4 below. (475) But in his Some seasonable and modest Thoughts in order to the furtherance and promoting the affaires of Religion and the Gospel especially in Wales (1656), p. 17; not in his more important The Parliament explained to Wales (1646). (476) Brooke, The Nature of Truth (1640), pp. 141–3. (477) ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ echoes ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay’. The conception of Paradise Lost—a universal history— may owe something to Ralegh, who also wanted to ‘assert eternal Providence’. Milton’s use of Ralegh and the latter’s influence on Milton’s style would be worth further study (cf. Firth, Essays, pp. 51–52; E. Thompson, Sir Walter Raleigh, pp. 64, 236–7). (478) D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier 17th Century (1962), p. 224. (479) J. Hall, The Balm of Gilead, in Works (1808), viii. 162. (480) W. Drummond, Familiar Letters, in The History of Scotland (second ed. 1680), p. 387. (481) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 185–93; and see pp. 136–8, 174–7 above. (482) J. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, ii. 231–4. (483) F. Osborn, A Miscellany of Sundry Essays (1659), sig. (a) 2; Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History of the Court of James I (1811), i. 157–64. Page 89 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (484) Bacon in the Parliament of 1656 quoted the History when arguing against ‘the tyranny of a commonwealth’, in which ‘every man had liberty to find out the richest to destroy for himself. Bacon also cited Coke. He favoured the Protectorate (ed. J. T. Rutt, Burton’s Parliamentary Diary, 1828, iii. 123). (485) Captain Badeley’s Answer unto Captain Middletons Remonstrance (1653), pp. 119–20. (486) See p. 135 above. (487) Thompson, op. cit., p. 235. (488) W. Penn, No Cross, no Crown, Chapter XXI, paragraph 11. (489) [Anon.], Rawleigh Redivivus (1683). Shaftesbury’s grandfather’s widow married Ralegh’s son Carew (Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 195). I am grateful to Professor Haley for drawing my attention to this point. (490) L. Stapleton, ‘Halifax and Ralegh’, J.H.I. ii. 211–24. (491) Locke recommends the History in Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, in works (1824), ii. 409. (492) Ed. W. H. D. Longstaffe, Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes (Surtees Soc, 1867), p. 33. (493) D. Defoe, A System of Magic (1840), p. 140 (published 1728); A Tour of Great Britain (Everyman ed.) i. 223. Cf. also A Historical Account of the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Walter Raleigh (1719), sometimes attributed to Defoe. The author, however, claims to be related to the blood of Ralegh, ‘one of the most illustrious commoners that England or perhaps the whole world ever bred’ (pp. 4, 8). (494) T. Gainsford, History of Perkin Warbeck, in Harleian Miscellany, vi. 496; Nathanael Carpenter, Geographic (1625); D. Wheare, De Ratione et Methodi Legendi Historias Dissertatio (1623 and many later editions: that of 1637 first ventured to praise Ralegh as one ‘who deserves the first place’ among modern historians). Cf. P. Heylyn, Microcosmos (1629), pp. 20, 375, 679: first published 1621, twelve editions by 1657. For Carpenter see p. 272 below, and for Wheare p. 158 above. (495) Ed. T. T. Lewis, Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley (Camden Soc, 1854), p. 27; ed. F. P. and M. M. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family (1892–9), iii. 163–4. Ralegh was also quoted by John Trapp, Sir Thomas Browne, Abraham Cowley, Samuel Butler, the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Derby, Dugdale, Gervase Holies, Evelyn, Stillingfleet.
Page 90 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (496) The Rambler, 18 May 1751. (497) E. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works (1796), i. 107–8. We may perhaps regard the ineluctable decline and fall of the Roman Empire, resulting from an initial loss of freedom, as a secularized version of Ralegh’s conception of law in history. This conception died hard: see J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (ed. D. Ogg, 1963), pp. 34, 39. (498) Life of George Crabbe, by his son (Oxford U.P., World’s Classics), p. 22. First published 1834. (499) ‘Though you in this, as in the rest, find me a fool’, said Ralegh in a draft letter to James (E. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1868, ii, p. lxii; Thompson, op. cit, p. 238; Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 568). (500) Captured by the Spaniards in 1620, her copy was recovered by a German when the Swedes recaptured Prague in 1648 (W. B. Rye, England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James I, 1865, p. 222). Elizabeth also had a copy of Foxe. (501) Thompson, op. cit., p. 239. (502) A. Ross, The Marrow of Historie (1650); Som Animadversions and Observations upon Sir Walter Raleighs Historie of the World, wherein his mistakes are noted (1653). The Marrow of Histories contains a poem by Benlowes which was not noticed by H. Jenkins in his Edward Benlowes, 1602– 1676 (1952). (503) Laud, Works (1847–60), vii. 627–8; cf. iv. 375. (504) Ed. P. Laslett, Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (1949), pp. 97, 117, 143, 292; D. Jenkins, God and the King (1649), p. 6. (505) Ed. F. Bamford, A Royalist’s Notebook (1936), pp. 194, 232. (506) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 188. (507) G. Goodman, The Court of King James I (1839), i. 65, 68–69. (508) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 96. (509) E. K. Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature (Cornell U. P., 1946), p. 142. (510) H. E. Sandison, ‘Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s Alcyon and Ralegh’s friend’, P.M.L.A. xliii. 664–72. The Relation of the…. Island Voyages was reprinted by Purchas.
Page 91 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (511) Ed. Sandison, Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges (1953), pp. 128–30, 135–82, 222. (512) Ibid., pp. 172–3; cf. similar criticisms of James’s pacific foreign policy in Ibid., p. 133. (513) Ibid., p. 165. (514) T. Birch, The Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (1760), p. 97. (515) Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature, pp. 51–53. (516) Bacon, Works, xi. 23. For Chaloner see p. 89 above. The elder Sir Thomas was a friend of Gresham. (517) Birch, op. cit., pp. 372–3; J. W. Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (1952), pp. 96, 147, 149; cf. pp. 51–52. Ed. E. S. Shuckburgh, Two Biographies of ‘William Bedell’ (1902), p. 241 and passim. For Bedell see p. 247 below. (518) K. T. Butler, ‘An Italian’s Message to England in 1614’, Italian Studies, ii. 4– 16; Harleian MS. 3344, f. 3; E. Rosenberg, ‘Giacopo Castelvetro’, H.L.Q vi. 122– 39. See p. 129 above. (519) For Hobart see p. 213 below. (520) Birch, op. cit., pp. 161–3, 453; Wilson, op. cit., pp. 67–68; Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, p. 215. For Lumley see p. 155 above; for Wright, pp. 36–40. (521) Birch, op. cit., p. 164; Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs, 28 July 1649. For Dury see pp. 90–94 above. (522) Birch, op. cit., p. 389; Wilson, op. cit., pp. 53–55; Sir Charles Cornwallis’s Discourse of the most Illustrious Prince Henry (1626, published 1641), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iv. 323. (523) Waters, op. cit., pp. 217, 275–6. For Barlow see pp. 36, 60 above. (524) Wilson, op. cit., p. 75; ed. J. O. Halliwell, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England (1841), pp. 46–49, 54–55, 63–64. In 1603 Lydiat dedicated his Emendatio Temporum to the Prince. For Crashawe see pp. 145–6 above. (525) Wilson, op. cit., p. 105; P. Sheavyn, ‘Patrons and Professional Writers under Elizabeth and James I’, The Library, New Series, vii. 311. Sylvester dedicated the Fourth Day of the Second Week of Du Bartas to Henry, and wrote a sonnet to him. For Sylvester see pp. 124 above, 249 below. (526) Wilson, op. cit., pp. 74–75. The Iliadand others of Chapman’s poems were dedicated to Henry. For Chapman see pp. 127–9 above. Page 92 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (527) Birch, op. cit., pp. 455–6. Since Henry would have no one in his household who did not go regularly to Communion, this is an additional piece of evidence to disprove the legend that Inigo Jones was a Catholic (see E. S. de Beer, ‘Notes on Inigo Jones’, Notes and Queries, clxxviii. 292; R. Wittkower, ‘Inigo Jones —“Puritanissimo Fiero”’, Burlington Magazine, xc. 51). (528) M. Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (1962), p. 13. Coryate’s Crudities was dedicated to the Prince. (529) J. Tulloch, Rational Theology in England in the 17th Century (1874), ii. 194. For Stoughton and Cudworth see p. 91 above. (530) See p. 124 above. (531) J. Gutch, Collectanea Curiosa (1181), i. 212–15; E. M. Portal, ‘The Academ Roial of King James I’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 1915–16, p. 192. This scheme is often confused with the academy proposed by Edmund Bolton, a much more aristocratic (indeed papist) and less scientific affair. See also W. E. Houghton, ‘The PLnglish Virtuoso in the 17th century’, J.H.I. iii. 62; J. Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (1956), pp. 17–19. (532) Birch, op. cit, pp. 390–1; Wilson, op. cit, p. 112. On his return to England Burges was neither allowed to preach nor to practise physic in London (despite commendations from Sir Theodore Mayerne) (ed. McClure, Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 470). He ultimately obtained a living in Warwickshire, after Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Bacon had intervened with the King on his behalf. The famous Puritan William Ames married Burges’s daughter and succeeded him as chaplain to Sir Horace Vere, commanding English troops in the Netherlands (Bacon, Works, xii, 371–2; S. B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, 1962, p. 173; A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain, 1596–1619, Leiden, 1962, p. 25). (533) Quoted by W. M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne (1963), p. 22. This is Richard Montague, Bishop of Chichester in 1628. (534) See pp. 22–27 above. (535) Bacon, Works, xi, 340. Cf. p. 89 above. For an alleged letter from Bacon to Prince Henry discussing the loadstone and magic, see J. W. Gough, The Superlative Prodigall: a Life of Thomas Bushell (1932), p. 147. Cf. also Bacon’s character of the Prince in Works, vi. 319–29. (536) Wilson, op. cit, pp. 33, 37, 111, 142. For Gwinne see p. 47 above; for Hakewill, pp. 178–80; for James, pp. 24–25. (537) Sir Charles Cornwallis, Discourse of…Prince Henry, Harleian Miscellany, iv. 322. Page 93 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics (538) Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana (1613); Birch, op. cit., p. 264. (539) Ibid., pp. 96–97, 110–12; Wilson, op. cit., pp. 76–77. Pett’s son Peter was a supporter of Parliament during the civil war. (540) T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (1924), p. 10; P. Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century (trans. M. Vernon, 1928), p. 292. (541) Birch, op. cit., p. 367; Wilson, op. cit., pp. 137–49. (542) Birch, op. cit., p. 265. Button was a near relation of the St. Johns and so a distant relation of Oliver Cromwell. He was subsequently knighted by his cousin Sir Oliver St. John, Lord Deputy of Ireland. (543) T. Scott, Fox Coeli (1624), quoted by Wilson, op. cit., p. 169. Fox Coeli ran to four editions in 1624. (544) Gorges, Poems, pp. 172–3. (545) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 191. Sir William Petty referred to this incident in a letter of 1682, an allusion altogether misunderstood by his editor (The PettySouthwell Correspondence, 1676–1687, ed. Lansdowne, 1928, p. 112) (546) See pp. 9–18 above. (547) M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night (1986), pp. 38, 65, and passim; E. G. Clark, Ralegh and Marlowe (New York, 1941), passim. Warner’s Albions England went through six editions between 1586 and 1612. (548) Erik Wikland, Elizabethan Players in Sweden, 1591–2 (Stockholm, 1962), pp. 25–26. (549) Brushfield, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and his History of the World’, Trans. Devon Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art (1887), p. 410. It is not mentioned in Rosemary Freeman’s English Emblem Books (1948). (550) Pepys, Diary, 12 February 1667; S. Butler, Hudibras, Book I, Canto ii, line 1169, quoted by N. L. Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 80. (551) Times Literary Supplement, 12 and 26 October 1951. (552) Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, pp. 28–29. See pp. 22 above, 241 below. (553) Bradbrook, op. cit, p. 87. (554) Cf. the passage on individuality in the Preface to the History: ‘Among those…whom we see and converse with, every one hath received a several picture of face, and every one a diverse picture of mind…from whence it cometh, Page 94 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Ralegh: Science, History, and Politics that there is found so great diversity of opinions’ (History, i, p. iii; cf. p. vii). This type of individualism also made its contribution to the evolution of toleration. (555) Joyce Horner, ‘The Large Landscape’, Essays in Criticism, v. 205. (556) Ralegh, History, i, p. i; Poems (ed. Latham), pp. 12, 23, 25–26, 29, 41, 44. Cf. the reply to Marlowe (p. 16) and A Poem (p. 21). (557) History, vi. 370. (558) Edwards, Sir Walter Raleigh, ii. 285. (559) D. Bush, ‘Science and Literature’, in 17th century Science and the Arts (ed. H. H. Rhys, Princeton, 1961), p. 48; cf. V. de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit: a Portrait of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1962), pp. 189–90. (560) Quoted by A. Latham, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. xvii. (561) Ibid., p. 155. (562) Ralegh, History, i. pp. xxviii, xxxv. See perceptive passage in Philip Edwards’s Sir Walter Rategh (1953), pp. 164–5. (563) Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, i. 365. (564) Bacon, Works, iv. 92. (565) Ibid. viv. 91. (566) Ralegh, History, vi. 370; cf. i. 60–61. Cf. Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part II, Act iv, scene i. (567) In 1649 Abiezer Coppe did in fact refer to God as a Leveller in the political sense (A Fiery Flying Roll, in N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957, p. 360). Winstanley said that Jesus Christ was the head Leveller (Sabine, op. cit, pp. 360–1).
Access brought to you by:
Page 95 of 95
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0005
Abstract and Keywords Sir Edward Coke was born in 1552. Throughout Queen Elizabeth's reign, he throve as a lawyer, steadily out-distancing his great rival Francis Bacon, and rising to be Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney-General. His famous Law Reports began to appear in 1600. Eleven volumes were published during his lifetime, two posthumously. Under James I, Coke became Lord Chief Justice, a position in which he distinguished himself by defending the rights and privileges of the common law even against the wishes of the King, until finally he was dismissed in 1616. In the twenties, he was a leading critic in the House of Commons, and has a large place in English history for the constitutional theories and myths which he uttered there and in the four volumes of his Institutes. Coke the constitutional lawyer is a familiar figure. This chapter looks at the contribution of his legal ideas to the origins of the English Revolution. Keywords: Edward Coke, Queen Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, James I, King, theories, myths, English Revolution
These two movements—science and law reform—were at the centre of the seventeenth-century revolution. B. S. MANNING, ‘The Nobles, the People and the Constitution’, P. and P., No. 9, p. 53. To the grave and learned writers of histories my advice is, that they meddle not with any point or secret of any art or science, especially with the laws of this realm, before they confer with some learned in that profession. Page 1 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker SIR EDWARD COKE, 3 Reports, sig. D 2.
I SIR EDWARD COKE was born in 1552. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign he throve as a lawyer, steadily out-distancing his great rival Bacon, and rising to be Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney-General. His famous Law Reports began to appear in 1600. Eleven volumes were published during his lifetime, two posthumously. Under James, Coke became Lord Chief Justice, a position in which he distinguished himself by defending the rights and privileges of the common law even against the wishes of the King, until finally he was dismissed in 1616. In the twenties he was a leading critic in the House of Commons, and has a large place in English history for the constitutional theories and myths which he uttered there and in the four volumes of his Institutes. Coke the constitutional lawyer is a familiar figure. I shall be more concerned with the contribution of his legal ideas to the origins of the English Revolution. Sir Edward was not a wholly attractive character. When he died in 1634 his widow looked back over the ups and downs of thirty-six years of married life. She said, ‘We shall never see his like again—praises be to God.’1 Bacon had been Coke’s rival for the lady’s hand, as for so many (p.202) other things. The Viscountess St. Albans left no equally memorable tribute to her husband—except that she married her gentleman usher within three weeks of Bacon’s death. Coke made a fortune at the bar which James I regarded as too great for a subject,2 and he had the reputation of being mean and a harsh landlord.3 He was ‘neither civil, nor affable, nor magnificent’ said James, puzzled to account for his great influence.4 As Attorney-General Coke behaved atrociously to Ralegh at his trial for treason, and no doubt to many lesser men of whom no record has survived.5 Yet the bully was also a coward. When King James threatened him with clenched fist, Lord Chief Justice Coke literally grovelled and ‘fell flat on all four’.6 When he himself had broken the law three times over in his haste to marry Lady Hatton before Bacon could get her, and was had up in the Church courts, the greatest legal expert in the country pleaded ignorance of the law, made humble submission—and got off.7 After Coke’s fall from royal favour in 1616, he hoped to reingratiate himself by marrying his daughter Frances to Sir John Villiers, brother of the royal favourite. When the lady refused, the ex-Lord Chief Justice seized her from her mother’s protection in an armed raid and (according to one account) tied her to the bedpost and flogged her until she agreed.8 The marriage was not an unqualified success. Her husband soon became subject to fits of melancholic depression, and was alleged to be impotent. Understandably, his wife soon left him, and had an illegitimate son amidst a blaze of high-society scandal.9 In the week of the marriage Coke was restored to his place on the Privy Council, but his fortunes at court were not permanently retrieved.
Page 2 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker Coke can hardly be left out of an inquiry into the intellectual origins of the English Revolution, yet he presents difficulties. He was a lawyer, not an intellectual. The confusion and self-contradiction in his writings are so great that one is apt to dismiss them as of no significance for our purposes. Yet the legal historians have no doubt of his importance. ‘A (p.203) second father of the law, behind whose writings it was not necessary to go’, said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen.10 His books are ‘the great dividing line’ between medieval and modern, said Maitland. ‘Though his work confounds the legal historian, its value can hardly be overestimated’, adds Professor Thorne.11 To grasp Coke’s significance we must recall what had been happening to English law. During the Tudor century decisive changes were taking place in society. The Church was completely subordinated to the secular power; the House of Commons rose to a position of new importance; there were sweeping economic changes. Peace and internal order, the end of feudal violence, the dissolution of the monasteries, and increased prosperity—I follow Hakewill’s analysis—had ‘set lawyers a-work’.12 ‘Peace is the mother of plenty—and plenty the nurse of suits’, wrote Coke himself.13 The common law had evolved in an agrarian society: it was the law of the land in both senses. In the early sixteenth century it seemed as though Chancery and the prerogative courts would secure jurisdiction over commercial cases with which the procedures of the common law were illadapted to cope. But the common law, in ways that are still obscure, made a remarkable comeback. Many leading lawyers were themselves men of property with growing commercial interests; and by a series of judicial decisions the common law began to be modernized and liberalized. But the process had not gone very far by the end of the sixteenth century. The resulting confusion, as many observers agreed, created a paradise for the dishonest lawyer.14 So there was every reason for clarification and codification of the law, to define and systematize its adaptation to the needs of the new business society, to weed out the obsolete, to define relations between Church, prerogative, and commonlaw courts. Archbishop Bancroft’s Canons of 1604 and the unpublished Canons of 1606 tried to codify the law of the Church.15 A protégé of Bancroft’s, Dr. Cowell, attempted in his (p.204) Interpreter (1607) to codify secular laws in the interest of the prerogative. Parliament in 1606–7 and 1610 attacked the 1604 Canons as ‘contrariant to the…great charter and other laws, statutes, liberties and free customs of this realm’ and called for the abrogation of twentythree of them.16 The same Parliament, possibly at Coke’s instigation, attacked Cowell.17 The controversies over the billeting of troops and martial law, leading up to the Petition of Right, may be seen as two rival attempts to redefine the law.18 It has been suggested that Charles I’s Book of Orders of 1631 amounted to ‘a most unambiguous abridgment of the law, both procedural and substantive, covering nearly the whole field of local government’.19
Page 3 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker That the law was out of date, uncertain, and in need of refashioning was agreed on all sides. The laws of England, Barclay said in 1614, ‘are few and very ambiguous. Much dependeth upon custom and the opinion of judges.’20 There was, Ralegh suggested, ‘none other difference between the judge and the thief, than in the manner of performing of their exploits; as if the whole being of justice consisted in point of formality’.This excessive formalism of English law permitted the corruption of justice ‘by reward, hatred, favour’.21 In 1603 Ralegh assumed that the commissioners for his trial would agree that the law was old fashioned and barbarous. ‘You will know that the law of England hath need of a merciful prince’, he said.22 That this was not merely an ad hoc argument is shown by the passage in the History which stresses the royal prerogative of mercy, ‘the law, in his own nature, being no other than a (p.205) deaf tyrant’.23 Bacon agreed that the penal laws should not be enforced too rigorously, or they would be ‘a shower of snares upon the people’.24 From this confusion in the state of the law, Bacon tells us, followed multiplicity and length of suits; advantage to the litigious; excessive power to judges; and insecurity to property.25 Coke agreed that the survival from an earlier age of ‘unnecessary statutes unfit for this time ‘created new problems in a period of rapid changes in economic practice. ‘Swarms of informers’ were enabled to blackmail and penalize men whose economic activities had become necessary to the community.26 Above all, insecurity to property. Yet it was ‘the law which protects our property’, a Gresham professor told his City audience in 1598.27 ‘The law of meum and tuum’, Ralegh agreed, marked ‘the difference between subjection and slavery.’28 These definitions would have been accepted equally by Lord Burleigh, Sir John Eliot, John Pym, William Prynne, Henry Ireton, and John Lilburne. A legally protected absolute right of property was challenged only by extremists like Cowell and Roger Mainwaring—and, Pym said in 1641, by Strafford.29 But James I was suspected covertly to favour Cowell: Charles and Laud made no secret of their support for Mainwaring and Strafford. Coke declared that his object in printing his Reports was ‘that common good…in quieting and establishing the possessions of many’.30 ‘I did not love to have a king armed with book law against me for my life and estate’, Sir Roger Twysden confided to his Journal in the agonizing days of choice at the beginning of the civil war.31 He referred especially to the antiquarian exploits of Noy and his like. In the Parliaments of 1593 and 1597 law reform in the interest of brevity and certainty had been proposed. In response to this discussion, (p.206) young Francis Bacon tried his hand at reform by drafting 300 legal maxims, 25 of which he presented to Elizabeth as an aperitif. These maxims were generalizations from existing statutes and cases, drawn from several different fields of law. Books, Bacon told James I, ‘must follow sciences, and not sciences books’.32 But Bacon’s maxims also aimed to state ‘the general dictates of reason Page 4 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker which run through the different matters of law and act as its ballast’. Hence when applied back as a criticism of existing laws they would—Bacon hoped— serve to promote consistency within and between them. So they would help to remedy ‘the uncertainty of law, which is the principal and most just challenge that is made to the law of our nation at this time’.33 As later when he came to deal with natural science, Bacon wanted to draw upon the experience of the practitioners—the lawyers—but to give coherence and predictability to their practice by devising a general theory.34 We traditionally think of Bacon and Coke so much as rivals and political opposites that it is worth recalling that they agreed on the necessity for systematization of the law. ‘It is a miserable bondage and slavery, ‘Coke observed, ‘when the law is wandering or uncertain.’35 ‘Certainty is the mother of quietness and repose.’36 Coke wrote in his presentation copy of the Novum Organum: ‘You propose to reconstruct the teaching of wise men of old. Reconstruct first our laws and justice’37—which does not suggest hostility to law reform. Bacon himself was in favour of ‘pruning and grafting the law’, not ‘ploughing it up and planting it again’. He praised Coke’s Reports, which ‘contain infinite good decisions and rulings over cases’, side by side with errors and dogmatism. Bacon saw that they were the nearest that England had so far come to a codification of the law.38 He wanted such reports to be published (p. 207) regularly.39 Yet Bacon hoped that ‘when Sir Edward Coke’s Reports and my rules and discussions shall come to posterity, there will be (whatsoever is now thought) question who was the greatest lawyer’.40 Bacon’s failure to achieve an agreed modernization of the law—the failure of the old régime—was Coke’s opportunity. In the thirteen volumes of his Reports Coke undertook the drudgery which Bacon preferred to leave to others. On this basis he could then attempt, in the four Parts of the Institutes? his own form of synthesis, very different from that which Bacon had tried to reach by the short cut of axioms.41 To grasp Coke’s achievement we must recall that there had been no Year Books since 1535. When Ben Jonson’s Fungoso said, ‘There’s a parcel of law books…—Plowden, Dyer, Brooke and Fitzherbert, such as I must have ere long’,42 he named the only collections of reports (Plowden, 1571, Dyer, 1585) and the two abridgements (Fitzherbert, 1516, Brooke, 1574) published in the sixteenth century. There had been no systematic treatises at all since the fifteenth century.43 In particular there was a complete absence of recent cases, reporting those decisions by which the law was being modernized.44 This was the gap which Coke so successfully filled. And his method differed from that of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was mainly concerned with the ‘resolutions’ of the judges, their statements of general principle, whether these formed the basis of their verdict or were dicta by the way. (‘Setting down sudden opinions of the judges for resolutions’, an unfriendly critic called it.)45 Coke wanted to reduce all to ‘the fittest and clearest method’, for ‘the right understanding of the true reason and Page 5 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker causes of the judgement and resolution in the case in question’.46 His ultimate object was to draw together bodies of principle from a whole series of cases.47 This is what a contemporary called ‘scattering and sowing his own conceits almost in every case’.48 Coke completed the task of collation that Bacon had called for; he applied reason to the work (p.208) of synthesis with a view to ending the uncertainty of the law. In the application of reason, Coke had his presuppositions, as Bacon or anyone else would have had; but they were different from Bacon’s.
II A generation ago, in a pioneering article, Mr. D. O. Wagner suggested that Coke had a bias in favour of economic liberalism. Where the past offered no rule, as in the case of monopolies, Coke produced one for which his authorities gave no warrant, and declared that monopolies infringed Chapters 29 and 30 of Magna Carta.49 He carried it off with dicta like ‘all trades…which prevent idleness…are profitable for the commonwealth, and therefore the grant [of a monopoly] is against the common law, and the benefit and liberty of the subject’. When faced with a rule he did not like, such as the right of gilds to govern their trades, Coke quietly ignored the precedents, or turned them with another dictum—‘at the common law no man could be prohibited from working at any lawful trade, for the law abhors idleness…especially in young men’.50 He rejected gild privileges supported by royal charter, on the ground that only Parliament could interfere with the Englishman’s right to engage in a lawful trade. And even ‘Acts of Parliament that are made against the freedom of trades…[and] handicrafts… never live long’. He argued, in laissez-faire style, that the workings of the market would suffice to eliminate unskilled workmen.51 Mr. Wagner based his conclusions on an analysis of all the relevant cases in the Reports and Institutes, though he discussed only two of the 600 in any detail. He concluded that Coke sometimes deviated from precedents and stretched the meaning of statutes and Magna Carta. He unwarrantably weakened the statutes against engrossing and usury in the interests of individual enterprise. He accepted the customs of London, even where they were ‘against common right and the rule of the common law’. ‘There appears in Coke’s writings a certain amount of what (p.209) can only be described as propaganda against control.’52 Mr. Wagner insisted that Coke merely summed up and consolidated a process that had begun before him; this was a crucial period in which legal decisions contributed very substantially to preventing the Crown establishing a control over the economic life of the country similar to that which the French monarchy enjoyed.53 And Mr. Wagner was careful to say that his own conclusions were only tentative. They have not, so far as I am aware, been followed up by legal historians: but I have not seen them challenged, and they are accepted at least by Professor Thorne.54 There is room for further research here, especially into the many cases in the later volumes of the Reports which deal with business matters. Although Parts I—III are concerned mainly with land Page 6 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker law, property and conveyancing, cases dealing with debts occur in ten of the last twelve volumes (2–9, 11–12); with bargain and sale in four (2, 5–7); with the customs of London in three (5, 8, 12); with municipal government (4, 11) and monopolies (11–12) in two; and deeds and agreements (2), bankruptcy (2), fraud (3), house property (4), perjury (5), usury (5), port customs (12), and forgery (13) all at least once. It may be worth collecting one or two other facts which seem to support Mr. Wagner’s thesis. Coke was a member of the Virginia Company, and believed that trade and traffic were the life of every commonwealth. A merchant was ‘the good bailiff of the realm’.55 ‘Freedom of trade’, Coke told the Commons of 1621, in words that recall Ralegh, ‘is the cause that the Low Countries so prosper. They are not burdened with impositions to burden trade, nor monopolies to restrain it. In all acts of Parliament freedom of trade is held the life of trade.’56 Coke wanted market tolls to be reduced.57 He criticized clerks of the market, whose duties he felt should be taken over by J.P.s—as they were after 1640.58 He pursued with implacable hatred monopolists and patentees, saltpetre men, informers, purveyors, and those who robbed Church and commonwealth ‘by colour of pestilential patents of thievish concealments’.59 On (p.210) the other hand he did his utmost to weaken the Statute of Apprentices60 and the prohibition on forestalling.61 ‘Those two great pronouns, meum and tuum’ were never far from his thoughts.62 His digressions are sometimes illuminating. Cap. xi of the Statute of Gloucester was made the occasion for advocacy of an expansion of English exports, as well as of conservation of English timber.63 A gloss on socage tenure was used to denounce idleness, ‘the ground and beginning of all mischiefs’.64 Coke warmly advocated houses of correction for sturdy beggars.65 A debate on subsidies in 1625 was used to recommend employing tradesmen rather than aristocrats in the Admiralty and Ordnance departments, and taking steps to improve waste grounds and forests.66 Coke wanted to see feudal tenures abolished.67 In 1628 he attacked arbitrary imprisonment as ‘a badge of a villein’; ‘this imprisoning destroys all endeavours’, makes a man ‘tenant at will for liberty’, and ‘a tenant at will never keeps anything in reparation’.68 One of Coke’s most quoted passages of eloquence about the common law being the best birthright of the subject comes in a section discussing the landlord’s right to distrain for unpaid rent.69 In the Case of Corporations Coke strongly favoured the development towards oligarchical rule in municipal government.70 In Tyringham’s Case he went out of his way to advocate laissez-faire. ‘Make what statutes you please, if the ploughman have not a competent profit for his excessive labour and great charge, he will not employ his labour and charge without a reasonable gain to support himself and his poor family.’71
Page 7 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker In Bonham’s Case (1608–10), Coke denied the power of the College of Physicians to fine and imprison unlicensed physicians practising within seven miles of London. For this would make the Censors of the College at once judges and parties, which was unjust, and so this clause in the act was void. Lawyers and political theorists have perhaps made too heavy weather of this case. We need not read into it issues affecting (p.211) fundamental law or the sovereignty of statute.72 Coke was faced with a monopoly which denied the right of men to sell their skills on the open market, and which made the monopolists at once prosecutors, judges, and beneficiaries from the fine. The procedure which the College adopted was sufficiently like that of Church and prerogative courts to strike Coke as ‘against common right and reason’. Nor should we overemphasize the confusion and contradiction which we can see in his attitude to statute and fundamental law. Sir Edward’s theory of sovereignty was that of Bodin, not that of Hobbes. Coke’s unspoken assumption that men have a right to do what they will with their own persons and skills represents the thread of continuity running through all his decisions.73 It explains his campaign for economic liberalism. In 1607 Coke is found protecting apothecaries against physicians: ‘to be an apothecary and then a physician is no disparagement, but a mean to prove the better physician, as an attorney or clerk may after prove the better judge’. As a result provincial apothecaries won the right to practise as physicians.74 Just as Magna Carta had been transformed from a baronial charter of privileges into a declaration of the rights of all free Englishmen: so Coke gave a new significance to a highly feudal principle when he argued that ‘the house of an Englishman is to him as his castle’.75 For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more and more Englishmen whose houses were also workshops became rich enough to be able to wage law; and at the same time governments strove more and more to enforce a regulation of industry and agriculture which could only be made effective by extending inspection into private houses. And when it came to billeting, as it did in the sixteen-twenties, Coke’s phrase acquired an almost revolutionary significance. Two other examples may illustrate Mr. Wagner’s point that Coke was merely summing up a process initiated by other judges. First, the (p.212) transference of commercial causes from the Court of the Admiralty (as well as from gilds) to the common-law courts. In about 1570 Elizabeth complained that the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London were taking on themselves to try cases of contracts arising upon and beyond the seas, which properly belong to ‘Our Court of Admiralty’, feigning the same to have been done within some parish or ward of London.76 The complaint was repeated in very similar terms in 1598 and in 8 James I.
Page 8 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker Merchants disliked the Admiralty Court, in whose jurisdiction they had no part, and whose personnel and procedure were closely linked with those of the Church courts.77 One of the main functions of the court was the collection of the Lord Admiral’s perquisites.78 (Cf. Ralegh’s reference to the loss which merchants might suffer from ‘some prowling Vice-Admiral’.)79 The Privy Council took great interest in the Admiralty’s proceedings, and frequently interfered with its judicial functions.80 But merchants liked the common-law courts little better, since these were slower and unable to order positive action. Gradually, however, the common lawyers began to recognize the existence of a ‘law merchant’, a separate body of customs accepted by merchants. In the last three decades of Elizabeth’s reign there were complaints that the Admiralty’s business was falling off, because of common-law prohibitions, and of the right of the Spanish Company to hear and determine suits in which its members were involved.81 A transitional stage in weaning commercial cases from the Admiralty Court, which shows the active participation of merchants in the process, was the statute 43 Eliz. cap. 12, setting up a Court of Policies and Assurance. The Commissioners of this court were the Recorder of London, two doctors of the civil law, two common lawyers and ‘eight grave and discreet merchants’. We do not know how effectively the court functioned: Lewes Roberts in 1641 complained of ‘delays and hindrances that happen by tedious suits in (p.213) adventures at sea among merchants’.82 In any case the court’s activity was confined to London, and no provision was made for excluding either the Admiralty or the common-law courts from its sphere. It seems to have faded out before or during the Interregnum.83 In 1622 Gerard Malynes failed to mention the Admiralty in discussing Lex Mercatoria. He argued that matters of account should be tried in Chancery, ‘leaving all other cases triable by the common law’, though the procedure in all courts should be accelerated. What was really needed was to make the common law ‘an art or science’ by codification and taking away ‘all ambiguities and dark sentences’.84 In fact, by the time this treatise was written, the common lawyers were well on the way to recognizing law merchant as ‘part of the laws of this realm’.85 In the year which saw the publication of Lex Mercatoria C. J. Hobart could state that ‘the custom of merchants is part of the common law of this kingdom, of which the judges ought to take notice; and if any doubt arise to them about their custom they may send for the merchants to know their custom, as they may send for civilians to know their law’.86 Under Coke the common-law courts were beginning to claim sole jurisdiction over contracts made beyond sea for doing any action or paying any money in England. The Admiralty, which recognized law merchant and had hitherto enjoyed jurisdiction, was declared to be no court of record, and so unable to take recognizances: rivers, ports, and creeks were part of England, and so exempt from Admiralty jurisdiction. Forty-five prohibitions were issued to the Admiralty in the first eight years of James I.87 Coke vigorously supported this campaign for Page 9 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker extending the common law’s jurisdiction. His view of the limits of Admiralty jurisdiction conflicts with that of the judges of Queen’s Bench in 1575, with Bacon’s in 1616, and with the resolutions which Charles I got all the judges to agree to in 1633.88 Coke had intended to print Thomlinson’s Case—the decisive case—in his 7 Reports in 1608, but the King forbade (p.214) it. It was not published until 1658.89 But by then the monarchy had fallen and Coke’s battle had been won. In conducting this squabble, Coke and the other judges may have been motivated mainly by reasons of prestige and profit. But the important underlying factor was the growing corruption of the Admiralty under the Howards and Buckingham, and its use for political purposes. If the common law was to be made (in C. J. Holt’s phrase) ‘the overriding jurisdiction of the realm’, it must subsume law merchant.90 In fact the Admiralty survived the crisis of 1641, together with Chancery, experience of which in 1624 had made Chamberlain speak of the law as ‘one of the greatest grievances of the commonwealth’.91 When the time came for overall law reform, in April 1648 Admiralty jurisdiction was limited, and the court brought under Parliament’s control. It survived only because the common lawyers, on the defensive against radical reformers, were disinclined to sacrifice any existing institution. Yet after 1660 the Admiralty, without a Lord Admiral, dealt with little but prize cases; its commercial jurisdiction went to the common-law courts. The full elaboration of commercial law in the common-law courts was a long process not completed till the eighteenth century; but it was Coke who ‘secured for the common law control over the development of the commercial law’.92 A similar story can be told about the Commissioners of Sewers. These traditional and inoffensively named bodies were composed of the principal county landowners, nominated by the government. They performed functions which were subtly changing in the sixteenth century with the development of largescale land reclamation. In the early seventeenth century the Privy Council supported the Earl of Bedford and other great landowners in schemes for draining the Fens which were bitterly opposed by the commoners in the Isle of Ely, led first by Oliver Cromwell’s uncle and then by Cromwell himself after he had inherited his uncle’s land. In backing up the drainers against ‘riots, insolencies and disturbances’ the Commissioners had departed from their traditional medieval functions of preventing rivers and drainage channels from over-flowing, (p.215) and keeping them free from obstruction. The Commissioners’ activities might be of advantage to the commonwealth, though there were two views about that, but they were not merely enforcing traditional common-law obligations.93 In 1610 Rowland Vaughan alleged that the Commissioners of Sewers arbitrarily overrode both the common law and local opinion to maintain weirs on the river Wye in which some of the Commissioners had vested interests; to the hindrance of river navigation, and so of local trade, and of salmon-fishing, which ‘gave sustenance’ to many thousands in five or six Page 10 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker shires. The opponents of the Commissioners, significantly for our purposes, asked only for the law of the land.94 The Commissioners of Sewers had very wide powers: they could fine and imprison without limit, and could decide for themselves what constituted ‘contempt’ for their authority.95 The City of London thought it worth while to get a special Act of Parliament (3 Jac. I, cap. 14) removing London watercourses from their jurisdiction,96 which suggests that there were grounds for apprehension. There were disputes at the beginning of James’s reign about the powers of Commissioners of Sewers to make new channels as well as maintaining the old ones.97 In Rooke’s Case (1610) the judges decided that the proceedings of Commissioners of Sewers ‘ought to be limited and bound within the rules of reason and law’, and refused to support the administration’s policy even when pressed to do so. In particular they regarded it as illegal to tax the subject to pay for new drainage schemes which those taxed did not approve of. This was one of the points on which Coke was questioned by the Privy Council in 1616. ‘Sometimes when the public good is pretended’, said Sir Edward sardonically, ‘a private benefit is intended; and if any such new invention is in truth (quod raro aut nunquamfit) good for the commonwealth, and yet no consent can be obtained for the making of it, then there is no remedy but to complain in Parliament.’98 But the Privy (p.216) Council backed up the drainers, and Coke’s dismissal in 1616 led to a temporary defeat of the attempt to prevent Sewers Commissioners acting as agents of royal policy. The Council decided that Commissioners of Sewers could not only make new works, but could lay the charges on the towns and hundreds which would benefit by them, without even waiting for a survey in case of necessity.99 Court pressure on local Commissioners of Sewers, and resistance to it, continued.100 But meanwhile the gentry had fought back. Oliver Cromwell ‘was especially made choice of by those who ever endeavoured the undermining of regal authority’ to be their spokesman to the Commissioners of Sewers at Huntingdon, ‘in opposition to His Majesty’s most commendable design’ of backing the Fen drainers.101 When the Long Parliament was preparing the Grand Remonstrance, its summary of Charles I’s misdemeanours, Cromwell was added to a committee to ‘explain the Commission of Sewers’.102 The resultant paragraph 32 of the Remonstrance may safely be attributed to him. ‘Large quantities of common and several grounds’, it said, ‘hath been taken from the subject by colour of the Statute of Improvement, and by abuse of the Commission of Sewers, without their consent and against it.’ After the abolition of the prerogative courts, commissioners were no longer liable to government pressure on behalf of highplaced individuals, and the common-law courts reasserted their authority. The local Commissions of Sewers seem more and more to have merged with quarter sessions.103 Thus in yet another sphere the right of the propertied not to be taxed without their own consent was asserted, and an incipient system of administrative law was checked, all the more noxious in that early Stuart Page 11 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker administrators were never above suspicion. Coke again seems to have been the decisive figure, though the Lord of the Fens may have made the victory of Coke’s interpretation of the law possible.
III Part of the difficulty in assessing Coke’s originality stems from his success. In the Parliament of 1621 he took the lead in proposing a whole (p.217) programme of law reform. He introduced a Bill against monopolies which failed to pass. But ‘good Bills in Parliament seldom die’:104 its passage in 1624 put Coke’s interpretation of the law on the statute book.105 Coke, described as ‘the Hercules and pillar of the House’,106 also supported in 1621 a Bill against informers and promoters, which became law in 1624.107 In 1621 he proposed a Bill to subordinate Chancery to the common-law judges.108 In the same Parliament William Hakewill was one of the members of a committee to review and rationalize the laws.109 A number of Bills were proposed, for abolishing the death sentence for small offences, for reforming the law of debt,110 and several others whose object was to reform that law. Many which failed to pass in 1621 were enacted in 1624.111 In four important respects Coke anticipated legal reforms which were to be partially realized during the Interregnum, though two of them not finally until the nineteenth century. First, Coke opposed the sale of legal offices Tor they that buy dear must sell dear’;112 this at a time when a M.P. could say ‘the price of a Serjeant is as known as the price of a calf.’113 The actual occasion of Coke’s dismissal in November 1616 was his refusal to allow Buckingham to pocket the revenues of the office of chief clerk of pleas in the King’s Bench, the incumbent of which was resigning for the purpose. Coke said that the money should go to increase the judges’ inadequate salaries.114 For secondly—and this is a corollary of opposition to sale of office—Coke wanted fees to be replaced by steady and adequate salaries.115 Thirdly, he opposed torture, which he declared was not warranted by the common law,116 though as Attorney-General he had (on royal insistence) authorized its application as part of the preliminary examination of a suspect.117 Fourthly, Coke (p.218) objected to the traditional practice whereby the government took extrajudicial opinions from the judges, or ordered a stay of judgement until the royal pleasure was known. His new principle was established by the end of the seventeenth century. The collapse of the old régime and the victory of Coke’s law led to a permanent separation between judicial and administrative functions and so to the elimination of torture from English judicial proceedings. James I and his Privy Council in 1616 thought that Coke’s Reports contained ‘many exorbitant and extravagant opinions’, and had tried vainly to make him expurgate them.118 In 1621, when Coke was committed to the Tower, his manuscripts were seized, and three of them were never recovered.119 Ten years later, when it was reported that Coke was ‘about a book concerning Magna Page 12 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker Carta’,120 Charles I prohibited its publication, fearing ‘somewhat may be in prejudice of his prerogative, for Sir Edward is held too great an oracle amongst the people, and they may be misled by anything that carries such an authority as all things do that he either speaks or writes’.121 When Coke lay dying in 1634 his house was ransacked, and fifty-odd manuscripts were taken away, including the last three Parts of the Institutes.122 The old régime was well aware of the danger and of the appeal of Coke’s views, and effectively silenced him. The Long Parliament had hardly sat for a month when it appointed a committee to recover Coke’s confiscated writings, and in 1641, on the same day as it voted the execution of Strafford, ordered the remaining three Parts of the Institutes to be published.123 12 and 13 Reports appeared in the fifties. Henceforth the Reports and the Institutes were accepted as the law of the land. Such modernization and codification as English law received it received through Coke’s writings.124 When the compilers of the Massachusetts Code of 1648 were at work, they ordered copies of Coke’s Institutes, Reports, New Terms of the Law, and Book of Entries, as well as Dalton’s Country Justice. The law of Massachusetts had already proscribed all feudal incidents and monopolies, together with imprisonment (p.219) for debt, and had simplified procedure by eliminating technicalities. Coke was naturally the main inspiration of those who drew up the first modern code of the western world.125 So James and Charles were right enough, from their point of view, to dislike the direction in which Coke was modifying the law. ‘He hath made himself popular by…pulling down government’, said James I.126 ‘Throughout his Institutes’, Hobbes observed of Coke, ‘he endeavours…to diminish…the King’s authority.’127 There could be no political neutrality in these matters. An attack on monopolies and royal charters to gilds was an attack on the prerogative: this was another point on which Coke was asked to explain himself to the Privy Council in 1616. The King has no prerogative’, said Coke flatly, ‘but that which the law of the land allows him.’ He distinguished between ‘prerogative disputable and indisputable’, what the legal historians call ordinary and absolute prerogative. For Coke prerogative was indisputable in affairs of state, like the right to make war or peace; prerogative disputable concerned property: ‘Meum et tuum, bounded by law.’ ‘The common law hath so admeasured the prerogative of the King that he cannot take or prejudice the inheritance of any.’128 Naturally such passages— e.g. the condemnation of the decision in Bate’s Case—could not be published under the old regime: but they had been uttered in the Parliament of 1628, when Coke added proudly ‘It is not I, Edward Coke, that speaks it, but the records that speak it.’ So when Coke said, ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign’,129 he really was striking a blow against the royal prerogative. Wentworth wanted to set Charles I’s ‘power and greatness…above the expositions of Sir Edward Coke and his Year Books’.130
Page 13 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker One way of modernizing the law was by proclamation. When in 1610 Coke challenged the King’s right to make new offences by proclamation, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere said that in cases where there is no authority or precedent it should be left to the King to decide: for otherwise the King would be no more than the Doge of Venice. Coke’s stand was formally (p.220) conservative: there must be great consideration before anything of novelty is established, to provide that it is not against the law of the land.131 But he points the direction in which history was to advance.
IV Coke’s ‘perpetual turbulent carriage’ towards courts other than those of the common law132 was no doubt partly selfish in its motivation. Nevertheless, a desire to restrict their competence goes naturally with his wish to rationalize and systematize the law. Coke held that the Court of Requests was no legal court, though since it existed it would be work worthy of a Parliament to legalize it.133 He similarly questioned the right to jurisdiction of the Council of the North and the Council in Wales.134 In the 1621 Parliament he attacked the Chancellor for protecting insolvent debtors: he wanted to subordinate Chancery to the common law.135 He held that the law of the forests was bounded in England by the common law, and not, as in other countries, ad principis placitum.136 In relation to Church courts there is an even greater logic in Coke’s position. (Indeed it is wrong to personalize the dispute too much. Bancroft was already complaining of the issue of prohibitions in 1605, before Coke became Chief Justice of Common Pleas. As in so many other respects, Coke made himself the eloquent and courageous spokesman of a trend already in existence.)137 Before the Reformation Church courts had been part of an international organization: now they were part of a national system of justice. Though held in the bishop’s name, they were just as much the King’s courts as a court leet held in the name of a lord of a manor.138 Coke of course had to say that Church courts always had been subordinated to the royal authority: but his argument rests in fact on that consolidation of national authority which had been the achievement of the Tudor century. His argument in the discussion of Cawdrey’s Case was that there must be a single national system of justice. The danger in the argument, from the point of view of the royal supremacy, was that the Reformation (p.221) had been enacted by statute; and ‘expounding of statutes that concern the ecclesiastical government or proceedings…belongeth unto the temporal judges’.139 Coke’s case against the High Commission was that it had exceeded its statutory powers. Since the Act of 1559 had merely restored traditional rights, it could not have given an ecclesiastical court powers which had not previously been enjoyed by such courts. The powers which the bishops claimed for the High Commission would have given them jurisdiction over lay property (legacies, tithes) without known limitation of possible sentence and without appeal.140 Precedents for the High Commission’s actions ‘may be many, especially against the weaker sort’, who did not take legal advice. But they had Page 14 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker no validity.141 (Lest I should seem to be idealizing Coke’s and Parliament’s opposition to the Church courts, let us recall that the result of their stripping alimony cases from the High Commission was, in Bacon’s words, to leave wives ‘wholly to the tyranny of their husbands’.142 Coke thought burning Wightman for heresy in 1612 was illegal—but not wrong.)143 James said Coke was hostile to ‘the liberties of his church and the state ecclesiastical’.144. Coke would have replied that there was ‘general complaint against the multiplicity of ecclesiastical courts’, and that he was only defending the liberties of the subject against ecclesiastical encroachments.145 In fact his resolute stand against the oath ex officio led to the proclamation of the splendid individualist principle that a free man should be accused only of actual words or deeds. ‘The ecclesiastical judge cannot examine any man upon his oath, upon the intention and thought of his heart. No man may be punished for his thoughts. For…thought is fee.’ ‘An oath in a man’s own cause is the device of the Devil to throw the souls of poor men into hell.’ Oaths should be demanded of laymen only in matrimonial and testamentary causes where no discredit could ensue (a notable restriction!), ‘for laymen for the most part are unlettered, wherefore they may easily be inveigled and entrapped, and principally in heresy and matters of faith’. Accordingly between 1608 and 1616 Coke granted prohibitions to men and women whom the ecclesiastical courts were questioning about their opinions, thus overthrowing, (p.222) he was told, what had been the practice of the High Commission for sixty years.146 Prohibitions were similarly used to check Bancroft’s attempt to increase tithe payments to the Church.147 Coke is quoted as saying, ‘If no bishops, then no laws, if no laws, no kings’. He denied the accuracy of the pamphlet in which this is quoted, so we should not attach too much importance to it.148 But since it is the most friendly remark attributed to him about the Church we should note its constitutional implications. Bishops are recognized legislators: to abolish them would be to change the structure of Parliament, and so of the monarchy. Hyde and Waller were to say similar things in 1641;149 but it was hardly what James meant by ‘No bishop, no king’. We should observe too that the same report attributes to Coke very harsh remarks about papists and Church courts, and only a very mild rebuke to Puritans.150 A more realistic appraisal perhaps was that of Sir Henry Marten (an ecclesiastical lawyer who knew Coke well). He said that Sir Edward’s will was ‘a monument to his continued malice against the jurisdiction of the Church in testamentary causes’, ‘a precedent to both men and women how to out the Church of all power…in their real and personal estates’.151 Coke was one of those who took notes at the lectures which Walter Travers, Hooker’s Puritan rival, gave at the Temple in the early fifteen-nineties.152 Sir Edward held the high Puritan view—or so he told Bacon—that it was sinful Tor a man to go against his own conscience, though erroneous, except his conscience be first informed and satisfied’.153 Coke was guardian to Roger Williams, a man not Page 15 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker unlearned in the law. Williams regarded Coke as a ‘blessed man’, who would have sympathized with his emigration to New England.154 So there was some affinity between Coke and those Puritans who, Sibthorpe complained, ‘make the law above the King’.155
(p.223) V When we look at Coke’s attitude to the law he praised so much, what at once impresses us are the apparent contradictions in his methods.156 He changed his view on a number of subjects during his career—on the proper sphere of royal proclamations, on the validity of benevolences and impositions, on the legality of commitment by Council, of asking judges for extra–judicial opinions upon pending cases. It would be easy to make him out an inconsistent and opportunist politician:157 easy, but irrelevant. Nevertheless his ideas are difficult to reconcile one with another. ‘The common law’, Coke said, ‘is the absolute perfection of reason.’158 Hence nothing that is contrary to reason is consonant to law.159 The common law, ‘refined and perfected by all the wisest men in former succession of ages,…cannot without great hazard and danger be altered or changed’.160 Yet in fact there have been ‘many changes and alterations of the common law’,161 and there are today ‘variety of opinions’.162 Coke’s object was ‘to reconcile doubts…arising either upon diversity of opinions or questions moved and left undecided’.163 He agreed with Bacon that peace and plenty had led to increased litigiousness.164 Coke attributed the confusion in the law to laymen making ‘conveyances, assurances, instruments, and wills ‘without proper legal advice, and to Acts of Parliament being drafted by laymen.165 ‘The supposed variety of opinions and rules in our books’, and ‘the uncertainty’ of the law is ‘hominis vitium and not professionis’.166 Nevertheless the fact remained that ‘divers doubts and questions of law remained undetermined’. Even judges themselves disagreed.167 There was a ‘multitude of suits in personal actions…to the intolerable charge and vexation of the subject’. Often there were many suits in the same case, and different verdicts.168 ‘The learned’ had to ‘perplex their heads to make atonement and peace by construction of law between insensible and disagreeing words, sentences and provisos.’169 An interpreter thus was needed. ‘It is the best manner of expounding, so to interpret the laws that they may agree with one another.’170 ‘The best interpreter of the law is custom’,171 which sometimes ‘overcometh or (p.224) mastereth the common law’.172 Yet custom is not to be followed blindly. ‘The custom of any place or country is not be be alleged in things which of common right to all men are granted and allowed.’173 Failing custom as a guide, ‘such an interpretation ought always to be made, that absurdity and inconvenience be avoided’.174 For ‘the law of England cannot abide an absurd thing’.175 These platitudes gave judges, fettered by no doctrine of binding precedent, a pretty free hand to make what they pleased of the law.176 If a judge did not like a previous judgement, he could dismiss it as ‘a sudden opinion’.177 Or he could find a later precedent, ‘fitter for the modern practice of the law’.178 If he did not Page 16 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker like a statute, he could appeal to custom or ‘common right and reason’ against it;179 or—vaguer still—he could construe it by ‘the rule and reason of the common law’.180 This mysterious process involved bringing ‘the reason of the law so to our own reason, that we perfectly understand it as our own, and then, and never before, we have such an excellent and inseparable propriety and ownership therein, as we can neither lose it nor any man take it from us’. ‘The law is unknown to him that knoweth not the reason thereof.’181 ‘Reasonableness in these cases belongeth to the knowledge of the law.’182 Luther had said rather similar things about the grace of God, an equally mystical and personal concept. Another name for reason was discretion. ‘Law and discretion should be concomitant’—not ‘every man’s discretion that sitteth on the seat of justice’, but ‘that discretion that ariseth upon the right discerning and due consideration of the true and necessary circumstances of the matter’.183 Rarely can so many questions have been begged in so few words. In different mood, the judge might adopt an attitude of historical relativism: ‘the times being distinguished, the laws will be reconciled’.184 Or he could apply a legal maxim out of its full context.185 Or he could appeal to the spirit of the law against its inconvenient letter: ‘whilst the (p.225) property of the words is attended to, we often miss the true sense’.186 ‘The law of England respecteth the effect and substance of the matter, and not every nicety of form or circumstance’187 The remarkable dictum in III Institutes, that it is not lawful to predict the date of the end of the world, or even to announce that it is at hand, appears to be supported only by Biblical texts.188 Finally, if all else fails, ‘necessity has often overcome the common law, and that which is necessary is lawful’.189 There were, I am sorry to say, ‘malevolent persons’ who thought Coke gave himself a further resource by devising precedents ‘of his own head’. In the 1621 Parliament he had to produce a manuscript to convince these cavillers.190 In at least one case Coke reported the exact opposite of the actual decision, and in others the authors he cites do not support his conclusions.191 There is a further muddle in Coke’s thought, in that he elevated both the common law and Parliament. Sometimes he spoke as though the courts had the right to sit in judgement on statutes: ‘in many cases the common law shall control Acts of Parliament, and sometimes shall adjudge them to be utterly void’—e.g. when ‘against common right and reason’.192 Acts of Parliament, ‘being part of the laws of the realm’, are ‘to be expounded…by the judges of the law’.193 Sometimes he spoke as though Magna Carta was a fundamental law, though he admitted that parts of it had been altered by subsequent statutes. At other times he seemed to think Parliament was supreme: ‘The power and jurisdiction of the Parliament…is so transcendent and absolute, as it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds.’194 Clearly the alliance between common lawyers of his type and Parliament was so close that the possibility of a clash between the two did not occur to him, just as Laud never faced the possibility of conflict between the royal supremacy and divine right Page 17 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker episcopacy. It was the Levellers who used Magna Carta and the supremacy of law, which Coke had trained on the prerogative, against the sovereignty of Parliament.195 (p.226) So although Coke piously declared that ‘no man out of his own private reason ought to be wiser than the law, which is the perfection of reason’,196 the object of a legal education is to convey ‘the secrets of the law’.197 When James spoke of determining disputed points of law by his reason, Coke explained that ‘Causes which concern the life or inheritance of his subjects…are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgement of the law, which…requires long study and experience.’198 Similarly, when the House of Commons spoke reason to James in May 1621, the King replied that ‘reason was so variable according to several humours that it were hard to know where to fix it’. ‘Reason is too large. Find me a precedent and I wall accept it.’199 It has been a thesis of this book that there was no longer universal agreement on what was ‘reasonable’.200 Rationality is a social concept, and social divisions in England (and elsewhere) were producing conceptions of what was ‘rational’ which were so different that in the last resort only force could decide between them. The ‘reasonableness’ of the sanctity of private property was imposed by the New Model Army’s pikes and confirmed by Dutch William’s mercenaries. Nor, protest as they might, were either King or Commons really prepared to be bound by precedents they did not like. When in 1621 Coke obeyed James and brought him a precedent, the King retorted that he wished ‘that he would bring precedents of good kings ‘times’.201 On the other side, Peter Wentworth had distinguished in 1575 between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ precedents, and William Prynne rejected some (though of course not all) precedents from ‘popish Parliaments in time of ignorance’.202 Precedents were as interpretable as the Bible. The question that mattered, as Hobbes saw, was Who is to interpret? Coke then conveyed a great deal when he described the judge as ‘a law speaking’.203 ‘A new judgement doth not give or make a new law, but declares the old;…by a judgment, the law is newly revealed, that of long time hath been covered.’204 ‘Without question the law is sprung up from a divine mind, and this admirable unity and consent in such diversity of things proceeds from God, the fountain and founder of all good (p.227) laws and constitutions.’205 Coke no doubt saw himself and his fellow judges as God’s agents in this work of reconciliation. ‘The judges’, observed Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who watched this development with a critical eye, ‘themselves do play the Chancellor’s parts upon statutes, making construction of them according to equity and enlarging them pro bono publico against the letter and intention of the makers, whereof our books have many hundreds of cases.’206
Page 18 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker Where Ralegh urged James to see that he must adapt himself to social change and co-operate with Parliament, Coke—possibly more realistically—wished this constitutional revolution to be mediated through judges and to be confirmed by statute. Judges did not turn to the legal record with absolutely open minds to find out what past practice really had been: if they had done so they would have found hopelessly conflicting answers. As practical men, facing urgent practical problems, they took what they wanted from the available records of the past, as theologians took what texts they wanted from the vast arsenal of the Bible. The judges were perfectly prepared to prohibit the publication of some statutes whose popular dissemination they thought might be dangerous.207 Coke himself did his best to suppress any precedents that he did not like, taking care that ‘such only as (in my opinion) should hereafter be leading cases for the public quiet might be imprinted and published’.208 He was very successful: his successors rarely went behind Coke to see what medieval precedents really were. Coke’s works, Blackstone said, have ‘an intrinsic authority in courts of justice, and do not entirely depend on the strength of their quotations from older authorities’. C. J. Best put it more bluntly early last century when he said, ‘We should get rid of a great deal of what is considered law in Westminster Hall if what Lord Coke says without authority is not law.’209 In this work of selection the judges, drawn from a homogeneous social group and with similar ideas of what was right and proper, could work out a roughly agreed line of advance from precedent to precedent. Coke was not a dictator: he summed up and made sense of the groping rationalization of his predecessors. But because of his tremendous learning, and because the law had not yet been made available in comprehensible form to laymen, Coke was able to acquire a position of authority in (p.228) interpreting the law such as no Protestant theologian had in interpreting Scripture. Most gentlemen had a legal education of some sort, and thought of politics in legal terms. Exactly half of the local governors’ of Somerset between 1625 and 1640 had attended one of the Inns of Court (54 out of 108); only 15 of these were called to the bar.210 No less than 22 of the regicides had been at Gray’s Inn.211
VI This then is Coke’s importance for our purposes. First, he systematized English law and in the process continued and extended the process of liberalizing it, of adapting it to the needs of a commercial society. In so doing he had to challenge everything that impeded the development of a world in which men of property could do what they would with their own: monopolies and gild privileges, arbitrary taxation and arbitrary arrest, paternal control over the economic life of the country. This brought the common law into conflict with the prerogative and its courts, the Church and its courts; it was natural and inevitable that Coke should turn to the House of Commons for support as soon as he had failed to achieve his aims within the government. In doing so, he contributed his share—it is not for me to say how great a share—to the evolution of a doctrine of Page 19 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker fundamental law based on natural reason:212 the doctrine which was to be used by Coke’s pupil Oliver St. John against Strafford,213 and later against Charles I; a doctrine which played its part in the political thinking of, for example, Lord Brooke, Henry Parker, John Lilburne. Characteristically, Coke himself in 1628 rejected the idea of fundamental law, ‘a word I understand not’. He wanted property and personal liberty to be protected by definite and known common and statute law principles.214 Coke’s second great contribution was more directly political, but it followed naturally from the liberalization of the common law. His tremendous labours achieved what Camden, Stow, Speed, and Ralegh had failed to do: they gave Englishmen an historical myth of the English (p.229) constitution parallel to Foxe’s myth of English religion.215 In primitive times Englishmen had had good laws (as they had had a pure Church): the continuous enjoyment of those laws had been broken by William the Conqueror (with the support of the Pope) and by many of his successors. But Englishmen had fought back, as the heretics had fought back, and with greater success. Magna Carta and the Parliamentary statutes which Coke interpreted so lovingly and so inaccurately were monuments to the eternal vigilance with which God’s Englishmen had defended their liberties. It was at this point, where liberty and property coincided, that Coke was most eloquent and most urgent. As early as 1605 he used words which are normally quoted only in part: No subject of this realm, but being truly instructed by the good and plain evidence of his ancient and undoubted patrimony and birth-right (though he hath for some time by ignorance, false persuasion, or vague fear been deceived or dispossessed) but will consult with learned and faithful councillors for the recovery of the same. The ancient and excellent laws of England are the birth-right and the most ancient and best inheritance that the subjects of this realm have, for by them he enjoyeth not only his inheritance and goods in peace and quietness, but his life and his most dear country in safety. (I fear that many want true knowledge of this ancient birth-right.)216 Again and again in the Institutes Coke reminds his readers that this vigilance is now more necessary than ever. So the struggle of common lawyers and Parliamentarians was given historical significance and dignity, the prestige of a thousand-years-old tradition. And Coke’s interpretation had staying power: Professor Butterfield has called him the first Whig historian.217 Yet to his contemporaries Coke must have seemed no more an innovator than Luther had been: both merely led men back to purer origins. We speak of Coke’s history (like Foxe’ s) as mythology. Yet (unlike Foxe) Coke met with no serious challenge to his interpretation in his (p.230) lifetime, except on political grounds: governments silenced him because they could not Page 20 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker answer him. Coke did not, as is often said, invent Magna Carta: the Pilgrims of Grace, the Marian clergy, Cartwright, Penry, and many other Puritan ministers had appealed to it.218 But he does seem to have invented Magna Carta as a bulwark of economic liberty. And in his speeches to Parliament in the sixteentwenties he placed this Magna Carta in history and made it the possession of every propertied Englishman. Eliot in 1628 echoed Coke when he complained that ‘what Magna Carta itself decides to be meum et tuum is now no meum [ef] tuum’219 Coke moreover, who wanted books to sell cheaply, wrote the Prefaces to the Reports, and the text of the Institutes, in English, unlike all his legal predecessors, who adhered to Law French or Latin. This too was part of the patriotic myth. ‘Our English language…is as copious and significant, and as able to express any thing in as few and apt words, as any other native language that is spoken at this day. And (to speak what we think) we would derive from the Conqueror as little as we could’220 It was as natural for Coke to write in English as for Luther to write in German; as natural as it was for him to be so aggressively anti-Spanish that men believed Gondomar was responsible for his imprisonment in the Tower in 1621;221 or for him to believe that if only government controls were removed an English liberal society could solve all its own problems. I compared Coke to Luther, and that comparison can be carried further. Luther’s translation of the Bible started a movement which he could not control. Coke, more fortunate than Luther, did not live to see the fruits of his labours. From the time of More and Starkey there had been those who described the common law as a conspiracy among the rich to keep the poor in due subjection;222 the Levellers and Winstanley in the sixteen-forties showed that this tradition had not died, and Cromwell himself said that ‘the law, as it is now constituted, serves only to maintain the lawyers and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor’.223 But there was another legal tradition—that of the communal manor courts. In these little Commonwealths’, as Coke called them,224 litigation (p.231) was cheap; and, where the authority of the lord of the manor was not in question, it may have been fair enough.225 But part of the rationalization of the common law that we have been describing concerned precisely the position of copyholders and courts leet. The ‘reasonableness’ of copyhold customs were being tried at common law; and what seemed reasonable to a propertied judge might seem the rankest injustice to a copyholder.226 In 1604 William Stoughton argued that the steward was only the chairman of a court leet, and had no authority to hear, examine, or judge ‘but by common voice and consent of all the homagers and suitors to the court’.227 Yet Coke in his Compleat Copyholder said that the lord (and presumably his steward as well) ‘is not tied to the strict forms of the common law, for he is a chancellor in his court’.228 The conflicts of the mid- and later seventeenth century over whether juries were judges of law as well as of fact were conflicts about the right of the humbler classes in society to have their
Page 21 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker say in the administration of justice: as were the Levellers’ proposals for leaving far more business to local courts; and their insistence on lay assessors.229 Coke’s writings, for many on the Parliamentary side, marked the beginning, not the end, of reform. ‘What is it that you chiefly aim at in this war?’ the troops were asked in The Souldiers Catechism of 1644; and the reply was, after reforming religion and bringing the enemies of Church and state to justice: ‘At the regulating of our courts of justice, which have been made the seats of iniquity and unrighteousness.’230 The course of fighting the propaganda and military battles of the civil war brought home to many Parliamentarians that their actions could not all be based on precedent; but the Levellers carried their rejection of the past furthest, and read into Coke’s writings conclusions as remarkable as those which Coke himself had read into Magna Carta.231 Just as Luther’s appeal to individual conscience could be used against Luther, so the contradictory principles to which Coke had appealed in (p.232) modernizing the common law—reason, natural justice, the spirit of the law, necessity—could be used against Coke himself. Above all, just as Luther taught laymen to criticize priestly mumbo-jumbo and they turned the criticisms against Lutheran ministers; so Coke taught laymen to interpret the law, and the radicals used this against the mumbo-jumbo of the lawyers. As early as 1628 George Wither thought that lawyers should …be disposed of, as now they see The priories and monasteries be.232
Twenty-five years later it was common form to lump together ‘the corrupt interests of the lawyers and the clergy’ as the main obstacles to reform. Just as some of the sectaries would have abolished a separate priesthood, so Winstanley thought that in the free commonwealth there would be no need of lawyers, Tor there is to be no buying and selling’.233 ‘Do not they [The judges] assume the sole guiding, learning, interpreting, examining, and overruling of the law to themselves?’ asked John Jones in 1650. ‘How can that law be called common to all which they…monopolize, ingross, and appropriate to themselves?’ The lawyers were worse than the bishops whom Parliament had just abolished.234 Jones quoted Coke to argue that ‘the laws (if published to the people as they ought) would be sufficient to guide them all in all the right ways of justice’. But the judges keep them in French and Latin, so that they can ‘devise for themselves to mend where they list, which happeneth sometimes for the rich, but rare or never for the poor’.235 He wanted to wrest the law ‘out of the hands of those false interpreters at Westminster’. The civil war had been fought, he argued, to get the laws reformed against the lawyers.236 Lilburne infuriated the lawyers by holding adult education classes in
Page 22 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker the law (whilst he was in Newgate jail) as much as the translators of medical textbooks had infuriated the doctors in Elizabeth’s reign.237 For the radicals generally, from Hugh Peter through the Levellers and Diggers to John Warr and William Cole, Coke’s restatement of the (p.233) law to safeguard property and preserve its freedom of action seemed far too conservative. The demand for codification under the Commonwealth came from men who were conservatives only in so far as they wanted to give legal validity to popular customs which the propertied judges were trying to abolish as ‘unreasonable’.238 The reformers came to regard ‘the profession of our laws as epidemically evil’239 and wanted root-and-branch reform of the premises on which law rested, a break with the precedents of the past rather than their adaptation. They bore the same relation to Coke as the radical sects of the same period did to Luther. We must beware of dismissing the call for further reform and codification as coming from a ‘lunatic fringe’, if there was such a thing. It started, as we have seen, in the House of Commons. It was supported by the Lord Mayor of London in 1649;240 by a Committee appointed by the Rump of the Long Parliament, of which the distinguished lawyer Sir Matthew Hale was chairman;241 by Bulstrode Whitelocke;242 and by Major-General Fleetwood in 1655.243 ‘There is one general grievance in the nation’, the Lord Protector told Parliament in September 1656. ‘It is the law.’244 The cry for the laws in English was an old one. Robert Burton had echoed it.245 A medical reformer said in 1659 that Edward Noy had agitated for translation. Hering wanted lawyers, like physicians, to be paid by the state and to charge no fees. He hoped to see all books of law and physic translated into English.246 Inability to understand legal processes without paying for a lawyer was an especial grievance for the middle and lower classes, among whom ‘the general and inbred hatred…against both our laws and lawyers’ was particularly keenly felt.247 As the civil war and the New Model Army drew the common people more and more into politics, so the demand for legal reform had become (p.234) a demand for social reform, for protection of the middling and poorer sort. Imprisonment for debt was against Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, said John Jones: he might have added that it had been abolished in Massachusetts.248 Jurors should be judges both of law and fact, said Jones, Lilburne, and many others: ‘mechanics, bred up…to handicrafts’ could judge as well as the selfappointed experts of gentle extraction, just as they could preach as well as university-trained divines.249 It was this that closed the ranks of the conservatives around ‘the corrupt interest of the lawyers and the clergy’, and made any codification other than that in Coke’s works out of the question.
Page 23 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker In short, the antiquarianism of the House of Commons before 1640 had been functional: it did not exist for its own sake. In the sixteen-thirties Noy demonstrated that Coke’s techniques could be devoted to proving opposite conclusions to his. Charles I’s personal rule was ‘the only period of English history when the policy of the government has actually been based on historical research’.250 Men were interested in the constitution in order to do things with it, not for its own sake: not even Parliament was sacred. Cromwell’s objection to ‘arbitrary Parliaments’ was that, like arbitrary kings, they might interfere with property.251 Here we must return for a moment to Bacon. He thought that the general principles of law should not (as hitherto) be discussed only by practising lawyers or armchair philosophers. For the end of law is ‘the happiness of the citizens’, and the test of laws is practice. Hence law was a matter for statesmen, ‘who best understand the conditions of civil society, welfare of the people, natural equity, customs of nations, and different forms of government, and who may therefore determine laws by the rules and principles both of natural equity and policy’.252 That sounds admirable—until we reflect on the ‘statesmen’ who surrounded the first two Stuart kings. The Commons, like Coke, could no more trust the royal reason than he could trust theirs. Coke and the property-owners preferred the existing state of affairs (administered by them and their like, with no control of judges from above) to a codification which, however desirable in Baconian theory, could have been absolutist in Jacobean practice. The apparently excessive vigilance with which the (p.235) Commons pounced on Dr. Cowell for one or two unfortunate definitions shows how near the surface their anxieties were. In 1610 Coke approved of James’s proposal that some penal statutes should be repealed, which ‘remain but as snares to entangle the subjects withal’; and that ‘one plain and perspicuous law’ should be made, ‘so as every subject may know what acts be in force, what repealed,…what enlarged…; so as each man may clearly know what and how much is of them in force; and how to obey them’. But he was doubtful about ‘bringing the common laws into a better method’, and insisted that this could be done only by Parliament, with the advice of the judges.253 Bacon’s own condemnation for bribery in 1621, however factiously motivated, helped to set new standards of conduct for judges, as Bacon himself saw.254 ‘We cannot mention the reformation of the law’, said Cromwell in 1650, ‘but they presently cry out, we design to destroy property.’255 The common lawyers, the men of property, the House of Commons, came to prefer that the status quo should be modified by judge-made precedent, rather than rationalized by the royal government,256 or later by Leveller or Fifth Monarchy radicals. Just in the same way J.P.s wanted to be left alone by the central government,257 whether that of Laud or of the Major-Generals. When Laud tried to reform admitted economic abuses in the Church, his attempt brought on the government even more opprobrium than the existence of the abuses had done.258 So with the law, Page 24 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker both the need for reform and the government’s attempt to provide it harmed the ancien régime. Once Star Chamber had been abolished and the Privy Council lost its teeth, judges became lions under the mace rather than under the throne. Hobbist sovereignty was never popular with most of the men of property. The muddles of Coke suited them better. Illogical though ‘the balanced constitution’ was, it met their needs—once kings had been taught their lesson. It is not without its symbolism that Coke should have died on Oliver Cromwell’s day of victories—September 3. Postscript. In an interesting article, ‘The “Economic Liberalism” of Sir Edward Coke’ (Yale Law Journal, Vol. 76, 1967), Barbara Malament (p.236) criticized historians who ascribe to Coke ‘an anticipation of laissez-faire’, and appears to include me among them. The careful reader will agree that I do not adopt ‘the laissez-faire thesis’, or attribute to Coke anything so unhistorical as ‘modern notions of competition’ or ‘full employment’ (Malament, p. 1350). Coke was a protectionist who had no objection to regulation by Parliament Ms. Malament seems to me to take a rather unhistorical view of the common law’s inherent ‘bias’ against restraint of trade (p. 1345) and to ignore the climate of opinion in which attitudes towards gilds, towards ‘reason’, ‘the public interest’ and ‘the rights of Englishmen’, were changing (pp. 1341–3, 1358). To suggest that economic and social change produced stresses and strains of which lawyers had to take account is not the same as attributing to Coke a conscious wish ‘to destroy the system itself’ (p. 1357). What mattered was the later use that others made of Coke’s ideas. But it is good to have lawyers at last discussing Wagner’s tentative suggestions. Notes:
(1) Quoted by S. E. Thorne, Sir Edward Coke, 1552–1952 (Selden Soc. Lecture, 1952, published 1957), p. 4. (2) C. W. Johnson, Life of Sir Edward Coke (1837), i. 25. (3) See a letter wrongly attributed to Bacon in Bacon, Works (1826), v. 402. For an example of Coke’s sharp dealing see The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert (ed. B. Mellor, Hong Kong, 1961), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv. (4) Bacon, Works, xiii. 95. (5) Ralegh’s case is conspicuously not referred to in the Third Part of Coke’s Institutes, which deals with high treason. (6) Quoted in Sir W. Holdsworth, History of English Law (1922–50), v. 431. (7) Strype, Life of Whitgift (1822), ii. 376, 401. The marriage was solemnized without banns or licence, in a private house, and at an illegal hour. Lady Hatton at least repented at leisure. Page 25 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (8) L. Nosworthy, The Lady of Bleeding Heart Tard (1935), p. 62. (9) Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 88–89, 601. The son subsequently married the daughter of Sir John Danvers, a regicide, and changed his name to Danvers out of hatred to that of Villiers (Johnson, Life of Coke, ii. 80). (10) Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), ii. 205. (11) S. E. Thorne, op. cit, pp. 5, 13. (12) Hakewill, Apologie, p. 548. (13) Coke, IVInstitutes, p. 76. (14) Hakewill, loc. cit.; W. Carey, The Present State of England (1627), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iii. 201–4. Carey gave excessive suits in law as one of three reasons why ‘our fathers were very rich with little, and we poor with much’. Cf. also Wither: So costly be their wild interpretations Of laws and customs; and such variations Are found in their opinions, that few know When they uprightly or in safety go.
(Brittans Remembrancer, Spenser Soc. reprint, 1880, ii. 374–9: first published 1628. (15) The former were accepted as binding by common-law judges until 1640 (R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, 1910, ii. 117). (16) F. Thompson, Magna Carta: its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300–1629 (Minnesota U.P., 1948), p. 258. (17) S. R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603–42 (1883–4), ii. 66–67. (18) L. Boynton, ‘Martial Law and the Petition of Right’, E.H.R. lxxix. 255–84; Rushworth, iii, pp. 76–81. (19) T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–40 (1961), p. 179. (20) J. Barclay, The Mirrour of Mindes (Englished by T. May, 1631), p. 115. Hakewill agreed on the necessity for codifying and rationalizing the law (Apologie, p. 548). (21) Ralegh, Works, ii. 29–30. Ralegh hinted delicately that only fear of being punished for scandalum magnatum prevented louder outcry in England.
Page 26 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (22) Edwards, Life of Raleigh, ii. 271–3; cf. Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), iii. 248. Ralegh in his trial in fact came up against two of the major abuses of the English law of treason that the seventeenth century was to see amended—the possibility that a man might be condemned on the evidence of a single witness (which rested on a precedent from Mary’s reign, and against which John Lilburne had to fight) and use of hearsay evidence, not excluded until near the end of the century (Holdsworth, History of English Law, ix. 214). Ralegh rejected hearsay as ‘of no authority nor credit’. ‘Common bruit is so infamous a historian’ (History, i. 257; cf. also his speech about the Brownists in 1593, p. 153 above). He has been stigmatized as an uncritical historian; but his standards in regard to evidence were higher than those of Sir Edward Coke. Coke argued at Bacon’s trial that only one witness was necessary in a charge of bribery. The need for two witnesses in treason trials was statutorily established in 1661. Sir J. F. Stephen cynically but plausibly observed that this was because members of the ruling class were more likely to be accused of treason than of other offences (History of the Criminal Law, i. 226, quoted by J. H. Wigmore, ‘The Required Number of Witnesses’, Harvard Law Review, xv. 91, 101). (23) Ralegh, History, i. 36; cf. Works, i. 349. Coke also agreed in regretting the number of executions in England, though he did not think the law was to blame (III Institutes, Epilogue). (24) Bacon, ‘Essay of Judicature’, Works, vi. 507. (25) Bacon, Works, xiii. 64. Cf. E. W. Ives, ‘The Reputation of Common Lawyers in English Society, 1450–1550’, Birmingham Historical Journal, vii. 130–1: ‘Lawyers and lawsuits were numerous because of the position which the law occupied in society’. (26) Coke, III Institutes, pp. 191–4; cf. M. G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, 1563–1642 (Harvard U.P., 1956), passim; M. W. Beresford, ‘The Common Informer, the Penal Statutes and Economic Regulation’, Econ. H. R., 2nd Series, x. 221–38; P. J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (1962), Chapters V–VII. (27) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, p. 117. ‘Fortunas quae tueatur jurisprudentia’: the words are Matthew Gwinne’s in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Physic. (28) Ralegh, Works, i. 179. (29) J. Rushworth, The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1680), pp. 662, 669– 70. (30) Coke, 1 Reports, Preface to the Reader. On property and common law cf. M. A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (Rutgers U.P., 1949), pp. 34–38, 335–8. Page 27 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (31) Quoted in Certaine Considerations upon the Government of England (ed. J. M. Kemble, Camden Soc., 1849), p. xxi. (32) Bacon, Works, xiii. 67. (33) Ibid. vii. 319. (34) Bacon’s legal maxims are interesting as his first use of aphorisms. They anticipate his later ‘middle axioms ‘in philosophy, which Bacon always described as the most fruitful for works (‘middle ‘because they stand between the lesser axioms derived from the particulars of sense on the one hand, and on the other those solid, properly defined propositions which Nature herself ‘would acknowledge ‘—Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, pp. 187–8). Maxims were a commonplace in legal thinking before Bacon, especially in the civil law. But Bacon—in law as in science—claimed that he kept closer to particulars than his predecessors. (For the whole of the above paragraph, cf. Kocher, ‘Francis Bacon on Jurisprudence’, J.H.I. xviii. 3–13.) Coke perhaps meant something similar when he defined a maxim as ‘a sure foundation or ground of art and a conclusion of reason’ (I Institutes, pp. 10b-11 a). (35) Coke, 6 Reports, p. 42. (36) Coke, I Institutes, p. 212a. (37) Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum; Instaura leges justitiamque prius.
(J. M. Gest, ‘Writings of Sir Edward Coke’, Yale Law Journal, xviii. 514.) (38) Bacon, Works, xiii. 66–71. (39) Ibid. xii. 86; cf. v. 104. (40) Bacon, Works, xiii. 70. (41) The Institutes partially corresponded to one of the three desiderata for the law which Bacon had laid down in Works, xiii. 69–70. (42) Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, Act II, scene i. (43) Coke, 3 Reports, sig. C 2b; 10 Reports, sig. d v-vi; cf. Van Vechten Veeder, ‘The English Reports’, Harvard Law Review, xv. 1–25; H. A. Hollond, ‘English Legal Authors before 1700’, Cambridge Law Journal, ix. 303–13; T. F. T. Plucknett, ‘The Genesis of Coke’s Reports’, Cornell Law Quarterly, xxvii. 194–6.
Page 28 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (44) Cf. Bacon, ‘The cases of modern experience…are fled from those that were adjudged and ruled in former times’, quoted by Thorne, op. cit., p. 6. (45) The Lord Egerton’s Observations on the Lord Coke’s Reports (n.d., ? 1710), pp. 1–2. There is no adequate evidence for attributing these Observations to Egerton, but they may be by a clerk in his office. (46) 8 Reports, p. 49, quoted by Van Vechten Veeder, op. cit., p. 10. (47) Plucknett, op. cit., pp. 196–201, 212–13. (48) Egerton’s Observations, p. 2; cf. p. 20. (49) Cf. II Institutes, p. 47: ‘Generally all monopolies are against this Great Charter because they are against the liberty and freedom of the subject and against the law of the land.’ (50) 11 Reports, Cases of Monopolies and of Ipswich Tailors; cf. II Institutes, pp. 47, 322, and J. U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540– 1640 (American Philosophical Soc, 1940), p. 42. In 1621 the wharfingers of London quoted Magna Carta in a petition against the monopoly of the woodmongers (N.R.S. vii. 99). (51) D. O. Wagner, ‘Coke and the Rise of Economic Liberalism’, Econ. H. R. vi. 30–44. All quotations from Coke in this paragraph, unless otherwise indicated, are from Mr. Wagner’s article. Cf. p. 225 below (52) Wagner, op, cit., pp. 32–34, 42–44 (53) Nef, op. cit., passim (54) S. E. Thorne, Sir Edward Coke, pp. 10–12. But see pp. 235–6 below (55) Quoted in F. Thompson, Magna Carta: its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, p. 359; Coke, 2 Reports, p. 79. Cf. N.R.S. ii. 76; Coke, II Institutes, pp. 41–42 (56) N.R.S. v. 93 (57) II Institutes, pp. 221–2 (58) IF Institutes, pp. 273–5; cf. The Lord Coke His Speech and Charge (1607), sig. G 4. Coke denied the authenticity of this pamphlet (7 Reports, Preface), but it appears to represent his views on this matter (59) 10 Reports, sig. d, and Arthur Legat’s Case; 12 Reports, Case of the King’s Prerogative in Saltpetre; II Institutes, pp. 224, 543–6; III Institutes, pp. 83–84,
Page 29 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker 181–5; IV Institutes, p. 76; Speech and Charge, sig. G 4–H lb. Cf. Bacon, Works, xi. 97–101 (60) 13 Reports, pp. 12–13; cf. M. G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, 1563–1642, pp. 241–3, and E. Heckscher, Mercantilism (trans. M. Schapiro, 1935), i. 292–3, on Tolley’s Case, in which Coke is reported to have gratuitously exempted several unskilled occupations from the Statute of Apprentices (61) N.R.S. v. 93 (62) III Institutes, Proeme, sig. B 2 (63) II Institutes, pp. 323, 307 (64) I Institutes, p. 85b; cf. III Institutes, Epilogue (65) II Institutes, p. 734 (66) Ed.S. R. Gardiner, Debates inthe House of Commons, 1625 (Camden Soc, 1873), pp. 85–87, 131–3 (67) F. Pollock, The Land Laws (1881), p. 127. Cf. J. Hurstfield, The Queen’s Wards (1958), pp. 166–8; Sir T. Smith, De Republica Anglorum (ed. L. Alston, 1906), Book 3, Chapter 5 (68) Lords’ Journals, iii. 761 (69) I Institutes, p. 142 (70) 4 Reports (71) 4 Reports, p. 39. Cf. Coke’s pleasure at the assimilation of copyholders to the position of freeholders (The Complete Copyholder, para. 9) (72) Bonham’s Case first became of political and constitutional importance when it was quoted against Parliamentary sovereignty—by Judge Jenkins in 1647, and by Lilburne in his Legall Fundamentall Liberties (1649). See J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English History (1955), pp. 30, 64–65, 111; cf. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution, pp. 100–3; S. E. Thorne, ‘Dr. Bonham’s Case’, L.Q.R. liv. 543–52. Coke’s attitude in Bonham’s Case seems to override the judgment in Read v. Jenkins (1595), and the other three judges were against him; but Hobart adopted Coke’s position later (J. Bell and T. Redwood, A Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain, 1880, p. 5; Gough, op. cit., p. 38) (73) Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Chapter III. See also p. 225 below
Page 30 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (74) Roberts The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism Roberts, op. cit., p. 374. Yet Coke—consistently—opposed the patent granted to the Apothecaries by the royal prerogative. See p. 72 above (75) 5 Reports, p. 9lb; 11 Reports, p. 82b; cf. 2 Reports, p. 32a, 7 Reports, p. 6a, 8 Reports, p. 126a; III Institutes, p. 162 (76) A. T. Carter, ‘Early History of the Law Merchant in England’, L.Q.R. xvii. 244; cf. F. C. D. Tudsbery, ‘Law Merchant at Common Law’, Ibid, Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (twelfth ed., 1794), iii. 105–8 (77) J. S. Purvis, The Records of the Admiralty Court of York (St. Anthony’s Hall Papers, No. 22, 1962), p. 4; cf. pp. 14–15 for a list of the types of business which the York Court regarded as appertaining to it (78) ‘Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Admiralty was looked upon mainly as a source of profit’, R. G. Marsden, ‘The Vice-Admirals of the Coasts’, E.H.R. xxii. 477 (79) Ralegh, Works, ii. 30 (80) Ed. Marsden, Documents Relating to the Law and Custom of the Sea, i, 1205–1648 (Navy Records Soc, 1915). Mr. Mardsen refers especially to the fifteen-nineties. Cf. English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–95 (edK. R. Andrews, Hakluyt Soc, 1959), pp. 3–4 (81) Ed. Marsden, Select Pleas in the Court of Admiralty, ii, 1547–1602 (Selden Soc., 1899), pp. xii-xv, xliii-lvii, lxxix. Cf. R. Zouch, The Jurisdication of the Admiralty of England Asserted against Sir Edward Coke (1663), pp. 143–5 (82) L. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (1641), in Early English Tracts on Commerce (ed. J. R. McCulloch, 1856), pp. 81, 85 (83) IV Institutes, p. 250; F. D. MacKinnon, ‘The Origins of Commercial Law’, L.Q.R. lii. 37; Holdsworth, History of English Law, viii. 289; F. Martin, The History of Lloyds (1816), p. 50, quoted in W. J. Jones, ‘English Marine Insurance’, Journal of Business History, ii. 63–66 (84) G. Malynes, Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria (1626), sig. A 5, pp. 306–15: first published 1622 (85) I Institutes, p. 182a;cf. 172a (86) Reports of…Sir Humphrey Winch (1657), pp. 24–25 quoted (inaccurately) by MacKinnon op. cit., p. 33. Hobart was Chancellor to Prince Henry and Holdsworth’s patron (see p. 191 above)
Page 31 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (87) 6 Reports, Dowdale’s Case; 12 Reports, pp. 78–79, 104; 13 Reports, pp. 51– 54; I Institutes, p. 261b; IV Institutes, pp. 134–6, 141–2. Cf. Holdsworth, History of English Law, i. 554; MacKinnon, op. cit., p. 34 (88) Bacon, Works, xiii. 91; Zouch, The Jurisdiction of the Admiralty, pp. 47, 120– 3; H. J. Crump, Colonial Admiralty Jurisdiction in the 17th Century (1931), pp. 18–23 (89) 12 Reports, p. 104 (90) Sir W. Holdsworth, Some Makers of English Law (1938), p. 130 (91) Chamberlain, Letters, ii. 564, 598–9; cf. III Institutes, 123–8, IV Institutes, p. 86. In 1650 a radical law reformer remarked sardonically that Bacon was the only Lord Chancellor who had died poor (J. Jones, The New Returna Brevium, 1650, p. 28). For the greater likelihood that the Admiralty would find for the Crown (in cases of prize and smuggling) than the common-law courts, see G. L. Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–1668 (New York, 1912), i. 294–308 (92) Holdsworth, Some Makers, pp. 130, 159; History of English Law, i. 556–8; Purvis, op. cit., pp. 5, 31–33; [Anon.], Reasonsfor Settling Admiralty Jurisdiction (1690), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), viii. 359–64 (93) L. L. Jaffe and E. G. Henderson, ‘Judicial Review in the Rule of Law’, L.Q.R. lxii. 350–5 (94) Ed.Ed. E. B. Wood, Rowland Vaughan His Booke (1897), pp. 50–62. There was a similar quarrel in Kent in 1600. Here the Commissioners ordered weirs to be removed, but did nothing to remove mills which obstructed navigation. In 1610 landowners in Devon and Cornwall, in the interests of their weirs, mills, and fish-ponds, tried to stop the use of rivers to float wood down to the coast (Taylor, Late Tudor and early Stuart Geography, pp. 120–1) (95) S. B. Webb, English Local Government: Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes (1922), p. 24, and passim. Cf. Robert Callis, The Reading…Upon the Statute of 23 Hen. VIII Cap. 5, of Sewers (1647: delivered at Gray’s Inn 1622), passim; [Anon.], Instructions to Jurymen on the Commission of Sewers (1664); [Anon.], The Laws of Sewers (1732), pp. 35 ff.; [Anon.], Of the Laws and Commissions of Sewers (n.d.? early eighteenth century), esp. pp. 6–9 (96) IV Institutes, pp. 275–7. The Lord Mayor of London was responsible for the conservation of the Thames as far as Staines (97) H. C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens (second ed., 1956), p. 31 (98) 5 Reports, Rooke’s Case; 10 Reports, Case of the Isle of Ely. Such complaint, Coke added with grim satisfaction, had been utterly rejected in 3 Jac. I Page 32 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (99) Sir W. Dugdale, A History of lmbanking and Drayning (1662), pp. 371–2 (100) L. E. Harris, Vermuyden and the Fens (1953), passim (101) Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England (1681), p. 460; cf. Sir Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I (2nd ed., 1813), pp. 217–18. For the profits which the beneficiaries hoped to gain, sec H. Mirrlees, A Fly in Amber (1962), pp. 316–22 (102) C.J. ii. 309 (103) L. L. Jaffe and E. G. Henderson, ‘Judicial Review in the Rule of Law’, L.Q.R. lxii. 355; cf. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640, pp. 148–52 (104) IV Institutes, pp. 32, 83 (105) N.R.S. v. 289–90; cf. II Institutes, p. 96, III Institutes, pp. 181–95; E. R. Foster, ‘The Procedure of the House of Commons against Patents and Monopolies, 1621–4’, in Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Noiestein, ed. W. A. Aiken and B. D. Henning (1960), pp. 59–85 (106) N.R.S.v. 284 (107) 21 Jac. I, cap. 4; cf. Davies Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, pp. 73– 74 (108) N.R.S. ii. 265, 223; iii. 98; vii. 586 (109) Ibid iv. 47–48. (110) H.M.C., Third Report, Appendix, pp. 17, 26 (111) N.R.S. vii. 300–7 (112) I Institutes, p. 234; II Institutes, p. 566; III Institutes, p. 154. The example given is Sir Arthur Ingram’s purchase of the office of Cofferer of the Household; so Coke stretched the conception of legal office far into the civil service (113) Sir Francis Seymour, in Debates of the House of Commons in 1625 (ed. Gardiner), p. 111 (114) C. W. Johnson, Life of Sir Edward Coke (1837), i. 329–31. Coke’s successor (Montague) had to sign an agreement to Buckingham’s proposal before being appointed. Coke also declared that judicial offices could not be granted in reversion (11 Reports, Auditor Curie’s Case and sig. A 6) (115) II Institutes, p. 210. Cf. R. Robinson, ‘Anticipations under the Commonwealth of Changes in the Law’, Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, i (1907), p. 478 Page 33 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (116) III Institutes, p. 35. (117) Bacon, Works, xii. 93, xiv. 78–79 (118) Bacon, Works, xii. 399; G. Goodman, The Court of King James 1, ii.161–3 (119) C. W. James, Chief Justice Coke, his family and descendants at Holkham (1929), p. 40 (120) H.M.C., Seventh Report, Appendix, i.548 (121) C.S.P.D., 1629–31, p. 490. James had been told in 1616 that Coke ‘would be accounted the martyr of the commonwealth’ if punished (Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 11) (122) Roger Coke, Detection of the Court and State of England, i. 309 (123) II Institutes, p. 746; C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace (1955), p. 430 (124) Mr. B. S. Manning suggests that C. J. Rolle’s Abridgment (published posthumously in 1668) ‘came near to being a digest of the whole law’ (Manning, ‘The Nobles, the People and the Constitution’, P. and P., No. 9, p. 55). Rolle was a vocal M.P. from the sixteen-twenties, and a Parliamentarian in the civil war. He was a member of the Council of State after the execution of Charles I (125) G. L. Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachussetts (New York, 1960), pp. 120–35 (126) Bacon, Works, xiii. 95 (127) Hobbes, English Works, vi. 62. Cf. Coke’s hope, in 1628, that he would not have ‘to live under the law of convenience and discretion’ (Judson, Crisis of the Constitution, p. 242) (128) N.R.S. iv. 79; L.J. iii. 762; II Institutes, pp. 36, 63; Lords ‘Journals, iii, p. 762. Cf. Ralegh’s distinction between a ‘Turk-like’ and an absolute monarchy (see p. 136 above) (129) Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 9562. Coke may have said ‘will have no saving’ [of sovereign power]. It comes to the same thing. 12 and 13 Reports, published during the Interregnum, deal largely with questions of royal prerogative (130) C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1961), p. 402 (131) Holdsworth, History of English Law, v. 433 (132) Bacon, Works, xiii. 95; cf. pp. 90–91
Page 34 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (133) IV Institutes, pp. 97–98 (134) Ibid., cap. XLVIII-XLIX;12 Reports, pp. 50–56 (135) II Institutes, pp. 582–3; IV Institutes, pp. 245–6; 12 Reports, pp. 50–56. But Coke defended the legality and utility of Star Chamber (IV Institutes, pp. 62–63). We have seen how he criticized the Court of Admiralty and the Commissioners for Sewers. Cf. also II Institutes, p. 280—against the Commission for Defective Titles (136) IV Institutes, pp. 290, 319–20 (137) II Institutes, pp. 601 –18 (138) 5 Reports, Of the Kings Ecclesiasticall law, passim; IV Institutes, pp. 321– 45 (139) II Institutes, p. 614 (140) See my Society and Puritanism, p. 351, and references there cited (141) IV Institutes, pp. 324–35; 12 Reports, pp. 20, 49–50, 59–62, 69, 84–86, 88– 89; cf. Bacon, Works (1826), vi. 439–40 (142) Bacon to James I, 11 November, 1615 (Works, xiii. 90). Cf. G. W. Prothero, Select Statutes and…Documents, 1558–1625 (1906), pp. 431–3 for the Commission, and p. 305 for the Commons’ petition on behalf of husbands (143) Gardiner, History of England, ii. 129 (144) Bacon, Works, xiii. 95. Coke ‘as it were purposely laboured to derogate much from the rights of the Church and dignity of churchmen ‘(Egerton’s Observations, pp. 1–2) (145) The Lord Coke His Speech and Charge, sig. G 2v; II Institutes, pp. 599–638 (146) 13 Reports, p. 10; M. H. Maguire, ‘The Attack of the Common Lawyers on the Oath ex officio’, in Essays…in Honor of C. H. Mcllwain (Harvard U.P., 1936), pp. 222–7, and references there cited. On prohibitions see II Institutes, pp. 601– 18 (147) II Institutes, pp. 364, 490, 639–64. Cf. my Economic Problems of the Church (1956), esp. pp. 127–8, 246–8. See also II Institutes, p. 491 (mortuaries) and pp. 625–7 (non-residence) (148) The Lord Coke His Speech and Charge, sig. G; 7 Reports, Preface (149) Clarendon, History of the Rebellion (1888), v. 512; Life (1759), i. 81, 138–9; Old Parliamentary History (1763), ix. 388–9 Page 35 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (150) The Lord Coke His Speech and Charge, passim, esp. sig. G 2. C. W. Johnson, in his Life of Sir Edward Coke (1837) quoted Roger Coke on Sir Edward’s love for the Church of England. This appears to amount to little more than a desire to prevent simony in presentation to livings C. W. Johnson (Op. cit., p. 372) (151) I owe this quotation from an unpublished fragment in Henry Marten’s papers in the Brotherton Library, Leeds, to the kindness of Professor C. M. Williams. Coke’s will was seized by the government in 1634 and has never been seen since. (152) Fuller, Church History (1842), iii. 128. For Travers and science see p. 247 below. (153) Bacon, Works, xiii. 77. (154) Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, p. 223. (155) Quoted by Lamont, Marginal Prynne, p. 15. (156) See pp. 210–11 above. (157) Holdsworth, History of English Law, v. 427–9. (158) II Institutes, p. 179. (159) I Institutes, p. 56b; 4 Reports, p. 72. (160) Ibid., sig. B iib; I Institutes, p. 97b. (161) I Institutes, p. 395. (162) 1 Reports, Preface to the Reader. (163) 3 Reports, sig. D 3b. (164) IV Institutes, p. 76; cf. Bacon, Works, xiii. 64. (165) 2 Reports, To the Learned Reader; 4 Reports, sig. B v. (166) 9 Reports, sig. C vi. (167) 4 Reports, sig. B v. (168) 8 Reports, sig. A iib (169) 2 Reports, To the Learned Reader. (170) 8 Reports, p. 169. (Interpretari et concordare leges legibus est optimus interpretandi modus.) Page 36 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (171) 2 Reports, p. 81; 10 Reports, p. 70. (Optimus legum interpretes consuetudo.) (172) 4 Reports, p. 21. (Consuetudo vincit communem legem.) (173) 11 Reports, p. 85. (In hiis, quae de jure communi omnibus conceduntur consuetudo alicuius patriae vel loci non est alleganda—except apparently that of London—see p. 208 above.) (174) , 1 Reports, p. 51. (175) 9 Reports, p. 22. (Lex Angliae non patitur absurdum.) (176) C. K. Allen, Law in the Making (1951), pp. 192–223; Sir T. Wilson, The State of England (1600) (ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany, xvi, 1936), p. 37. (177) I Institutes, p. 148. (178) Coke, A Book of Entries (1614), sig. a ix. (179) See T. F. T. Plucknett, ‘Bonham’s Case and Judicial Review’, Harvard Law Quarterly, xl. 35–36. (180) I Institutes, p. 272b. ‘The rules of the common law’ are ‘true touchstones to sever the pure gold from the dross and sophistications of novelties and new inventions’ (Ibid., p. 379b). (181) Ibid., pp. 394–5; cf. 7 Reports, sig. A vi. (182) I Institutes, p. 56b. (183) Coke, A Little Treatise of Baile and Mainprize (second ed., 1635), p. 31. (184) 9 Reports, p. 16. (Distinguenda sunt tempora, et concordabis leges.) Bacon had also advocated an historical approach (Works, v. 104). (185) For an example see Maguire, ‘The Attack of the Common Lawyers on the Oath ex officio’, p. 223. (186) 9 Reports, p. 110. (Plerumque dum proprietas verborum attenditur, sensus veritatis amittitur.) (187) I Institutes, pp. 283; cf. p. 38 lb, and 5 Reports, part ii, p. 4; 11 Reports, p. 34. (188) III Institutes, pp. 120–9. (189) 5 Reports, part II, p. 40. (Saepenumero necessitas vincit communem legem, et quod necessarium est, licitum est.) Page 37 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (190) N.R.S. v. 36. (191) Plucknett, ‘Bonham’s Case and Judicial Review’, p. 51; Van Vechten Veeder, ‘The English Reports, 1292–1865’, Harvard Law Quarterly, xv. 11. (192) Coke’s reply on Bonham’s Case, in Bacon’s Works (1826), vi. 441. (193) 9 Reports, sig. C iiib. The judicial review which Coke claimed for the common-law courts in Bagg’s Case (1615) developed after the abolition of Star Chamber (Jaffe and Henderson, op. cit., p. 359). (194) IV Institutes, p. 36. (195) See pp. 231–3 below. (196) I Institutes, p. 97b. (197) Ibid., p. 395: the phrase recurs. (198) 12 Reports, p. 65. (199) N.R.S. iii. 156; F. Thompson, Magna Carta: its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, p. 319; Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 372. (200) Cf. pp. 109, 165 above, 231, 233, 262 below. (201) Ed.Lady de Villiers, The Hastings Journal of 1621 (Camden Miscellany, xx, 1953), pp. 27–28, 31. (202) D’ Ewes, Journals, pp. 241–4; Lamont, Marginal Prynne, p. 89. (203) 7 Reports, p. 4 (Judex est lex loquens); I Institutes, p. 130a. (204) 10 Reports, p. 42. (Novum judicium non dat jus novum, sed declarat antiquum;…per juditium jus est noviter revelatum, quod diu fuit velatum.) (205) 3 Reports, sig. C. 2. (Lex orta est cum mente divina.). (206) Gough, Fundamental Law in English History, p. 38: for examples of the common law overruling statute in the interests of economic liberalism see G. L. Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–1688 (New York, 1912), i. 91. (207) Thompson, Magna Carta, p. 235; cf. 3 Reports, sig. E, and IV Institutes, p. 3. (208) 9 Reports, sig. vib; cf. p. 253 above. (209) Quoted in Van Vechten Veeder, ‘The English Reports, 1292–1865’, Harvard Law Review, xv. 12. Page 38 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (210) T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–60 (1961), p. 31. (211) Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, i. 34. (212) See Gough, Fundamental haw in English History, passim, esp. Chapter III. (213) J. Rushworth, The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1680), p. 703. John Thurloe in his turn was a pupil of St. John. (214) Judson, Crisis of the Constitution, pp. 247–8. The concept of fundamental law, F. D. Wormuth tells us, ‘does not occur until the end of Elizabeth’s reign’ (The Royal Prerogative, 1603–49 (1939), pp. 32–3). (215) ‘Beware of chronicle law reported in our annals’, Coke warned his readers, ‘for that will undoubtedly lead thee to error. ‘Monkish annalists were of course especially suspect. Chronicles should be trusted ‘in those things they have published concerning the antiquity and honour of the common laws’—for instance in associating them with Brutus and asserting that the laws of the ancient Britons were written and spoken in Greek (3 Reports, sig. C 3-D 3; cf. 8 Reports, To the Reader). Coke thought that Parliament existed before King Arthur, and that there were sheriffs before the Saxon invasions (9 Reports, sig. C-C ivb.). (216) 5 Reports, sig. A vb-A vi. (217) H. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (1944), pp. 40, 47–68. For Coke’s genuine belief in the importance of historical research for an understanding of the English constitution, see a letter of 1605 to Robert Cecil, quoted in Fussner, The Historical Revolution, p. 84. (218) Ed. L. Fox, English Historical Scholarship in the 16th and 17th centuries (1956), pp. 57–58; ed. E. Cardwell, Synodalia (1842), ii. 435; F. Thompson, Magna Carta, pp. 198, 221, 227, 279; Examinations of Henry Barrowe, John Greenwood and John Penrie (1593), sig. Dv. (219) Stowe MS. 367, f. 9v. quoted by J. N. Ball, The Parliamentary Career of Sir John Eliot (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1953), pp. 226–7 (220) ° II Institutes, p. 745; III Institutes, Proeme, sig. B 2v. (221) Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 419. (222) Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Everyman ed.), p. 112; ed. K. M. Burton, Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Thomas Lupset (1948), p. 174. (223) Ed. C. H. Firth, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow (1894), i. 246. (224) Coke, Compleat Copyholder (1644), p. 203: first published 1630. Page 39 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (225) J. C. Dawson, A History of Lay Judges (Harvard, 1960), pp. 232–3, 255–6. (226) R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the 16th Century (1912), pp. 124–5. To take an example from a different field, it was only in the year 1649 that the journeymen weavers had any chance of establishing it as ‘unreasonable’ ‘that such a number of men as 16 or more should have liberty to exercise a power over as many thousands without, nay against, their wills, consent, or election’ (A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney, English Economic History: Select Documents, 1914, p. 309). (227) W. Stoughton, An Assertion for true and Christian Church-Policie (Middelburg, 1604), pp. 368–9. Stoughton was one of the very few people before 1640 to defend the use of the word ‘democracy’, and to apply it to juries. He was in favour of handing all the business of the Church courts over to the commonlaw courts (Ibid., pp. 90–103). This treatise was reprinted in 1642. (228) The Compleat Copyholder, section 43. (229) M. James, Social Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930), p. 328. (230) The Souldiers Catechism, Composedfor the Parliaments Army (1644), p. 9. (231) See my Puritanism and Revolution, esp. pp. 75–87. (232) Wither, Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 215–16. (233) Winstanley Sabine, Works (ed. Sabine), p. 512. (234) John Jones, The Judges Judged out of their own Mouths (1650), pp. 55–56, 115–16. (235) Jones, The New Returna Brevium (1650), p. 15; cf. pp. 32–33. This pamphlet was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Cf. Jones, The Jurors Judges of Law and Fact (1650), pp. 14, 24–25, where Coke is cited for the argument that corrupt and mercenary lawyers cause civil wars and that jurors ought to be judges. Cf. also William Cole, A Rod for the Lawyers (1659), p. 11. (236) Jones, The Judges Judged, title-page and pp. 93–94. (237) Gregg, Freeborn John, p. 124. Cf. pp. 27–29, 68 above. (238) Cf. Overton, An Appeale, in D. M. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes (New York, 1944), esp. pp. 190–2. For Lilburne’s use of that most excellent of English lawyers, Sir Edward Cook’, see Legall Fundamental Liberties, in Haller and Davies, Leveller Tracts, p. 406, and D. B. Robertson, The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New York, 1951), pp. 129–30. For Wildman see A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (1938), p. 371.
Page 40 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (239) The Laws Discovery (1653), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), ii. 555. (240) G. B. Nourse, ‘Law Reform under the Commonwealth and Protectorate’, L.Q.R. lxxv. 525. (241) Several Draughts of Acts, in Somers’ Tracts (1809–15), vi. 177–245. (242) R. H. Whitelocke, Memoirs Biographical and Historical of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1860), p. 455. (243) Ed.T. Birch, Thurloe State Papers (1742), iii. 697. (244) Abbot, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iv. 274. (245) Burton ed Everyman, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 102. (246) Preface by R. W. (?W. Ryves, Culpeper’s quondam servant) to Culpepers School of Physic (1659), sig. A 7 (R. W. was arguing in favour of translating medical texts); Nickolls, Original Letters, pp. 100–1. See pp. 107–8 above. (247) J. Hare, Englands Proper and onely way to an Establishment in Honour, Freedom, Peace and Happinesse (1648), p. 6; cf. Some Advertisements for the new Election of Burgesses (1645), Somers Tracts (1748–51), i. 32–38. (248) J. Jones, The Crie of Bloud (1651), sig. A 5v, Epistle Dedicatory to Oliver Cromwell. For Massachusetts see pp. 218–19 above. (249) Jones, The Jurors Judges of haw and Fact, pp. 49–75. ‘Writing is but a handicraft taught a lawyer’ (Ibid., pp. 60–61). (250) P. Styles, ‘Politics and Historical Research’, in English Historical Scholarship in the 16th and 17th centuries (ed. Fox), p. 70. But cf. Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (1956), pp. 15–23. (251) Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iv. 487. (252) Bacon, Works, v. 88. (253) 4 Reports, sig. B iii; cf. Ill Institutes, Epilogue. (254) Bacon, Works, xiv. 242. (255) Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 246. (256) ‘Judges ought to remember’, Bacon had told them, ‘that their office is…to interpret law, and not to make law’ (Works, vi. 506).
Page 41 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Sir Edward Coke: Myth-Maker (257) Coke in the 1621 Parliament supported their protests against the interference of the commissioners for licensing ale-houses Commons’ Debates, 1621, ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Relf, and H. Simpson (N.R.S. iii. 43. vi. 54.) (258) See my Economic Problems of the Church, esp. Part III.
Access brought to you by:
Page 42 of 42
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Conclusion Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0006
Abstract and Keywords If one looks at the lives of Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke, they have curiously much in common. All tried to make careers in the royal service, all three obtained knighthoods, Bacon a peerage. Bacon and Coke were Privy Councillors. However under James all failed. Ralegh was condemned as a traitor and executed. Coke was dismissed from office. Bacon was perhaps the one whose ideas made least impact on the government he served; he was thrown to the wolves in the 1621 Parliament. Their disgrace, and the censorship exercised against Ralegh and Coke, no doubt added to their prestige: it certainly gave them leisure to write some of their most significant books. The book's search for intellectual origins has revealed no Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx; but it has perhaps suggested ways in which minds were being prepared for new courses, by men whose proffered services the old regime was unable to use. Keywords: Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx
This is the age where in all men’s souls are in a kind of fermentation, and the spirit of wisdom and learning begins to mount and free itself from those drossy and terrene impediments where with it has been so long clogged, and from the insipid phlegm and caput mortuum of useless notions in which it has endured so violent and long a fixation…. Methinks I see how all the old rubbish must be thrown away, and the rotten buildings be overthrown and carried away with so powerful an inundation. These are the days that must lay a new foundation of a more magnificent philosophy never to be overthrown.
Page 1 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion HENRY POWER, Experimental Philosophy (1664), p. 192. Power, yet another Halifax man, began writing this book in 1653. No man can rightly and successfully investigate the nature of anything in the thing itself; let him vary his experiments as laboriously as he will, he never comes to a resting-place, but still finds something to seek beyond. BACON, Works, iv. 17.
I IT IS ABSURD to try to discuss the intellectual origins of the English Revolution in relation only to Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke, even though I have tried to emphasize the extent of the interests and influence of all three. A full discussion would have to deal with far more topics than those I have here picked out. We should have to consider the way in which the Renaissance concept that true aristocracy consisted in virtue, not birth—a doctrine designed by the humanists to civilize the landed class—slowly merged into the Puritan concept of the oligarchy of the godly, which in the civil war period was used to justify the maintenance of revolutionary dictatorship by a minority against the mass of the gentry.1 (p.238) In the entourage of Thomas Cromwell a few daring spirits subverted the doctrine of degree by preaching the equality of man and advocating a career open to the talents.2 In the entourage of Oliver Cromwell these doctrines were put into practice. We find various intervening stages of the doctrine not only in the writings of a religious radical like John Ponet, who thought that aristocracy originated in popular appreciation of the virtuous, and whose works were reprinted in 1639 and 1642;3 but also in The Mirror for Magistrates, and works of men like Ralegh himself and his friends Spenser, Marlowe,4 and Chapman. Virtue makes honour, as the soul doth sense, And merit far exceeds inheritance,
Chapman wrote in 1595, in a poem dedicated to Matthew Roydon.5 The Puritan in An Humerous Dayes Mirth (1599) said that in religion there was no difference between estates.6 But it was an admirable character in The Gentleman Usher (1602) who drew political conclusions: Had all been virtuous men There never had been princes upon earth, And so no subject; all men had been princes. A virtuous man is subject to no prince, But to his soul and honour.7
Page 2 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion The point was not usually so clearly made, at least until the virtuous were free to organize themselves in the New Model Army. But in the English society where aristocracy still ruled, the disturbing doctrine of the superiority of virtue to birth had meanwhile often been expressed—among others by Robert Greene,8 Ben Jonson,9 John Webster,10 Robert Burton,11 George Wither,12 and John Milton.13 It was stressed by Puritans like William Perkins14 and Arthur Dent,15 by Sir John Eliot (p.239) writing in the Tower,16 by George Hakewill,17 by Thomas Beedome apropos Captain James,18 and by the Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford.19 Sprat in his History of the Royal Society declared that ‘traffic and commerce have given mankind a higher degree than any title of nobility’.20 Only in 1688 did the Tory dramatist Johnny Crowne put the sentiment into the mouth of a traitor.21 That is one line of thought which it would be interesting to work out. Another, perhaps of no less significance, is the influencing of feudal doctrines of contract by new commercial and legal ideas. The change was mediated in part by the Puritan contract theology of the Cambridge and City preachers, the Ramists Dudley Fenner and Perkins, Preston, Ames, Sibbes—and of John Dury. This came very near to suggesting that a bargain could be struck with God, and that He could be held to the letter of His bond: ‘as a rich man oppresseth a poor man, and gets out of him all that he is worth, he leaves him nothing, he plays the extortioner with him’.22 If God could be held to his promises, it was not as seditious as James thought to dispute the omnipotence of kings.23 Part of God’s covenant, Hakewill tells us, is the orderly and perpetual working of the universe.24 The exact processes by which the all-pervading contractualism of seventeenth-century thought evolved still await their historian. It has frequently been suggested that the covenants which members of sectarian congregations signed between themselves and with their minister influenced the evolution of social contract ideas in political theory.25 Men like Roger Williams and John Cotton emphasized the parallels between a congregational church and a City company.26 But ideas drawn from the law of property may have been equally relevant, and at an earlier date. Thus in 1593 we find Horatio Palavicino explaining to (p.240) his patron the Earl of Shrewsbury that a contract overrode his loyalty to ‘an honourable personage whom I greatly reverence’.27 So feudal principles were undermined. Hobbes was soon to define justice as the keeping of covenants—and no more: where there was no covenant there could be no injustice. A third relevant idea was that the end of the world was at hand. Fifth Monarchists in the sixteen-fifties found this a stimulus to direct revolutionary action, just as throughout the Middle Ages the poorer classes in the towns had always been ready to embrace the idea when preached to them in time of crisis. But in the century of crisis before the civil war the imminence of doomsday had been announced by many perfectly respectable thinkers, including Fulke Greville, Beard, and Ralegh:28 it had been popularized by innumerable ballads. Page 3 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion An extreme conservative like Bishop Goodman, whose book on the corruption of nature was the occasion for George Hakewill’s defence of the Moderns, was so upset by the geographical discoveries, the new astronomy, and the new morality that he thought they could only presage the destruction of the world. Men as different from Goodman as Joseph Meade (‘a curious florist, an accurate herbalist thoroughly versed in the book of Nature, a keen student of anatomy’), Napier (the inventor of logarithms), and Francis Potter (later Fellow of the Royal Society) occupied themselves in setting a date for it.29 Sir Isaac Newton was working on the subject for most of his adult life.30 The interest was shared by Lord Brooke and Milton,31 who expected Christ’s coming in the near future. So did those simpler souls in the Parliamentary Army who in 1643 thought that He would come to destroy King Charles and that the Earl of Essex was John the Baptist;32 or those who followed Venner the wine-cooper in 1657 and 1661. A full account of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution would have to discuss the ‘liberal’ constitutional ideas which descend from Fortescue through Christopher St. Germain, Thomas Starkey, and (p.241) Sir Thomas Smith. The latter touches our story at many points. The son of a protestant sheep farmer, he himself purchased monastic lands, and disliked ‘conjurors and mass-mongers’. At Cambridge he won a reputation as a mathematician: he later got Walsingham to send him medical books and mathematical instruments from Paris. Smith was interested in astronomy, having Copernicus in his library, and making globes with his own hands; and also in astrology, navigation, alchemy, medicine, economics. He had a laboratory in his house, and conducted chemical experiments together with Sidney’s mother. He met and discussed with Ramus, and had his works in his library.33 Smith, like Dee, wanted England to adopt the new Gregorian calendar. He was a defender of the use of the vernacular, and himself (Ben Jonson thought) had a prose style comparable to those of Ralegh and Bacon. Like Ralegh, Smith was a proponent of religious toleration, an admirer of the yeomanry, an advocate of colonization, as well as setting new architectural fashions.34 Like Bacon, Smith favoured a career open to the talents. Like Coke, he disliked wardship and torture. There were eleven editions of his Commonwealth of England between 1583 and 1640: Sir John Eliot possessed a manuscript copy, and it was paraphrased by Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.35 Smith founded two mathematics readerships at Queens’ College, Cambridge: his instructions anticipate Gresham College’s criticism of contemporary lecturing practice. Smith links the radicalism of the reign of Edward VI with the radicalism of the Revolution. A fifth trend is very difficult to assess because it runs underground. In 1645–6 the Leveller Richard Overton published pamphlets which refer to, and expect his readers to be aware of, the Marprelate pamphlets which had a wide popularity in 1588–9,36 The latter were suppressed, and those believed to be the authors were hunted down and executed. It may well be that Marprelate’s irreverent wit appealed to an erastian anti-clerical public which was not in the usual sense of Page 4 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion the word ‘Puritan’, but which shared Puritanism’s enemies: the public which had enjoyed Simon Fish and Bishop Bale. If one wanted to look for links (p.242) between Marprelate and Overton, one might find them in the pamphlets of Thomas Scott and John Bastwick, which had to be published abroad and smuggled into England. Even the posthumous Table Talk of the sophisticated Selden has something of the same robust and brutal anticlericalism. The general effects of early Stuart censorship also deserve more serious consideration. The generation brought up by Foxe to think of printing as a divine invention for scattering darkness and spreading light was encouraged by Bacon to see printing as an example of the superiority of the industrial craftsman over the academic scholar.37 How would such men regard censorship? It was not only because of their suppression of lecturers that the bishops were believed to want to bring in darkness ‘that they may the easier sow their tares while it was night’.38 Laud was alleged to have suppressed Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Lewis Bayley’s Practice of Piety.39 Many were the complaints of ‘tyrannical duncery’ in the sixteen-thirties; many mute inglorious Areopagiticas appeared at about the same time as Milton’s.40 I might, again, have said more about the rise of economic theory, starting with Gresham’s Law. Thomas Mun knew that private vices might be public benefits, and advanced at least one iron law: ‘So much treasure only will be brought in or carried out of a commonwealth as the foreign trade doth over- or underbalance in value.’ He advocated a Navigation Act, in common with Ralegh and many M.P.s in the 1621 Parliament.41 Other merchants, like Wheeler, Malynes, and Misselden discussed economic theory in their practical treatises. Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Henry Spelman seem to have understood the nature of inflation.42 Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke advocated free trade, and the two former contributed to the idea of law in the social sciences. Only the intellectual stimulus of the Revolution was needed to create a new science. Many reasons led Marx, the Bacon of sociology, to call Petty ‘the father of English political economy’.43 Petty shared his labour theory of value with Winstanley and Hobbes, his economic approach to politics with Winstanley and Harrington.44 But his emphasis on division of (p.243) labour and his use of statistics were more original, as was his assertion of the principle that ‘making civil positive laws against the laws of nature’ was vain and fruitless.45 Petty and John Graunt, the founders of statistics, were Parliamentarians as well as Baconians and Fellows of the Royal Society: Graunt’s method derived from the ‘mathematics of…shop-arithmetic’, from London science, as well as from Bacon.46 The controversies concerning the position of women, which raged before and during the civil war, would also be relevant to our discussion. The economic processes which gave a new social significance to small merchants and artisans increased the number of wives who shared in control of the household productive unit. Spinsters too benefited: it is during the lives of Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke that the word ceases to be restricted to female spinners and comes to Page 5 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion mean any unmarried woman, so obvious was it that such a woman could find employment in the clothing industry.47 Professor Jordan in his study of charity during this period concluded that women possessed far more ‘disposable wealth and certainly far greater independence of judgement than has commonly been supposed’. In London the proportion of women benefactors increased rapidly between 1621 and 1650.48 One consequence of these economic developments was the Puritan doctrine of marriage, emphasizing the wife as helpmeet and partner in the family jointstock, whilst insisting on childreni’s right to choose whom they would marry. The guides to godliness, of which so many were published during our period, as well as the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, did much to popularize the ideal of monogamous wedded love.49 Another consequence was a revival of traditional complaints about London citizens’ wives dressing above their station, which this time gave rise to a pro- and anti-feminist literature. The drama of the time reflects this interest in the position of women. The playwright who wrote The Taming of the Shrew also created Benedick and Beatrice. (p.244) The popular theatre for which Shakespeare wrote was in general in favour of the improvement in women’s status which had taken place. It was the coterie theatre, the haunt of courtiers and Inns of Court men, that had a cynical and contemptuous attitude towards women.50 There were many female translators and authors, including Bacon’s mother, Sidney’s sister and niece. Some of the dates are interesting. Jane Anger her protection for women appeared in 1589. Willobie his Avisa was published in 1594, ostensibly a poem in praise of middle-class women and of bourgeois and Puritan virtue, contrasting the behaviour of aristocratic and court ladies. Some think this book was an allegory written by a member of Ralegh’s circle, possibly Matthew Roydon.51 In 1609 an Oxford don, William Heale, attacked the practice of wifebeating in An Apologiefor Women, and made a reasoned plea for women’s rights, frequently quoting Sidney’s Arcadia in doing so. He was expelled from his fellowship at Exeter College next year. One hopes that the reason alleged, absenteeism, was the true one. In 1620 appeared Haec Vir, a comprehensive reply to those who would have condemned women of all classes to dress in the way traditionally held appropriate to their rank. It broadened out into a fervent plea for freedom from the petty bondage of foolish custom. ‘Custom is an idiot’, said the author in words that curiously anticipate Tom Paine; ‘and whosoever dependeth wholly upon him, without the discourse of reason, will…become a slave indeed to contempt and censure.’ On lines reminiscent of Spenser and Ralegh, the pamphlet argued from the mutability of all nature that a right to change is essential for social progress. This ‘Areopagitica of the London woman’, as Professor L. B. Wright called it, proclaimed that women ‘are as free born as men, have as free election and as free spirits’.52
Page 6 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Professor Wright, from whose admirable Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England I have taken many of these facts, comments that the feminist writers of 1616–20 present the problem with a clarity of logic and a modernity hitherto unknown. There was, he suggests, a serious undercurrent of intelligent thinking upon women’s status in a new commercial age. And this inevitably had political implications. Many bourgeois writers, Professor Wright says, vigorously defended women against the cynicism of the coterie dramatists and cavalier poets.53 Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, advised his son not to educate his daughters.54 (p.245) Comenius favoured the equal education of boys and girls: in Bacon’s New Atlantis women as well as men acted as technical assistants to the philosophers. Professor Notestein has testified to the rapid increase of literacy among women in this period:55 their share in opinion-forming should not be discounted. There is a connexion between women and radicalism, as there always had been between women and sectarianism. Women were far more determinedly secular in their charity than men.56 Many of the religious sects allowed women to participate in church government. In the émigré congregation in Rotterdam, to which Hugh Peter was called in 1633, both sexes voted.57 Mr. Thomas has shown the importance of this for England in the revolutionary decades, when women preachers were succeeded by women petitioners and women demonstrators.58 As early as 1605 Joseph Hall had depicted the imaginary commonwealth of Viraginia or She-Land as a sort of democracy, ruled by majority vote and perpetual sovereign Parliaments.59 Fifty years later, after experiencing just such horrors, the author of The Whole Duty of Man said that many men had been led into ‘schism and sedition’ by the same wiles as had induced Adam to eat the apple.60 The Revolution did a great deal for women. Civil marriage was—briefly— established; the Quakers gave women equality in practice as well as in theory; the Muggletonians held out the prospect that we shall all be males in heaven. The first professional women painters, and the first women to publish music, date from the Interregnum, as do the first poetesses of any significance: the first professional actresses and women of letters from just after it. And when the first woman novelist, Mrs. Aphra Behn, wrote her masterpiece, Oroonoko, about Ralegh’s Guiana, the only white colonist whom she praised was Colonel Marten, brother of the republican and regicide Henry Marten.
II But these are imponderables. Easier to estimate is the intellectual stimulus which Englishmen received from outside. The translation of the (p.246) classics into the vernacular, at which so many men laboured in Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns and which the Earl of Leicester patronized, put the republican ideas of Greece and Rome into the hands of the middle and lower classes, excluded from political influence. Hobbes was not the only one to think that ‘the Page 7 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion allowing of such books to be publicly read’ was of scarcely less revolutionary significance than the translation of the Bible.61 Professor Fink has demonstrated the influence of Venice on political and constitutional thought, from the fifteenthirties when Thomas Starkey suggested that there might be advantages in reducing the English king’s power to that of the Venetian Doge62 down to the poem Britannia and Rawleigh (c.1675), attributed to Marvell. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a large number of books were published on the Venetian constitution.63 Sir Thomas Smith, anticipating Bacon and Ralegh in this too, admired Venice, though he recognized that the English monarchy was ‘far more absolute than…the dukedom of Venice’.64 Sir Philip Sidney thought highly of the Venetian constitution,65 and Bacon regarded Venice as ‘the wisest state of Europe’.66 Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, on the other hand, declared that James I would become a mere Doge if he could not determine in cases where there was no authority or precedent.67 In 1644 several M.P.s asked the Venetian Ambassador for an account of his country’s constitution; in 1647 George Wither recommended its adoption.68 But Venice was influential in other spheres as well as the constitutional. On Venetian territory foreign Protestants could live unmolested by the Inquisition. Venice’s erastianism was praised by Selden, its tolerance by D’Ewes.69 The republic’s controversy with the Papacy made it popular in England. ‘All the world knows they [the Venetians] care not threepence for the Pope’, said Selden.70 The writings of Paolo Sarpi were (p.247) translated into English and widely read: Coke had one of them in his library.71 The Calvinist William Bedell, an Emmanuel man, was intimate with Sarpi.72 Sir Edwin Sandys, leader of Parliamentary opposition under James I, may have written his Europae Speculum at Venice, with Sarpi’s help.73 The Puritan Thomas Goodwin spoke of Venice with approval.74 John Wheeler in 1601 commended the Venetian nobility for not disdaining to take part in trade.75 Forty years later Lewes Roberts held up Venice as an example of economic liberalism to the Long Parliament.76 The Venetian republic was also a centre of scientific influence since it contained the University of Padua, the most liberal in Europe (there were no religious tests) and the one which contributed most to the rise of modern science. Both Vesalius and Galileo had been safe in their unorthodoxy so long as they remained at Padua.77 Sarpi corresponded with Bacon and Gilbert, and may have influenced Harvey.78 Sir Thomas Smith studied law at Padua, Sir Philip Sidney astronomy and mathematics. Sir Francis Walsingham studied there during his Marian exile. English medical students of more than ordinary ability went to Padua to get the training that Oxford and Cambridge could not give them. The number of Paduan degrees among those on the roll of the College of Physicians began to diminish only after 1665. Lawrence Wright, later Cromwell’s physician, studied there.79 Robert Child, one of the early New England scientists, a friend of Hartlib and associate of the founders of the Royal Society, took his doctorate of medicine at Padua.80 So it is (p.248) hardly surprising that high-flying Page 8 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion royalists, from Bancroft to Filmer, anathematized Venice;81 that Sir Henry Savile visited and studied the republic in 1582;82 that Milton spent a month there in 1639; and that Dury recommended for imitation the encouragement of science and inventions by ‘the wise state of Venice, the most ancient and best settled republican society of the world’.83 There is a good book to be written on the overall influence of Venice and Padua on pre-revolutionary England. Even more important as an intellectual influence than the honorary Protestants of Venice were the fighting Protestants of France and the Netherlands. Whether or not Davila’s History of the Civil Wars of France really was Mr. Hampden’s vade-mecum, we can find in it many ideas which were to be influential in England, from Sir John Eliot onwards.84 Davila’s view of history, like Ralegh’s, was providential.85 Hampden was accused of using the pretence of religion to justify Parliament’s cause because ‘the people would not be drawn to assist us’ otherwise.86 So, Davila said, did Coligny; so, Davila tells us, Henry of Navarre thought the Ligueurs did.87 The Huguenots were careful to attack evil councillors only, not the king himself.88 Sir Philip Warwick said that ‘our new statesmen,…well acquainted with the history of D’Avila’, learnt from him how to manufacture or at least encourage plots against themselves.89 The Huguenots too had realized the importance of making their enemies appear the aggressors, relying on popular rumours and panic to support them in their ostensibly defensive position.90 They were skilful in their use of preachers as propagandists, and of the printing press.91 They financed their war by selling Church property.92 The Catholic Ligueurs used the name ‘Cavalier’;93 Marlowe made the Guise family apply the word ‘Puritan’ to the Huguenots.94 Cromwell in 1657 might have been copying the dilatory tactics of Henry IV in 1590.95 If the politicians studied Davila, Fairfax much admired the Huguenot (p.249) D’Aubigné’s Histoire Universelle;96 and many other books on the French wars, including one attributed to Ramus,97 helped to form English opinion before and during the Revolution.98 One of these, Arthur Golding’s translation of DuplessisMornay’s A Woorke concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (1587), was alleged to have been started by Sir Philip Sidney; the first edition was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester, that of 1604 to Prince Henry.99 Sidney also translated part of the Biblical epic of the Huguenot Du Bartas. The full translation by Joshua Sylvester, Groom of the Chamber to Prince Henry, entitled Devine Weekes and Workes (1605), was a best-seller which contained many political allusions as well as a good deal of popular science.100 Wentworth, on the other hand, learnt the lessons of the French wars from Matthieu’s Derniers Troubles, a work which favoured absolutism.101 The most obvious source of intellectual influence came from the Revolt of the Netherlands. Under Leicester’s patronage A Tragicall Historie of the troubles and Civile Warres of the lowe Countries was translated in 1583 by Thomas Stocker, as propaganda for English intervention on the Dutch side.102 The cause Page 9 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion of the rebels seemed to many Englishmen to be their own cause.103 Henry Robinson observed in 1644 that when men were asked in what country they would choose to be born if not their own, they replied ‘in Holland’.104 Ralegh and Bacon expressed warm admiration for Dutch political and economic organization, and especially for the concentration of wealth there in the hands of the industrious classes rather than of the nobility and gentry.105 Coke also praised the economic liberalism of the Netherlands.106 Citizens of London and East Anglia visited the middle-class republic of the Netherlands,107 as their betters went on the grand tour. Sir (p.250) Thomas Gresham modelled London’s Royal Exchange on Antwerp’s Bourse: he had been an enthusiast for the Dutch rebel cause.108 The Puritans, Nashe observed in 1592, ‘care not if all the ancient houses were rooted out, so that, like the burgomasters of the Low Countries, they might share the government amongst them as states’.109 Hobbes, three generations later, in discussing the origins of the civil war, said that the citizens of London and other great trading towns envied the Dutch their prosperity, and ‘were inclined to think that the like change of government would to them produce the like prosperity’.110 Thomas Scott had said in 1622 that the best of what Plato and More ‘fancied might be’ existed in the Netherlands, (p.251) ‘after a most exact and corrected copy’.111 Use of the word ‘patriot’ to describe someone opposed to court and courtiers seems to derive from Dutch examples.112 Men could have learnt from the Dutch Revolt the tactic of professing loyalty to a king whilst attacking his ministers, of distinguishing between King and commonwealth,113 of undermining a government by withholding taxation,114 the use of theories of natural law and contract, the modern use of the word ‘state’.115 It was because Dorislaus vindicated the Dutch for ‘retaining their liberties against the violence of Spain’ that Matthew Wren complained of his history lectures at Cambridge.116 Dr. Alexander Leighton, in a work probably published in the Netherlands, pointed out to the Parliament of 1628 that the Dutch had got rid of bishops and prospered;117 Robert Burton noted that they excluded the aristocracy ‘and will admit none to bear office but such as are learned’. He praised Dutch industry and held it out as a model for Englishmen.118 John Goodwin in 1649 said that ‘a people…formerly governed by kings may very lawfully turn these servants of theirs out of doors; as…the Hollanders of late have done’.119 In consequence of having ‘revolted from their master’, Henry Parker added, the Netherlands ‘prosper and flourish beyond all in Europe’.120 Philip Hunton (Provost of Durham College), the Levellers, Milton, and William Dell all quoted the Dutch Revolt as an example establishing the right of resistance in the name of nature and reason.121 M.P.s in 1604 and many others noted with approval what they took to be the economic and social consequences of the Revolt;122 men praised Dutch practice, whether in fishing or farming, or in their low rate of customs.123 M.P.s observed Page 10 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion enviously in 1610 that when taxes were raised in the Netherlands ‘they pay to themselves’.124 Their religious toleration was widely acclaimed as soon as men could write freely on such a subject; the economic advantages of toleration were not least stressed.125 For Hugh Peter, William Petty, William Cole, and many others, the Dutch offered models of social and legal reform.126 Dutch styles in art began to become influential in England from the early seventeenth century.127 Again the enemies of Dutch principles and practice are predictable: James I, Charles I, Sir Robert Filmer, Sir Thomas Aston.128 No one, I believe, has so far properly investigated the extent to which Englishmen dissatisfied with Oxford and Cambridge sent their sons to Leiden University, or what Leiden’s influence on English thought was. The first student in Leiden’s Faculty of Medicine, and the first English graduate of the university, was John James, Leicester’s physician. Later (p.252) students included Geoffrey Whitney the poet, John Robinson, John Burges, Sir William Paddy, Dury, Haak, Ames, Petty, William Bridge, Francis Rous, Theodore Diodati, John Bastwick, Robert Child, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Collins.129 Leiden soon came to share first place with Padua as a centre for students wanting a more modern medical education than they could get in England.130 Astronomy, botany, and chemistry were also better taught there than anywhere in Great Britain.131 Sir Philip Sidney corresponded with Charles de l’Escluse, Leiden Professor of Botany.132 Dorislaus was a Leiden doctor of civil law before he came to Cambridge. Vossius, who had been Brooke’s first preference for the lectureship, was also of Leiden. But Leiden, where Cartwright was offered a chair of divinity in 1580, also attracted theological malcontents: hence James I’s interest in the heresies of Vorstius in 1612. If this Arminian was not dismissed, James threatened, ‘we shall be enforced strictly to inhibit the youth of our dominions from repairing to so infected a place as is the University of Leiden’.133 It would have been a difficult threat to carry out. Between 1575 and 1600 110 Englishmen matriculated at Leiden; 105 between 1600 and 1619; 95 in the ensuing decade, 145 between 1630 and 1639 and 300 in the decade of civil war. After the purge of Oxford and Cambridge the number fell sharply to 70 between 1650 and 1659, rising again to 85 in the decade after the Restoration.134
III As well as the specific influences of the French religious wars and the Revolt of the Netherlands, we should note the more general effect of Calvinist political theory. From the start there had been an unresolved contradiction in Protestant political thinking. The ultimate logic of Luther’s ‘priesthood of all believers’ when applied to politics was an (p.253) individualist anarchy. Luther himself backed away from this logic when confronted with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, but he never arrived at a satisfactory formulation for a state church which could contain consciences saying ‘Here I stand so help me God I can no other’. Secular Page 11 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion authority, Luther said, must ‘be held in respect by good people, although they do not require its services’.135 This begged every possible question: who are the good people, how can they be known, is there no limit to the respect they must show for the state? Calvin’s political theory is little less ambiguous; but he made an essential distinction, which his successors elaborated into a theory of resistance. Revolt is never justified except when led by people who are themselves magistrates—i.e. responsible citizens, men of property with a stake in the country, whether they be princes of the blood in France, the StatesGeneral in the Netherlands or Parliament in England. ‘Private men’ should never take the law into their own hands, but should tarry for the magistrate.136 This theory neatly ruled out revolt by the many-headed monster or by Anabaptists: and yet preserved society and the Church from the absolute subordination to the secular power which had been Lutheranism’s fate after the Peasants’ Revolt. England was not exempt from the dualism of Protestant thought, or from fear of the many-headed monster. From Tyndale to Filmer there is a continuous trend of political thought which stresses the need for a strong central authority to curb the individualist anarchy which the priesthood of all believers might appear to foster. The Pilgrimage of Grace taught Henry VIII’s government the dangers of egalitarian social theories: The Homily on Wilful Disobedience no less than Filmer saw monarchy, the saviour of social order, in perpetual danger of being crucified between two thieves, the Pope and the people.137 But Mary’s reign demonstrated the risks of concentrating power in the hands of a prince who might not be godly enough; and from the time of Ponet, Goodman, and Knox onwards Calvinist theories began to have their attractions for Protestant but propertied Englishmen. These theories gave substance to the alliance which formed in Elizabeth’s reign between Puritans and Parliament. But, as Archbishop Whitgift darkly informed the Presbyterian Cartwright, ‘the people are commonly bent to novelties and to (p.254) factions, and most ready to receive that doctrine that seemeth to be contrary to the present state, and that inclineth to liberty’.138 We must always emphasize the dual function of Calvinist political theory. When Robert Browne threatened to appeal to the many-headed monster by his slogan of ‘reformation without tarrying for any’ he was directly attacking the body of orthodox Puritan thought which wished to tarry for the magistrate, to wait for agreement between Queen and Parliament.139 Similarly when John Field said ‘it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire’, he was on the eve of losing the support of moderate men.140 But men had to tarry a long time for Elizabeth; and James showed no signs of abandoning her position. Meanwhile the tightly knit Calvinist organization, cemented by the Calvinist discipline, produced an admirably effective revolutionary force.141 Successful Calvinist-led revolt in Scotland and the Netherlands, and the long-drawn-out struggles first in France and then in Bohemia and the Palatinate, increased the international prestige of Calvinist theories of revolt. Buchanan and the Huguenot political thinkers had a Page 12 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion considerable influence on the Sidney group, Ralegh, and many others down to Rutherford and Milton.142 In 1648 the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos was published in an English translation. Paraeus had followers in Oxford, where Laud took the lead in opposing him, for once in complete harmony with James I. Milton used Paraeus in The Reason of Church Government and in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.143 John Lilburne studied the works of Beza.144 Those who equated Calvinist political theory with republicanism—from the hostile Bancroft to the friendly Calibute Downing—were pushing logic further than the Puritans themselves would.145 Yet in the sixteen-forties a cool secularist like Henry Parker has very close affinities with Calvinist political ideas. A right of revolution if authorized by (p.255) the lesser magistrates was written into the coronation oath proposed by the Isle of Wight terms offered to Charles I in 1648.146 Milton reminded Presbyterian critics of the execution of Charles I that the Independents had only acted on the principles of Calvin, Buchanan, and Paraeus.147 Henry Nevile, Harringtonian republican, who was so little of a Puritan that in 1659 the House of Commons debated at length a charge against him of atheism and blasphemy, nevertheless recalled with cheerful condescension that it was ‘honest John Calvin’ who ‘taught some of us to deliver ourselves from the tyrannical yoke’.148 Nevile wanted to epater the godly; but his point was historically accurate. The revolution of 1688, though entirely secular, was a happy example of a Calvinist revolution, led by the magistrate, in which no organized group emerged to express the discontent of the lower orders.
IV If we look at the lives of Ralegh, Bacon, and Coke, they have curiously much in common. All tried to make careers in the royal service, all three obtained knighthoods, Bacon a peerage. Bacon and Coke were Privy Councillors. Yet under James all failed. Ralegh was condemned as a traitor in 1604, executed in 1618. Coke was dismissed from office in 1616. Bacon—who held on longest, since he could not conceive of his programme being implemented except by royal favour—was perhaps the one whose ideas made least impact on the government he served; he was thrown to the wolves in the 1621 Parliament. Their disgrace, and the censorship exercised against Ralegh and Coke, no doubt added to their prestige: it certainly gave them leisure to write some of their most significant books. Their attempts to work with the government may testify to ambition, or to miscalculation, or both, on their part; but we must also see them as reacting to that crise de conscience of the early seventeenth century which I discussed above.149 Each in his different way shows something of the ‘double heart’ which is so familiar in the literature of the time: Bacon, ‘the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind’; Coke, the brutal persecutor of Ralegh and the courageous defender of liberty; Ralegh, a bundle of paradoxes, monopolist defender of free trade, courtier and philosopher, royal favourite and
Page 13 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion constitutionalist, a (p.256) man who is himself the most conspicuous example of the failure to master passion by reason which he so bewailed in history. Before we condemn any of them for subordinating ideals to ambition (or in the case of Coke, for discovering ideals after ambition had been thwarted), we should recall that the governments of the old regime were far from monolithic. Prince Henry (and in 1624 Buckingham and Prince Charles) played the part of leader of the opposition which in the eighteenth century was to become traditional for the heir to the throne. Henry and Secretary Winwood were Ralegh’s friends, and Winwood stood by Coke in 1616;150 Coke went in and out of the Privy Council from 1616 to 1625, even after he had in the 1621 Parliament led the opposition as a Privy Councillor. Cranfield failed to give the government unity of purpose and action: Laud and Strafford came too late, and anyway never succeeded in overcoming faction. This disunity was an important factor in delaying the evolution of revolutionary ideas. Men genuinely believed, down to 1629 and even later, that only evil councillors stood between the King and an acceptable policy. So there was no republican political theory, at least that we know of; there were none who said that sovereignty should reside in Parliament to the exclusion of the King.151 Very few before 1640 even differentiated between King and commonwealth. For most of the sixteenth century the only alternatives in fact to the sovereignty of the Tudors had been feudal anarchy or civil war or foreign conquest. When under the Stuarts other possibilities arose, there was a time-lag in political thinking before the theory of Parliamentary sovereignty was formulated. ‘The truth is,’ said George Lawson, ‘they were not unanimously resolved what they should build up, though they were agreed well enough in pulling down.’152 Only after civil war had broken out did men turn from the King to the sovereignty first of Parliament and then of the people: from the Laudian state Church first to an erastian establishment and then to the sects. Our search for intellectual origins has revealed no Rousseau or Karl Marx; but it has perhaps suggested ways in which minds were being prepared for new courses, by men whose proffered services the old regime was unable to use. Once Laud’s power had gone, Parliament ordered the publication of Coke’s suppressed works: private enterprise (p.257) saw to it that Bacon’s and Ralegh’s books were printed in ever-increasing numbers. None of our three was a wholly original thinker, not even Bacon: their function was to state clearly what other men were groping towards, which is the definition of an historical great man. Ralegh, the most sensitive of the three, in his poetry expresses Hamlet’s sense that the time is out of joint. The frustration, the sense of great potentialities and small achievements, was only in part personal and temperamental; it was also an expression of the spirit of Ralegh’s age, for whom Death was the Leveller. Ralegh faces both ways: together with this poignant sense of transitoriness, and of the dead weight of the past, there is Page 14 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion his conception of historical law, the optimism and forward look of his belief in private enterprise, in empire, in Parliament.153 Bacon similarly summed up one of the ways in which traditional authority was being undermined. He caught the optimism of the merchants and craftsmen, confident in their new-found ability to control their environment, including the social and political environment: and their contempt for the old scholasticism. Coke too contributed to the confidence of the men of property in themselves and in private enterprise; and in the years of national disgrace he revived and dignified the patriotic legend. All three provided ideas for the men who hitherto had existed only to be ruled, but who in the sixteen-forties would help to take over the government. Together with the Puritan sense of destiny and emphasis on self-help, they prepared men for revolution. ‘Not to try’, Bacon said, ‘is a greater hazard than to fail.’154 Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke shared common enemies with the Puritans—the dissolute, shallow, increasingly pro-papist court, the pro-Spanish and bribed section of the aristocracy; lack of government interest in or support for educational projects or for overseas expansion; use of historical research to free the government from Parliament and common law; interference with private enterprise; prelatical duncery. Literary historians are becoming conscious of a divergence of attitudes in the early seventeenth century. On the one hand, Puritanism, the new science, optimistic belief in progress, and Parliamentarianism; on the other, neopopery, traditional medieval theology, sceptical pessimism, and royalism. Iconoclasm, austerity, introspection, and insular patriotism, plus an internationalism of Protestant peoples on the one hand; sensuousness, (p.258) courtly magnificence, rhetorical drama, and an internationalism of counter-reformation monarchies on the other.155 Of course the lines were never clear-cut: but the tendencies can be traced. The attitudes which each individual adopted, in every sphere, would depend on all sorts of private and psychological considerations. A man like Nashe, bitterly jealous of the ‘many base men, that wanted those parts which I had’, and yet ‘had wealth at command’, asked himself, ‘Have I more wit than all these?…Am I better born? am I better brought up?…And yet am I a beggar?’ He threw himself into the controversies against the new men and their ideas, whether Puritan, Ramistic, or scientific.156 On the other side, the men whose economic and philanthropic activities were transforming their society—from the merchant prince who founded the Royal Exchange and Gresham College to the smaller men who endowed scholarships, almshouses, apprenticeships, and marriage portions for virtuous spinsters—such men might enjoy seeing doubt cast on the usefulness of mere scholars and mere courtiers. The ideas we have been examining offered points of intellectual contact for those dissatisfied with the old ways, just as the Royal Exchange and Gresham College, ‘a kind of Exchange for scholars’,157 gave them physical points of contact.
Page 15 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion These ideas also had political implications. Government patronage of science, called for by Hakluyt, Bacon, and so many others, was essential if the best use was to be made of the resources of the country: if England was to become a major power. The Royal Society, though not living up to Bacon’s hopes, gave science a recognized position in the state: and Newton was its triumphant product. Similarly the policy of colonial expansion, which Sidney, Hakluyt, Briggs, Ralegh, and Coke lauded, became government policy during the Interregnum, and continued after 1660. Science and sea power, empire and trade, religion and the destiny of God’s Englishmen, all went together, with Ralegh as their symbol.158 The English historical myth, created by Foxe, was elaborated by Hakluyt, Ralegh, Bacon, and Coke till it became a force we have all had to struggle against. Coke’s attitude to the law, and Ralegh’s (p.259) constitutional theories, raised political problems even in their own lifetime, problems to be solved by the abolition of prerogative courts in 1641 and by the establishment of the supremacy of common law and statute in the later seventeenth century. The ideas we have been considering not only created scepticism about the attitudes and values of the old regime; they specifically if indirectly forced men to think about state power. I do not want to claim too much: Jericho was not overthrown by trumpet blasts. But Bacon, Ralegh, Coke, together with the many lesser figures whom we have studied in this book, helped to undermine men’s traditional belief in the eternity of the old order in Church and state, and this was an immense task, without the successful accomplishment of which there could have been no political revolution. A man like George Hakewill, son of an Exeter merchant, brother of a Parliamentarian lawyer, rejected the traditional doctrine of the sinfulness and helplessness of man as much because it hamstrings human effort as for historical reasons. His tacit moral assumptions, that effort is good and despair is bad, are those of the activists, of the sea-dogs, of Professor Jordan’s men of charity, of the New Model Army. Hakewill’s emphasis is Baconian: but it is also Puritan. Like the covenant theology, it finds room for human effort. For Hakewill as for Bacon the starting-point is activity, mankind’s endeavour to discover the world in order to change it.
V Finally, there is no end to the pedigree of ideas. I have arbitrarily chosen three men who themselves summed up the thought of many others. But even in this brief summary one can see tracks leading further back. Behind Ralegh stands Sir Philip Sidney, who anticipated him in so many ways: behind Sidney stands Ramus, advocate of reason rather than authority, proponent of what has been called ‘the common man’s logic’. It was utilitarian, practical; like the Baconian method, it ‘levelled men’s wits’.159 The Duke of Guise, in Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, ordered Ramus to be killed because of ‘that peasant’s’ disrespect for authority. ‘Ne’er was there collier’s son so full of pride’, Anjou agreed. Abraham Fraunce made his Aristotelean say that Ramus profaned and prostituted logic, Page 16 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion ‘and made common to all, which before was proper to schoolmen and only consecrated to philosophers’. Fraunce replied, ‘Cobblers be men, (p.260) why therefore not logicians? And carters have reason, why therefore not logic?’160 Ramus himself had sought to democratize the Huguenot churches in Paris by placing in the entire congregation those powers which had resided in the elders.161 This was later to be a crucial issue between Presbyterians and sectaries. In Sweden it was the Ramist Johan Skytte who in the sixteen-thirties advocated a career open to the talents.162 Ramus had opposed the idea of the decay of nature, and Hakewill spoke approvingly of his logic.163 Behind Bacon stands not only the Ramistic Cambridge of his youth,164 but also the body of London craftsmen and scientists, which included so many Ramists and translators of Ramus—Hood, Briggs, Wootton, Bedwell. Behind Ramus again stands Calvin, who distinguished sharply between first and second causes, and who thought that nature should be studied that God might be glorified.165 Most of the great English Puritans were followers of Ramus, martyred for his Protestantism in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew: we need mention only Perkins, Chaderton, George Downham,166 Gouge, Ames, Hugh Peter, and Milton.167 Comenius too was a Ramist.168 Leiden was a Ramist university. Ramus’s critics include Hooker and Bishops Goodman, Richard Montague, and Earle.169 Among our other intellectual influences, the political theory of Huguenot, Scottish, and Dutch rebels was Calvinist; the new ideas of contract and covenant, of an aristocracy of merit: none of these could be discussed without mentioning Calvin. So though I started by saying I would not discuss Puritanism, here it is coming back again. I tried above to define what I mean by the word ‘Puritan’.170 Very few of the so-called ‘Puritans’ were ‘Puritanical’ in the (p.261) nineteenthcentury sense of that word, obsessed by sex and opposed to fun: ‘Puritanism’ of this sort was largely a post-Restoration creation. The body of ideas which has to be called ‘Puritan’, for want of a better word, was a philosophy of life, an attitude to the universe, which by no means excluded secular interests. Professor Frank, after an intensive study of newspapers between 1640 and 1660, emphasized the fact that the ‘Puritan Revolution’ was ‘secular rather than religious…. The press of that day was more revolutionary than Puritan.’171 ‘Puritanism’ in the seventeenth century was not in the narrow sense restricted to religion and morals, any more than science or history were narrowly ‘secular’ subjects. Calvinism was primarily an urban phenomenon, with the clothing and commercial city of Geneva as its source of origin, Amsterdam, La Rochelle, and London as its secondary centres. Without entering into controversies about the nature of the connexions between Calvinism and capitalism, we can agree that some correlation exists. Early science is in England, as it is elsewhere, intimately associated with the towns, with merchants and craftsmen. The two Page 17 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion trends are not identical: some scientists were Roman Catholics, but very few in England; some Puritans opposed science, but fewer than we are often led to believe;172 the scientific movement owed much to the independent Paduan tradition. But the intellectual ferment of the Reformation, the reformers’ sceptical attitude towards miracles and images, and some of Calvin’s attitudes in particular, contributed to the development of science.173 The very idea of a reformation which was a return to first principles, and the conception of the progressive revelation of truth, ultimately led to a belief in progress.174 Scientific utilitarianism and radical Protestantism grew up side by side in the urban centres,175 with support from some gentlemen but deeply rooted in the middle and lower middle class. In the sixteenth century the individualist revolt of Luther, together with the scientific and geographical discoveries, had shattered the old universe, the old certainties. The truth which jesting Pilate’s generation was seeking was being slowly reconstructed by experiment and by religious experience. Truth could no longer be imposed from above, by authority: it had to be rebuilt from below, on individual conviction. Many of the ideas which we have been looking at can be linked by the (p.262) emphasis on experience, experiment, rather than authority; on things rather than words, on the test of the senses and the heart as against intellectual exercises divorced from practice, on thinking as against the learning by rote which had been necessary before the invention of printing; on reason against precedent, but on experience against ‘reasonings vain’.‘Their whole knowledge of learning without the book’, said Ascham, ‘was tied only to their tongue and lips, and never ascended to the brain and head, and therefore was soon spit out of the mouth again.’176 Sir Thomas Smith, to quote another of the Edwardian forerunners, prided himself that he did not write about ‘vain imaginations, fantasies of philosophers to occupy the time and to exercise their wits’. He described England as he knew it, ‘so that whether I writ true or not, it is easy to be seen with eyes (as a man would say) and felt with hands’. ‘Thus you see what experience doth’, wrote Thomas Wotton, introducing William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent in 1576; ‘and thus you see where other folks’ experience is to be had:…—from the history of England.’177 Even a relatively credulous man like William Harrison appealed to his own experience against ‘talking philosophers, void of all experience’, just as William Harvey was to do.178 ‘This I knew experimentally’, George Fox was saying of his spiritual experiences two years after the scientists and Comenians began to foregather at Gresham College. When Gilbert Burnet was trying to convert the Earl of Rochester—who had no doubt imbibed the scientific spirit during his two years’ stay at Wadham (1660–1)—he endeavoured to show that religious experience was something that could be demonstrated by experiment, something as real as physical experience. It was no use appealing to authority.179 Similarly Baxter spoke of ‘soul-experiments’, ‘heart-operations’.180 Page 18 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Reliance on experience and experiment thus links history, religion, and science. We may compare the shift in legal procedure, beginning in our period, from reliance on gossip of neighbours, extorted confessions, torture, and rhetoric to the scientific use of evidence.181 There is in literature a parallel emphasis on the all-importance of individual experience. ‘Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.’182 Fulke Greville (p.263) too contrasted traditionally accepted authority with the truth of the heart when he made his priests say: Yet when each of us in his own heart looks, He finds the God there far unlike his books.183
Ralegh, as we have seen, played a part in the evolution of the poetry of introspection.184 If we could lay aside foolish questions’, said Greville’s heir in 1641, and ‘seek into our hearts…we might have our Heaven here’.185 It is difficult for us to realize how great a revolution lay in this reliance on one’s own senses, one’s own conscience, even against traditional authority. We have got so used to regarding originality as a virtue that wins scholarships that we forget the time, not so long ago, when it was regarded as an intellectual offence.186 In Ignatius his Conclave Copernicus, Paracelsus, Machiavelli, and Loyola disputed ‘the principal place, next to Lucifer’s own throne’, which was reserved for those ‘which had so attempted any innovation in this life, that they gave an affront to all antiquity, and induced doubts and anxieties and scruples, and after, a liberty of believing what they would; at length established opinions directly contrary to all established before’.187 The right to believe what one would was an extension to the realm of ideas of the right to do what one would with one’s own, which underlay the economic and legal revolutions of this period.188 Those who in the seventeenth century thought there was a connexion between freedom of thought and freedom of economic activity were quite right. Confidence in the new attitude was built up very slowly. In 1547 Andrew Boorde, Thomas Cromwell’s protégé and an early popularizer and almanac-maker, said cautiously: ‘Whereas Galen with other ancient and approbate doctors doth praise pork, I dare not say the contrary against them; but this I am sure of, I did never love it.’189 But Paracelsanism and acquaintance with new drugs in the East and West Indies caused greater flexibility of attitude. Similarly on oceanic voyages men observed facts which contradicted Aristotle and Ptolemy; slow (p. 264) absorption of these transformed men’s ideas about the universe and their attitudes to authority. In 1605 the Catholic Richard Verstegan still felt it necessary to apologize for putting forward a geographical theory based on observation and not to be found in ancient books.190 But in 1633 when Captain James, friend of Briggs and Gunter, found that his observations on latitude and longitude were different from what traditional mathematical calculations had led him to expect, he had no hesitation in saying flatly: ‘but thus we found it by Page 19 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion practice’.191 Nor must we leave out of account experiences linking religion and science, which seem less real to us but which were for contemporaries as conclusive as laboratory experiments. Richard Hakluyt was brought to cosmography by reading the 107th Psalm.192 Descartes, Pascal, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury had visions no less than Gerrard Winstanley, George Fox, and John Bunyan. The evidence of the heart was for all these men no less real than sense data. I have argued elsewhere that the Protestant religion of the heart facilitates change in response to social pressures more than the Roman Catholic and Laudian religions of authority.193 The whole of Coke’s work was an exercise in adapting the common law to meet the needs of a changing society: hence its triumphant success. In science the victory of the experimental method over the authority of the Ancients made even more obviously for change. All these fitted the pragmatic attitudes of our merchants and craftsmen. The experimental method led to improvements in science and industry, in surveying and navigation; individual consciences studying the Bible found there new and equally welcome truths. Some consciences found an even greater liberation. The Bible, said Milton in 1641, ‘ought to be so in proportion as may be wdelded and managed by the life of man, without penning him up from the duties of human society’.194 ‘When we are treating of worldly affairs’, Henry Parker agreed, ‘we ought to be very tender how we seek to reconcile that to God’s law which we cannot reconcile to men’s equity: or how we make God the author of that constitution which man reaps inconvenience (p.265) from.’195 Already Christianity was ceasing to be mysterious: God, like the King, was being subordinated to man-made laws. Never before the sixteen-forties could men have said in print that the Bible should be interpreted with reference to social needs. Many of the ideas which Puritanism embraced had been prevalent among lower and middle class heretics in the Middle Ages, just as the alchemists had anticipated something of the experimental method and look forward to Boyle. The difference in our period is that the Third Estate, the industrious classes, have risen in social and therefore political importance. Hence industry, thrift, and the bourgeois virtues play so large a part in Protestant ideology; hence the traditional Protestant emphasis on the godly artisan;196 hence Bacon, ‘the philosopher of industrial science’, set himself to learn from the craftsmen, to restore contact between the men of theory and the men of practice. The radicals (Webster, Biggs), from whom the most violent attack on the universities came, inherited the craftsmen’s alchemical tradition and the doctors’ astrological tradition. Mathematicians and astronomers like Wallis and Ward could more easily fit themselves into the universities once they were purged. Bacon had wanted alchemy and astrology to be carefully sifted, and Boyle started. But the radical associations of alchemists, emphasized during the Revolution, were too close. When the political and intellectual reaction came, Boyle worked hard to Page 20 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion purge science of subversiveness and irreligion. Newton completed the revolution in mathematics and physics: the chemical revolution had to wait for the ‘dual revolution’ of the late eighteenth century before it was completed by the political radicals Priestley and Lavoisier.197 Similarly the intellectual advance of Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters to a rational materialism was picked up by the French Encyclopaedists and late-eighteenth-century English radicals. Marvell’s intuitive sense of the interrelation of freedom and destiny, and Harrington’s more elaborately scientific approach to history, look forward to the Scottish school. In political economy Adam Smith started from where Petty left off.198 So after the excitement of the revolutionary decades, the pace of intellectual development slowed down for the next hundred years. When the republican Moses Wall, friend of Milton and admirer of Menasseh (p.266) ben Israel,199 tried to explain to the former in 1659 the reasons for ‘the non-progressency of the nation, and…its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths’, his diagnosis was Bacon’s in reverse: men remained fallen because science and industry, and the Third Estate generally, were inadequately developed. ‘Whilst the people are not free, but straitened in accommodation for life, their spirits will be dejected and servile.’ If liberty and spiritual truths are to be recovered, ‘there should be an improving of our native commodities as our manufactures, our fishery, our fens, forests, and commons, and our trade at sea, &c.’, plus the abolition of copyhold and tithes: ‘which would give the body of the nation a comfortable subsistence’.200 It is an analysis applicable to many so-called underdeveloped countries today. Spiritual truths are easier to grasp if one is not hungry. So my conclusion is the banal and eternal one, that history is all very mixed up. But wisdom lies, I think, in recognizing the complicated interconnexions and not allowing ourselves to be unduly influenced by the categories of analysis which we invent for our own convenience. I should like to end by quoting again from Hiram Haydn’s invaluable book, The Counter-Renaissance: Nothing more clearly demonstrates that it is one movement, infecting alike theology, natural science, and the social and political sciences, than the parallel phenomena of the early Reformation’s premium on the faith of the lowly and humble, the empirical scientists’ concern with the value of the artisans’ and practitioners’ work, and the emergent democratic principles apparent in the writings of the political and social thinkers of the sixteenth century who scoffed at the established hierarchy of ‘professions’, ‘Vocations’ and traditional castes…. They are utterly alike in their rejection of a middleman of received authoritarian truth—whether a scientific pundit of long standing, the Roman Catholic Church, or a traditionally accepted authority on the nature of the state and the nature of man.201
Page 21 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Professor Haydn was arguing against departmentalization of history, the separate analysis of religious, political, and economic ‘factors’, as Comenius in 1642 argued against the departmentalization of knowledge: ‘Can any man be a good naturalist, that is not seen in the metaphysics? Or a good moralist, who is not a naturalist? Or a logician, who is ignorant (p.267) of real sciences?’202 Although I left Puritanism out of my analysis of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution, a discussion of science, history, law, repeatedly brought us back to it. The conflicts in all these spheres seem to me to relate to the social and political conflicts in the society which gave them birth, and so to be different aspects of a single revolution. Notes:
(1) Cf. F. Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (1954), pp. 14–15. (2) W. G. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Harvard U.P., 1948), esp. pp. 160, 194, 209–11. (3) ‘The people of a great and thankful mind gave them that estimation and honour;…the respect only of their virtue and love to their country brought them thereto’ (J. Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power, 1556, sig. [G. vii—vii4 ], quoted in Zeeveld, op. cit., p. 258). Ponet was also a scientist and a mathematician. (4) Spenser, esp. The Faerie Queene, Book VI; Teares of the Muses; Marlowe, Tamburlaine, passim. For Ralegh see pp. 150–1, 176 above. (5) G. Chapman, Works: Poems and Minor Translations (1875), p. 34; cf. p. 116— a poem dedicated to Prince Henry. (6) Chapman, Dramatic Works (1873), i. 58. (7) Ibid., p. 331. (8) R. Greene, Plays and Poems (1905), ii. 196. (9) Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, Act v, scene i. (10) Webster, Complete Works (1927), ii. 238. (11) Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), ii. 137–44. (12) Wither, Juvenilia (Spenser Soc. reprint), i. 254–5, 372–4, 383–6, 428–9; ii. 50–52; Hymns and Songs of the Church (1856), p. 231: first published 1623. (13) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), i. 471–3. (14) Perkins, Workes (1609–13), i. 119; ii. 293. Page 22 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (15) Dent, The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven, quoted in A. West, The Mountain in the Sunlight (1958), p. 18. (16) Eliot, The Monarchie of Man (1879), ii. 179–81. (17) Hakewill, An Apologie, pp. 604–5. (18) T. Beedome, Select Poems (1928), p. 29; cf. p. 37. First published 1641. (19) ‘A marquis’s or a king’s word, when you stand before Christ’s tribunal, shall be lighter than the wind’—letter of 8 June 1637, in Letters of Samuel Rutherford (ed. A. A. Brown, 1894), pp. 327–8. (20) Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 408. (21) J. Crowne, Darius, King of Persia, in Dramatic Works (1874), iii. 435. (22) J. Preston, The New Covenant (fifth ed., 1630), pp. 477–8; J. M. Batten, John Duty (Chicago U.P., 1944), pp. 107–10; P. Miller, The New England Mind: the 17th century (New York, 1939), pp. 365–91; J. G. Moller, ‘The Beginnings of Puritan Contract Theology’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xiv. 46–67. Cf. Hakewill, Apologie, p. 601, and my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 245–9. For Preston’s influence on Prynne, see Lamont, Marginal Prynne, p. 91. (23) James I, Workes (1616), p. 531. (24) Hakewill, Apologie, ii. 147. (25) Notably by C. Bourgeaud, The Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England (transl. B. Hill, 1894), passim, and by Lord Lindsay; see for instance his The Modern Democratic State, i (1943), p. 119. (26) R. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent (1848), p. 46 (first published 1644); J. Cotton, Covenant of Gods Free Grace (1645), quoted by P. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard U.P., 1956), p. 85. The comparison seems first to have been made, interestingly enough, by the Jesuit Robert Persons. See A Catholicke Devyse (1606), sig. 00 4. Cf. also my Economic Problems of the Church, pp. 346– 8. (27) L. Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (1956), p. 40. (28) Greville, Poems and Dramas, i. 224–5; Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgments, p. 3. Ralegh thought that ‘the long day of mankind’ was ‘drawing fast towards an evening and the world’s tragedy and time near at an end’ (History, i. 204; cf. ii. 65).
Page 23 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (29) J. Meade, Clavis Apocalyptica (1627); C. E. Raven, Synthetic Philosophy in the 17th century (1945), p. 22; Francis Potter, An Interpretation of the Number 666 (1642). There are said to have been eighty such treatises published in England before 1649. See my Puritanism and Revolution, p. 325. Meade was a friend of Hartlib. (30) See Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995), passim. (31) Brooke ‘did often say, He should live to see the millenary fools’ paradise begin in his life’ (Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, 1813–20, ii. 434); Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), i. 707; iii. 256. (32) Sir S. Luke, Journal (ed. I. G. Philip, Oxfordshire Record Soc, 1950), p. 976. (33) Strype, Life of…Sir Thomas Smith (1820), pp. 2, 15, 89, 93, 100–5, 118, 146, 161, 166, 279; Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith (1964)passim.. (34) B. Farrington, Francis Bacon, p. 12; G. Williamson, The Senecan Amble (1951), p. 89; E. Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625 (1962), pp. 63–65. Smith combined a modern outlook with a precociously learned classical taste in architecture: cf. Ibid., pp. 133–5, and pp. 22, 196 above. For Smith as colonizer see p. 141 above. (35) Sir T. Smith, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England (ed. L. Alston, 1906), pp. 40–45, 105, 120–1; Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.) iii. 221; Dewar, op. cit., pp. 15–16. See p. 262 below. (36) Cf. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), pp. 53–54. (37) J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed. J. Pratt, n.d.), iii. 718–22; iv. 252–3; Bacon, Works (1826), ii. 118–21; Works, iv. 129. Foxe was a friend and protégé of Bale’s. (38) J. A. R. Marriott, The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland (1907), pp. 182–3. (39) J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, ii. 450; Laud, Works, iv. 226. (40) W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, iv (1940), p. 210 and passim. (41) McCulloch, op. cit, pp. 208–9; cf. p. 129. (42) See my Economic Problems of the Church (1956), p. 99 for Smith and Spelman. (43) K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1904), p. 60. Page 24 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (44) Ed. Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, p. 511; T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Everyman ed.), pp. 44, 130. The former passage was quoted by Marx in Value, Price and Profit (1865), printed in Selected Works (Moscow, 1935), i. 313. (45) Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (1662), in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, i. 48; cf. pp. 57, 60; ii. 473. Petty had been Hobbes’s amanuensis, as Hobbes had been Bacon’s (G. N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton, 1937, p. 135). (46) Graunt, Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, in Petty, Economic Writings, ii. 323; cf. S. Matsukawa, ‘The 300th Anniversary of John Graunt’s Observations’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, iii. 49–60. Graunt was a protege of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and brother-in-law to the Cromwellian MajorGeneral, Thomas Kelsey. He died a Catholic. See now J. O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton U.P., 1978). (47) The Oxford English Dictionary has ‘spinster’ used to describe a wife in 1580; by 1617a dictionary definition gives the modern meaning. (48) W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660 (1958), p. 354; The Charities of London, 1480–1660 (1960), p. 29. (49) W. M. Haller, ‘The Puritan Art of Love’, H.L.Q. v, passim; L. L. Schiicking, Die Familie im Puritanismus (Leipzig, 1929), passim. (50) A. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), p. 228 and passim. (51) See pp. 128–9 above. (52) Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, pp. 495–7. (53) Ibid., pp. 465, 503, 506–7. (54) E. H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Harvard U.P., 1959). (55) W. Notestein, ‘The English Woman, 1580–1650’, in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan (ed. J. H. Plumb, 1955), pp. 102–3, 106. (56) Jordan, Philanthropy in England, p. 355. (57) R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan (Illinois U.P., 1954), p. 77. (58) K. V. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sectss’, P. and P., No. 13. (59) J. Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), English translation by J. H[ealey], The Discovery of a New World (1608). Page 25 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (60) The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, in The Works of the…Author of the Whole Duty of Man (1704), p. 360. (61) Hobbes, Leviathan (Everyman ed.), p. 174; Behemoth (1679), in English Works (1840), vi. 9190–1; Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics, passim. See pp. 27–29 above. (62) Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (ed. K. M. Burton, 1948), pp. 163–7. (63) Z. S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (North-western U.P., 1945), passim, esp. pp. 41–51; J. W. Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (1952), p. 150. (64) Smith, De Republica Anglorum, p. 59. (65) Sidney, Complete Works111,. 127. (66) Cabala (1654), i. 8. Venice and Padua were the only places in Italy about which Shakespeare was well informed (Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England, p. 370). Cf. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 103. (67) See p. 219 above. (68) G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the 17th Century (1898), p. 125; Wither, Miscellaneous Works (Spencer Soc), I, no. viii. p. 9, no. xii, p. 15; III, pp. 48–52. Cf. Henry Parker on the supremacy of law in Venice (The Cordiall of Mr. David Jenkins…answered, 1647, p. 28). (69) Selden, Table Talk, s.v. ‘Religion’; Sir Simonds D’Ewes, The primitive practice for preserving truth (1645), quoted by W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, iv (1940), p. 22. For Venetian tolerance, and the limits to it, see A. Stella, ‘Ricerche sul Socinianesimo’, Bolletino dell’Istituto…di Storia dello Stato veneziano, iii. 77–120. (70) Selden, loc. cit. (71) Fink, op. cit., pp. 44–45; Hassall, A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, p. 50. The book was A full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised bull against Venice (1606). (72) Ed. E. S. Shuckburgh, Two Biographies of William Bedell (1902), passim;, articles by G. Cozzi in Bolletino dell’Istituto…veneziano, i. Bedell was subsequently Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, the majority of whose heads, like those of Emmanuel, seem to have combined Calvinism with an interest in science. Bedell was preceded by Walter Travers, who possessed globes and compasses, and whose library contained books on medicine and alchemy (S. J. Knox, Walter Travers, 1962, p. 147), by the Puritan Henry Alvey and by the Page 26 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Ramist William Temple (see pp. 120–1 above; for Emmanuel see pp. 278–81 below). Although there were no doctrinal tests, the atmosphere of Trinity College was strictly Calvinist. We may compare Calvinist Edinburgh, where chairs of mathematics and natural philosophy were endowed in 1583, forty years before Oxford. (73) See pp. 146–7 above. (74) T. Goodwin, Works (1862), iv. 252. Goodwin, however, thought it going too far when some men tended to convert God into a Doge of Venice (Ibid. vvi. 507). (75) J. Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (1601), p. 7. (76) L. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffcke (1641), dedicated to the High Court of Parliament; in J. R. McCulloch, Early English Tracts on Commerce (1856), pp. 101–2. (77) J. H. Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua, 1961), passim; A. P. Cawadias, ‘Harvey in Paduat’, in Circulation: Proceedings of the Harvey Tercentenary Congress (ed. J. McMichael, 1958), pp. 48–49. (78) S. P. Thompson, Notes on the De Magnete of Dr. William Gilbert (1901), p. 17; William Gilbert and Terrestrial Magnetism in the time of Queen Elizabeth (n.d., ?1903), pp. 6–7; A. Robertson, Fra Paolo Sarpi (1911), pp. 67–71, 78–79. (79) Stoye, op. cit., p. 143. So did the younger Peter Chamberlen. (80) S. E. Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, pp. 245, 266–7. (81) R. Bancroft, A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (1593), pp. 7–8; ed. P. Laslett, Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (1949), pp. 207–8, 220–2. (82) J. R. L. Highfield, ‘An Autograph Manuscript Commonplace Book of Sir Henry Savile’, Bodleian Library Record, vii. 75–80. (83) A Seasonable Discourse Written by Mr. John Dury (1649), sig. Dv. (84) J. Forster, Sir John Eliot Sir John Eliot (1865), ii. 451–2. (85) H. C. D’Avila, The History of the Civil Wars of France (English trans., 1678), p. 406. When Charles I read the first edition of this translation (1647), he regretted that he had not earlier studied ‘this original’ of ‘the Grand Contrivers’. (86) [Anon.], Persecutio Undecima (1648), p. 6; The Regall Apology (1648), quoted by D. W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (1940), p. 49. Page 27 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (87) D’Avila, op. cit, pp. 19, 277. (88) Ibid., p. 271; cf. R. M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–63 (Geneva, 1956), p. 107. (89) Sir Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I (1813), p. 198. (90) D’Avila, op. cit, p. 281. (91) Ibid., pp. 378, 359. (92) Ibid., p. 137. (93) Ibid., p. 408. (94) C. Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, passim. (95) D’Avila, op. cit, p. 456. (96) J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (1959), p. 27. (97) The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discoverie of the Civill warres of France, trans. Thomas Timms (1574). (98) Salmon, op. cit, p. 122. Ralegh in his History has a passage drawing on his own experience in the French wars, which he uses to warn against royal treachery (v. 7). Milton, Dugdale and many others compared the English Revolution to the French wars of religion (Milton, Complete Prose Works, Yale ed., iii. 176–7; Salmon, op. cit., p. 142). Cf. pp. 252–5 below. (99) Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters, pp. 272–4. There were four editions of this translation before 1640. (100) Sylvester’s work ran to twenty editions or summaries. See also p. 192 above. (101) Stoye, op. cit., p. 65. (102) Rosenberg, op. cit., pp. 104–7. (103) See p. 144 above; cf. D’Ewes, Autobiography, i. 93–94. (104) H. Robinson, John the Baptist (1644), p. 85, quoted in Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration in England, iv. 163–4. (105) See pp. 87, 150 above. This point was elaborated by Francis Osborn in his Traditional Memoirs (Secret History of the Court of James I, 1811, i. 84). Cf.
Page 28 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Drayton’s reference in Polyolbion to cheap Dutch labour (M. Drayton, Complete Works, 1876, iii. 16). (106) N.R.S. v. 93. (107) Osborn, loc. cit.; Stoye, op. cit., pp. 241, 267–72. Cf. a letter of 1605 from Sir Charles Cornwallis to Secretary Cranbourne expressing anxiety at Dutch strength and wealth ‘in a people of their condition’. It would not have mattered if the Netherlands had been a monarchy (Winwood State Papers, 1725, ii. 76). (108) Gresham helped to secure asylum in England for protestant refugees from the southern Netherlands. We should not underestimate the political influence of these refugees. Almost by definition they would have radical views. (109) T. Nashe, Pierce. Peniles.se his Supplication to the Divell (1592), in Works (ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1958), i. 212–13.1 owe this reference to Mr. Charles Hobday. (110) Hobbes, Behemoth, in English Works, vi. 168. (111) T. Scott, The Belgic Pismire (1622), p. 90. (112) E. H. Kossmann, In Praise of the Dutch Republic (1963), pp. 8–11; The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby (ed. D. Parsons, 1836), p. 57. (113) J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1892), ii. 178–9, 240–2, 358, 566. (114) Ibid. vii. 337, 366. (115) Ibid. viii. 500. (116) Parr, Life of…James Usher, ii. 393–4. See pp. 157–8 above. (117) [Leighton], An Appeal to the Parliament, or Sions Plea against the Prelacie (1628), pp. 221–2. (118) Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 86–89, ii. 139–40. (119) J. Goodwin, The Obstructours of Justice (1649), quoted by P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (1954), p. 84. (120) [H. Parker], The Cordiall of Mr. David Jenkins…answered, p. 30; cf. W. Cole, A Rod for the Lawyers (1659), p. 14. (121) Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchic (1643), p. 10; [Anon.], The Hunting of the Foxes (1649), in Somers Tracts (1809–15), vi. 47; D. M. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes (New York, 1944), pp. 356–7; Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), iii. 49, 226; J. Needham, Time: the Refreshing River (1943), p. 100. Cf. G. Page 29 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion Griffiths, ‘Democratic Ideas in the Revolt of the Netherlands’, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, 1–li. 50–63. (122) Ralegh, Works, ii. 109–36 (the fact that this tract is probably not by Ralegh is irrelevant here); W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance (Chicago U.P., 1942), pp. 186, 214–15, 225, 238; cf. J. Hall, An Humble Motion, p. 31. (123) E. S., Britains Buss (1615); Richard Whitehorne, A Discourse…for the advancement of…the New-Found-Land (1622), p. 22; G. E. Fussell. ‘Low Countries’ Influence on English Farming’, E.H.R. lxxiv. 611–14; L. Roberts, in McCulloch, op. cit., p. 101. Eliot assured M.P.s in 1624 that the low rate of customs at Amsterdam led to a greater total yield than in England (Forster, Sir John Eliot, i. 169). (124) Ed. S. R. Gardiner, Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (Camden Soc, 1862), p. 114. (125) Among others by Lord Brooke, A Discourse opening the Nature of… Episcopacie, in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, 1638–47, ii. 135; R. Overton, A Remonstrance (Ibid. iii. 366); H. Robinson (Jordan, Men of Substance, passim); Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent (1848), p. 245; George Fox, Concerning the Jews (1660), in Gospel Truth Demonstrated (1106), p. 244; Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth (1650), pp. 90–91; and many others, including Roman Catholics under the Protectorate (Jordan Development of Religious Toleration, iv. 335, 444, 457). (126) H. Peter, Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651); A Word for the Armie (1647); B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1853), iii. 388; Petty, Economic Writings, i. 260–1, ii. 653; ed. Lansdowne, Petty Papers (1927), i. 77– 90, ii. 185–6; Cole, A Rod for the Lawyers, p. 14. Cf. Kossman, op. cit, pp. 14, 19. (127) M. Whinney and O. Millar, English Art, 1625–1714 (1957), pp. 8, 60. (128) Laslett, op. cit., pp. 207–8, 220–2; Aston, A Survey of Presbytery (1641). (129) J. A. van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons and Professors (Leiden, 1962), pp. 59, 107, 123–7; A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain, i. 1596– 1619 (Leiden, 1962), pp. 13, 25, 286; D. C. Dorian, The English Diodatis (Rutgers U.P., 1950), pp. 26, 32–33, 79–80; Morison, Builders of Bay Colony, p. 245. Daniel Whistler’s Leiden dissertations on rickets was the first book printed on the subject. (130) C. Goodall, The College of Physicians Vindicated (1676), pp. 57–64. (131) Bachrach, op. cit., pp. 13–15. Sir William Brereton, future Parliamentarian general, visited the Botanic Garden and the Anatomy School at Leiden in 1628 (Stoye, op. cit., p. 244). Page 30 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (132) Van Dorsten, op. cit., pp. 30, 93. (133) G. N. Clark, The Colonial Conferences between England and the Netherlands in 1613 and 1615, Part 2 (Bibliotheca Visseriana Dissertationum Jus Internationale Illustrantium, xvii, 1951), p. 12. Leiden was the last European refuge of the Pilgrim Fathers. (134) Stoye, op. cit., p. 295; cf. Clark, op. cit., pp. 10–14. For the radical political atmosphere at Leiden in 1627 see The Oxinden Letters, 1607–42 (ed. D. Gardiner, 1933), p. 33. Comenius was warmly welcomed there in 1642 (J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education, 1954, p. 64). (135) M. Luther, Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, in Reformation Writings (ed. B. L. Woolf, 1952–6), ii. 298. But cf. R. Bainton, Here I Stand (New York, 1950), for Luther’s anticipation of Calvin’s political doctrine in the period before Lutheranism won legal recognition. (136) J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. H. Beveridge, 1949), ii. 674–5. (137) Filmer, The Anarchy of a Mixed Monarchy (1648), in Laslett, op. cit, p. 277. (138) Whitgift, Works (Parker Soc, 1851–3), i. 466. (139) Ed. A. Peel and L. H. Carlson, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne (1953), pp. 150–70. (140) A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (1925), pp. 252–3. (141) Cf. H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the 16th century’, Journal of Modern History, xxvii. 335–51. (142) Ed. H. J. Laski, A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (1924), pp. 48–54; S. Rutherford, hex Rex (1644), esp. pp. 140–2, 229, 257. Cf. P. Heylyn, Thellistory of the Presbyterians (1670), pp. 79–80, 194–6; Salmon, op. cit, p. 81. See pp. 122, 135–6 above for Sidney and Ralegh. (143) Heylyn, History of the Presbyterians, pp. 90–91, 430; M. Y. Hughes, ‘Milton’s Treatment of Reformation History’, in R. F. Jones, The Seventeenth Century, pp. 260–2; G. W. Whiting, ‘Paraeus, the Stuarts, Laud and Milton’, S.P. 1. 221–9. Paraeus’s Irenicon (1614) urged reunion of Protestants on the lines for which Dury and Comenius were soon to work. (144) P. Gregg, Freeborn John, p. 220.
Page 31 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (145) R. Bancroft, Dangerous Positions (1593) and A Survay of the pretended Holy Discipline (1593), passim; C. Downing, A Discourse of the State Kcclesiasticall (second ed., 1634), pp. 13–20. (146) ‘The Form of a Bill for a new Coronation–Oath pursuant to the Treaty in the Isle of Wight’, in E. Ludlow, Memoirs (1699), iii. 350–1. (147) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), iii. 46, 59, 123–4. (148) [H. Nevile], Plato Redivivus (1681), p. 93; ed. J. T. Rutt, Parliamentary Diary of Thomas Burton (1828), iii. 296–305. (149) See pp. 9–14 above. (150) Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 7. (151) J. W. Allen, English Political Thought, 1603–44 (1938), pp. 386–412; J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Harvard U.P., 1942), pp. 175–82; cf. my Century of Revolution, pp. 62–66. (152) G. Lawson, Politico Sacra et Civilis, First Part (1660), p. 105. Lawson might be paraphrasing the words of Cromwell, cited on p. III above. (153) Contrast, for example, the conclusion to Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Tryal of Valentinian (1611), in which revolt is regarded as mere anarchy: murder or suicide are the only possibilities facing tyranny’s victims. (154) Bacon, Works, iii. 617. (155) P. Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (1954), pp. 249–56; cf. H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, passim. (156) Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, in Works (1958), i. 158; cf. Jonson’s Macilente in Every Man out of his Humour. This social discontent is the theme of the three Parnassus Plays. (157) T. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1840), ii. 465. (158) In the reign of George III John Langhorne apotheosized Ralegh as a hero of liberty, of anti-Spanish patriotism, and of empire, associating him with Sidney and Milton (The Poetical Works of John Langhorne, 1798, pp. 50, 59–60). (159) Cf. P. Miller, The New England Mind: the 17th century, pp. 151–2; H. Craig, The Enchanted Glass (1950), pp. 145–51, 182. (160) Fraunce, The hawiers Logike (1588), Sig. ¶ ¶ 2v–¶ ¶ 3, quoted by Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, p. 225. (161) R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan, p. 19. Page 32 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (162) N. Runeby, Monarchia Mixta (Stockholm, 1962), pp. 553–4, 558. (163) Haydn, op. cit, p. 531; Hakewill, Apologie, pp. 297–9, ii. 135. (164) T.Granger’s Ramistic treatise on preaching, Syntagma Logicum or the Divine Logike (1620), was dedicated to Bacon. Bacon was, however, very critical of Ramus. (165) Calvin, Institutes, i. 57, 104, 122, 144, 483–6, 501; cf. P. Miller, op. cit., pp. 31, 47–48, 173. (166) Downham published his Commentarius in Rami Dialecticam at Frankfurt in 1610. He was so Puritan that he could only obtain an Irish bishopric, though he came of an episcopal family. In 1631 he was in trouble with Laud for publishing an attack on Arminianism. (167) Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, passim; P. Miller, op. cit., Chapter V and Appendix A, passim. (168) See also J. Wilkins, Mathematical Magic (fourth ed., 1691), Sig. A 4–5 (first published 1648). Hobbes’s rendition of Aristotle’s rhetoric was bound up with Dudley Fenner’s version of Ramus, under the general title A Compendium of Logick and Rhetorick in the English Tongue (1651). The latter was for long attributed to Hobbes himself (Howell, op. cit., pp. 276–9). Fenner renounced his Anglican orders in the Netherlands (cf. p. 30 above). (169) Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Everyman ed.), i. 167–8; Hakewill, Apologie, ii. 134; Howell, op. cit., pp. 200–2. Montague’s criticism came as part of his attack on Selden. (170) See pp. 25–26 above. (171) J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Harvard U.P., 1961), pp. 271–2. (172) See p. 100 above. (173) See pp. 22–31 above. (174) For a good example of this see R. Greenham, Workes (1612), pp. 824–5. (175) Cf. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, pp. 245–6, and references there cited. (176) R. Ascham, The Scholemasler (ed. Arber, 1870), p. 88: first published 1570. See also pp. 101–4 above. (177) Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1906), p. 142; Lambarde, op. cit., Sig. ¶ ¶. Page 33 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (178) W. Harrison, Description of England, in R. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), p. 236. For Harvey see p. 102 above. (179) Quoted by G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1946), p. 8; cf. pp. 36, 39; V. de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit (1962), pp. 6–8, 198–9. (180) Reliquiae Baxterianae, i. 124. (181) Cf. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, p. 376. (182) Sidney, Poems (1962), p. 165. (183) Greville, Poems and Dramas, ii. 137; cf. Life of Sidney, p. 135. In French experience means both experience and experiment. (184) See p. 196 above. (185) Lord Brooke, The Nature of Truth (1640), p. 169. (186) Cf. Hakewill, Apologie, ii. 132. (187) J. Donne, Ignatius his Conclave in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (1929), p. 361: first published 1611. Donne’s Loyola was able to defeat the claims of the others to have made innovations equal to his. (188) See pp. 208–11, 242–3 above. (189) A. Boorde, A Compendyous Regiment (1547), quoted by R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, p. 3. Cf. p. 45 above. (190) Verstegan, The Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), quoted by Taylor, hate Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, p. 86. Verstegan was a friend of Gresham. (191) W. W., The Strange and Dangerous Voyages of Captain Thomas James (1633), p. 9, quoted by Jones, op. cit, p. 75. For James see pp. 43–44 above. (192) Taylor, Original Writings…of the…Hakluyts, ii. 396–7. (193) ‘Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism’, in Essays…in Honour of R. H. Tawney (ed. F. J. Fisher, 1961), pp. 15–39. (194) Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale ed.), i. 699. The liberating effects of this approach can be seen in Areopagitica. (195) H. Parker, Jus Populi (1644), p. 57.
Page 34 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Conclusion (196) See my Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, Chapter 4, passim. (197) S. F. Mason, A History of the Sciences (1953), chapters 25–26. For the ‘dual revolution’ see E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (1962), passim. (198) See my Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 353–66, and p. 181 above. See now J. R. Jacob; Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977). (199) In 1650 Wall had translated Menasseh ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel (L. Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell, pp. xxvii, 56–62). (200) Quoted by Masson, Life of Milton, v. 602–3. (201) Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, pp. xiv–xv; cf. p. 85. (202) Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles (1642), quoted by J. Needham, Time: the Refreshing River, p. 26.
Access brought to you by:
Page 35 of 35
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
(p.268) Appendix: A Note on the Universities I SINCE MY VIEW on the position, or absence, of science in Oxford Sand Cambridge before the civil war is closer to that traditionally held than to the view recently put forward by Mr. Curtis (Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558–1642, 1959), I should state my reasons for disagreeing with Mr. Curtis. For his book as a whole I have great admiration: he has used new material to draw attention to many interesting points about the universities previously overlooked. He is quite right to insist that historians’ descriptions of Oxford and Cambridge have been too lightly based on contemporary criticisms, which from the nature of the case were one-sided. These descriptions often embody a ‘Whig’ attitude, condemning the past for not being the present. But I feel that in his enthusiasm to correct what he believes to be mistaken views, Mr. Curtis has himself sometimes been guilty of over-statement, straining the evidence, and special pleading. His conclusion that ‘the universities, despite their statutes, were teaching the results of recent findings in mathematics and science’ seems to me too sweeping if, as appears from the context, this remark is intended to apply to the period before the Parliamentarian purge of Oxford and Cambridge.1 The function of the universities during Mr. Curtis’s period was twofold: to produce clerics for the state Church, and to give a veneer of polite learning to young gentlemen, few of whom had any intention of taking a degree.2 Their function, Mr. Curtis rightly insists, was not thought to include research or the pursuit of new truths.3 One or two dons, and some of the abler undergraduates, might have a spare-time interest in mathematics or science. But such studies were not the reason for coming (p.269) to Oxford or Cambridge. In 1654, when Seth Ward claimed that ‘since the universities came into those hands where now it is’, they offered training in scientific subjects, he asked, ‘Which of the nobility and gentry desire when they send their sons hither that they should be set to Page 1 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities chemistry or agriculture or mechanics? Their removal is from hence commonly in two or three years, to the Inns of Court, and the desire of their friends is not that they be engaged in those experimental things, but that their reason, fancy and carriage be improved by lighter institutions and exercises, that they may become rational and graceful speakers, and be of an acceptable behaviour in their counties.’4 The Church after the fifteen-eighties was becoming increasingly conservative, and increasingly linked to the royal government: so we should expect its influence to work against a serious interest in science.5 But all that Church and government had to do, in order to prevent change in the universities, was to refrain from encouraging it themselves. As Mr. Costello has convincingly shown, the universities were enmeshed in a centuries-old scholastic synthesis. The schoolmen had been discredited since the Reformation: but this if anything increased the solitary eminence of Aristotle. ‘The realm of knowledge’, says Mr. Costello, ‘was divided into four provinces (each province concerned with some phase of being): metaphysics (being in general), physics (being as qualified), mathematics (being as quantified), and cosmography (the being of this geographical world). The very neatness of such an arrangement concealed an intransigence, and seemed to excuse Cambridge dons, and too many other scholastic masters, from any obligation to rethink the old curriculum in terms of the busy findings of the new mathematics and the New Sciences.’6 ‘The seventeenth-century mind was heir to a system so over-systematized that its only escape was either to attempt a new synthesis by incorporating the new discoveries, to give up the struggle, or to branch off in a new direction. Some, like Suarez, did attempt restatement, but the result was only further bickering and confounded confusion. Others simply gave up and allowed scholasticism to become an empty form. A few branched out in new directions and found themselves in the modern world.’7 It would therefore have needed a major philosophical revolution to change the system, a revolution which would have been opposed by the (p.270) hierarchy of the Church, and by the government. By its very failure to change, the system became more and more intransigent. The time, moreover, was ripe for new syntheses: Oxford and Cambridge, as John Hall pointed out, were lagging behind ‘the Jesuit Colleges and many transmarine universities’.8 Leiden and Franeker in the republican Netherlands had shown the possibilities; Padua in republican Venice had moved with the times. But as the Laudian rulers of the Church and the rulers of the Stuart state felt more and more insecure, they became more and more suspicious of change of any sort. And they exercised effective control over the universities. If we re-examine the evidence in the light of Mr. Costello’s thesis, we may see things rather differently from Mr. Curtis. For the contemporary criticisms of Oxford and Cambridge all point in one direction. This is not a matter only of the Page 2 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities well-known and possibly prejudiced strictures of Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, and Wallis. In 1583 Giordano Bruno thought Oxford was ‘the widow of good learning in philosophy and pure mathematics’. Its doctors were doctors of grammar only.9 ‘Arithmetic,…geometry and astronomy…are now smally regarded in either’ university, William Harrison said in 1587.10 George Hakewill in 1627 noted the backwardness of Oxford in anatomy, botany, history, and Arabic.11 Robert Burton said that degrees were awarded to those who ‘have spent the usual number of years in chopping logic’.12 A character in Davenant’s The Platonic Lovers (1636) asked: Is there yet nothing new, to render benefit For human life?… Why do we build you Colleges?
Ever since Aristotle’s death academics had done nothing but write comments on his works.13 William Oughtred, who went up to Cambridge in 1592, had to teach himself mathematics in his spare time.14 For Hobbes (Oxford 1603–7) his scientific interests were a pleasing diversion from his academic studies.15 (p.271) Hobbes’s contemporary, George Wither, learnt nothing from his Oxford tutor, and goes out of his way to tell us that when he acquired an interest in natural science he had to satisfy it for himself. The dons ‘heap up a great multitude of words and sayings’, but do not ‘with knowledge into practice go’.16 William Gascoigne (1612–44) told Oughtred in 1640 that he left Oxford without knowing what a proposition in geometry meant.17 Francis Gardiner, writing to his son’s Cambridge tutor in 1646, assumed that geometry and arithmetic would be spare-time occupations (‘his fancy turning that way’, the father rather apologetically said): he did not mention tutorial help with these subjects, though giving specific instructions about logic, philosophy, Greek, and Hebrew.18 Matthew Robinson, who came up to Cambridge about the same time, also had to pursue his interests in anatomy, astronomy, meteorology, and natural history on his own and in his spare time.19 In the case of the few men of genius produced by pre-revolutionary Oxford and Cambridge, Osborn tells us, ‘the least part of this excellency came from their mother’. The practice of ordinary tutors, he says, was to ‘throw to their pupils the dry bones, and not the marrow, of erudition’.20 As an example of what Osborn meant, Richard Hakluyt did not learn his cosmography at Oxford but from his cousin the lawyer; though he lectured on the subject (probably only to his own college) till 1582 or 1583, after he left it apparently ceased to be taught until the Savilian chair of Astronomy was founded in 1619.21 Bishop Williams in 1638 noted the absence of public encouragement for mathematics in Oxford or Cambridge.22 In fact Dee, William Gilbert, Wright, Hariot, Oughtred, Wallis, Pell, as well as Harvey and Petty, all left the universities. To study medicine, Mr. Page 3 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities Curtis admits, men went to London or overseas.23 Licences to beg were issued in far greater numbers by late sixteenth-century Oxford than licences in surgery.24 ‘Towardly and capable souls’, said John Hall, ‘staid men, of tried and known abilities in their profession’ were not ‘allured…to stay in the (p.272) universities.’ Their places were filled by ‘drones’.25 Edward Wright threw up his fellowship at Caius in 1589, Lawrence Kemyis his at Balliol in 1582: the latter either because ‘he discovered that the demand for mathematical tutors was slight, or else his adventurous soul grew weary of the interminable theological debates of his colleagues’.26 Hall’s point could also be illustrated from the career of Nathanael Carpenter (1589–1628), a Fellow of Exeter whom it is at first sight surprising that Mr. Curtis does not mention as a favourer of the new learning in Oxford. For Carpenter was an anti-Aristotelean exponent of the new astronomy, who wrote the ‘one work of outstanding merit’ on geography which came from Oxford in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. He was a proponent of navigation and sea-voyages as necessary for ‘the promotion of religion and sciences’; an admirer of Ralegh; an early advocate of freedom of scientific investigation and discussion, favourably quoted by Hakewill; a keen Saxonist. A friend of Briggs and Hues, Carpenter studied not only their works but also those of Leonard Digges, Arthur Hopton, Sir Humphrey and William Gilbert, Wright, Blundeville, Brerewood, Verstegan, and Purchas. He almost personifies one theme of this book. Yet Carpenter would not have fitted into Mr. Curtis’s picture. For he complained that he was not advanced by Oxford, and he left to become chaplain to Ussher in Ireland. This was no doubt because of Carpenter’s religious and political views. He was so fierce a Calvinist that his Achitophel, or the Picture of a Wicked Politician (1629) was called in and the anti-Arminian passages were suppressed. In 1627 he had preached three sermons, very critical of kings, which ‘were very much applauded by all the scholars that heard them, and were by them most eagerly desired to be printed’.27 Hall’s own criticism of the universities is familiar: ‘Where have we anything to do with mechanic chemistry?…Where is there an examination and consecution of experiments?…Where have we constant reading from either quick or dead anatomies, or any ocular demonstration of herbs?’28 John Webster, who also advocated the teaching of chemistry, might equally be cited; or any number of other Interregnum (p.273) critics.29 Gerrard Winstanley was not being exceptionally radical when he said that ‘the secrets of the creation have been locked up under the traditional, parrot-like speaking from the universities’.30 Thomas Hall’s reply to Webster hardly supports Mr. Curtis’s view that science was widely taught at Oxford and Cambridge. For this defender of the universities thought that Webster’s advice to scholars ‘to leave their libraries and fall to laboratories, putting their hands to the coals and furnace’ was a ‘short cut to bring men to the Devil’.31
Page 4 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities Isaac Barrow, who came up to Cambridge in 1647, spoke of mathematics then as ‘neglected by all and unknown, even on the outward surface, by most’.32 He first introduced the new philosophy into Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity after 1649: before 1645 Wallis had never heard of the new philosophy.33 Unkindest of all, even Godfrey Goodman, the near-papist Bishop of Gloucester who had been Hakewill’s opponent, wrote in 1653 of Cambridge that ‘whereas before your studying of philosophy did only serve for your disputations and your keeping of acts for your degrees; now I could wish that they might tend to some practice whereby they might be more useful’. So he proposed to give the university his collection of mathematical instruments, optic glasses, herbals ‘and some things which belong to chemistry’.34 I have said nothing of the descriptions of undergraduate boorish-ness and ignorance made by Burleigh, William Harrison, Bruno, Travers, Sir Thomas Knyvett, Nathanael Carpenter, Robert Burton, John Earle, Henry Peacham, and Sir Simonds D’Ewes;35 nor of the descriptions of the drunkenness, idleness, or other inadequacies of dons by Wither, John Winthrop, and Lady Harley.36 This is the sort of generalizing gossip of which Mr. Curtis is sceptical. Arthur Wilson, who said he had never drunk so much in his life as at Oxford in the sixteenthirties, ‘with some of the greatest bachelors of divinity there’, is not the most reliable (p.274) witness.37 But perhaps we should pay more attention to the parent who in a private letter of 1646 to William Sancroft assumed that ‘most tutors’ at Cambridge were idle.38 More too might be said about the purchase and sale of scholarships, degrees, and fellowships, and the possibility of obtaining places by court favour,39 which must have had an effect on academic standards which can hardly be over-emphasized. This at least is suggested by the numerous efforts of Parliament to check such abuses.40
II In establishing his new view of the universities in the early seventeenth century, Mr. Curtis cites the ‘Directions for a Student’ attributed to Richard Holdsworth. The attribution is not absolutely certain, and the manuscript presents difficulties for Mr. Curtis’s thesis. Books published in 1646 and 1647 are recommended in the ‘Directions’, though Holdsworth had no connexion with Cambridge after 1643. He ceased indeed to be a college tutor in 1626, and may have ceased to reside two years earlier, when he was appointed to a living in London.41 No scientific books published before 1638 are included in the list of extra-curricular reading which the document gives.42 It should therefore be used with caution as evidence for teaching methods in Cambridge before the civil war. Nor is this all. Even if the document could be used for this period, we must ask, How typical was Holdsworth? First and foremost, although Mr. Curtis does not mention the fact, he was a Gresham Professor from (p.275) 1629 to 1637. It is hardly surprising that he should have carried some Gresham methods back with him to Cambridge, and should have thought it necessary to apologize for the Page 5 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities emphasis on Aristotle which the curriculum forced on him.43 The books by Comenius and Bacon must have been added to his reading-list after he had ceased to be a tutor. Secondly, despite his adherence to the King in the civil war, Holdsworth (son and brother-in-law of Puritans) had been radical enough in the thirties to co-operate with three future Independents, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Henry Burton, in puffing John Dury.44 Holdsworth protested against one of the canons of 1640, and as late as December 1640 the Scots still thought of him as a possible supporter of Presbyterianism.45 He refused a bishopric in 1641, and was enough of a Puritan to be nominated to the Westminster Assembly of Divines. So Holdsworth is very far from typical of Oxford and Cambridge tutors. There is a striking contrast between the Instructions alleged to be his and those drawn up by James Duport. The latter are exactly what the traditional view of pre-civil war Oxford and Cambridge would lead us to expect, though in fact they may well date from the sixteen-fifties.46 The example of Holdsworth cannot therefore be given the significance which Mr. Curtis seeks to attach to it. His other evidence, interesting though it is, tells us nothing new about scientific teaching in the universities. There were Ramists in Cambridge in the late sixteenth century: Mr. Curtis’s examples show how many of them were Puritans, like William Gouge and (at Oxford) John Rainolds. Individual fellows of colleges became eminent in the scientific world, usually after resigning their fellowships, like Hakluyt and Edward Wright. Others like Richard Madox had social contacts with London scientists.47., Some college libraries had some scientific books. Then as now undergraduates were more up to date in their interests than most tutors. The notebooks of Brian Twyne, active Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1605 to 1623, ‘show that he kept abreast of current developments in mathematics, astronomy, cosmography, and navigation’. (Twyne’s interest in science may be due to the fact that his father was a physician.) (p.276) But Mr. Curtis’s suggestion that these notes were ‘prepared for use in tutoring’ is pure conjecture. ‘The most conclusive bit of evidence’ for the conjecture, in Mr. Curtis’s opinion, is a note by Twyne that he lent a multiplication and division table ‘to Mr. Elyott’, and the fact that there was a Benjamin Elliott at Corpus during Twyne’s 18 years as active fellow there.48 On evidence like this—one tutor’s notes (ignoring for the moment the problem of dating), the social contacts of some others, the books owned by and the subsequent interests of a few dons and undergraduates—it would be easy to argue that Marxism was being taught to undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteen-thirties. Mr. Curtis quotes via Professor Johnson some interesting subjects for disputations at Oxford between 1576 and 1611, which at least recognize the existence of Copernicus and Gilbert.49 But do these prove any more than the presence of questions on Marxism in Oxford schools papers today? (It is noteworthy, moreover, that no examples are cited after 1611.) Such teaching of modern subjects as there was in Oxford resulted not from the university’s action, but from the chairs endowed by Sir Henry Savile Page 6 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities and staffed by professors from Gresham College; from the lectureship in natural philosophy founded by Sir Charles Sedley, and that in anatomy founded by the Londoner Richard Tomlins. Similarly Camden and Lord Brooke forced history upon the two universities. The first Camden Professor at Oxford had quarrels with the authorities about the scope of his subject; the holder of Brooke’s chair at Cambridge was hounded out by the Laudians. When Briggs came to Oxford as Savilian Professor he realized that he was the thin end of a wedge which he hoped to drive in further; and that similar influences were needed at Cambridge.50 The next blow on the wedge came from the Parliamentary Commissioners. Mr. Curtis seems to me to miss the significance of their activities in opening a door to science in Oxford. Indeed, he regards the Parliamentary visitations of the universities as ‘a crippling blow’, which ‘enforced rigid conformity to the religious systems then in favour’.51 This (in my opinion) mistaken belief may explain, though it can hardly excuse, his use of evidence drawn from the sixteenfifties to illustrate the state of science in Oxford and Cambridge before the civil war.52 Sprat’s remarks about the universities’ contribution to science relate, (p. 277) though the future bishop was too tactful to mention this, to the Parliamentarian epoch.53 His failure to appreciate this makes Mr. Curtis miss the significance of the controversies of the sixteen-fifties about university education, and makes him less than fair to John Webster.54 It is true that ‘Oxford had become by the 1650’s a centre of scientific research’, but it had become this very recently indeed. It is true of the fifties that ‘the universities, despite their statutes, were teaching the results of recent findings in mathematics and science’.55 But the statement is not true of the period before the end of the civil war, or at least its truth has not been demonstrated, and the mass of contemporary evidence seems to be against it. Mr. Curtis’s failure (as I see it) to appreciate the significance of the Parliamentarian purge is connected with his interpretation of the preceding period. The century between Reformation and Revolution saw constitutional changes in the universities which are linked with the rise in importance of the colleges. The strength of medieval Oxford, says its historian, had lain in the halls, ‘self-governed, unendowed, and unincorporated’.56 They were relatively democratic; the colleges, which catered especially for the sons of the gentry, were at first small and privileged communities. Many of the halls were Puritan centres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were also more hospitable to intellectual innovation than most colleges. At Gloucester Hall the Principal from 1626 to 1647 was the Calvinist Degory Wheare, first Camden Reader in History and John Pym’s friend. Wheare’s appointment as Reader seems to have been due to Thomas Allen, Oxford’s solitary mathematician of eminence until the arrival of Briggs. Allen had resigned a fellowship at Trinity to transfer to the more congenial atmosphere of Gloucester Hall. He was a protege first of Leicester, then of Northumberland, a friend of Hariot (formerly of St. Page 7 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities Mary’s Hall), with whom he corresponded about the comet of 1618, and (like Wheare) a supporter of Hakewill.57 Thomas Hobbes was an undergraduate of Magdalen Hall, where he indulged in extra-curricular reading of astronomy and cosmography.58 But the Hall drew its undergraduates especially from Buckinghamshire, a radical county since the days of the Lollards. It may have been his experience (p.278) of this ‘nest of Puritans’59 that made the sage of Malmesbury think that the universities turned out too many seditious Puritans: Christopher Guise’s tutor there was ‘disaffected to the present government’ in the sixteen-thirties.60 The revisions of the statutes of Oxford and Cambridge, from Cardinal Pole and Whitgift to Laud, restricted university democracy by curtailing the power of proctors and fellows, bringing the Halls under control, and concentrating authority, both in the university and in the colleges themselves, in the heads of houses. The latter were often themselves royal nominees—‘those little living idols or monuments of monarchy’, a Harringtonian Fellow of Durham College was to call them.61 This constitutional change had intellectual consequences. The best that even the kindly Fuller could find to say of ‘a good Master of a College’ was that ‘his learning, if beneath eminency, is far above contempt’. Fuller took it for granted that the Head of a House would be expected to make ‘a worthless man Fellow’ if urged to do so by the court. ‘Oftentimes’ Masters ‘make only dunces Fellows’, without even the excuse of royal pressure.62 The author of The History of the University of Cambridge, though disappointed of a fellowship himself,63 was hardly a prejudiced enemy of the universities. In the brief radical interlude of Edward VI’s reign the royal commission of 1549 tried to stimulate medical eduction at Cambridge, and made mathematics the subject of the first year of the arts course, relegating grammar to schools. But Edward’s reign was as exceptional in intellectual as in religious history. The first Elizabethan revision of the Edwardian statutes reinstated an arts course of rhetoric, logic, and philosophy; Whitgift’s statutes of 1570 made no mention of mathematics at all. At Oxford the statutes of 1565 and 1586 reimposed the old subjects and authorities. The Laudian statutes summed up this conservative trend. The bishops in 1584 opposed the making of any provision for research in the universities.64 It is to the actions of their enemies that we must look for intellectual innovations. Emmanuel College was founded by a Puritan for Puritans: from the start it had strong scientific leanings. Timothy Bright, medical writer, inventor of shorthand, protege of Sidney and Walsingham, was a (p.279) witness to its foundation statutes. His brother was a Fellow.65 Its first Master was Lawrence Chaderton, the earliest exponent of Ramus’s logic at Cambridge.66 Chaderton was a keen botanist as well as a member of the Puritan delegation at the Hampton Court Conference. Preston, Chaderton’s successor, had originally contemplated a medical career, and scientific images and metaphors abound in his sermons.67 Page 8 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities The fourth Master was Richard Holdsworth, who helped John Wallis to find his way to mathematics. The Cambridge Platonists, of whom all but Henry More were Emmanuel men, neatly illustrate the fusion of Puritanism, Parliamentarianism, and science. Emmanuel men in our story include Jeremiah Horrocks, the younger Peter Chamberlen, Phineas Pett, Jeremiah Bainbridge, William Bedell, Samuel Ward, Anthony Burges, John Stoughton, Ralph Cudworth, and John Bastwick: though Bastwick left for Padua to study medicine. Of the university members of the group which began to meet at Gresham College in 1645, four came from Oxford halls (Wilkins and Goddard from Magdalen Hall, Merrett and Haak from Gloucester Hall); Wallis and Foster were Emmanuel men, Ent from Puritan Sidney Sussex. The only other college represented was Gresham’s old college, Caius, with its strong medical tradition.68 So before 1642 there was a cleavage within the academic ranks. The university establishment was solidly conservative. The university Parliamentary seats became pocket boroughs for Charles I.69 There was probably less support for Parliament during the civil war from dons than from any other section of the population, except the paid officers of the Church courts.70 But at Oxford the halls, and to a lesser extent Wadham,71 were more forward-looking; at Cambridge Puritan Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex and to a lesser extent Caius and perhaps Puritan Christ’s.72 (p.280) There were a few tutors in other colleges with advanced ideas, mostly Puritans, who no doubt tried to introduce new methods and subjects into their teaching; there were no doubt many undergraduates who responded. But only after the civil war, and with outside support, did the hitherto repressed minority triumph. All the members of the Oxford halls acknowledged Parliament’s authority at the Visitation, whereas more than half the Fellows of colleges were expelled for refusing to submit. At Cambridge eleven of the new heads of houses under the Commonwealth came from Emmanuel.73 ‘Mathematics, which had before been a pleasing diversion, was now to be my serious study.’ The words which Wallis applied to his appointment to the Savilian chair of Geometry fit the universities as a whole during the Interregnum.74 The Commissioners at Oxford put an end to the requirement of celibacy in heads of houses, and introduced lay heads. They tried to reduce the power of the oligarchy, even after they had introduced their own nominees to controlling positions. (A petition from ‘divers’ of Oxford had complained to the Long Parliament in 1642 that the Laudian statutes illegally took away the liberty of Convocation and Congregation, whilst increasing the power of the Chancellor and heads of houses.)75 The Commissioners proposed the institution of fellowships terminable (as at Wadham) at stated periods, in order to prevent men becoming ‘drones’. College electors were sworn to nominate none to fellowships who were suspected of bribery.76 Wallis, the Long Parliament’s cryptographer, who had given evidence against Laud at his trial,77 became a professor; Wilkins, later Cromwell’s brother-in-law, became Warden of Wadham, Page 9 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities with Sydenham and Sprat among his Fellows. Goddard, Cromwell’s physician, became Warden of Merton. Petty was Professor of Anatomy and Vice-Principal of Brasenose. Seth Ward as Professor of Astronomy after 1649 revived the reputation of the subject: his chair and that of Physic received handsome augmentations. The whole intellectual atmosphere changed. By 1654 Ward could claim that, though Oxford respected Aristotle, it did not insist that he should be studied.78 (p.281) Contemporaries believed that equally important changes took place in the social composition of undergraduates. Balliol admitted far fewer FellowCommoners between 1640 and 1670. Many men from poorer and socially less distinguished families managed to get to the universities, thanks to newly endowed scholarships. Oxford ‘flourished in number, but few nobility, gentry also’: they were replaced by ‘the sons of upstart gentlemen’, and by ‘men very mean and poor at their first coming’. Yet royalists like Wood and Clarendon had to admit that Interregnum Oxford ‘yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge of all parts of learning’.79 And to a lesser extent the same was true of Cambridge, though the changes there were less radical than at Oxford since they were made in the period of Presbyterian supremacy.80 But the Restoration brought back the nobility and gentry, the ruling oligarchies and gowns.81 By the end of the century ‘the best days of the Halls had passed away’ at Oxford.82 It seems to me, therefore, quite illegitimate to illustrate the condition of Oxford and Cambridge before the civil war by evidence from the fifties, ‘since the universities came into those hands where now it is’. It also seems to me mistaken to deny the close connexion between Puritans and the foward-looking minority inside the universities (Carpenter, Holdsworth, Emmanuel, the halls).83 It seems to me wrong to underestimate the powerful forces within the universities which opposed fundamental changes. These forces used government support to check Puritanism and self-government, and to prevent any modernization of the curriculum. The ideas which mobilized men for revolution came largely from Puritans, with useful support from the scientists; they were directed against (among other things) the ‘inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery’ of the bishops and consequent intellectual frustration. This struggle had its counterpart inside Oxford and Cambridge: only the Puritans and scientists could never have won there without support from outside. Notes:
(1) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 249–50. See other criticisms of Mr. Curtis by Mrs. Simon, ‘The Social Origins of Cambridge Students, 1603–1640’ (P. and P., no. 26, pp. 58–67).
Page 10 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities (2) Of those Somerset men who matriculated at Oxford or Cambridge without intending to pursue a clerical career, only one in five took a degree (T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640, 1961, p. 31). (3) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 227–31, 259–60. (4) [Seth Ward], Vindiciae Academiarum (1654), pp. 30, 4.9–50. (5) See p. 31 above. (6) W. T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at early 17th century Cambridge (Harvard U.P., 1958), p. 148. For Mr. Curtis’s view of this work, which appeared too late for him to use, see his review in lsis, li. 112–13. (7) Costello, op. cit., p. 11. (8) J. Hall, An Humble Motion (1653), p. 28. (9) Quoted by F. A. Yates, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, ii. 232; cf. G. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity (translated by Jack Lindsay, 1962), p. 6. Cf. Sidney, quoted on p. 121 above. (10) W. Harrison, Description of England, in R. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), p. 150. (11) Hakewill, Apologie, p. 275. Arabic was of use to mathematicians and scientists, as well as to Levant traders. Cf. p. 41 above. (12) R. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy Everyman (Everyman ed.), i. 327. (13) Sir W. Davenant, Dramatic Works (1872), ii. 56. (14) W. O[ughtred], An Apologeticall Epistle, Sig. A 4v, in The Circles of Perfection, translated by W. Forster (1632). (15) See p. 277 below. (16) G. Wither, Juvenilia (Spenser Soc. reprint), i, pp. x–xiv, 189–90, 345–6. Mr. Curtis quotes similar criticisms by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the Earl of Essex, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (op. cit, pp. 68, 127–8). (17) Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 81. (18) H. Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War in England (1842), i. 152. (19) Ed. J. E. B. Mayor, Autobiography of Matthew Robinson (1856), pp. 21, 26; cf p. 97. (20) Osborn, Miscellaneous Works (1722), ii. 275–6. Page 11 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities (21) R. B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, pp. 61–62; J. N. L. Baker, The History of Geography (1963), p. 120; contrast Curtis, op. cit., pp. 234– 5. (22) See p. 49 above. The founders of English economics were also nonuniversity men (W. Let win, The Origins of Scientific Economics, 1963, pp. 83– 86). (23) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 153–4, 163; cf. V. C. H. Cambridgeshire, iii. 208. (24) C. E. Mallet, History of the University of Oxford, ii (1924), p. 133. (25) J. Hall, An Humble Motion, pp. 16–17, 28. (26) H. W. C. Davis, A History of Balliol College (revised ed., 1963), p. 85. (27) N. Carpenter, Geographie (1625), esp. pp. 75–115; Hakewill, An Apologie, p. 310; A. Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ii. 422; Foster Watson, The Beginning of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England, pp. 117–22, 136–7, 261, 283; Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, pp. 136–7; R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 68–69; P. Miller, The New England Mind: the 17th Century, p. 500; Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution, pp. 313–14, 322–3; Baker, op. cit, pp. 1– 14. In December 1649 Roger Williams was trying to borrow John Winthrop’s copy of Carpenter’s Geographie (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, New Series, vii. 277). See also pp. 50, 60 above. (28) J. Hall, An Humble Motion, p. 27. (29) See pp. 107–10 above. (30) Ed. Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, p. 271; cf. pp. 214, 238, 474– 5. (31) T. Hall, Histrio-Mastix (1655), quoted by Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 96. (32) P. H. Osmond, Isaac Barrow (1944), pp. 38–39. (33) S. E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 77. Cf. Sir William Temple, quoted on p. 105 above. (34) G. Goodman, The Two Great Mysteries of Christian Religion (1653), Sig. a 2. (35) Strype, Annals of the Reformation (1824), III, part i, pp. 709–10; Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), pp. 149–50; J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 1535–1625 (1884), pp. 263–4, 394–5; ed. B. Schofield, The Knyvett Letters (1620–1644) (1949), p. 20; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. pp. 327–30; J. Earle, Microcosmographie (1628), ‘A Young Gentleman of the Page 12 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities University’; D’Ewes, Autobiography, i. 141–2; cf. V. C. H. Cambridgeshire, iii. 440. (36) Wither, Juvenilia, i. 186–7; H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (1958), p. 255; Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley, pp. 54–55. (37) F. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa (1779), p. 470. Cf. Memoirs of the Family of Guise (ed. G. Davies, Camden Soc, 1917), pp. 116–17, and further references there, for excessive drinking at Oxford. (38) Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War, i. 151–3, 385. (39) Holinshed, Chronicles, p. 149; Strype, Life of Whitgift (1822), i. 149–50, 610–11; Strype, Annals, III, part ii, pp. 199, 299; Burton, Anatomy, i. 327–8; (Anon.) The Curates Conference (1641), in Harleian Miscellany (1744–56), i. 481; J. Webster, Complete Works (ed. F. L. Lucas, 1927), ii. 244; Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, pp. 82–83, 170–1; G. B. Tatham, The Puritans in Power (1913), pp. 97– 100; G. Soden, Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester (1953), pp. 56, 388; Mullinger and Mallet, passim. (40) Mullinger, op. cit, pp. 268–9 (Bill of 1576–7, vetoed by Elizabeth; passed in 1589); Cambridge Characteristics in the 17th Century (1867), pp. 36–37 (unsuccessful petition in 1625); The University of Cambridge from…1626 to the decline of the Platonist Movement (1911), pp. 98–99 (unsuccessful Bill in 1629). Cf. Curtis, op. cit, p. 53. (41) Holdsworth dated letters from Gresham College on 11 February and 16 June 1631 (information kindly supplied by Mr. F. P. White, Keeper of the Records, St. John’s College, Cambridge) and again on 11 May and 8 June 1632 (Add. MSS. 6193, ff. 157–9). (42) Curtis, op. cit., p. 133. The ‘Directions’ are printed in H. F. Fletcher’s The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Illinois U.P.), ii (1961), pp. 623–4, and discussed at length in the text. Unfortunately this volume came to my notice too late for me to be able to make full use of it. The ‘Directions’ were treated much more cautiously by S. E. Morison, who first drew attention to them in 1935 (The Founding of Harvard College, esp. 62–77). He noted the absence of even the most elementary mathematical or scientific studies, apart from Aristotelean physics. (43) Curtis, op. cit, p. 112. (44) G. Westin, Negotiations about Church Unity, 1629–34 (Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift, Band i, 1932), p. 207. Other signatories, all Puritans, included Richard Sibbes, Daniel Featley, Stephen Marshall, John Davenport, John White, Samuel Ward, Thomas Taylor, Cornelius Burges. See also pp. 52, 53 above.
Page 13 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities (45) Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, p. 58; R. Baillie, Letters and Journals (1775), i, 220. Baillie thought Holdsworth ‘famous for learning’. (46) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 113–14. (47) Ibid., pp. 118–19, 251, 234–5, 243–5, 237–9. (48) Curtis, op. cit., pp. 121–2, 230. (49) Ibid., p. 233. (50) Ibid., pp. 117–18—contrast p. 246, where Mr. Curtis seems to me to miss Briggs’s point. (51) Ibid., p. 277. (52) Ibid., Chapter IX, passim, and pp. 274–5. (53) Curtis, op. cit, pp. 227–8, 248–9, 257–8. (54) Ibid., pp. 232, 246, 274, see pp. 104–12 above. (55) Ibid., pp. 260, 249–50. (56) Mallet, op. cit, ii. 287. (57) Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 26–27; Stephens, Thomas Hariot, p. 138; Hakewill, Apologie, p. 158;, Sig. c 2. For Wheare, see above; for Allen, p. 130. Sir Kenelm Digby was at Gloucester Hall. (58) T. Hobbes, The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1680), pp. 33–34, quoted by S. I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962), pp. 2–3. (59) F. P. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War, i (1892), pp. 118–19. Ralph Verney was taught astronomy, chronology, and geography by his Magdalen Hall tutor in the late sixteen-thirties. Walter Charleton and Thomas Sydenham were at Magdalen Hall. So was John Bidle, the Socinian. (60) Ed. G. Davies, Memoirs of the Family of Guise (Camden Soc, 1917), p. 116. (61) W. Sprigge, A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth (1659), p. 45. (62) T. Fuller, The Holy State (1841), pp. 93–95. (63) I owe this point to Mr. Curtis. (64) Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 1535–1625, pp. 306–9. (65) W. J. Carlton, Timothe Bright, pp. 41–43; for Bright see p. 68 n. above.
Page 14 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities (66) Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, pp. 179, 222. Milton’s friend, the younger Alexander Gill, who was degraded from the ministry for drinking the health of Buckingham’s assassin in 1628, had been at Wadham. (67) See my Puritanism and Revolution (1958), p. 239. (68) D. Stimson, ‘Comenius and the Invisible College’, lsis, xxiii. 378. Contrast Curtis, op. cit, pp. 248–9. Emmanuel became the largest Cambridge college under Preston. Its entry was not to be so high again until 1890 (J. A. Venn, The Entries in the Colleges of the University of Cambridge, 1544–1906, 1908). (69) M. B. Rex, University Representation in England, 1604–1690 (1954), pp. 57, 97. (70) Cf. T. May, History of the Parliament of England (1647), iii. 79; S. Fisher, The Rusticks Alarme to the Rabbies (1660), in The Testimony of Truth Exalted (1679), pp. 579–80; Hobbes, Behemoth, in English Works, vi. 347–8; L. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (ed. C. H. Firth, 1885), i. 114–15; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), ii. 469. (71) Wadham drew its undergraduates from the west-country clothing areas. One of its original statutes begins ‘in all matters of education nothing is better than practice’. The Fellows were not compelled to take orders; they were subject to a year’s probation on appointment, and to a limit of years on their tenure. (72) Professor Morison plausibly attributes the exceptional interest in astronomy and perspective shown in the 1634 regulations of Sidney Sussex College to its Puritan Master, Samuel Ward, formerly of Emmanuel College (The Founding of Harvard College, p. 76; cf. Curtis, op. cit., pp. 243–4). Books in Sidney Sussex library first interested Seth Ward in mathematics (W. Pope, Life of Seth Ward, 1691, p. 27). The isolated defender of the circulation of the blood in Oxford was a Sidney Sussex man. (I owe this information to Mr. N. Tyacke.) (73) Ed. M. Burrows, The Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford (Camden Soc, 1881), pp. 564–71; Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 1535– 1625, p. 314. (74) P. Allen, ‘Scientific Studies in the English Universities of the 17th century’, J.H.I, x. 231 and passim. (75) Leybourne-Popham MSS. (H.M.G.), pp. 4–5. (76) Mallet, op. cit, ii. 372, 387, 393–4. (77) Prynne, Canterburies Doome, p. 73.
Page 15 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Appendix: A Note on the Universities (78) Pope, op. cit., p. 23; [Ward], Vindiciae Academiarum, pp. 32, 58–60. (79) Davis, op. cit., p. 101; A. Wood, Life and Times, i. 149, 299, 301; Tatham, op. cit., p. 194; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, iv. 259; cf. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 53; R. H. Latham, Life of Sydenham, prefixed to Greenhill’s translation of Sydenham’s Works (1848), i, pp. xxi–xxii. (80) V.C.H. Cambridgeshire, iii. 201, 440, 467. Mr. Curtis agrees that ‘the situation improved even at Cambridge’ ‘shortly after’ the sixteen-thirties; but he does not give the credit for the improvement to the Parliamentarians (Op. cit., p. 246). (81) Hair, which Laud had kept cut short, was worn long in Roundhead Oxford. (82) Mallet, op. cit., ii. 299. (83) Curtis, op. cit, pp. 248, 287–8.
Access brought to you by:
Page 16 of 16
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0007
Abstract and Keywords The issues at stake in the seventeenth century were often discussed in what one would regard as religious language; but ‘religion’ then covered far more than it does today. As Sir Louis Namier used to say, religion was (among other things) a sixteenth-century word for nationalism. However, in looking for the intellectual origins of the major achievements of the English Revolution, this chapter gives more weight to the Protestant Reformation. The novel achievements of the English Revolution thus include: regicide; abolition of prerogative courts and so confirmation of gentry control of their localities; establishment of effective control of finance and foreign policy by Parliaments representing gentry and merchants, guaranteeing the finance necessary to make England the world's leading naval power; abolition of feudal tenures, which made possible first the agricultural and then the industrial revolution; the establishment of religious toleration of sorts. Keywords: religion, Louis Namier, nationalism, English Revolution, Protestant Reformation, England, Parliaments, regicide, foreign policy, finance
WHEN I gave these lectures in 1962, Gardiner’s phrase ‘Puritan Revolution’ was still being used by historians to describe the events in mid-seventeenth-century England. ‘The English Revolution’ continued in use by historians in continental countries which had experienced revolutions themselves (e.g. Guizot, Marx). Gardiner’s ‘Puritan Revolution’ always seemed to me likely to mislead readers in the present century because it suggested that the revolution was primarily about religion. Even when I was a schoolboy I noticed that Anglicans and dissenters Page 1 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ did not fight in our village street. The issues at stake in the seventeenth century were often discussed in what we would regard as religious language; but ‘religion’ then covered far more than it does today. As Sir Louis Namier used to say, religion was (among other things) a sixteenth-century word for nationalism. But in looking for the intellectual origins of the major achievements of the English Revolution I should now wish to give more weight to the Protestant Reformation than I did in 1962. The two generations before 1640 had seen great changes in English society, a great economic divide in the countryside. The fortunate few who were conveniently placed to produce for the market and who were sufficiently skilful, industrious, or lucky, and who seized their chance, could prosper by taking advantage of rising prices. The mass of the poor were getting both relatively and absolutely poorer, were becoming a permanent under-class. They could not spare the labour of their children to give them the education without which upward mobility was virtually impossible. So in villages new and sharper class divisions were developing—no longer setting gentry against the rest, but gentry, some yeomen, some merchants, some artisans, against the rest. This was so novel that contemporaries had no word to describe the emerging new rich as a social group: the term ‘parish elites’ is an invention of historians. (p.286) When men spoke of ‘the people’ in the seventeenth century, they normally excluded the poor.1 Hard and disciplined work, as well as good luck, was necessary if you were to prosper in this newly competitive society. Hence these virtues, and the wickedness of idleness and dissipation, were preached by Catholics and Protestants alike. Jesuits opposed the traditional Sunday sports and the theatre no less than did those whom we call ‘Puritans’. ‘Puritan’ social attitudes might be shared by many who did not accept ‘Puritan’ theology. So in my lectures I picked out secular issues and did not deal specifically with those which were regarded as religious in the seventeenth century—notably foreign policy (see pp. 300–1 below). I thought that ‘the Puritan Revolution’ was dead and buried. But I was wrong. It has been resurrected recently in the writings of historians who speak of the English Revolution as ‘the last of the religious wars’. This phrase seems to me even less appropriate than ‘the Puritan Revolution’, which did at least suggest something startlingly new. The English Revolution is significant in history as the first of the great revolutions, of which the French and Russian revolutions are later examples, very conscious of their debt to the English Revolution. In the English Revolution, as I pointed out, men drew parallels and lessons from the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. I drew attention especially to the influence of the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. But in none of these do we find the fundamental changes that separate the English Revolution from preceding history—regicide,
Page 2 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ shifts in agrarian property relations, mass democratic and subversive movements. The revolution was so novel that Englishmen who took part in it had at first no word to describe what they were doing. When Louis XVI looked out of his window in 1789 he described what he saw as a revolt. ‘No, Sire,’ said a courtier. ‘It is a revolution.’ The word had come, via the American Revolution, from the seventeenth-century English Revolution. Until the sixteen-forties the English word ‘revolution’ implied a circular process, ‘a turning back to the first point’. Those who made the English Revolution had no previous experience to guide them: there was no Jean Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx. All they had was the Bible, believed to contain guidance on every subject. But the word ‘revolution’ does not occur in the English Bible, though the Old Testament knows (p.287) ‘revolt’ (Isaiah 1: 5, 31: 6; Jeremiah 5: 23, 6: 28; Hosea 5: 2 and 9: 15). Some historians hold the eccentric view that men cannot do things which they have not got words to describe. Oliver Cromwell was one who performed that not very difficult feat in seventeenth-century England. In 1641, when he was asked ‘what he would have’, Oliver replied that he did not know: he knew only what he would not have. But in January 1655 he told the members of his first Parliament that ‘those mighty things God hath wrought in the midst of us’ had been ‘the revolutions of Christ himself’. ‘Let men take heed’, he added, ‘how they call them necessities of men’s creations.’2 If we substitute some such phrase as ‘the historical process’ for ‘God’, that is pretty well the modern definition of ‘revolution’. For Cromwell language had caught up with reality. Historians, I suggest, might follow him. The French historian Robert Mandrou, who knows something about revolutions, agreed with Cromwell. Post-revolutionary England became ‘another sort of society’.3 Breaking with traditional practices, rejecting divine-right monarchy, absolutism, and arbitrary government, the revolution marked the beginning of England as a great naval and imperial power, financed by the newly established control of taxation by an elected Parliament. Mandrou seems to think religion hardly worth mentioning in connexion with the English Revolution. But we must not underestimate the intellectually liberating effects in the long term of the competition of rival religious views and sects: legal acceptance of dissent was another legacy of the English Revolution. Later nonconformity, however, became something very different from the revolutionary ‘Puritanism’ of a Cromwell or a Milton. It is necessary, I think, not only to reject the word ‘Puritan’ in ‘the Puritan Revolution’ but also to insist on the word ‘revolution’. Some historians appear to think there cannot have been a revolution because they can find no conscious revolutionaries who planned it. But the French Jacobins, and the Russian Bolsheviks, who were conscious revolutionaries, had the English model to follow. The causes of great revolutions are not to be found in the machinations of Page 3 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ agitators but in shifting social attitudes. The English Revolution was recognized both by contemporaries and by later revolutionaries as something quite different from a ‘war of religion’. No later revolutionaries, curiously enough, drew analogies between this great revolution and the wars of religion. Some (p.288) royalists in the sixteen-forties suggested analogies with the Dutch revolt in order to discredit their enemies, and the use of natural law arguments by parliamentarians to justify rebellion may well derive from that revolt.4 But in 1789 the French consciously looked back to Charles I when they tried and executed Louis XVI. Regicide had been an unprecedentedly horrific crime in the seventeenth century. Girondins and Jacobins in the French Revolution were compared with Presbyterians and Independents in the English Revolution. Use of terror by French and Russian revolutionaries when faced with foreign intervention was anticipated by Cromwell’s effective terror in Ireland after the ending of the Thirty Years’ War had set France and Spain free to intervene in England. Activists in both later revolutions expected a Cromwell to emerge, and they got Napoleon and Stalin. Regicide is one reason for identifying the English Revolution as the first of the great European revolutions. Kings and rulers had previously been assassinated, often unpleasantly, but no monarch had been tried in public as a traitor to his people. Treason was a crime against our sovereign lord the king: how could a king be guilty of it? Only on the basis of the revolutionary claim that the people are superior to the king, and that he is subordinate to the elected assemblies which represented them. This claim was not invented by the Parliamentarians. It had been made in 1556 by John Ponet, Bishop of Winchester, who by then was a Marian exile. He had formerly been chaplain to Thomas Cromwell. In Ponet’s view, ‘kings and princes have their authority of the people’ and a prince might be a traitor to the commonwealth—as the court which tried Charles I decided that he was. Ponet justified tyrannicide when ‘the whole state’ neglected to punish ‘tyrants, idolaters and traitorous governors’. He gave the Biblical example of Jael, among others. His Short Treatise of Politique Power was reprinted in 1639 and again in 1642.5 So there was ample opportunity before the latter date to reflect on the arguments which Ponet put forward. The double reprinting after nearly a century tells its own story. If we look at the achievements of the English Revolution, over and above regicide, we can see how different they were from what resulted from ‘the wars of religion’. First, and foremost, the abolition of feudal tenures and wardship made English landlords absolute owners of their property, free from royal control and from the uncertainties of feudal (p.289) tenure. At the same time security of tenure for copyholders was rejected, so they could be evicted
Page 4 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ whenever this suited the landowner’s convenience. The combined effect was to make possible long-term, planned estate management. A second major transformation dating from the English Revolution was the Navigation Act. English merchants had been demanding such an act since the late fourteenth century; it was seriously canvassed in the sixteen-twenties and again in 1642.6 The Navigation Act of 1651 was confirmed at the Restoration. This gave English merchants a monopoly of trade with England’s overseas possessions. The Navigation Act, backed up by the great fleet inherited from the Commonwealth, contrasted sharply with the disastrous economic and foreign policy of the sixteen-thirties, when Charles had been unable to protect English merchants from pirates in the Mediterranean and ordered them to stay out of it. He could not even protect them in the English Channel. Laud’s insistence in 1634 that members of foreign churches in England conform to Anglican ceremonies disrupted the Wealden and Norwich clothing industries, whose expertise depended on Protestant émigrés from the continent. Rates of customs had been a matter for the royal prerogative. But in 1660 Parliament assumed this was now its right. Henceforth control of taxation was employed to further English trade and imperial conquests. English Parliaments were prepared to vote large sums for the navy, though obstinate in refusing to trust the government with a standing army. The Navigation Act created a closed imperial economy, in which English merchants could buy cheap in order to sell dear, at home or abroad. One consequence was a vast and rapid expansion of re-export trade; another consequence was an accumulation of capital which prepared for the Industrial Revolution. By the early eighteenth century England had a near-monopoly of the lucrative slave trade. ‘The labour of a slave in the plantations is worth six times as much as the labour of an Englishman at home’, wrote Davenant in 1698: he was speaking presumably of the employer’s profits.7 As Ralegh had predicted, England now controlled the trade of the world and so became a great power.8 A third consequence of the revolution was the effective conquest of (p.290) Ireland, as it had never been conquered previously: the first English colony, we might say. A relatively friendly union with Scotland was established, looking forward to 1707. Ireland had long been a potential back door to invasion from Europe: the sixteen-nineties saw the last serious attempt to use it for that purpose. Henceforward the British state was securely consolidated and the newly expanded home market was securely monopolized by English merchants. Fourthly, thanks to the revolution, the clergy were deprived of the political power which Laud had tried to recover for them. In 1610 Samuel Harsnett, Bishop of Chichester, and in the sixteen-twenties high-flying clergymen like Sibthorpe, Mainwaring, and Montague, had defended taxation levied by the royal prerogative without consent of Parliament, just at a time when French priests were elaborating a theory of royal absolutism in connexion with the war Page 5 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ against Protestant La Rochelle. George Abbott was sequestrated from the Archbishopric of Canterbury for refusing to comply with Laud’s ecclesiastical policy. Under the Laudian regime clergy were appointed J.P.s in increasing numbers. The gentry’s control of local government was further upset by a new and determined attempt to take the initiative in administering the poor law away from the localities, aided by Laud’s restoration of the effectiveness of episcopal visitations and church courts, backed up by the all-powerful Court of High Commission.9 The Book of Sports upset labour discipline and social subordination. The revolution changed all this. Church courts lost their power with the abolition of the High Commission Court in 1641. None of the hated prerogative courts were restored in 1660. This, together with the Triennial Act and the declaration of the illegality of Ship Money, confirmed the supremacy of Parliament and the common law over the executive. Merchants were in consequence freed from much government interference, and J.P.s from the gentry were left in control of local government. Dissenters from the Church of England, many of them merchants, slowly attained freedom of conscience and of worship, though their failure to establish stable control over the government during the revolutionary decades forced them to accept a subordinate position in the state. One by-product of the abolition of church and prerogative courts was the end of the monopoly of the College of Physicians, which was (p.291) not restored in 1660, despite denunciations of enthusiasts in ‘physick’ as in divinity.10 Medical practice became ‘a free economic activity like any other’, and entry to the profession became easier.11 Many doctors grew very rich as the new profession throve to gentility. But three out of four Englishmen, the Quaker social reformer John Bellers estimated in 1714, could not afford medical advice or treatment;12 and the death-rate among children of the poor remained horrific. The novel achievements of the English Revolution thus include (l) regicide; (2) abolition of prerogative courts and so confirmation of gentry control of their localities; (3) establishment of effective control of finance and foreign policy by Parliaments representing gentry and merchants, guaranteeing (4) the finance necessary to make England the world’s leading naval power; (5) abolition of feudal tenures, which made possible first the agricultural and then the industrial revolution; (6) the establishment of religious toleration of sorts. That England became the greatest European power in the eighteenth century, and her constitution became the model for European radicals, and that English ideas were the basis of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—these consequences of the revolution marked a startling change in England’s world position. Thomas Hobbes, who lived through the revolution without altogether approving of it, had no doubt that ‘if in time as in place there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe the highest of time would be that which passed in Page 6 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ England between 1640 and 1660’.13 He would not have said that if the English Revolution had been the last of the religious wars, of which Hobbes strongly disapproved. Perhaps this is the moment to declare a certain solidarity with Professor Fussner (whom I mention on p. 166 above). My old friend and sparring partner Lord Dacre (earlier known as Hugh Trevor-Roper) spoke disapprovingly of Fussner in the course of an entertaining demolition job which he dedicated to these lectures way back in 1966.14 I must have expressed myself very badly, since Lord Dacre summarizes ‘Hill’s equation’ as ‘Puritan v. Royalist = Moderns v. Ancients’ (p. 81). ‘Hill’s thesis…is that Puritanism in general in the early seventeenth century was the ideology of forward-looking men, the men who were destined to create a new science, a new philosophy, and a new political system, (p.292) and that the struggle between Puritans and Anglicans, Roundheads and Cavaliers, is also the struggle between Ancient and Moderns’ (p. 61). Any reader of my book will be able to decide for him- or herself whether that is a fair summary of my ‘thesis’. What I actually said was: ‘Leaving Puritanism aside, I propose to discuss some of the other ideas…. that motivated the seventeenth-century revolutionaries’ (p. 7 above). ‘I left Puritanism out of my analysis of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution.’ What I did suggest was not that Puritans were ‘pioneers of historical thought’,15 but that controversies in science, history, and law ‘relate to the social and political conflicts in the society which gave them birth’—and so does Puritanism (p. 267 above). I was (and still am) very far from thinking of Puritanism as a cause of everything else. Here I agree with Professor Fussner.16 As I write this introduction, a powerful new book by Victor Kiernan shows how Shakespeare’s tragedies reflect the pre-revolutionary crisis in which ‘one norm of conduct’ was ‘breaking down before its successor had established itself’. England as Shakespeare had depicted it in his later histories contained at least as much rottenness as Hamlet’s Denmark. In his tragic world Shakespeare shows more of the worse than of the better side of the new way of living.17 England was ‘growing rationally aware of its deepening discords’, ‘ceasing to be able to imagine itself a true community’, torn ‘between a gentry growing mercenary and a merchantry growing gentrified’, ‘and new generations inheriting old maladies from the past’. ‘Doomsday was narrowing down into competing programmes the clash of old and new that had forged Shakespearean tragedy was becoming a matter for politicians instead of poets.’ Shakespearean tragedy offers no solutions, Kiernan suggests, ‘except in the magnificence of the language of its heroes’.18 Perhaps the tragedies are more fully comprehensible to us than they were to seventeenth-century readers and theatre-goers.
Page 7 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ Notes:
(1) J. S. Morrill, Seventeenth-Century Britain, 1603–1714 (1980), pp. 108–9. See also my ‘The Poor and the People’, in People and Ideas, pp. 247–73. (2) See my ‘The Word “Revolution”’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), where I give many other examples. (3) R. Mandrou, Louis XIV en son temps, 1661–1715 (Paris, 1973), p. 544; cf. pp. 27–28, 377. (4) C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (1964), p. 87. (5) Op. cit. I cite from the reprint of 1642, pp. 26–36, 40–49, 52–58, 63. See also Chapter 18 below, where I discuss Scottish defenders of a popular right of revolt. (6) See my A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), pp. 11–12. (7) C. Davenant, Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England, I.C.S.P. Venetian, 1636–9, pp. 421–2; 1640–2, pp. 77–78, in Political and Commercial Works (1771), ii. 17–47; cf. Reflections upon the Constitution and Management of the Trade of Africa (1709), Ibid., v. See my A Nation of Change and Novelty, pp. 16–17. (8) See pp. 138–48 below. (9) See my ‘Archbishop Laud’s Place in English History’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty (1993), pp. 72–99. (10) Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 270. (11) My Change and Continuity in 17th-century England, pp. 159–69, 176, 327; Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (1980), p. 51. (12) John Bellers, An Essay Towards the Improvement of Physick (1714), ‘To the Parliament’. (13) Hobbes, English Works (ed. Sir W. Molesworth, 1889–45), vi. 165. (14) In a review in History and Theory, v, no. 1 (1966), pp. 61–82. (15) History and Theory, v, no. 1 (1966), p. 81. (16) See p. 350 below. However, Lord Dacre caught me out in one very bad error. On p. 244 above I confused Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, with Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland; and I did so through relying on secondary sources. I have corrected this howler for the present edition, and take this opportunity of thanking Lord Dacre for his justified rebuke. (17) V. G. Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare (1996), pp. 230–1. Page 8 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Introduction: ‘These Mighty Things God Hath Wrought’ (18) Ibid., pp. 236–7, 264, 273–4.
Access brought to you by:
Page 9 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Religion, Politics, and Economics Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0008
Abstract and Keywords Religion, politics, and economics seem to be inextricably linked in seventeenthcentury England. Unlike most Continental countries, England had no army or significant bureaucracy, and also needed the state church and its courts, topped by the High Commission, to control heresy, the press, and education. This was especially the case when — as in the sixteen-thirties — relations with the gentry were strained. The church was a necessary part of the government of England — on that Charles I and Oliver Cromwell agreed. Charles had no doubt that ‘religion is the only firm foundation of all power’; in 1646 he was still ‘most confident that religion will much sooner regain the militia than the militia will regain religion’. Cromwell expressed the same point rather differently when he said: ‘No government can permit ministers to pretend scruples’. This was the general view of ruling persons. Keywords: religion, politics, economics, England, state, church, courts, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell
I RELIGION, POLITICS, and economics seem to me inextricably linked in seventeenth-century England. Unlike most Continental countries, England had no army or significant bureaucracy; governments had to rule through J.P.s. They also needed the state church and its courts, topped by the High Commission, to control heresy, the press, and education. This was especially the case when—as in the sixteen-thirties—relations with the gentry were strained.
Page 1 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics The church was a necessary part of the government of England—on that Charles I and Oliver Cromwell agreed. Charles had no doubt that ‘religion is the only firm foundation of all power’; in 1646 he was still ‘most confident that religion will much sooner regain the militia than the militia will regain religion’. Cromwell expressed the same point rather differently when he said: ‘No government can permit ministers to pretend scruples.’1 This was the general view of ruling persons. Archbishop Laud declared that anyone libelling the clergy was attacking the king and the state;2 Francis Bacon had told the judges in 1617 that ‘there will be a perpetual defection except you keep men in by preaching as well as law doth by punishing’.3 ‘The chief use’ of the clergy, said Sir John Coke, ‘is now the defence of our church, and therein of our state.’4 He was Secretary of State from 1625 to 1639. Whitgift and Laud both heartily disliked parliaments. In 1641 Edward Hyde ‘could not conceive how religion could be preserved without bishops, nor how the government of the state will subsist if the government of the church were altered’, for episcopacy was a part of the government of England.5 His point had been anticipated by Thomas Nashe (or some other government pamphleteer attacking Martin Marprelate): (p.294) He that now says, Why should bishops be? Will next cry out, Why kings? The saintes are free.6
Francis Chestlin agreed, after some experience, declaring in 1648 that ‘episcopal government’ was ‘the king’s spiritual militia and the most powerful as commanding the consciences of subjects’.7 In 1660 episcopal government was restored with exactly that function in mind. In 1589 Bishop Cooper had spoken of‘the loathsome contempt, hatred and disdain that the most part of men in these days bear…toward the ministers of the church of God…He who can most bitterly inveigh against bishops and preachers…thinketh of himself, and is esteemed of other, as the most zealous and earnest furtherer of the gospel.’ He seems to have accepted that ‘our bishops and ministers are evil men’, though he did not think that a sufficient reason for abolishing them and confiscating their lands.8 Francis Godwin, in his Catalogue of the Bishops of England (1601), admitted that ‘in the vulgar sort…is bred a conceit’ that the ‘functions and callings’ of the clergy were ‘utterly unlawful and Antichristian’.9 Richard Greenham wrote of the ‘great hatred against the clergy’ because of their strict collection of tithes and lax attention to dispensing hospitality.10 Izaak Walton two generations later confirmed that the common people believed bishops to be Antichrist.11 Archbishop Sandys agreed that ‘the ministers of the word…are esteemed tamquam excrementa mundi’.12 Another bishop, Aylmer, declared that ‘our estimation is little, our authority is less; so that we are become contemptible in the eyes of the people’.13 James I is said to have admitted that he made bad men bishops, but claimed that ‘no good men would take the office on them’.14 Why should anyone be surprised when the
Page 2 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics Bishop of Waterford and Lismore in Ireland was ‘condemned for iniquities far above all that is kept on record concerning Sodom’?15 Above all, some aspiring clergymen defended what parliamentarians regarded as arbitrary taxation, without consent of Parliament. The ecclesiastical canons of 1604 were criticized in the House of Commons as infringing property rights.16 When Bishop Neile retaliated by attacking (p.295) the House in 1610 he was said to have committed a greater treason than killing a judge. Henry Marten among others in 1610 and 1614 denounced parsons who preached up a prerogative right to taxation: they tended to be those who were promoted. Both Marten and Sir Roger Owen accused the clergy of supporting absolutism. Bancroft indeed thought that to say that ‘the king’s necessity must be relieved’ was a sound proposition in speculative divinity.17 Thomas Brightman in 1615 recognized that bishops were unpopular with ‘the people and the multitude’, adding: ‘Yea, and the nobility hath of a long time smelt out this rub.’18 When Richard Montagu was under attack in 1628 for rejecting the authority of Parliament in religious matters in his Apello Caesarem, Pym in his speech to the House of Lords demanding his impeachment was very careful to stress Montagu’s subversion of Parliament and the laws of England rather than his theology. Selden claimed never to have heard property denied but in the pulpit.19 The ecclesiastical canons of 1640 provocatively asserted a ‘regal power’ of taxation. They have slighted the people, the vulgar’, said Jeremiah Burroughs from the pulpit in the following year, ‘as if their very souls were made to lie under them for them to trample upon.’20 ‘The church and state do mutually support and give assistance to each other,’ Bishop Goodman declared; and he quoted James I’s ‘no bishop, no king, no nobility’.21 Hugh Peter was to put it more concisely: ‘the state pays them [the clergy], and thus they have dependence upon the state.’22 Robert South reminded the lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn in 1660 that ‘if there were not a minister in every parish, you would quickly find cause to increase the number of constables’.23 This was a point increasingly stressed whilst men still remembered the social anxieties of the sixteen-forties and fifties. Thus the Revd Jeremy Collier in 1698: ‘If eternity were out of the case, general advantage and public reason and secular policy would oblige us to be just to the priesthood. For…religion is the basis of government.’ Even if’a scheme of infidelity could be demonstrated’, it should be kept secret, lest it ‘shake the securities of civil life’.24 Marvell had quoted the turncoat Samuel Parker in similar vein: (p.296) Put the case the clergy were cheats and jugglers, yet it must be allowed they are necessary instruments of state to awe the common people into fear and obedience, because nothing else can so effectively enslave them. [’tis this it seems our author would be at] as the fear of invisible powers, and the dismal apprehensions of the world to come: and for this Page 3 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics very reason, though there were no other, it is fit they should be allowed the same honour and respect as would be acknowledged their due if they were sincere and honest men. ‘No atheist could have said better’ was Marvell’s dry comment.25 Charles I and Oliver Cromwell also agreed in denying that the breach which led to civil war was caused by religion. So did Clarendon, who thought that the government had alienated those men of rank and wealth who were its natural supporters: he tacitly assumed that the lower classes tended naturally to be hostile to government. The bishops who had monopolized so many great offices under Charles I, Clarendon said, ‘by want of temper or want of breeding did not behave themselves with that decency towards the greatest men of the kingdom as in discretion they ought to have done’. So they incurred ‘the universal envy of the whole nobility’.26 But there were hazards for men of property in looking for popular support against bishops and clergy. As was shown in the 1640s, ‘the multitude’ might get out of the control of their betters. When abolition of bishops was proposed in the Long Parliament, Edmund Waller defended episcopacy on social grounds as ‘a counterscarp or outwork’. If it ‘be once taken by this assault of the people…we may in the next place have as hard a task to defend our property’.27 Election of ministers by congregations might be dangerous. Since the dissolution of the monasteries presentation to five out of every six benefices was in lay patronage—that is, controlled by the gentry.28 Their appointees would not be dangerous radicals. Preservation of lay patronage seemed essential to gentry power. The Ordinance of 1646 setting up a Presbyterian state church carefully laid it down that elders were to be chosen by those members of congregations who were not ‘servants that have no families’. The maintenance of tithes, ensuring that there was a ‘living’ in every parish, was also important for the gentry. In many parishes the right to collect tithes had passed into the hands of lay ‘impropriators’ since (p.297) the dissolution of the monasteries. If tithes were abolished—as many radicals demanded in the revolutionary decades—and ministers were elected by congregations, the clergy would be wholly dependent on the congregations which chose and supported them. The church would cease to be committed to the maintenance of gentry power. The church can be compared as an institution of social control to the press and the radio today. But its power was vastly greater, since the majority of the population was illiterate, had no independent organs of discussion, no political power such as the vote gives, and no tradition of independent political action except by blind revolt.
Page 4 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics II So, long before 1640, lines were being drawn. Andrew Melville in Scotland called Richard Bancroft ‘the capital enemy of all the reformed churches of Europe’.29 Francis Cheynell, preaching to the Long Parliament, referred to ‘Bishop Bancroft and the Babylonian faction’.30 Theological disagreements were inextricably confused with issues relating to the sanctity of property and to foreign policy. In the sixteen-twenties attacks on papists by M.P.s were increasingly intended to impress opinion outside the House, a new practice of which Charles not unreasonably complained. M.P.s who made fiercely antiCatholic speeches in the House maintained friendly relations with their papist neighbours in their countries. Theological polarization was a consequence of considerations of foreign-policy issues on which the King’s advisers were rightly thought to be unsound. Everything was mixed up. Successive archbishops from Whitgift to Laud campaigned to elevate the status of ‘priests’: clergymen were increasingly appointed as J.P.s. We see here some of the long-term causes of the English Revolution: whether we should describe the issues as religious or political or economic is an unanswerable question. Opposition to Archbishop Laud linked the desire of the ‘natural rulers’ to be left alone to run their localities with the demand for a forward commercial imperial policy and fear of royal absolutism. Lurking behind it all was the menace perceived in Catholic victories in the Thirty Years War which led to restoration of confiscated church lands in Germany as well as to religious persecution. (p.298) Men were aware of the possibilities of revolt. After the failure of the Marprelate Tracts, the radical Puritan John Field, despairing of Parliament, declared that ‘seeing we cannot compass these things by suit nor dispute,…it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass that we desire’.31 But this was risky. ‘The multitude and people’ might not find Presbyterian discipline as attractive as their betters. Not all of Laud’s enemies were anxious to see a Presbyterian discipline established. As relations between Parliament and Charles’s government reached breaking-point, many conservative gentlemen began to have second thoughts. A petition from the gentry of Cheshire in December 1641 said that Presbyterianism ‘must necessarily produce an extermination of nobility, gentry and order, if not of religion’.32 Henry Oxinden feared that ‘Presbyterian government…will…equalize men of mean conditions with the gentry. Naturally they have ever hated and in their hearts despised’ their betters.33 Sir Thomas Aston in 1641 cited men who say they are ‘all sons of Adam, born free…They will plead Scripture for it, that we should all live by the sweat of our brows.’34 In June 1642 the King warned Parliament to accept his terms lest ‘at last the common people…set up for themselves’.35
Page 5 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics When it came to civil war, ‘Military preparations had effected little had not the fires been given from the pulpit’.36 Royalists agreed on the importance of popular preaching in raising support for Parliament.37 In Lancashire Puritan preachers invariably found supporters of the parliamentarian cause among the yeomanry and traders ‘of the neighbourhood’. Lecturers, Heylyn tells us, were often ‘the creatures of the people’38 because elected by their congregations. Lecturers were said to have been decisive in determining resistance to the king in the crucial towns of Hull, Plymouth, and Gloucester in the first year of the civil war. Most London parishes had elected lecturers, which helps to explain the capital’s consistent loyalty to Parliament.39 But from the start there were signs of extreme radical views. In (p.299) Oxfordshire ‘Vulgar hearts’ were saying ‘the gentry…have been our masters a long time and now we may chance to master them’. In 1643 a Northamptonshire rioter hoped ‘within this year to see never a gentleman in England’.40 Sir John Oglander in the Isle of Wight wailed that ‘the gentlemen of England…could call nothing their own, and lived in slavery to the unruly base multitude’.41 The High Sheriff of Lancashire in November 1462 had summoned the gentry of the county to turn out for the king and ‘for the securing of our lives and estates which are now ready to be surprised by a heady multitude’.42 Even the official historian of Parliament deplored ‘that extreme licence which the common people, almost from the beginning of the Parliament, took to themselves of reforming without authority, order or decency’.43 John Hotham, deserting to the King in January 1643, gave as his reason that if the war continued ‘the necessitous people of the whole kingdom will presently rise in mighty numbers’ and ‘ultimately set up for themselves, to the utter ruin of all the nobility and gentry of the kingdom’.44 When the Earl of Essex was demoted from command of the Parliamentary army in December 1644 he promised henceforth to ‘devote his life to redressing the audacity of the common people’.45 Similar social alarm was expressed in the breakdown of 1659–60, when it contributed significantly to the sudden and unexpected restoration of Charles II. Contemporaries seem to have been under the illusion that they were living through a social revolution rather than a ‘war of religion’. Everybody agreed on the political importance of religion: and since the Reformation most men had agreed that binding truths and laws were to be found in the English Bible. But the Bible had to be interpreted. Not all of its truths were equally evident to all readers; and here social considerations came into play. We should perhaps look to economics rather than to religion for the rise of individualism, the right of men to do what they would with their own: but the priesthood of all believers and the doctrine of the perfectibility on earth of the elect, the supremacy of the godly individual conscience over all earthly institutions, gave confidence to those who believed themselves to be saints. Those who held such ideas tended to be men of property, and so they easily and innocently assumed that ‘the people of England’ meant ‘Englishmen of property’. Page 6 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (p.300) This had consequences for foreign policy and colonization. It was Englishmen’s religious duty to spread Christ’s kingdom into the New World, and to oppose the Antichristian forces of Spain and France. England was a country especially favoured by God; the Pope was Antichrist, the royalists in the civil war were known as ‘the Antichristian party’. The Thirty Years War and England’s economic and political crisis forced millenarian ideas upon Protestants already predisposed to accept them. Catholics seemed to be winning the war on the continent; English owners of former monastic property could not but be antiCatholic. In the sixteen-thirties it was easy to see an international popish plot, in which Henrietta Maria was a leading figure.46 The Irish revolt of 1641, for which the Pope sent over his representative to take command, confirmed this view. We can call such ideas ‘religious’, or ‘Puritan’, if we wish. But they are so deeply infused with economics and politics that we are in danger of misleading ourselves unless we continually recall that ‘religion’ means something very different from what it does today. Wage labourers were taught that it was a religious duty to labour in their calling. One of the Homilies of the Church of England was on the wickedness of idleness.47 This theme was eagerly taken up by Puritan preachers like Richard Baxter. Baxter was a good and charitable man; but he had no doubts that poverty was a disgrace, the consequence of sinfulness.48 What Britain most needs, Hugh Peter said, is ‘justice, charity and industry’, pointing out that these virtues had ensured the prosperity of the Netherlands.49 Most of the profits from the industry of the poor went to their employers—who were no doubt themselves not idle, from patriotic as well as self-regarding motives. One reason for abolishing saints’ days had been that they reduced working time. Sabbatarianism was based on biblical authority, but it also made economic sense to give labourers one day of rest in seven.50 Puritan preachers supported the colonizing ambitions of godly rich adventurers. Thomas Cooper in 1615 asked ‘Can you do God better service than in promoting his kingdom and demolishing the power of Satan’ by ‘furthering this great and glorious work of the gathering in of (p.301) the Gentiles’ by colonizing Ireland and Virginia?51 The English people are ‘marked and chosen by the finger of God’ to possess North America, declared the Secretary of the Virginia Company in the following year.52 Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney and in his poetical treatises set out a long-term programme for Parliamentary control of taxation to pay for a forward foreign policy in the interests of God and England. ‘If we first seek the kingdom of God’, Hakluyt pronounced, ‘all other things will be given unto us.’53 After Cromwell’s Western Design had conquered Jamaica nearly forty years later, one of the officers participating declared that ‘the propagation of the gospel was the thing principally aimed at and intended’.54 No doubt he meant it;
Page 7 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics but they were also establishing a base from which Spanish America could be plundered, and trade developed with the Indians. The frightening international situation, as Catholics seemed to be gaining the upper hand in Germany, was another stimulus to fresh thinking. In his sermon of 1615 Thomas Cooper reminded the Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs of London of the need ‘to provide some retiring place for ourselves…if so be the Lord for our unthankfulness should spew us out’.55 Winthrop in 1629 and Hooker in 1631 were afraid that God would afflict or even desert England. Sir Simonds D’Ewes in 1638 was advised that he should make provision of refuge for harsh times if they should happen in England.56 The situation before 1640 was thus complex. There were two potential revolutionary forces. John Ponet in 1556 had spoken for one of them when he said that ‘kings and princes…have their authority of the people’.57 By ‘people’ he no doubt meant the propertied classes whom Parliament represented. But men were also aware of potential rebellion by groups hitherto outside politics. Sir Robert Cotton in 1628, whilst advising M.P.s to make every effort to get rid of the Duke of Buckingham, warned them (p.302) at the same time to beware of pressing too hard lest they open the gates to popular insurrection.58 But in 1640 Henry Burton argued that when a king became a tyrant, nobles and commons could take up arms against him (as the Scots had done against Charles I). If the lead was taken by magistrates, that was not rebellion. ‘There is a necessity of duty lying upon all Christian magistrates to exterminate and extirpate the whole hierarchy and prelacy as Antichristian enemies of Jesus Christ.’ If the magistrates did not do their duty, the common people must act.59 There was no right of resistance, but it might become a duty. We should perhaps think of at least two revolutions in the mid-seventeenth century. The first, which was successful, freed well-to-do people from royal arbitrariness from above and from the demand from below for customary tenant rights; it established the gentry’s effective control of the state. The second revolution, less coherent in its aims and ultimately unsuccessful, aimed at turning the world upside down, giving freedom and secure property rights to smaller men, and recognizing them as having a right to participate in government. The first was the freeholders’ revolution, the second the unsuccessful revolution of smaller peasants, copyholders. The first reduced the power of king, lords, and bishops, but retained them because of their social role.60 Once prerogative and church courts were abolished, gentry and rich merchants could dominate the legal system and the Church of England. Maitland explained that ‘libertas’ meant freedom to oppress others.61 But who were the freeborn? John Hall of Richmond in 1654 noted disapprovingly that ‘not one of the meanest Page 8 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics servants in a family but is in his conceit one of the people’. A pamphlet of 1659, replying to Harrington, thought that for the time being only ‘such as are freeborn in respect of their holy and righteous principles’ should be enfranchised citizens.62 That would solve the problem of who were ‘the people’, but it might have been difficult in practice to determine whose principles were ‘holy and righteous’. John Archer insisted that in the coming millennium only the elect would be freemen, the reprobates becoming their slaves. He did not explain how exactly this would be enforced.63 (p.303) But Drayton in 1619 had anticipated Maitland by making his Norman barons ask What privilege hath our free birth, they say? Or in our blood, what virtue doth remain?… Then to what end hath our great conquest served?64
The Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, of the supremacy of the individual conscience, enabled some radicals to carry emphasis on liberty further than conservatives liked. Perkins declared that no man’s law can bind conscience, a doctrine which he used to facilitate acceptance of usury.65 For separatists congregational discipline was designed to ensure that the judgement of the congregation prevailed over that of the individual, so giving him a sense of spiritual security.66 Arise Evans noted that when the Bible was ‘engrossed…in great men’s hands… they might do as they pleased with the people that knew little or no Scripture’. But since the invention of printing, and given freedom to read and discuss the Bible, ‘knowledge is increased among the people, so that they will not be ruled by the kings set up after the manner of the gentiles any more’. ‘Here is the Good Old Cause that God raised an army up to stand for.’67
III So we come back to economics. Great: changes were taking place in the still primarily agrarian English economy, changes which we inadequately sum up as ‘the enclosure movement’. The mass of the peasantry held very small plots, if any. But they had access to common fields and the waste, in which all villagers had customary rights. Livestock could be pastured on the common fields; the waste gave access to wood for fuel and for building, to fruits and berries, game, and a host of other perquisites. Enclosure of commons and/or waste deprived the poorer inhabitants of their means of livelihood, reducing them to wage labour if they could find it, or if not—as was more likely—to vagabondage and begging. (p.304) The real burden of the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation fell on the poorest class, and created new insecurities in the countryside. Purchasers of monastic lands were not restrained by traditional obligations to maintain hospitality and charity in times of hardship. They wanted returns on their investment: enclosure and consolidation of estates led to a new Page 9 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics emphasis on production for the market and a disregard for the interests of tenants. In the long run we can see that enclosure and capital investment in long-term planning for production for the market, fen drainage, and disafforestation did make England a richer country. But only in the long run.68 Meanwhile a vested interest in Protestantism was created among the propertied class. In these circumstances the religious emphasis on the duty of hard work and disciplined labour, though no doubt in many cases self-interested, had its rationale. England had ample raw materials, wrote Robert Burton in 1621: only industry is lacking. He had no pity for beggars and vagabonds.69 George Herbert’s Parson was to ‘labour for wealth and maintenance’ so as to ‘have the wherewithal to serve God better, and to do good deeds’. ‘The great and national sin of this land’, Herbert believed, was idleness.70 Tenants withdrawing their lands from the plough should be excluded from the kingdom of God, said John Worlidge.71 The Puritans Dod and Cleaver also urged men to be good husbands for their estates, but for less religious reasons: if we preserve our goods we retain our freedom. The godly servant ‘will labour for his master with an upright heart’, even in his absence. Those who refuse either to cultivate their lands, or to let others cultivate them, dry up the springs of the market and so depopulate the countryside.72 Joseph Hall, future bishop, told ‘rich citizens’ that ‘ye may be at once rich and holy’. ‘Religion bids us to good husbandry…. What account can be given to our Maker, if we never look after our own estate?’73 Sylvester, in his translation of Du Bartas, had gone out of his way to explain that God was not idle before the creation;74 and Milton, in Of Christian Doctrine, collected texts stressing the importance of labour.75 (p.305) Norden, in The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1607), and other agricultural writers taught farmers that it was their duty to improve their properties to the utmost, exploiting the riches of the natural world in the national interest.76 Richard Sibbes thought that popery had been set up ‘to maintain stately idleness’, so closely was Protestantism linked to the work ethic.77 A poem attributed to Samuel Butler assumed that enclosers would naturally have taken Parliament’s side in the civil war.78 After the revolution, the wickedness of idleness in the lower classes was accepted by all commentators who got into print. ‘Idleness’, wrote Richard Baxter in 1673, ‘is a crime not to be tolerated in a Christian society.’79 The author of The Whole Duty of Man, later in the century, also appealed to gentlemen to recognize their duty to improve their estates.80 There may well have been more rejection of Christianity. Denial of the resurrection, of the existence of God or of the devil, are said to have been common in Exeter diocese at the end of the sixteenth century. All came by nature.81 The ten or more Digger colonies which sprung up in the south Midlands in imitation of the Diggers in 1651–2 cannot have come from nowhere. Page 10 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics The Levellers came round too late to recognizing the existence of such radical groups—perhaps they were too radical for them.
IV Equation of the interests of religion with those of the English propertied class is often embarrassingly explicit. As Crowley put it succinctly, the poor were To pay with all patience That their lords demand; For they for their sufferance In such oppression Are promised reward In the resurrection.82
(p.306) Crowley had noted as early as 1551 how Protestants used the Bible to justify selfish individualism.83 The Homily against Idleness rather surprisingly criticized idle gentry as well as vagabonds.84 Edward Elton, in his Exposition of Colossians (1615), justified the existing class-divided society in words which have a familiar ring: ‘God,…out of sundry orders and degrees of men, doth gather a sweet harmony and agreement.’ But men must be ‘held in with the bridle of some greater authority and power…. when in the place where there should be justice there is wormwood, and in the place of judgment wickedness, yet therein doth appear the providence of God, who doth wisely order and impose things…to…the preservation of the society of mankind…. Better a tyranny than an anarchy…. This may settle and stay our minds…when…justice and equity is bought and sold.’ The guilty will, after all, be punished in the after life, even if not now.85 William Bradshaw anxiously explained away the text ‘If any would not work, neither shall he eat’ (2 Thessalonians, 3: 10) as referring only to servants, not to rentier landlords.86 Dod and Cleaver pointed out that those who refuse either to cultivate their land themselves, or to let others cultivate it, dry up the springs of the market and so depopulate the countryside.87 But when Isaiah tells us (l: 15) that the Lord threatened not to spare Jerusalem because the hands of the inhabitants were full of blood, the Geneva margin glossed ‘blood’ as ‘avarice, deceit, cruelty and extortion’. Hobbes noted that Presbyterian preachers ‘did never inveigh against the lucrative vices of men of trade or handicraft’.88 Joseph Blagrave in 1660 cited Psalm 91 to support the view that ‘riches are tokens of God’s love and favour unto his chosen people’.89 One of Oliver Cromwell’s criticisms of Fifth Monarchists was that they did not recognize property as one of the badges of the kingdom of Christ.90
Page 11 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics In many European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Catholicism provided ideological support for absolutism. We do not have to look much further than economics to account for the (p.307) anti-Catholicism of many of the English gentry. They had acquired the loot of the monasteries, and were not going to give it up—as their co-religionaries in Germany were having to do after the Catholics’ temporary victory in the sixteen-twenties. Nobody, I think, has tried to calculate what it would have cost the English gentry if Catholicism had been restored: it is no doubt impossible. But there are some suggestions. The properties of St. Albans Abbey were valued at £2, 510 at the dissolution: a century later they were worth eighty times that sum to the owners.91 No wonder James II, in introducing his Declaration of Indulgence in 1687, thought it necessary to explain that he had no intention of following the grant of toleration to Catholics by attempting to recover monastic lands, religion and property being ‘the two things men value most’. Marvell, in his Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), had an eloquent passage about the ‘general earthquake over the Nation’ which would result from a restoration of monastic lands. ‘There is no Englishman’, he concluded, ‘that hath either a soul, a body or an estate to save…but is…bound to the best of his power and knowledge, to maintain the established Protestant religion.’92 In popular usage ‘popery’ had unpatriotic implications ever since Henry VIII had established (for political rather than religious reasons) England’s independence of the papacy. Jesuits sent over from Rome stirred up disaffection and revolt under Elizabeth and James I. Charles I obstinately refused to disavow his ‘evil [and papist] councillors’ in the sixteen-thirties, and even after military defeat in the civil war. Hence the stress on ‘religious’ issues in the arguments before and during the war. ‘Evil councillors’ and all that they stood for had to be rejected before the long-term measures necessary for England’s future imperial greatness could be undertaken. Somebody said that Ship Money, which fell most heavily on the poor, was levied to maintain popery and superstition. He was making my point in seventeenth-century idiom. Notes:
(1) Ed. Sir C. Petrie, Letters of Charles I (1935), pp. 200–6; ed. W. C. Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Harvard U.P., 1937–47), iv. 260–79. (2) Laud, Works (Oxford U.P., 1847–60), v. 43–44. (3) Bacon, Works, xiii. 213. (4) MSS of the Earl Cowper (Historical Manuscripts Commission), i. 90. (5) Clarendon, Life, i, 81, 94–97; History, vi. 100. (6) [Anon.], A Whip for an Ape (1589).
Page 12 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (7) F. Chestlin, Persecutio Undecima (1681), pp. 47. first published 1648. When I quoted this passage on p. 254 above I added that Field ‘was on the eve of losing the support of moderate men’. (8) Cooper, Admonition to the People of England, pp. 9, 168–9. Italics mine. (9) Op. cit, sig. ASv. (10) Greenham Greenham, Works (1612), p. 698. (11) Walton, Lives (World’s Classics), p. 185. (12) Quoted by Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford U.P., 1965), p. 406. (13) Quoted by J. Waddington, Congregational History (1869), i. 8. See also my Religion and Politics, pp. 51–5.9. (14) Lord Brooke, A Discourse…of…Episcopacie (1642), p. 94. (15) Ed. E. S. Shuckburgh, Two Biographies of William Bedell (Cambridge U.P., 1902), pp. 146, 149. (16) The Apology of the House of Commons (1604), in Select Statutes and other Constitutional Documents (ed. G. W. Prothero, Oxford U.P., 1906), pp. 290–1. (17) Ed. E. R. Foster, Proceedings in Parliament, 1610 (Yale U.P., 1966), ii. 328, 79; cf. Proceedings in Parliament (House of Commons, 1614), (ed. Maija Jansson, American Philosophical Society, 1988), pp. 390–4. (18) T. Brightman, The Revelation of St John Illustrated (4th ed., 1644), pp. 139, 149. (19) Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), pp. 595–604; Commons Debates, 1628 (ed. R. C. Johnson and M. J. Cole, Yale U.P., 1977), iii. 196. (20) Burroughs, Sions Joy (1641), p. 34. (21) G. Goodman, The Court of King James, i. 421. (22) Peter, Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651), p. 11. (23) South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions (1737), i. 131. (24) Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (4th ed., 1699), pp. 129, 190. (25) Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (ed. D. I. B. Smith, Oxford U.P., 1971), p. 139. The words in square brackets are Marvell’s.
Page 13 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (26) Clarendon, History, i. 117; cf. pp. 132, 272; v. 512; vi. 100; Life, i. 1, 96–7. (27) Old Parliamentary History (1763), ix. 388–9. (28) My Puritanism and Revolution, p. 52. (29) N. Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (1956), p. 57. (30) Cheynell, Sions Memento and Gods Alarum, in Fast Sermons to Parliament (ed. R. Jeffs, 1970–1), vi. 228. Bancroft, Cheynell said, ‘suggested that this [Presbyterian] discipline of Sion would not only overthrow the Babylonish monarchy but the English monarchy also’. (31) A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (1925), pp. 252–3. (32) A Remonstrance against Presbytery, quoted by S. R. Gardiner, History of England…1603–1642 (1884), ix. 392–3. (33) Ed. D. Gardiner, The Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 1642–1670 (1937), pp. 36– 7. (34) Aston, A Remonstrance against Presbitery (1643), sigs. I 4v–K, M4. (35) Rushworth, Historical Collections, v. 732. (36) A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus (1643), in Somers Tracts (1748–51), v. 400. (37) Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ii. 319–21. (38) R. Halley, Lancashire, Its Puritanism and Nonconformity (Manchester, 1869), i. 283; Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), p. 282. (39) H. G. Owen, ‘Lecturers and Lectureships in Tudor London’, Church Quarterly Review, Jan.-Mar. 1911, pp. 65–79. (40) F. P. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family (1893), ii. 69. Lords’ Journals, v. 42. (41) F. Bamford, A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander (1936), p. 106. (42) Ed. S. M. Farington, Farington Paperst (Chetham Soc, 1856), p. 88. (43) T. May, History of the Parliament (1647), i. 113–14. (44) Portland MSS. (Historical Manuscripts Commission), i. 82.
Page 14 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (45) Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1643–7, p. 162. (46) Cf. Matthew Newcomen, The Craft and Cruelty of the Churches Adversaries, November, 1642, in Fast Sermons, i. 246–7. (47) Homilies, pp. 438–45. (48) Baxter, Chapters from A Christian Directory (1673) (ed. J. Tawney, 1925), p. 23; The Saints Everlasting Rest (Edinburgh, n.d.), p. 331. (49) Mr Peters Last Report of the English Wars (1646), pp. 12–13. Italics mine. (50) See p. 48 above. (51) Cooper, The Blessing of Japheth, Proving the Gathering in of the Gentiles and the Finall Conversion of the Jewes, pp. 33–35. (52) John Rolfe, A True Relation of the State of Virginia Left by Sir Thomas Dale Kt. in May last 1616 (ed. H. C. Taylor, New Haven, 1951), pp. 33–41. (53) R. Hakluyt. Principal Navigations (Everyman ed.), vi. 3–4; Divers Voyages (1582), Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. (54) Thurloe State Papers, iii, 681; cf. Gerald MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry 1603–1660 (Wisconsin U.P., 1990), pp. 236–40. (55) The Blessing of Japheth, sig. A 2–3. (56) Ed. E. Emerson, Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Massachusetts U.P., 1976), p. 225. (57) Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politique Power. I quote from the edition of 1642, pp. 26–36, 40–58, 63. Cf. pp. 238, 288 above. (58) Cotton, The Dangers Wherein the Kingdome now Standeth (1628). (59) Burton, A Replie to a relation of a conference between Laude and Mr Fisher the Jesuit (1640), sig. B2v, C4v, pp. 86–87, 296, 306. (60) See Chapter 12 below. (61) Quoted by G. G. Coulton, Mediaeval Panorama (Cambridge U.P., 1945), p. 56. (62) Hall, Of Government and Obedience (1654), p. 102; cf. p. 110; [Anon.], A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government, quoted by V. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane (1970), p. 227. (63) Archer, The Personall Reigne of Christ upon Earth (1641), passim. Page 15 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (64) Michael Drayton, The Barons Warres, in Poems (Scolar Press reprint, 1964), pp. 6–7. (65) See my ‘William Perkins and the Poor’, in Puritanism and Revolution, chapter 7 passim; The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, p. 180; cf. pp. 168–70. (66) S. Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford U.P., 1988), pp. 147–9. (67) Evans, A Rulefrom Heaven (1659), pp. 45–57. (68) See my The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 359–60. (69) Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman ed.), i. 90–104. (70) Herbert, Works (ed. F. E. Hutchinson, Oxford U.P., 1941), pp. 248, 274. (71) Worlidge, Systema Agricullurae (1672), sig. B 2, quoted by Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton U.P., 1985), pp. 235. (72) Dod and Cleaver, Proverbs, chapters XI–XII, pp. 2–3, 92–93; chapter XX, pp. 14, 129–31; The Ten Commandments, p. 146; cf. Proverbs, II, pp. 19–20, VII, p. 46. (73) Hall, Works (Oxford U.P.), v. 107; i. 274. (74) J. Sylvester, Complete Works (ed. A. B. Grosart, Hildesheim, 1869), i. 91, 84, 88. (75) Milton, Complete Prose Works, vi, Book II, chapters VIII–XVII, esp. pp. 728– 32. (76) Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England (ed. M. Leslie and T. Taylor, Leicester U.P., 1992), p. 36; cf. pp. 43, 51. (77) Sibbes, Works (Edinburgh, 1862), i. 91, 88. (78) The Posthumous Works of Mr. Samuel Butler (6th ed., 1754), pp. 77–106. There is no reason to suppose that the attribution is correct. (79) Baxter, Chapters from A Christian Directory (ed. J. Tawney, 1925), pp. 23, 41, 62, 64. (80) [Anon.], The Whole Duty of Man (1104), i. 419, 428; ii. 284. (81) Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 168–70.
Page 16 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Religion, Politics, and Economics (82) Robert Crowley, Select Works (ed. J. M. Cowper, Early English Tract Society, 1872), p. 41. (83) See epigraph on p. 375. (84) Homilies, pp. 438–45. (85) Elton, op. cit, pp. 13–14, 954–6, 963, 978–9. (86) Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (1620), pp. 190–1, published by Thomas Gataker. Bradshaw died in 1618. (87) Dod and Cleaver, Proverbs, XI, 26, pp. 92–3. (88) Hobbes, English Works (ed. Sir W. Molesworth, 1839–45), vi. 194–5. (89) Blagrave, Ephemeris, sig. A 3v. (90) Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iii. 438. (91) J. Stevens, An Historical Account of all Taxes (1725), pp. 188–9, 216. (92) In State Tracts (1693), p. 73.
Access brought to you by:
Page 17 of 17
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0009
Abstract and Keywords Three seventeenth-century characters appear in retrospect to attach undue importance to individuals. For their contemporaries, they were vastly influential in many areas of thought. All three in their published works demonstrated that they had wide-ranging interests and aims. The changes in English economic life did not occur in a vacuum. Francis Bacon, Walter Ralegh, and Edward Coke all took favourable account of the freedom of trade in the Netherlands, the most advanced capitalist state in Europe. They all made much of the commercial republic of Venice as a model to follow. Bacon corresponded with Paolo Sarpi. All three spoke favourably of the Dutch republic as a model, not least in its awareness of the economic advantages of religious toleration. Ralegh was interested in science and trade as well as in history. Coke's advocacy of free trade and commercial liberty generally owed more to his position in an increasingly competitive society than to his legal expertise. Keywords: Francis Bacon, Walter Ralegh, Edward Coke, freedom, trade, Netherlands
THE WAY in which I structured these lectures around three seventeenth-century characters appears in retrospect to attach undue importance to individuals. This was not my intention, though for their contemporaries they were vastly influential in many areas of thought. But my association of science, history, and law with these three was too restrictive. All three in their published works demonstrated that they had wide-ranging interests and aims.
Page 1 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke Bacon was not an original scientific thinker: he was a lawyer by profession, and no mean historian as well as a theorist of science. I was right, I think, to discuss craftsmen first in almost excessive detail before dealing with Bacon’s theories; this was necessary to show the social basis of his work (p. 81 above). Bacon gave new confidence to artisans and merchants by stating clearly and with approval ideas towards which others were groping their way (p. 257). He thought that a better life was attainable on earth by human effort: he rejected the idea of a past golden age. Bacon helped the experimental method to triumph over the authority of the ancients: like Ralegh, he also helped even to modify the unchallengeable authority of the Bible. The changes in English economic life did not occur in a vacuum. Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke all took favourable account of the freedom of trade in the Netherlands, the most advanced capitalist state in Europe (pp. 209–10). They all made much of the commercial republic of Venice as a model to follow. Bacon corresponded with Paolo Sarpi. All three spoke favourably of the Dutch republic as a model, not least in its awareness of the economic advantages of religious toleration (pp. 246–8, 249–51). Ralegh was interested in science and trade as well as in history (p. 150). He supplied plenty of ideas for mechanics and colonizers, and made himself the spokesman for merchants’ interests, urging the use of state power to protect and forward the interests of trade. Coke’s advocacy of free trade and commercial liberty generally owed more to his position in an increasingly competitive society than to his legal expertise (p. 214). Merchants were discussing economic theory as (p.309) well as the right of men to do what they would with their own (pp. 242–3). My pp. 74–5 dealt with monopolies in religion and law, science and medicine: I emphasized that the policy which privileged medical practitioners as against apothecaries was supported by the prerogative and church courts (pp. 74, 211; my Change and Continuity, p. 151).1 The state church was opposed to modern developments in science and medicine just as the common law favoured the propertied against the customary liberties of smaller men. We tend to think of Coke as a conservative defender of the law. But that is not how his contemporaries saw him. From 1621 onwards he was an advocate of law reform, anathema to traditional lawyers. Coke introduced a bill against monopolies in the House of Commons in 1621; it passed in the next Parliament (pp. 216–36). He asserted the superiority of the common law over prerogative, challenging the growth of an incipient system of administrative law backed up by the royal prerogative, and the royal right to make new offences by proclamation (pp. 213–28). Coke strongly defended the rights of individuals not to be taxed without their consent through Parliament. I suggested that Coke’s attitudes towards the law were determined by his respect for private property and his insistence on its freedom of action against attempts to control it from above by the royal prerogative or from below by Page 2 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke ‘customs’ which the men of property regarded as ‘unreasonable’ (pp. 229–36). Coke did not respond to demands for the rights of the unpropertied, including the right not to have to ‘fee a lawyer’ to defend them in court. The difference between those who advocated ‘tarrying for the magistrate’ and those who demanded ‘reformation without tarrying for any’ was that magistrates were men of property and so had no wish to enfranchise the Many-Headed Monster (p. 253). Coke was a man of steadily increasing property. Cases which Coke reported covered the crucial years during which the common law was being modernized and adapted to the needs of business men in a commercial society. A judicial decision of 1568 had given landlords property rights in minerals on their land, and so deprived English sovereigns of the ‘royalties’ which their continental rivals continued to enjoy—to the benefit of the English coal industry, among other things. In 1605 a decision that inhabitants as such had no common rights on waste land had removed another obstacle to the enrichment of enterprising landlords. Coke thought that the common law is (p. 310) the perfection of reason (p. 226). But men’s ideas of what is reasonable can change. In economic matters the law was changing rapidly during Coke’s lifetime. Hence he had to insist that cases concerning property must be decided not by natural reason ‘but by the artificial reason and judgment of the law, which…requires study and experience’ (p. 226). James I objected to judge-made laws; so too, for different reasons, did the victims of seventeenth-century economic change. Judges were men of property, normally landowners themselves. Chancery too looked after the interests of landlords and big merchants. Disputes in the mid- and later seventeenth century over whether juries were judges of law as well as fact turned on the right of the poorer classes to have a say in the administration of justice. They were analogous to the Leveller demand for decentralization of justice, so that local offences should be tried in local courts, by local juries, not be referred to juries of London property-owners who would not understand the issues. A jury of locals would know what it was talking about; business men in London or Canterbury would not. Moreover, to have to travel to London and stay there for several days in order to defend their property rights was prohibitive for poor artisans and copyholders. All too often we hear of men who are ‘too poor to wage law’ (expressive phrase). Only when a number of small men banded together was resistance to gentlemanly oppression feasible, and even then it was unlikely unless by some accident of local politics the support of a rival gentleman was forthcoming. ‘Many a man’, sighed Richard Stock, ‘lives in oppressing and injuring others, his tenants and inferiors; and either there is no civil law against him, or if there be either his greatness or purse will carry it out with ease.’2 ‘The people are very hardly treated’, observed a French visitor to England in 1597, ‘and there is no justice where the nobility has any interest.’3 Page 3 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Bacon, Ralegh, Coke Clarendon in 1668 tells us a good deal about pre-revolutionary justice when he took credit to himself for the fact that after 1660 ‘there had never passed so many years together in any age, in which the crown had not in the least degree interfered in any cause or title depending in Westminster-Hall, to incline the court to this or that side; or in which the crown itself hath had so many causes judged against it in several courts: at least in which former practice and usage on behalf of the (p.311) crown had been less followed.’ ‘He [Clarendon] had been reproached with nothing so much as his too much adhering to the law, and subjecting all persons to it.’4. Whether Clarendon was really so Simon-pure as he wishes to suggest, the picture which he gives of royal gerrymandering with justice may be believed for the period before 1640. Notes:
(1) Cf. Nicholas Culpeper’s campaign against the College of Physicians when after 1640 he was free to wage it (A Physical Directory, 1649). Cf. also F. N. L. Poynter, ‘Nicholas Culpeper and his Books’, Journal of the History of Medicine, xvii. 155–9. (2) Stock, A Commentary upon the Prophecy of Malachi (Edinburgh, 1865), p. 165. Stock died in 1641, and this commentary was first published in that year. (3) Ed. G. B. Harrison, De Maisse’s Journal (1931), p. 12. De Maisse presumably included the gentry in the word ‘nobility’. (4) Clarendon, Life, iii. 912.
Access brought to you by:
Page 4 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
William Tyndale and English History Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0010
Abstract and Keywords William Tyndale is among the intellectual forebears of the English Revolution. David Rollinson's The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500– 1800 provides much useful information about the world in which Tyndale grew up. Rollinson perceptively called the events of 1640–1960 ‘the revolution that the Protestant Reformation as envisaged by William Tyndale had always implied’. Tyndale came from Gloucestershire, where there was a strong Lollard tradition. He was the English Luther; but — though he did not live to see the distinction drawn — he was the father of English nonconformity rather than of Anglicanism. At a conference held in Oxford in 1994 to celebrate the quincentenary of Tyndale's birth, services were held in Anglican college chapels. Tyndale was safely out of the way before the compromise Church of England emerged: he was burnt as a heretic in 1536. Keywords: William Tyndale, English Revolution, David Rollinson, Lollard tradition
IF I HAD known more about Tyndale when I prepared my lectures I should certainly have included him among the intellectual forebears of the English Revolution. David Daniell’s splendid William Tyndale: A Biography has transformed our understanding of him. David Rollinson’s The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 provides much useful information about the world in which Tyndale grew up. Rollinson perceptively called the events of 1640–60 ‘the revolution that the Protestant Reformation as envisaged by William Tyndale had always implied’.1
Page 1 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History Tyndale came from Gloucestershire, where there was a strong Lollard tradition. He was the English Luther; but—though he did not live to see the distinction drawn—he was the father of English nonconformity rather than of Anglicanism. At a conference held in Oxford in 1994 to celebrate the quincentenary of Tyndale’s birth, services were held in Anglican college chapels. If the shade of Tyndale was watching, I think he would have been upset. Tyndale was safely out of the way before the compromise Church of England emerged: he was burnt as a heretic in 1536. I do not think he would have approved of being treated as an Anglican saint. He thought bishops were Antichristian, and was quoted to that effect by Francis Johnson, preacher to the Middleburgh merchants in 1590.2 Tyndale disapproved of set forms of prayer, and so of any liturgy. For him true prayer was ‘talking with God’, in one’s own words, not mindlessly repeating words written by someone else.3 Tyndale annoyed St. Thomas More by translating ekklesia as ‘congregation’, not ‘church’. That was linguistically accurate; but it had far-reaching consequences. Christ’s ‘tell it unto the church’ meant ‘let the congregation decide’. It did not mean ‘refer it to bishops and their far-away courts’, to (p.313) the laws of a great power structure stretching over the whole of Christendom, whose personification in England was the tyrannical Cardinal Wolsey. (In the sixteen-thirties Laud no doubt reminded men of Wolsey in his control of state power, perhaps even in his theology.) ‘The congregation’ of the faithful would know what it was talking about in disputed matters: judges in London or Canterbury would not. ‘Elders’ were for Tyndale those laymen who enjoyed recognized authority in their community: not ‘priests’ nominated by some outside authority or person over whom the community had no control. Tyndale’s attitude here is strictly analogous to the Leveller insistence that justice should be decentralized, that offences should be tried in local courts by local juries, not referred to juries of London property-owners who would not understand the issues. This was destructive of any form of international or national church. When the separatist John Greenwood told his interlocutors in March 1589 that ‘the whole commonwealth is not a church’ he was following Tyndale, whether he knew it or not. Fifty-four years later Francis Cheynell expressed Tyndale’s doctrine when he told the House of Commons that ‘the godly part of the nation is the national church’.4 The sharp nose of St. Thomas More detected political subversion as well as heresy in Tyndale’s writings. Tyndale linked Protestantism firmly to rejection of the Norman Yoke, which for him consisted of king, lords, and bishops. William the Conqueror’s invasion of 1066 was incited by the Pope, who sent ‘a banner to go and conquer England’ and promised ‘forgiveness of sins to all in the invading army’. (Wolsey, Tyndale pointed out, obtained papal remission of sins again for Englishmen who died in Henry VIII’s war against France.)5 William would not ‘have been able to conquer the land at that time, except the spirituality had wrought on his side’, Tyndale wrote. William established tithes to persuade the Page 2 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History clergy to preach up the Norman Yoke—sufficient reason in itself for abolishing tithes: Tyndale thought they should be confiscated and divided among the poor after a sufficient maintenance had been provided for the ‘preaching of God’s Word’.6 Tyndale attributed all evils to the Norman Conquest of the free AngloSaxons. ‘What blood did that conquest cost England, through which almost all the lords of the English blood were slain, and the Normans became rulers, and all (p.314) the laws were changed into French.’7 Soldiers in the New Model Army were asking in the sixteen-forties, ‘Who were the lords but William the Conqueror’s colonels?’ Sir Henry Spelman attacked the servitudes and incidents of feudal tenures introduced at the Conquest as stigmas of bondage.8 When Spenser wrote that the common law was ‘that which William brought in with his conquest and laid upon the neck of England’, he was abandoning the myth of the continuity of English law across the Conquest—and he was echoing Tyndale.9 Tyndale had a carefully worked-out view of English history as a long succession of struggles against the papacy as well as against the Norman Yoke. ‘That mighty king, William’, was compelled to surrender his right to the investiture of bishops to the Pope, thus losing control over the church. King John was a patriot who ‘would have put a good and godly reformation in England’. (Milton echoed this when he noted in his Commonplace Book that John promised ‘to abolish the unjust laws of the Normans and to restore the laws of King Edward’.)10 But John was ‘forsaken by his own lords’ and the Pope ‘sent unto the King of France remission of his sins to go and conquer King John’s realm’.11 In Richard II’s reign the bishops incited an Irish rebellion ‘as before against King John’, and provoked his deposition and the slaughter of ‘many a thousand’ Lollard heretics.12 It was the bishops who sent King Henry V out to conquer France, lest he agree to Parliament’s proposal to confiscate church lands. The papacy was responsible for the Wars of the Roses.13 The moral of all this history was that the clergy must be deprived of their civil power. Tyndale is usually remembered for his The Obedience of a Christian Man, in which he emphasized the power of kings in the hope of inciting Henry VIII to assert his power against the papacy. Selected quotation from this work can make Tyndale seem a defender of royal absolutism. One suspects that the copy of Tyndale’s Obedience which Anne Boleyn gave Henry to read had such passages marked. Naturally Henry thought it a book fit for all kings to read. It is Anne Boleyn’s most important contribution to English history. But in fact Tyndale was careful to distinguish: ‘the authority of kings is but a limited power, and when they (p.315) transgress they sin against their brethren and ought to reconcile themselves to their brethren and to ask for forgiveness.’14 ‘The most despised person in the realm is the king’s brother and fellow-member with him, and equal in the kingdom of God and of Christ.’ Kings must remember that ‘the people are God’s not theirs’ and ‘the law is God’s, not theirs’. The King is ‘but a servant, to execute the laws of God, and not to rule after his own imagination’. We must obey God rather than men. ‘The worst in the realm may tell the king, if he do Page 3 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History him wrong, that he doth naught, and otherwise than God commanded him.’ ‘When men say a king’s word must stand, that is truth, if his oaths and promises be lawful and expedient.’ (The italicized word is open to wide interpretations.) Tyndale told kings, ‘if ye fear your commons, so testify ye against yourselves, that ye are tyrants. For if your commons accused you not of evil doing, what need ye fear your commons? What commons were ever so evil that they rose against their heads for well-doing?’ ‘So far yet are worldly powers to be obeyed only as their commandments repugn not against the commandments of God.’15 In the Prologue to his translation of the Old Testament Tyndale remarked that ‘God…is ever ready to reap tyrants off the face of the earth, as soon as their sins are ripe’.16 In the century before the English Revolution Tyndale’s ideas were ‘being repeated endlessly and with scarcely any modification’, said Christopher Morris in Political Thought from Tyndale to Hooker.17 Tyndale was quoted, among many others, by Alexander Leighton, William Prynne, William Dell, and John Bunyan. John Knox used Tyndale’s translation of the Bible.18 William Dowsing the iconoclast possessed a copy of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man.19 Tyndale attacked the rich and proclaimed equality among believers. Tyndale was not only a religious but also a social radical, as the title of his Parable of the Wicked Mammon suggests. ‘The rich (as James saith) persecute the true believers. The rich will never stand forth openly for the Word of God.’ ‘Property is a right curse, and a thing that God (p.316) giveth to his enemies.’20 Tyndale proclaimed equality among believers. All the commandments, he declared, boiled down to two: love God and love your neighbour. And that effectively meant only one commandment, since ‘we have God dwelling in us…if we love one the other’.21 The very commandments of God bind not where love and need require’, he wrote.22 Milton was to say something similar but more provocative: ‘the practice of the saints interprets the commandments.’23 Some of Tyndale’s writings verged on antinomianism. ‘He that loveth his neighbour in God and Christ’ fulfils all the commandments. ‘All inferior laws are to be kept as long as they are servants to faith and love; and then to be broken immediately, if through any occasion they hurt either the faith which we should have to Godward…or the love which we owe to our neighbours for Christ’s sake.’24 ‘Right freedom, and liberty from sin and from the law, is a freedom to do good only with lust, and to live without compulsion of the law.’ Tyndale even laid himself open to the charge that he justified expropriating the rich: ‘Christ is Lord over all; and everyone lord of whatsoever another hath. If thy brother or neighbour therefore need, and thou have [the means] to help him and yet shewest not mercy but withdrawest thy hands from him, then robbest thou him of his own and art a thief.’25 Diggers and Ranters were to think along those lines
Page 4 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History during the English Revolution. Abiezer Coppe even used the same image as Tyndale in seeing God come upon tyrants ‘as a thief in the night’.26 Tyndale himself deliberately broke the law by importing his translation of the New Testament into England. He gave hostages to fortune when he wrote: ‘To steal, rob and murder are holy when God comman-deth them.’ He was no doubt thinking of the Old Testament patriarchs who committed such sins. But now? Tyndale warned that ‘to follow our own lusts is not freedom but bondage’.27 Tyndale had an open, enquiring mind, which led him to take seriously many very heretical ideas—mortalism, for instance, the belief that the soul has no conscious existence after death until the final resurrection.28 This seems to have been fairly widespread in the sixteenth century. (p.317) The heretics Francis Kett and Edward Wightman, burnt respectively in 1589 and 1612, had been soulsleepers. In New England Mrs. Hutchinson claimed to have arrived at the idea independently. The heresy was attributed to Thomas Hariot; Sir Thomas Browne flirted shamefacedly with it for a time.29 Richard Overton’s Man’s Mortalitie, a serious defence of the sleep of the soul, appeared in 1643. By 1644 Parliament was alarmed at the apparent spread of the heresy; in January 1645 Fast Sermons against it were preached both to the House of Commons and the House of Lords.30 Some Ranters and Muggletonians were mortalists.31 Tyndale’s influence survived especially among the radicals of the Revolution. His last cry at the stake, ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes’, was not forgotten. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s long-suffering secretary, echoed it: ‘God open her Majesty’s eyes.’32 Tyndale had intended it as a call for Henry to respond to the needs and wishes of his people; men who a century later prayed for Charles to see through the wiles of his evil councillors had similar elusive hopes. Notes:
(1) Rollinson, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500–1800, pp. 148, 154. (2) For Johnson, see The Writings of John Greenwood mid Henry Barrow, 1591– 1593 (ed. L. H. Carlson, 1970), pp. 458–66. (3) Tyndale, Expositions of Chaps, v, vi and vii of St Matthew’s Gospel, in Expositions…of the Holy Scriptures (Parker Society, Cambridge U.P., 1849), p. 80. (4) Greenwood, Writings, 1587–1590, pp. 22–29; Cheynell, Sion’s Memento and God’s Alarum (1643), in Fast Sermons to Parliament, vi (1971), p. 236. (5) Expositions, pp. 294–306.
Page 5 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History (6) Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Parker Society, Cambridge U.P., 1848), pp. 90– 97. (7) Tyndale, The Practice of Prelates, in Expositions, pp. 294–5. For the Norman Yoke see Chapter 17 below. (8) Spelman, English Works (3rd ed., 1727), ii, esp. pp. 80–86. (9) Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in Works (ed. R. Morris, 1924), p. 610. (10) Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 428, quoting Holinshed. (11) Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises, pp. 186, 339. (12) Tyndale, Practice of Prelates, pp. 294–6; Expositions, pp. 224–5; An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (Parker Society, 1850), p. 166. (13) An Answer to More’s Dialogue, p. 212. (14) Expositions, pp. 36, 57, 86; cf. p. 117. (15) Obedience, pp. 140–2, 334. (16) Tyndale Tyndale, Old Testament, p. 11. (17) Op. cit, pp. 49, 113; cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge U.P., 1978), ii. 66–74. (18) Leighton, An Appeal to the Parliament: or Sions Plea against the Prelacie (1628), p. x; Prynne, A Breviate of the Prelates Intolerable Usurpations (1637), p. 324; Dell, A Plain and Necessary Confutation of divers Gross and Antichristian Errors (by Sidrach Simpson) (1660), in Several Sermons and Discourses (1709), pp. 591–2; Bunyan, The Acceptable Sacrifice (1689), Miscellaneous Works, xii. 27; cf. p. 426; Knox, On Rebellion (ed. R. A. Mason, Cambridge U.P., 1994), p. 101 n. (19) John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the Bureaucratic Puritan’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays presented to G. E. Ay line r (ed. Morrill, P. Slack, and D. Woolf, Oxford U.P., 1993), p. 179. (20) Expositions, p. 179; Obedience, pp. 138–46; cf. p. 135. (21) Tyndale’s New Testament (ed. D. Daniell, Yale U. P., 1989), pp. 4, 8. (22) Expositions, p. 232. (23) Milton, Complete Prose Works, vi. 168. Page 6 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
William Tyndale and English History (24) Tyndale, New Testament, pp. 4, 8; Obedience, pp. 332–40. (25) The Wicked Mammon, in Doctrinal Treatises, p. 97; Obedience, pp. 182–5. (26) Obedience, pp. 138–42; Coppe, The Fiery Flying Roll (1650), ii. 2. (27) Doctrinal Treatises, pp. 407, 501. (28) Ibid., pp. xii-lxxx; Answer to More, pp. 180–1, 188–9; N. T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Harvard U.P., 1972), pp. 100–11. (29) My The World Turned Upside Down, p. 174; Burns, op. cit., pp. 1–5, 10, 69– 70, 123. (30) Burns, op. cit., pp. 143–5; my Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 318–19. (31) Burns, op. cit., Chapters 2 and 3; Lodowick Muggleton, Acts of the Witnesses (1764), pp. 10, 12, 25, 28, 79, 102, 122–3; my A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church (Oxford U.P., 1989), pp. 76–81. (32) P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Policy’, Raleigh Lecture, in Proceedings of the British Academy, viii (1994), p. 70.
Access brought to you by:
Page 7 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Feudal Tenures Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0011
Abstract and Keywords In England, the abolition of feudal tenures led to the establishment of absolute property rights for big landowners, and to vociferous demands by Levellers and other radicals that copyholders — the majority of the peasantry — should receive equal security for their tenure. English historians have failed to pay sufficient attention to the question of feudal tenures during the two generations before the civil war, when it was under frequent discussion. Feudal or military tenures were associated by radicals with the Norman Yoke. They date from the days when the King could raise an armed force only by calling on his tenants-in-chief, the biggest landowners, to turn out with their subtenants, armed to fight for him. By the seventeenth century the military aspects of this tenure were obsolete, but it remained as a means by which the King could exercise control over the biggest landowners. Keywords: England, feudal tenures, rights, landowners, peasantry, Norman Yoke, King
IN ALL accounts of the French Revolution the abolition of feudal tenures looms large, and land distribution was crucial in the Russian Revolution. In the French Revolution the peasantry won secure property in their lands, at the expense of the higher classes, with long–term consequences for French political and social history. In the Russian Revolution all lands were nationalized and collectivized— again at the expense of the higher classes. In England the abolition of feudal tenures led to the establishment of absolute property rights for big landowners, and to vociferous demands by Levellers and other radicals that copyholders—the majority of the peasantry—should receive equal security for their tenure. English historians have failed to pay sufficient attention to the question of feudal tenures Page 1 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures during the two generations before the civil war, when it was under frequent discussion. H. E. Bell described failure to abolish feudal tenures and the Court of Wards as ‘an important subsidiary cause of the civil war’.1 I think he was right, but the point still needs emphasizing. There is plenty of evidence to support his claim. Most English historians have failed to appreciate the uniqueness of the English version of the abolition. Perhaps they take for granted that to those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken even that which they think they have. Feudal or military tenures were associated by radicals with the Norman Yoke. (See Chapter 17 below.) They date from the days when the king could raise an armed force only by calling on his tenants–in–chief, the biggest landowners, to turn out with their subtenants, armed to fight for him. By the seventeenth century the military aspects of this tenure were obsolete, but it remained as a means by which the king could exercise control over the biggest landowners. When a tenant-in-chief died leaving a minor as his heir—a fairly frequent occurrence in the seventeenth century—the latter became a ward of the crown, since a minor could not be expected to perform military service. (p.319) The king normally passed the wardship on to some court favourite or to a speculator. In either case the ‘guardian’ of the ward would exploit the estates, solely to his own financial advantage, during the whole of the minority— that is, for anything up to twenty-one years—unless the family could produce a large sum to repurchase the wardship, as they were sometimes prepared to do rather than see a speculator make havoc of the family fortunes. But then they had no capital to spend on long-term improvements in estate management—the way to wealth in the later seventeenth century. Alternatively, the guardian might sell the ward in marriage, so depriving the family of a large sum and of the unquantifiable advantages of social alliances established by a prudently planned marriage. Wardship amounted to a system of irregularly imposed death duties over which Parliament—representing the big landowners—had no control. It limited freedom of the market in land, and kept down its price. The Court of Wards enforced wardship, and it became universally hated by landowners. As Charles I’s financial needs became pressing he drastically increased the fees and other incomes of this court, so that it formed a very sizeable proportion of his revenue in the 1630s when no Parliaments were summoned. As Hurstfield put it, ‘the very landed classes who offered so valiant a resistance in the House of Commons to the government’s demands for money obliged the government to tax these same landed classes with so indirect and objectionable a charge’ as wardship.2 It was an uneconomical tax, from which courtiers or speculators favoured with the grant of a wardship gained more than the crown.
Page 2 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures English landowners had long been agitating for the abolition of feudal tenures and the Court of Wards. In Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, written in the 1530s, the author makes Cardinal Pole call for the shaking off ‘the tyrannical customs and unreasonable bonds’ imposed by William the Conqueror, and especially the feudal burdens of wardship and marriage.3 The abolition of feudal tenures was the basis for the agricultural revolution of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1654, for the first time, Parliament authorized the export of corn when the price was low. By the end of the century agriculture had become, in Edward Thompson’s words, England’s greatest capitalist industry. In the bad (p.320) harvest years of the 1590s there had been famine in England, Scotland, and France. In the 1690s there was famine in France and Scotland, none in England. England had ceased to be a corn-importing country and had become a corn-exporter. English farmers were ready to produce the food necessary to feed the landless peasants who formed the work-force for the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. The agricultural prosperity of the gentry was secured at the expense of their tenants many of whom drifted to the towns where they supplied labour for the factories. Land became a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other. Professor Perkin is one of the few historians to grasp the full significance of what he calls ‘the decisive change in English history which made it different from that of the continent. From it every other difference in English society stemmed’—‘a new chapter in the history of the (rural) world.’4 When the monasteries were dissolved former ecclesiastical property had normally been granted to purchasers to hold by ‘Knight’s service’, so very many landowners were affected. The importance of the issue for the landed classes was demonstrated by Cardinal Allen, an émigré in Spain. When the Armada was being planned he associated himself with Count Olivares in recommending a promise to abolish ‘this evil tax’ as a sure way of winning support for an invasion to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.5 The abolition was discussed at some length in Parliament in 1598, 1603–4, 1606, and 1610. In the latter year wardship was described as ‘the greatest [burden] our gentry groaneth under’: a contemporary claimed that the Commons ‘would treat of nothing else’ until the Court of Wards was abolished.6 Agreement on ‘the Great Contract’ was very nearly reached, and Cecil joked about M.P.s being able to ‘tell your neighbours that you have made a pretty hedge about them’.7 But the contract failed. Negotiations on it may well have given M.P.s the idea that the prerogative was up for sale. The issue was revived in the next Parliament, that of 1614,8 in 1626, and again when the Long Parliament met; but decisive legislation could not be passed until 1646, after Parliament had won the civil war. Then, immediately, feudal tenures,
Page 3 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures wardship, and the Court of Wards were abolished by Parliamentary ordinance— of course without the royal assent. (p.321) When the revolution seemed to be settling down under a Crom–wellian dynasty, an act of 1656 confirmed the abolition. But uncertainty reurned after Cromwell’s death. In 1660, in very different circumstances, Charles II announced that he proposed to return to the land of his fathers. Parliament voted acceptance and welcomed him back. The next business which Parliament took up was to appoint a committee to prepare a bill for confirming once again the abolition of feudal tenures.9 So great was the significance which the gentry attached to the issue. Clarendon described the abolition as ‘the most popular and obliging act they could perform’, and he opposed the mere suggestion made in 1651 that the exiled Charles might appoint a master of the Wards for the nonexistent Court on the grounds that ‘nothing would lose the King more the hearts and affections of the nobility and gentry’ than any suggestion that wardship and the hated Court might be revived.10 Confirmation of the abolition was one of the unspoken conditions of the Restoration. The Court of Wards followed the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High Commission into oblivion. But in the act of 1660 the compensation which the crown received was half what had been offered in 1610. When the abolition of feudal tenures was under discussion Sir Julius Caesar had argued that this would make for ‘a ready passage to a democracy, which is the deadliest enemy to a monarchy’.11 M.P.s insisted that there should be no such security of tenure for copyholders as they were proposing to vote for themselves.12 Apart from its social significance, wardship had come to seem essential to the crown’s financial independence. In the 1630s the Court of Wards brought the king more revenue than all his crown lands. Its annual revenue increased from four to five times during Charles’s reign, ‘by which husbandry all the rich families of England, of noblemen and gentlemen, were exceedingly incensed and even indevoted to the crown’. Those are the words of the loyal royalist Clarendon. The Scottish war of 1639–40 could hardly have been financed without the Court of Wards.13 During the revolutionary decades Levellers and other radical groups agitated for the conversion of the servile tenure of copyhold into freehold so as to obtain equivalent advantages for small men. They were (p.322) unsuccessful. In the act of 1646 copyholders were not mentioned: it was no time then to offend small tenants. A draft act of the Long Parliament would have limited the amount which could be demanded in fines from copyholders on descent or alienation of lands. But it never got on to the statute book: no doubt it had served its purpose and was never seriously intended. On the contrary: in 1656 and 1660, with the radicals safely defeated, confirmation of the abolition of feudal tenures was Page 4 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures accompanied by a clause specifically excluding copyholders from any relief. Big landowners thus obtained absolute property rights in their own lands, whilst being left free to evict copyholders whenever it suited their interests. The former had every incentive to invest capital in production for the market. The latter had no surplus to invest, ‘holding for life under a lord (or rather tyrant) of a manor; whereby people care not to improve their land by cost upon it, not knowing how soon themselves or theirs may be outed it. ‘They are far more enslaved to the lord of the manor than the rest of the nation is to a king.’14, Nor was the crown the only party interested in feudal tenures. In 1610 bishops complained that without their income from wardship they would be unable to meet their obligations. The Archbishop of Canterbury was eloquent on the bishops’ financial dependence on wardship, especially ‘the great ones’.15 Reformers might regard that as an additional reason for wanting to abolish episcopacy: it should perhaps be taken into account when we discuss ‘the Puritan Revolution’ or ‘the last of the religious wars’. The idea of the Norman Yoke conveyed different things to members of different social groups. Copyhold is a case in point. It was seen as a ‘badge of our Norman Slavery’ by Samuel Hartlib as well as by Levellers and other radical groups which during the revolution agitated for the conversion of the servile tenure of copyhold into freehold, so as to give smaller men some of the self-respect and independence which their betters enjoyed. Winstanley’s Appeal to the House of Commons of 1649 urged M.P.s to let the common people too be free…by virtue of their conquest over the Norman succession…. Take away the will of lords of manors for enslaving the common people’, as the king had been prevented from enslaving lords of manors.16 The Quaker Anthony Pearson, in The Great Case of Tithes (1657), said that abolition of the Court of Wards ‘had granted many great men such freedom for nothing as they (p.323) could neither in right claim nor in reason expect;…surely they will not deny the poorer sort of people their own dear-bought increase?’17 Pearson made the additional point that the burden of tithes made the cost of improving the waste too great for ordinary people to be able to afford, to the detriment of the national economy. Failure to abolish tithes during the revolution precluded small men from sharing in the profits of the agricultural revolution of the later seventeenth century.18 A pamphlet of 1681 declared that the taking away of the Court of Wards ‘has been as prejudicial to the yeomanry as it has been useful to the gentry, who before [the act]…were obliged to make their farms [rents] less, and to let long leases at reasonable rates, but now they erect great farms which few are able to rent, and rack the poor tenants’.19 The compensation given to the crown in 1660–1 for the abolition of the Court of Wards was financed by the excise, a tax which affected great landowners far less, comparatively speaking, than peasants or urban workers. In the French Revolution abolition of feudal tenures led to security of property ownership for Page 5 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures the peasantry; in the English Revolution it gave landlords absolute property in their lands and left their tenants exposed to racking of rents and eviction.20 So the basis was laid for the triumph of the Whig oligarchy. There were also less-calculable advantages. Before the revolution marriage of a tenant-in-chief could hardly be anything but a financial transaction. Abolition of the Court of Wards must have increased the chances of an heir or heiress choosing for him- or herself. Harrington had observed that ‘the lower sort’ were far freer in this respect than the nobility and gentry. So we might include among the intellectual origins of the English Revolution the pursuit of happiness for sons and daughters of big landowners. Whether thoughts of this kind were in the minds of landowners, the desire to abolish feudal tenures and wardship was certainly one of the major causes of their opposition to monarchy. We may sum up the reasons for opposition to Laudianism by gentry and big merchants, (l) Alarm at the Habsburg threat to England’s Protestant independence; (2) demand for a forward commercial-imperial foreign policy; (3) alarm about threats of absolutism, and especially of the increasing power of the clergy; (4) desire of the natural rulers to be left free to run their localities as they wished; (5) their desire to abolish (p.324) feudal tenures. The first three reasons might appeal to other classes in society: (4) was more contentious, but might win the support of yeomen and better-off peasants. But (5) was divisive so long as copyholders were excluded from sharing in the benefits. Wars of religion presume at least two sides—Protestants versus Catholics, Protestants versus Anabaptists. But when in 1640–2 the gentry leaders of the House of Commons and their clerical allies almost encouraged London antiCatholic mobs to pressurize governments, their motives were not religious. At the same time they were turning a blind eye to anti-enclosure riots by calling on the lower classes to fight against popish landlords, confident that they would remain under the control of their betters. There was no monolithic ‘Puritan’ party. The gentry and big merchants whom we call ‘Presbyterians’ were quite a separate grouping from the Londoners who rejected a state church and formed their own independent discussion groups under the chairmanship of a ‘mechanic preacher’, an artisan. Their discussions were by no means confined to what we today should regard as ‘religious’ issues. We must recognize that there were three (at least) groups in conflict in the sixteen-forties and fifties—royalists, anxious to restore as much of the familiar old order as possible; constitutional Parliamentarians to whom the legislation of 1640–2 had given most of what they wanted and which the king was unable to reverse; while a third group in process of formation comprised those who adhered to the view of the founder of English Protestantism, William Tyndale, that ‘the congregation’ was what mattered, not the state church. Conservatives wanted to preserve the national church, with its bishops and deans and its Page 6 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures liturgy, and a clergy nominated from above as an instrument of social control. They did not want congregations to elect their own ministers and discuss what they liked. For those who still have doubts about the revolutionary nature of the events of the sixteen-forties I recommend a swift glance at Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and Defence of the People of England (1651), and at Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646). Milton hailed with pride and delight the ferment of discussion which sprang up spontaneously in the freedom of the 1640s: Edwards expresses horror and panic at the novel social ideas which emerged during that unprecedented decade. ‘Instead of legal rights and the laws and customs of their nation, the sectaries plead for natural rights and liberties, such as men have from their birth.’21 (p.325) From their very different viewpoints Milton and Edwards are describing something without parallel in English history. But they are manifestly talking about the same phenomena, and their testimony fits into a pattern. The ferment of discussion which they describe had sprung up spontaneously and continued regardless of the disapproval of traditionalists. I should have paid far more attention to feudal tenures in my Ford Lectures. In the first place, the crown’s refusal to abolish them alienated its natural supporters, the aristocracy and gentry, and perhaps increased the unpopularity of the higher clergy. In the second place, the issue of copyhold divided lesser tenants from the gentry who took the lead against the crown in the early years of the revolution. This must have played a great part in fomenting the divisions which ultimately led to the return of Charles II. Charles’s acceptance of the abolition of feudal tenures marked the victory of big landowners over both crown and copyholders, and was crucial in shaping the economic and social history of England during the two centuries after 1640. The background to this ‘new chapter in the history of the (rural) world’ (Le Roy Ladurie’s description) can hardly be omitted from the intellectual origins of the English Revolution. Some years ago Eric Hobsbawm wrote a powerful article analysing the views of the eighteenth-century Scottish theorists on the transition to capitalism. Basing themselves on English experience, they concluded that two things were essential: first a guarantee to big landowners of absolute rights in their property, and secondly the expulsion of the poor from their village holdings to look for employment as wage-labourers elsewhere. As we have seen, this accurately describes what happened in England. Abolition of feudal tenures did not produce a free peasantry in England, as it did later in France; it produced a rural proletariat evicted from their landholdings. Ultimately, rich farmers employing wage labour produced the food necessary to feed the other landless peasants who, after much hardship, made their way to waged employment in towns and industrial areas, where they formed the work-force for the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. It was a crucial turning-point.
Page 7 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures Feudal tenures and wardship must have been matters of considerable social concern and discussion in the decades before the Long Parliament met. So long as they survived, they must have helped to alienate many gentlemen from the crown, and royal attempts to use feudal rights for money-raising purposes in the absence of taxes voted by Parliament could not but lead to fundamental questions being asked about the relationship of the king to the representative assembly. And that might lead on to (p.326) asking why membership of Parliament should be restricted to men of property? The abolition of feudal tenures gave big landowners an enormous capital bonus which could be invested in reorganizing agricultural production for the market. It enhanced a sense of confidence in a family’s resources and in the possibility of planning children’s marriages to meet the requirements of the strict settlement (first recorded just after the abolition) which facilitated the consolidation of great landed properties by enabling landowners to raise money on the security of their estates rather than having to sell them in time of financial crisis. Notes:
(1) Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge U.P., 1953), p. 146. (2) J. Hurstfield, The Queen’s Wards: Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth I (1958), pp. xiv-xv, 14–16, 40, 345. (3) Thomas Starkey, op. cit. (ed. J. M. Cowper, Early English Text Soct. 1871). For Starkey see pp. 230, 240 and 246 above. The dialogue does not necessarily represent the views of the spokesmen, though it is probably not far from them. (4) H. J. Perkin, ‘The Social Causes of the British Industrial Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xviii (1968), p. 135. (5) Hurstfield, op. cit., pp. xv, 245, 330, 338, 348. (6) Ed. E. R. Foster, Proceedings in Parliament, 1610 (Yale U.P., 1966), ii. 45–7. (7) Hurstfield, op. cit., p. 311. (8) Ed. M. Jansson, Proceedings in Parliament, 1614 (House of Commons) (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1988), p. 168. Clarendon, History, v. 228. (9) [W. Cobbett], Parliamentary History of England, 1660–1688 (1808), iv, pp. xv, 245. (10) Clarendon, History, v. 278–9. (11) J. Hurstfield, The Queen’s Wards, p. 323. Page 8 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Feudal Tenures (12) Foster, Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, i. 203. (13) Clarendon, History, i. 198–9; M. J. Havran, Caroline Courtier: The Life of Lord Cottington (1973), pp. 136–7. (14) Moses Wall to Milton, 26 May, 1659, in Milton, Complete Prose Works, vii. 511. (15) Foster, 1610 Parliament, i, pp. xvii, 164, 251. (16) Sabine, op. cit., p. 308. (17) Pearson, op. cit. (1732 ed.), p. 60. (18) My The World Turned Upside Down, p. 244. (19) Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 408. (20) See my Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Penguin, 1971), pp. 146–8. (21) Edwards, Gangraena, iii. 20.
Access brought to you by:
Page 9 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
The Many-Headed Monster Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0012
Abstract and Keywords The piece called ‘The Many-Headed Monster’ collected a good deal of evidence for social divisions in England which existed long before 1640 — anti-enclosure riots, riots against fen drainage, famine riots in the bad years of the fifteennineties and sixteen-twenties. Many sources, from Sir Thomas More's Utopia onwards, confirm that the law exists to protect the property of the rich. Some of the ideas which surfaced in the sixteen-forties must go back to the Reformation, if not further. They were no doubt discussed orally in taverns and ale-houses for many years. Setting the individual conscience as a rival to the claims of authority is a Protestant idea. Among other things it means that the present may claim superiority over the past. Since individual consciences are no longer controlled by the confessional, one can see the importance of congregational discussion. Keywords: social divisions, England, riots, famine, Thomas More, Utopia, law, Reformation
OVER TWENTY years ago I wrote a piece called ‘The Many–Headed Monster’, published in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (1974).1 In this I collected a good deal of evidence for social divisions in England which existed long before 1640—anti–enclosure riots, riots against fen drainage, famine riots in the bad years of the fifteen–nineties and sixteen–twenties. Many sources, from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, English translation 1551) onwards, confirm that the law exists to protect the property of the rich. ‘The riches and goods of Christians are not common’, asserts the 38th Article of the Church of England. Ralegh predicted that in case of Spanish invasion the poor would say ‘Let the rich fight for themselves’.2 The best comment on such Page 1 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster matters comes from a pamphlet of 1641, which said that ‘the fourth part of the inhabitants of most of the parishes of England are miserable poor people and (harvest time excepted) without any subsistence’.3 The laws against vagabondage were savage, but their enforcement was restrained by men’s knowledge that inequality and poverty, then as now, were the principal causes of crime. ‘Most commonly the simple country men and women…would not procure a man’s death for all the goods in the world.’4 Some of the ideas which surfaced in the sixteen–forties must go back to the Reformation, if not further. They were no doubt discussed orally in taverns and ale–houses for many years. Setting the individual conscience as a rival to the claims of authority is a Protestant idea. Among other things it means that the present may claim superiority over the past. Since individual consciences are no longer controlled by the confessional, one can see the importance of congregational discussion. Both individual consciences and the sense of the congregation will be more (p.328) open to change than when it was assumed that all problems have been solved by the church. Hence the revolutionary significance of Tyndale’s translation of ekklesia as ‘congregation’, not ‘church’, and indeed his rejection of a national church. Hence too the possibilities of disagreement. Many middle–class consciences believed strongly in the religious duty of hard work in the occupation to which God had called one—the duty especially of those born into the labouring classes. Others might feel differently: there is much evidence for hostility to wage labour.5 So the idea of novelty ceased to be shocking, and became almost desirable. Winstanley claimed not to get his ideas from books ‘before I saw the light of it rise up within myself’. His New Law of Righteousness insisted that ‘men must speak their own experienced words, and must not speak thoughts’.6 He agreed with the Puritan Thomas Taylor, who wrote that ‘true experience of Christ is experimental’. ‘It is not acquired out of books or relations…but by experience of himself.’7 This idea goes back at least to Tyndale, who insisted on relying on one’s own feelings and not on the words of others—‘as a man rehearseth a tale of another man’s words and wotteth not whether it be so or no as he saith, nor hath any experience of the thing itself’.8 ‘I aim not at words but things’, were the opening words of Lord Brooke’s Discourse of…Episcopacie (1641). Scientists agreed. William Gilbert praised true philosophers who looked for knowledge ‘not only in books but in things themselves’.9 There were other problems. Reliance on the absolute truth of the Bible necessitated being absolutely confident of what the Bible did in fact say. Tyndale’s translations of ekklesia as ‘congregation’, and pres-buteros as ‘elder’, undermined the authority of any state or international ecclesiastical organization. Biblical criticism by earnest Protestant scholars led to uncertainty about the accuracy of the text as we have it, and so ultimately contributed to scepticism. Thomas James’s Treatise of the Corruptions of the Scriptures (1612), Page 2 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster though impeccably orthodox, nevertheless by its painstaking exposure of forgeries showed how very precarious the ‘true’ text is.10 There are analogies between the godly man ‘speaking experienced truths’ to a critical and sophisticated auditory of his equals and the scientist describing experiments which can be tested (p.329) by other scientists—Harvey, for instance. For Quakers the ‘sense of the meeting’, accepting the ‘common sense’ of believers, became a check on the extravagances of the inner light of individuals. ‘Inspiration’, Davenant warned, was ‘a dangerous word.’11 The rapid spread of Quaker ideas in the sixteen–fifties—much more radical then than after the Restoration—suggests the existence of a public ready to receive such ideas. Quakers claimed to convert ‘such as neither magistrates or ministers ever speak to’.12 In ‘From Lollards to Levellers’13 I collected some evidence that led me to suggest that very radical heresies continued to exist in some areas, from at least the fourteenth century until they were able to surface after 1640.14 They include rejection of deference to superiors, refusal to take judicial oaths, millenarian communist ideas, opposition to tithes, insistence that laymen are as good as priests and have as much right to preach, theological heresies like antiTrinitarianism, mortalism, and others. Many of these attitudes survived after 1660, some reappearing in the late eighteenth century. Long before 1640 the authority of a national church had been called in question. Two early Protestant martyrs, John Frith and William Tyndale, were quoted to establish that bishops were Antichristian—‘more Antichristian than Antichrist himself’, said Milton a century later.15 Antichrist of course was the Pope. In between, Martin Marprelate, Thomas Cartwright, Isaac Barrow, William Ames, and many others had agreed. During the civil war Parliamentarian propagandists spoke of royalists as ‘the Antichristian party’, and Lilburne denounced ‘the Antichristian Church of England’.16 We can find many traces of opposition thinking before 1640 if we look for them, notably in asserting that godly laymen were better preachers than universityeducated divines.17 Radicals like Robert Browne, John Greenwood, and Henry Barrow thought that universities were ‘the very guard of Antichrist’s throne’. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson in New England was said to preach ‘better gospel than many of your blackcoats that have (p.330) been at the ninnie–varisitie’.18 Ideas which first got into print after 1640 give us some indication of the discussions which had been going on. Cobbler How put into practice his belief that the unlearned are to be preferred for the ministry before equally gifted learned men.19 Lord Brooke thought that ‘the ways of God’s spirit are free and not tied to a university man’; Roger Williams agreed that God’s people do not need the ‘lazy and monkish’ university, nor its ‘superstitious degrees and titles of divinity’.20 As soon find a true minister of the gospel ‘in the university of Newgate’, Henry Denne suggested.21 The Leveller Richard Overton’s Mr. Page 3 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster Persecution had been ‘of all the universities of Christendom’.22 Charles Herle, looking back in 1644 to the Laudian era, recalled that religion was then ‘contrived to make subjects slaves to kings that thereby kings may be so much the greater slaves to the Pope’. Similar remarks could be quoted from Robert Norwood, Roger Crab, Henry Stubbe, the Ranter Richard Coppin, the Fifth Monarchists John Spittle–house and John Canne, the Quakers George Fox, Richard Farnsworth, Samuel Fisher, and scores of others. In Wales and the North and West of England congregations appeared in the sixteen–forties which owed nothing to traditional Presbyterian Puritanism. Such congregations were often conventionally described as composed of:‘Anabaptists’, a name used in a general pejorative sense to describe those who were believed to reject the existing social and political order.23 William Gouge in his Of Domesticall Duties (1626) told his shocked London congregation that Anabaptists ‘teach that all men are alike and that there is no difference between masters and servants’.24 ‘The Anabaptists are men that will not be shuffled out of their birthright as freeborn people of England’, one of their defenders told Oliver Cromwell in 1655.25 (p.331) John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers, compared those who opposed church government being in the hands of the people with the spirit of those who enclose the commons of their poorer neighbours on the plea that common things are commonly neglected and that the value of commons is increased by enclosure.26 Value to whom? one might ask. Religious toleration might be seen as consumers’ choice in religion, the natural concomitant of free industrial production and internal free trade. Two quite different conceptions of religion emerge in quarrels over altar rails and vestments, and such matters. Radicals stressed the moral state of the individual recipient rather than the correct performance of ceremonies on his behalf at a table which separates the clergy from the laity. The believer, Milton insisted, is more sacred than any dedicated altar or church. The doctrine of the church of God, he added ‘seems much to favour two things…so dreadful [to the kings of this world], liberty and equality’.27 ‘He that fears God’, declared William Dell, ‘is free from all other fear’; he ‘fears not men of high degree’.28 ‘Greater is he that is in you’, Margaret Fell assured her husband, ‘than he that is in the world.’29 The abolition of church courts ended prosecutions for ‘sin’, leaving decisions on religious matters to the consciences of individuals. It was a greater moral revolution than is always appreciated. ‘If there were no God to reward the good nor punish the evil,’ declared Lodowick Muggleton, ‘yet could I not do other ways than I do; for I do well, not because I expect any reward from God, and I refrain from evil, not for fear God should see me, or seeing me will punish me; but I do well and refrain from evil, to please the law written in my heart, so that Page 4 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster I might not be accused in my own conscience.’30 Samuel Butler, looking at it from a rather different angle, observed that the religious controversies of the Revolution (as earlier of the Reformation) had helped to spread scepticism about religion as such among the lower classes. ‘Popery made the Christian religion a fable, and Reformation by discovering that cheat will in time bring it to nothing.’31 (p.332) Bruno Ryves gave a description of ideas held by the lower classes of Chelmsford at the beginning of the civil war. Kings are burdens: the relation of master to servant has no ground in the New Testament: in Christ there is neither bond nor free. Ranks such as peerage and gentry are ‘ethnical and heathenish distinctions’. There is nothing in nature or Scripture to justify one man having £1, 000 a year whilst another has not £1. The common people have long been kept under blindness and ignorance, and have remained servants and slaves to the nobility and gentry. ‘God hath now opened their eyes and discovered unto them their Christian liberty’ Gentlemen should be made to work for their living or else should not eat. Human learning has always been an enemy to the gospel; it would be better if there were no universities, and all books except the Bible were burnt. Any gifted man may be chosen by a congregation as their minister. The report is hostile, but the ideas recur in other sources.32
Page 5 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster Social and economic considerations often lurk behind what look like ‘Puritan’ or ‘religious’ issues. Propaganda for increasing England’s national wealth informs the Homily against Idleness, which went to great lengths to distinguish between the idleness of serving–men and the lower classes generally, and the productive sedentary activities of rulers, clergymen, and teachers. The former risk incurring God’s wrath. The Homily of Obedience taught that if there were no kings, princes, magistrates, and judges, ‘no man shall ride or go by the way unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children and possessions in quietness: all things shall be common’.33 John Knox denounced ‘the rascal multitude, and godless multitude’.34 Archbishop Parker had no doubt that the multitude had ideas of their own. But he believed that the consequences would be disastrous for the established order if it was ‘referred to the judgment of the subject, of the tenant and of the servant, to discuss what is tyranny, and to discuss whether his prince, his landlord, his master, is a tyrant’.35 Parker’s successor, Archbishop Bancroft, was terrified of what would happen if a Presbyterian system of electing church officers were adopted, ‘considering the sinister affections of the people, and how easily they are divided and rent asunder’.36 In Sidney’s Arcadia, among ‘the unruly sort of clowns,…railing was counted the fruit of freedom…He only seemed (p.333) to have most pre–eminence that was most rageful…. They had the glorious shadow of a commonwealth with them.’37 Spenser’s communist giant in Book V, canto ii of The Faerie Queene drew the vulgar about him, who hoped ‘uncontrolled freedom to obtain’. The giant promised that: I will throw down these mountains high And make them level with the lowly plain;… And as they were, them equalize again…. And all the wealth of rich men to the poor will draw.
Shakespeare’s peasants in Coriolanus and Henry VI were very class–conscious.38 Jack Cade’s rebels declared that ‘it was never merry world since gentlemen came up’; ‘Adam was a gardener’. Education, which the rich could afford, gave them class privileges, like benefit of clergy. The contrast between the prosperity of enclosing landlords and the poverty of evicted tenants was sufficiently novel to be obvious to the former as well as to the latter. Already it was giving the upper classes cause for anxiety. In 1597 an M.P. observed that if ‘the ruder sort’ were ‘privy to their own strength and liberty allowed them by the law’, they ‘would be as unbridled and untamed beasts’.39 An argument for colonizing Ireland in 1594, or Virginia in 1612, was that ‘the rank multitude’ might be exported and so ‘the matter of sedition…removed out of the City’ of London.40 Bishop Cooper in the 1590s denounced ‘Anabaptists’ who wanted ‘a general equality, most dangerous to the society of men’.41
Page 6 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster Many recognized that class politics were involved in religious disputes. The Earl of Hertford in 1589—speaking of the Marprelate Tracts—said ‘As they shoot at bishops now, so will they do at the nobility also, if they be suffered’.42 ‘There will be a perpetual defection,’ said Francis Bacon, ‘except you keep men in by preaching, as well as the law doth by punishing.’43 The only question was, in whose interests this power should be exercised. Edmund Waller, as civil war approached, looked upon episcopacy as ‘a counter-scarp or outwork’. If it was ‘taken by this assault of the people,…we may in the next place have as hard a (p.334) task to defend our property’.44 As Aston put it, ‘the old seditious argument will be obvious to them, that we are all the sons of Adam, born free; some of them say the gospel hath made them free.’45 Hence the horror of conservative M.P.s when it was proposed that the Grand Remonstrance should be printed. ‘You want to raise the people and get rid of the Lords’, Hampden was told. ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downwards’, said Sir Edward Dering: ‘I neither look for ease of our complaints from the common people, nor desire to be cured by them.’46 I have suggested in Chapter 13 that there were three sides in the English Revolution, not just two. Considering the necessity of a multitude, it was not good to wake a sleeping lion, Holies told the House of Lords in February 1642.47 When the two sides were lining up for war, it was ‘the rude kind of multitude,… the meanest of the people’, who prevented the royal commission of array taking effect in Gloucestershire. ‘Their insolency becomes intolerable’, wrote the Parliamentarian historian of the siege of Gloucester, whilst admitting that ‘they have produced good effects’, and ‘prudent men promote and maintain’ their efforts, ‘yet no further than themselves can overrule and moderate’. This turned out to be a dangerous game. Rioters against enclosure of the fens, declared that ‘the king should shortly be no longer king there’.48 ‘If we take not advantage of this time’, said an enclosure rioter in Essex in April 1643, ‘we shall never have the opportunity again.’ In Chelmsford the common people were said to have determined that they would no longer be ‘kept under blindness and ignorance’, or yield themselves ‘servants, nay slaves to the nobility and gentry’.49 Hobbes said that it was ‘under pretence of religion’ that ‘the lower sort of citizens…do challenge liberty to themselves’.50 Without accepting Hobbes’s accusation of ‘pretence’, we may agree that religious, political, and social questions were mixed up. Preachers like Jeremiah Burroughs and Edward Bowles addressed themselves directly to the (p.335) lower classes. The breakdown of controls led to ‘petty sectaries’ swarming ‘in every corner’, escaping from the control of ministers. Henry Oxinden recognized in November 1643 that it was ‘high time for all gentlemen to…endeavour rather to maintain episcopal government…than to introduce I know not what presbyterial government, which will equalize men of mean conditions with the gentry’, and enable them ‘to tyrannize over their betters, whom naturally they have ever hated and in their hearts despised’. The official historian of Parliament admitted Page 7 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster that ‘some who were not bad men’ objected to ‘that extreme licence which the common people, almost from the very beginning of the Parliament, took to themselves of reforming without authority, order or decency’.51 With hindsight we can see signs of a political as well as an economic crisis building up in the sixteen–twenties and thirties. There was growing influence of constituents on M.P.s.52 Professor M. A. Judson makes out a powerful case for seeing consistent policies in the House of Commons in defence of property against the prerogative in the sixteen–twenties.53 Notwithstanding Professor Elton–s scepticism about ‘a high road to civil war’ in Parliaments before 1640, memories died hard. Poverty was increasing, and the natural rulers were desperately anxious not to provoke the Many–Headed Monster, already seen as straining at the leash. We should take less notice of what M.P.s said in speeches in the House than of what they wrote in their diaries and ciphered correspondence. Verbal deference was carefully shown to the King even whilst opposing him. A new financial situation had arisen. Government revenue was inadequate for waging war. And a new social situation: the middling sort were growing richer and more self–confident just when M.P.s needed to speak for the people of England. The gentry were conscious of their own under-assessment to taxation by comparison with the middling sort: it was some reward for their work as unpaid local rulers.54 Government policy affected the local power of J.P.s and the gentry generally. What has been called ‘the impotence of Parliament’ was part of the impotence of the English state. Take, for instance, foreign policy. M.P.s voted taxes for wars against Spain or France; but the money was (p.336) spent on helping Louis XIII to suppress the Huguenots of La Rochelle. In the late sixteentwenties men began to fear the imposition of military absolutism. The multitude of diaries kept by M.P.s is, as Professor Hexter pointed out, evidence that Parliament was not an unimportant institution.55 Nor would M.P.s have been arrested if the government did not think their talk dangerous. If Parliament was impotent, why did Gondomar in 1621 say that Spain could not negotiate until Parliament was dissolved?56 When Charles I in 1628 declared that ‘It is not in the power of the Houses to declare and enact any law without my consent’, what ‘doctrines…set on foot at this time’ did he think it necessary to controvert? Within thirteen years Parliament assumed the right to legislate without the King, just as Charles foretold.57 The year 1628 seems to have marked a turning–point, with the Commons attempting to appeal to a public outside their walls, and outside what had hitherto been the political nation.58 The price of food was rising faster than other prices. There is much contemporary evidence to show that M.P.s as well as foreign ambassadors were aware of a threat of popular revolt, from the depression of the mid–sixteen– twenties onwards. Fear of it limited M.P.s’ freedom of action. In 1622 Sir Simonds D’Ewes, no radical, spoke of a ‘hoped for rebellion’, Sherland three Page 8 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster years later of the danger of a ‘commotion’ among the people. Unsuccessful foreign war accentuated social tensions.59 When in May 1628 the House of Lords wanted to add a clause to the Petition of Right ‘to leave entire the sovereign power wherewith your Majesty is trusted’, the Commons objected, ‘because the people are discontented’, ‘men’s minds are distracted’. Members of the two houses know that ‘sovereign power is a thing always so sacred that to handle it otherwise than tenderly is a kind of sacrilege’. ‘But every vulgar capacity is not so affected…Sovereign power has not now…the amiable aspect’ it used to have. ‘This petition will run through many hands…We know the humours of the people’, and do not wish to be responsible for anything ‘that may breed wild blood’. That was a clear threat of the (p.337) dangers of allowing the vulgar to discuss the origins and bounds of sovereign power: there was a body of opinion outside Parliament well–versed in political discussion and much less moderate than M.P.s. The House of Lords took the point, and backed down.60 This reminds us that we should not look only at Parliamentary debates for evidence that men were aware of a social and political crisis. There was an active public opinion outside Parliament. Cecil in 1601 was appalled that ‘Parliament matters are ordinarily talked of in the streets’. He had heard men say ‘God prosper those that further the overthrow of these monopolies! God send the prerogative touch not our liberty!’61 In 1610 the letter–writer John Chamberlain said that ‘our monarchical powers and regal prerogative [are] strained so high and made so transcendent every way that if the practice should follow the positions we are not like to leave our successors that freedom we received from our forefathers’.62 Puttenham had been afraid that popular preachers would ‘preach all truth to the rascal sort’, and so ‘pull people and their prince asunder’.63 That was what they achieved, even if it was not their intention. Notes:
(1) See also my The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 29–34 and chapters 6, 14, and 16. (2) N. L. Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh (1962), p. 129. (3) [Anon.], Considerations Touching Trade, with the Advance of the King’s Revenue (1641), p. 15. The reference to ‘The King’s revenue’ and the words in brackets inspire confidence in this tract’s relative objectivity. (4) Quoted in my ‘The Many–Headed Monster’, in Change and Continuity, p. 25. (5) I have discussed this in ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to WageLabour’, in Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England. (6) Winstanley, in Works (ed. G. H. Sabine), pp. 125, 204, 239–44. The idea that there might be a new\a\v of righteousness is itself provocative. Page 9 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster (7) Taylor, Works (1653), p. 411. (8) Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, pp. 55–56; Answer to More, pp. 51–52. (9) W. Gilbert, De Magnete (1600), Preface. (10) See my Change and Continuity, p. 114. (11) Ed. D. F. Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (Oxford U.P., 1971), p. 22; cf. p. 89. (12) [Henry Stubbe], Light Shining out of Darkness (1659), p. 88. (13) In Religion and Politics in Seventeenth–Century England, pp. 9–116. (14) The most obvious areas included Essex, Buckinghamshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Kent, Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, East Anglia and the Isle of Ely, Leicestershire, Warwickshire. (15) Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 856. (16) N. Tyacke, The Fortunes of English Puritanism, 1603–1640 (1988), pp. 12– 13, 49, 83, 103; The Writings of Henry Barrow 1587–1590 (ed. L. H. Carlson, 1963), pp. 57, 122, 139, 188; 1590–1591, p. 257; Lilburne, Come out of her my people (1639). I quote from the Rota reprint (Exeter U.P., 1971), pp. 1–5. (17) S. E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Harvard U.P., 1935), p. 176. (18) Ed. Peel and Carlson, Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne (1953), pp. 530–1; ed. Carlson, Writings of John Greenwood 1587–1590 (1962), pp, 268–9; Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587–1590, pp. 344–53, 534–41; 1590– 1591, pp. 191, 211–24. (19) Samuel How, The Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching (6th ed., 1972), pp. 36, 40–1, 51. (20) Lord Brooke, A Discourse…of…Episcopacie (1642), p. 106, in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, ii. 150; Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (Hanserd Knollys Soc., 1848), pp. 263–5; The Hireling Ministry None of Christs (1652), pp. 14–17. (21) H. Denne, Grace, Mercy and Peace (1645), in Fenstanton Records (ed. E. B. Underhill, Hanserd Knollys Soc, 1859), p. 377. (22) Herle, Ahah’s Fall by his Prophets Flatteries, pp. 302–3; [Overton], The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (1645), in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, iii. 250; cf. p. 228. Page 10 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster (23) See my The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 24, 73–85. Article 38 of the Church of England referred to –the false boasts of certain Anabaptists’. (24) Op. cit, pp. 33 1–2. (25) [J. Sturgion], Queries for His Highness to Answer, quoted by D. B. Heriot, ‘Anabaptism in England During the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Soc, xiii (1937–9), p. 29. (26) Robinson, A Justification of Separation from the Church of England (1610), quoted by J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers (5th ed. 1920), p. 143. (27) Milton, Of Reformation (164l), Complete Prose Works, i. 547–9; Eikonoklastes (1650), Ibid., iii. 509. (28) Dell, Christ’s Spirit a Christian’s Strength in Several Sermons and Discourses, p. 18. (29) Isobel Ross, Margaret Fell (1949), p. 219. (30) Muggleton, The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit (1764), p. 140. (First published, posthumously, in 1699.) (31) Butler, Prose Observations (ed. H. de Quehen, Oxford U.P., 1979), p. 196. Cf. my Writing and Revolution, pp. 283–5. (32) [Ryves], Angliae Ruina (1647), p. 27. (33) Homilies, pp. 438–45. (34) Knox, The History of the Reformation in Scotland (Glasgow, 1832), pp. 115, 131, 225, 237. (35) M. Parker, Correspondence (Parker Society, 1853), p. 61. (36) Ed. A. Peel, Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft (Cambridge U.P., 1953), p. 83. (37) Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (ed. A. Feuillerat, Cambridge U.P., 1963), pp. 120–2. (38) See p. 394 below. (39) Bland, Brown and Tawney, English Economic History: Select Documents, p. 271. (40) D. B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Cornell U.P., 1966), p. 157. (41) Cooper, An Admonition to the People of England (ed. E. Arber, 1895), p. 148. Page 11 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster (42) W. Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts (1908), p. 182. (43) Bacon, speech to the judges, 1617, in Works, xiii. 213. (44) Cf. Chapter 8, n. 28. (45) Sir T. Aston, A Remonstrance against Presbytery (1641), sig. B. 4. (46) F. Guizot, The History of the English Revolution (1884), p. 120; Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), pp. 108–9. (47) V. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford U.P., 1961), pp. 226–7. (48) J. Corbet, An Historicall Relation of the Military Government of Gloucester (1645), in Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1823), i. 8, 14; Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Diary, Harleian MS. 163 f. 135, a reference which I owe to the kindness of Robin Clifton. (49) Lords’ Journals, v. 42. (50) Hobbes, English Works, ii. 79; J. Burroughs, Sions Joy (1641), p. 34; E. Bowles, The mysterie of iniquity, yet working in the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, for the destruction of religion truly proteslant (1643), pp. 25–26; cf. James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (ed. E. Arber, 1869), p. 78 (first published 1642). (51) D. Gardiner Ed., The Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 1612–1670 (1931), pp. 36–37; T. May, History of the Parliament, i. 113–14. (52) D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the early Stuarts (Cambridge U.P., 1975), passim,. (53) M. A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (Rutgers U.P., 1949), pp. 221–40, 284, 302–8, 348. (54) Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford U.P., 1979), p. 49. (55) Hexter, ‘Power Struggle, Parliament and Liberty in Early Stuart England’, Journal of Modern History, 1 (1978). (56) D. H. Willson, The Privy Councillors in the House of Commons, 1604–1629 (Minneapolis, 1940), p. 413.
Page 12 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Many-Headed Monster (57) Commons’ Debates (1628), iv. 482; cf. S. D. White, Sir Edward Coke and ‘the Grievances of the Commonwealth’, 1621–1688 (North Carolina U.P., 1979), p. 251. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, p. 58. (58) B. S. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, passim. (59) Ed. E. Bourcier, Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1622–4 (Paris, n.d., ?1924), p. 58; cf. pp. 64–65, 83, 130, 145; Russell, Parliament and English Politics, pp. 74– 75, 252; cf. pp. 165–36, 339–41; Zagorin, The Court and the Country (1970), pp. 10–18. (60) My ‘Parliament and People in 17th–Century England’, People and Ideas in 17ih–Century England (Brighton, 1986), pp. 42–44. (61) Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents (1924), ii. 292. (62) Ed. N. E. McClure, The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), i. 301. Chamberlain cites disparaging use of the term ‘royalist’ as early as 1624 (Ibid., ii. 540). (63) George Puttenham, Partheniades, in Ballads from Manuscripts, ii (ed. W. R. Morrill, Hertford, 1873), p. 87; quoted by David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984), p. 70.
Access brought to you by:
Page 13 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
A Three-Sided Revolution Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0013
Abstract and Keywords A successful underground movement is likely to leave few traces. However, seventeenth-century propagandists were aware of continuities. John Cleveland spoke of ‘Presbyter Wyclif’ and ‘Tyler's toleration’. From the other side Levellers and William Dell emphasized the politically radical element in the heretical tradition; and Quakers brought into prominence many long-standing lower-class gestures of insubordination, such as refusing to doff the hat in the presence of social superiors or before a magistrate, or using ‘thou’ instead of the more deferential ‘you’. One seventeenth-century heresy with political implications was rejection of the Calvinist doctrine that only a favoured few are predestined to salvation. Almost by definition such a theology must be that of an elite and is unlikely to be accepted by the silent majority. Keywords: underground movement, propagandists, John Cleveland, Presbyter Wyclif, Levellers, William Dell, Quakers, heresy
WHAT I DID not discuss in 1965, and what indeed I did not know much about before I wrote The World Turned Upside Down, was lower-class sectarian thinking before 1640. It is difficult to obtain evidence for this, apart from hostile sources, and not enough work has been done on it. But there certainly were dangerous ideas about, which surfaced after the collapse of censorship. A. G. Dickens has shown us how Lollard influences survived in a popular materialist scepticism which makes one ‘feel appreciably nearer to the age of Voltaire than is normal in the sixteenth century’.1 Sir Keith Thomas gives numerous examples of popular heresy under Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts—denial of the resurrection, of the existence of God or the devil: all things come by nature. He Page 1 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution rightly rebukes embarrassed historians who dismiss these expressions of irreligion as the words of drunks or madmen.2 There is evidence for popular religious debates in the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, some of which got into print. The Marian martyrs were long remembered. Martin Marprelate was clearly not an isolated figure: he and his ideas were recalled in 1641 by Richard Overton as soon as publication was free. The controversy over women in the 1620s suggests ongoing discussions about their role.3 The Grindleton congregation, and other groups in the North of England which George Fox found waiting for him when he went north in the early sixteen-fifties, testify to a prehistory for ‘the Northern Quakers’. The New Model Army found friends to welcome its arrival in the North and South-West. Milton’s pride in the achievements of the English people no doubt led him to exaggerate in Areopagitica, but the horrified evidence collected by Thomas Edwards and his correspondents (who probably also exaggerated) gives some confirmatory evidence. (p.339) I first looked seriously at this more radical contribution to revolutionary ideas in England in The World Turned Upside Down. I owe this to Rodney Hilton, with whom I happened to be talking about a series of books which he was editing on revolts in English history. He mentioned the Peasants’ Revolt, the Chartists, and others, until I exploded ‘But what about the seventeenth century? The most revolutionary century in English history?’ His retort was quick and obvious. ‘Why don’t you write that one?’ I replied, on the spur of the moment, ‘But I have already written that book twice. I can’t go on.’ (I think I must have included Intellectual Origins as one of the two.) But on thinking it over, and especially in relation to the emphasis of his series on revolts by the lower classes, I realized that there might be a different book to write, and The World Turned Upside Down was the result, from writing which I learnt more than from any other book I have perpetrated. The World Turned Upside Down forced me to recognize, as Intellectual Origins had not done, the intimate connexion of radical religious ideas with radical politics. After The World Turned Upside Down I wrote a piece entitled ‘From Lollards to Levellers’ for a Festschrift for that much underestimated historian A. L. Morton. Here I quoted as epigraph some words of Lord Strickland in 1656: ‘Heresies are like leaden pipes in the ground. They run on still, though we do not see them, in a commonwealth where they are restrained. Where liberty is they will discover themselves, and come to punishment.’4 By 1656 radical ideas had enjoyed nearly a decade of relative liberty. When I sent a copy of The World Turned Upside Down to Geoffrey Elton (not yet Sir Geoffrey), with apologies, he told me dampingly that ‘the ideas you find put forward are awfully old hat—commonplaces of radical and heretical thinking since well before the Reformation’. I had already noticed some parallels between Page 2 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution late Lollard ideas as recorded by J. A. F. Thomson and A. G. Dickens (but not by Professor Elton) and seventeenth-century radicals.5 What began to interest me was how continuous this tradition was and how it survived under censorship before the invention of printing. A successful underground movement is likely to leave few traces. But seventeenth-century propagandists were aware of continuities. John Cleveland spoke of ‘Presbyter Wyclif’ and ‘Tyler’s toleration’. Cowley, Collop, and others linked sectaries of the (p.340) revolutionary decades with Wyclif.6 From the other side Levellers and William Dell emphasized the politically radical element in the heretical tradition;7 and Quakers brought into prominence many long-standing lower-class gestures of insubordination, such as refusing to doff the hat in the presence of social superiors or before a magistrate: or using ‘thou’ instead of the more deferential ‘you’. One seventeenth-century heresy with political implications was rejection of the Calvinist doctrine that only a favoured few are predestined to salvation. Almost by definition such a theology must be that of an élite and is unlikely to be accepted by the silent majority.8 From the legend of the Fall of Man onwards sin has been associated with scarcity. Adam and Eve were expelled from a Paradise of abundance, and Adam was condemned to hard labour if he was to eat bread in the sweat of his brow. The existence of a propertied ruling class was justified by its duty to relieve hardship in time of dearth, to extend charity to the poor, and to reduce rent to the victims of natural disasters. But in the increasingly competitive and mobile society of the seventeenth century, the unprivileged sector of the population was no longer trapped in a poverty from which none could escape, and those few who prospered felt fewer obligations to those less fortunate.9 The fact that some could between themselves whilst other sank into permanent rightless poverty seemed to the former to justify belief in the wickedness and fickleness of the poor, and the righteousness of those whom God had chosen to prosper, often through no apparent merits of their own. Calvin seemed to make sense to the men of property but was increasingly challenged by those who were prevented from prospering. Winstanley complained that the poor are ‘kept poor by their brethren in a land where there is so much plenty for everyone’, since there is ‘land enough in England to maintain ten times as many people as are in it’.10 Inheritance of sin may have begun to lose its immediately obvious inevitability as a contract society grew up within the world of inherited landed property. The theological challenge to the assumption that an omnipotent God has pre-ordained the mass of mankind to hell is (p.341) the counterpart of the earthly aspirations of those who see a few prospering at the expense of the many. Thomas Goodwin rebuked those who drew the wrong conclusions from Calvinist theology. ‘It is a strange thing that you will not allow God that which kings and princes have the prerogative of…. They will have favourites whom they will love, and will not love others; and yet men will not allow God that liberty’, but accuse him of cruelty and injustice.11 That God should have Page 3 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution favourites was hardly an argument likely to impress those whose chances of gaining royal or aristocratic favour were nil. Both in this and the afterlife, God’s favour seemed to be limited to the well-to-do; and in this life the favoured few were protected by the state and its laws. So God had ordained. The Calvinist doctrine of original sin made a coercive state a consequence of the Fall.12 The Homily on Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion taught that after the Fall God ‘did constitute and ordain in cities and countries several and special governors and rulers unto whom the residue of his people should be obedient… for the avoiding of all confusion which else would be in the world’. If the were no state authority ‘there must needs follow all mischiefs and utter destruction…of souls, bodies, goods’.13 Laws, wrote the judicious Hooker, ‘are never framed as they should be…unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast’. The Puritan John Owen agreed that the majority of men must be ‘overpowered by the terror of the Lord’ and ‘threats of the wrath to come’ if mankind is to be preserved from ‘the outrageousness and unmeasureableness of iniquity and wickedness which would utterly ruin all human society’.14 Such truths seemed self-evident to men of property, but there is no reason to suppose that they were equally accepted by those among the unpropertied who were capable of thinking for themselves. ‘Multitudes of people’, Edmund Calamy suggested in 1644, are ‘carried away with gracedestroying and land-destroying opinions’—such as ‘that God sees no sin in his elect children…and that God is never displeased with his people though they fall into adultery or any other sin’.15 Those doctrines were to be taught by Coppe, Clarkson, and the Ranters. (p.342) Richard Baxter drew what seemed to the men of property the selfevident conclusions. ‘Ordinarily to plead for a democracy is to plead that the sovereignty may be put into the hands of rebels…. That the major vote of the people should ordinarily be just and good is next to an impossibility.’16 Some of ‘the people’ ventured to think differently. A bricklayer at Hackney in the early sixteen-forties ‘maintained that all men should be saved’. So did ‘one Lamb, a soap-boiler’, a trooper in Northamptonshire, the Socinian John Biddle, Samuel Oates (father of Titus), and very many others, including the notorious Mrs. Attaway.17 Samuel Fisher in his Baptist days confessed that there was much popular hostility to the doctrine of original sin, though—he added—the gentry accepted it.18 In 1648–9 Gerrard Winstanley and Richard Coppin independently proclaimed—for the first time in print—that all mankind would be saved.19 Parliament’s Blasphemy Ordinance of May 1648 had picked out this heresy: it carried the penalty of life imprisonment.20 Democracy of salvation went hand in hand with the political democracy of the Levellers, the economic democracy of the Diggers, and the immoralism of Ranters. ‘Many thousands’, wrote John Reeve in 1656, ‘count the Scriptures mere inventions of wise men to keep the simple in awe under their rulers.’21 Page 4 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution Similar views had been expressed in Ralegh’s circle in the fifteen-nineties: now they were appealing to lower classes. Doubts about sin and hell accompanied criticisms of oligarchy: the restoration of oligarchic rule after 1660 was cause and consequence of a revived insistence on sin. After the Restoration we hear no more of such radical ideas, but the fact that they could not be expressed in print does not mean that they ceased to exist. George Fox had denounced clergy of the state church who ‘roar up for sin in their pulpits’; ‘it was all their works to plead for it’.22 But when Robert Barclay systematized Quaker theology in 1678, sin returned.23 The perfectibility of man had accompanied demands for political democracy; both disappeared from print at the same time. I suggest some reasons for this in Chapter 14. Notes:
(1) Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–1559 (1959), p. 13. (2) Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp. 168–70. (3) I have discussed this further in People and Ideas in 17th-Century England, Chapter 9, ‘Sex, Marriage and Parish Registers’; and in The World Turned Upside Down, Chapter 15. (4) Ed. J. T. Rutt, Parliamentary Diary of Thomas Burton (1828), i. 89. (5) Religion and Politics, pp. 96–106. (6) Cleveland, The Rustic Rampant, in Works (1687), p. 526; 1973), pp. 88 Abraham Cowley, The Civil War (ed. A. Pritchard, Toronto U.P., 1973), pp. p88, 103; John Collop, Poems (ed. C. Hilberry, Wisconsin U. P., 1962), p. 48. (7) Religion and Politics, p. 90; G. F. Nuttall, ‘The Lollard Movement after 1384, its Characteristics and Continuity’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Soc, xii (1935), pp. 243–50. (8) See D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago U.P., 1964), pp. 35–40 and passim. (9) See my God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Penguin, 1972), pp. 214–15. (10) Ed. G. H. Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Cornell U.P., 1941), pp. 507, 558 and passim; cf. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York, 1984), esp. pp. 26–29. (11) T. Goodwin, An Exposition of the Second Chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, Verses 1–11, in Works (Edinburgh, 1861–3), ii. 163.
Page 5 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
A Three-Sided Revolution (12) Calvin, Sermons Upon the Book of Job (1574), p. 718; Sermons Upon the Fifth Book of Moses (1583), p. 872, both quoted by J. DiSalvo, War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics oj’Religion (Pittsburgh U.P., 1983), p. 256; cf. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. H. Beveridge, 1949), i. 518. (13) Book of Homilies (Oxford U.P., 1802), pp. 470–1; Hooker, laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Everyman ed.), i. 188. (14) Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, in Works (1850–3), xii. 587. (15) Calamy, England’s Antidote, Versus the Plague of Civil Warre (1644), in Fast Sermons (ed. R. Jeffs), xiii (1971), p. 145. (16) Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 92–94. (17) Edwards, Gangraena, i. 80, 87, 92, 94; iii. 9–10, 107, 173; cf. Owen, Works, xii. 164. (18) S. Fisher, Baby-Baptism meer Babism (1653), pp. 27–29, 34–38, 44, 105–6. (19) Winstanley, The Mysterie of God (1648), pp. 17, 35–36, 56–58; The Breaking of the Day of God (1648), p. 15, in Sabine, Works, p. 286; cf. Winstanley’s dedication of The Law of Freedom to Oliver Cromwell (Sabine, pp. 501–14). (20) Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, i. 133–6. (21) Reeve, A Divine Looking-glass (1719), p. 94. (22) Quoted by G. F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660 (Cardiff, 1957), p. 59. (23) Barclay, Apology for the true Christian Divinity, as the same is set forth and preached by the people called in scorn Quakers (1678). Originally published in Latin at Amsterdam in 1676.
Access brought to you by:
Page 6 of 6
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Secularization and Other Influences Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords William Tyndale's emphasis on the supremacy of the congregation made two important points: the local congregation is the significant religious body, not the national church; the congregation and its ‘sense of the meeting’ integrates the individualism lurking in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Emphasis on the parish contributed to its autonomy. When Presbyterian ministers tried to restrict church membership — and so rule of the parish — to ‘visible saints’, this might have led to the re-establishment of oligarchy in local government. The battle against clerical rule led to separation and so ultimately to religious toleration, hence to political democracy. The émigré churches in the Netherlands represented a half-way stage — self-governing within strict limits. So economic problems drove lower-class members of congregations into separatism, to election of ministers, to real congregational control: the rich naturally preferred ministers nominated from above and a consistorial discipline. Keywords: William Tyndale, supremacy, congregation, body, church, individualism, parish, oligarchy, democracy, Netherlands
I TYND ALE’S EMPHASIS on the supremacy of the congregation made two important points: (l) the local congregation is the significant religious body, not the national church; (2) the congregation and its ‘sense of the meeting’ integrates the individualism lurking in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Emphasis on the parish contributed to its autonomy. When Presbyterian ministers tried to restrict church membership—and so rule of the parish—to ‘visible saints’, this might have led to the re-establishment of Page 1 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences oligarchy (though of a different sort) in local government. The battle against clerical rule led to separation and so ultimately to religious toleration, hence to political democracy. The émigré churches in the Netherlands represented a halfway stage—self-governing within strict limits. Some J.P.s refused poor relief to those who did not attend their parish church, thus forcing sectarian churches to take over many of the local-government functions of the state church. So economic problems (among others) drove lower-class members of congregations into separatism, to election of ministers, to real congregational control: the rich naturally preferred ministers nominated from above and a consistorial discipline. George Gifford in 1590 asked, ‘when the common artificers, the apprentice and the brewer, intrude themselves and they will guide [the parish], being ignorant, rash and heady, what worldly-wise man will not take it that discipline itself is but a bedlam?’1 Thomas Rogers (Bancroft’s chaplain) asserted in 1607 that the Family of Love ‘say they are not bound to give alms but to their own sect’.2 The poor were better off in most separatist congregations than in parish churches. So social factors contributed to the establishment of separatist churches; and congregational charity helped to induce the poor to belong to some church.3 When after the Restoration (p.344) church courts were trying to help a Nottinghamshire rector to collect tithes on wages, employers urged the workers to refuse: the worst penalty that could be imposed was excommunication, ‘which was only their not going to church’. They paid no tithes.4 Among other factors stimulating intellectual discussion, three must be mentioned, though I cannot pursue them very far. First, the scholarly work which accompanied the breach with Rome, and the controversies which followed, ultimately came to show how insecure the authority of the biblical text was.5 The Roman church could rely on ecclesiastical tradition and the authority of the Pope. Protestants had rejected these and so had greater difficulty in avoiding sceptical conclusions. A second factor emerged during the revolution itself. The printing explosion which followed the collapse of censorship in 1640, the sudden emergence of debates on politics and every other subject, created a public hungry for news and explanations. Political journalism developed to inform this newly created public. It helped to confirm the victory of the Moderns over the Ancients, with all that that implied, and to create new types of popular literature—ultimately the novel. Uncensored royalist pamphlets refuting the heresies of the radicals introduced their ideas to a much wider audience than itinerant preachers could ever have reached.6 It is worth recalling the controversies to which Harvey’s De Motu Cordis gave rise. He was accused of ‘dethroning the heart’, traditionally the ruling organ in the human body, and substituting the sovereignty of the blood, in which he located the soul. He rejected the authority of Aristotle, Galen, and the Ancients in a way that led Bishop Godfrey Goodman to expostulate: ‘If we be so meanly and basely persuaded of the Ancient, how apt shall we be of Page 2 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences innovation, what danger of a mutiny; the country boors may rise in sedition, and not without cause, for by your [Harvey’s] opinion all things may be improved’. Goodman is said to have been a keen chemist himself. His objection seems absurd to us, but so long as the world of scientific ideas was still not sharply differentiated from theology, philosophy, and politics, so long an experimental discovery was liable to be tested by ideological criteria.7 (p.345) Men still thought in terms of analogies between humanity and the physical universe. ‘Dethroning the heart’ seemed as subversive by analogy as the Copernican revolution in astronomy had been. The ultimate outward symbol of a king’s victory over a rival for power came when the challenger was publicly disembowelled and his heart held aloft for the crowd to see: ‘Behold the heart of a traitor!’ The idea of the self-movement of matter which seemed to be implied in the sovereignty of the blood might appear to postulate an animistic universe, so questioning divine omnipotence. If the soul was in the blood it might die with the body, and this might lead to the heresies of mortalism and materialism which enjoyed considerable popular support. One of Harvey’s critics indeed disapproved of his experimental method. As Roger French puts it, underlying Primrose’s rejection of experiment was his belief that the nobility of the heart cannot be investigated by such ignoble means as vivisection. Another critic, Parigiano, thought that Harvey was a revolutionary because he ‘denied too many places in the hierarchy and replaced them with nothing…. Most dangerous of all was Harvey’s suggestion that all parts [of the body] are nourished by the same, circulating, blood. As bad, Parigiano thought, as to serve a king the same food and drink as one would offer to his servant.’8 Astronomers stuck to Ptolemy for a century after Copernicus, and decades after Galileo. St. Thomas More said he would rather burn his Utopia himself than see it translated into English. Bruno was burnt and Galileo imprisoned; the London College of Physicians wished to keep its remedies secret, or at least to publish them only in the decent obscurity of Latin. Such facts may help to explain why Harvey published his De Motu Cordis overseas in 1628. Even after 1640 Fellows of the Royal Society spent much time and energy proving that science did not call the existence of God in question, and Newton suppressed studies to which the evidence suggests that he attached the greatest importance. The cosy hierarchical world picture must not be disturbed lest the social hierarchy should be challenged. Since I have been misinterpreted here, I must insist that Harvey was a very respectable character, a royalist during the civil war. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that he held any of the heretical ideas which some saw underlying his discoveries. He was influenced by the (p.346) results of his experiments, and by them alone.9 But the seventeenth century was the century Page 3 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences of political and social revolution as well as of the scientific revolution. Harvey unintentionally contributed to both. For many of his contemporaries, the social conclusions which his discoveries suggested seemed more significant—and more dangerous—than their scientific truth. Harvey won. In 1654, three years before Harvey’s death, Dr. Thomas Washbourne published a volume of poems, including one entitled ‘The Circulation’, which began: Our famous Harvey hath made good The circulation of the blood, And what was paradox we know To be a circulation now. The like in bodies doth befall Civil as well as natural: Such revolutions in them found That they are always turning round.10
Washbourne saw in Harvey’s discovery analogies with the economic and political revolutions through which he had lived. Perhaps it helped others to a similar understanding of and preparation for revolution. Finally, a third area of debate arose from the intellectual consequences of the discovery and opening up of America. The discussions to which this gave rise were of course not confined to England.11 The revelation of hitherto-unknown civilizations with very different cultural and political traditions came as a shock and forced a realization that vast numbers of human beings had never had any chance of learning about Christianity. All this led to new questions being asked, both about the diversity of social structures and about divine justice. More’s Utopia is one example of the literature to which the new world gave rise. For our purposes what is interesting is that Utopia was written in Latin, and that More said he would rather destroy it than see it translated into a (p.347) language which the vulgar could read. (In vain: an English translation was published in the relative freedom of Edward VI’s reign.) More had seen danger ahead if the non-Latin-speaking classes began to think about other types of social structure and political institutions, and to contrast Utopia with England.12 More important perhaps were the experiences of English colonists in America. Propertied colonizers took with them servants to do the hard work, and from a very early date many of these showed a regrettable tendency to ‘go native’ and settle with the Indians, whose mode of life they found preferable to servitude among their own people. Death-sentences were proclaimed for those who absconded from English settlements. Sir Thomas More had been right in thinking that the lower classes were not as content with English civilization as were the upper classes who benefited from it. There were lower-class rebellions Page 4 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences in Virginia, which Caliban’s revolt in The Tempest (believed to be Shakespeare’s last play) may reflect. In this light we may see Gonzalo’s speech to Alonso, King of Naples, as containing exactly the sort of ideas which Sir Thomas did not wish the uneducated to hear: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord… I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things. For no kind of traffic Would I admit, no name of magistrate: Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourne, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too—but innocent and pure; No sovereignty… All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of its own kind all foison, all abundance To feed my innocent people.13
(p.348) Nor was it only the new world of America that gave men thoughts critical of English institutions. Peter Lamborn Wilson in a recent fascinating book has drawn attention to the ‘Corsair Republics’ of North Africa in the first half of the seventeenth century. ‘A huge proportion—some say the majority—of Algerian captains and crews were…foreigners of some sort or another.’14 There was much coming and going between England and the pirate world of the Mediterranean. Sir Francis Verney, whose portrait was preserved at Claydon House, had been a Turkish pirate before dying at the age of 31.15 Captain Ward, who turned pirate at the age of 50, renamed his first capture ‘Little John’. Ward became the hero of a popular ballad. There is some evidence to suggest that, like Robin Hood, he used what he stole from the rich to give to the poor—in his case, to ransoming captives.16 Pirate crews were notoriously libertarian, by contrast with English naval or trading vessels. Pirate captains were elected, and were answerable to their crews; decisions on policy and disciplinary punishments were taken democratically. In James I’s reign Admiral Sir William Monson declared that mariners preferred the ‘liberty’ (his word) of service on a privateer to the irregular wages and floggings of men who had been press-ganged into the navy, and who might have to face the ultimate possibility of a death-sentence for mutiny.17
Page 5 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences Peter Wilson has drawn attention to the ‘Corsair Republic’ of Salee in North Africa, which reached its ‘golden age’, by an interesting coincidence, between the years 1640 and 1660. This relatively egalitarian and democratic republic— far more radical than the government of any European country—had a treaty with the Dutch and was recognized by the French government. Among its inhabitants were many English renegadoes. Some had been captured by pirates and (perhaps forcibly) converted to Islam; others chose voluntarily to come there. It had been renegadoes who taught pirates the use of sailing-ships rather than galleys. Wilson offers ‘a strange thought: does European democracy actually owe a direct debt to the Corsairs?…We might imagine whispers circulating from ship to ship [England sent a fleet to Salee in 1637!] about the enviable freedom of the Corsairs and Renegadoes.’18 (p.349) ‘Whispers’ there must certainly have been among pirate crews composed of men ‘deeply alienated from their own societies’. The evidence is insufficient to say more at present. The Corsair republics may have contributed something to the English Revolution, as Marcus Rediker thinks that the experience of privateers may have contributed to the ideology of the American Revolution.19 It is worth thinking about, and investigating further. We should not forget pirates in assessing the intellectual origins of the English Revolution any more than we should forget the discovery of America. Notes:
(1) Gifford, A Short Treatise against the Donatists of England, quoted by M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (1938), p. 311. (2) Rogers, The Faith, Doctrine and Religion professed and protected hi England (1681), p. 231. (3) J. A. Venn, Foundations of Agricultural Economics (1923), p. 107. (4) Ibid. See also my Society and Puritanism, pp. 285–6, 364, and chapter 12. (5) See p. 328 above. (6) Cf. John Tickell, The Bottomless Pit Smoking in Familisme (1651), pp. 35, 37; also my ‘Abolishing the Ranters’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty, pp. 172– 218, where I discuss J. C. Davis’s improbable idea that Ranters did not exist, but were invented by Quakers and the seventeenth-century gutter press and reinvented more recently by wicked propagandist historians like me. I hope that anyone inclined to take Davis’s arguments seriously will glance at this chapter. (7) For Goodman see index.
Page 6 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Secularization and Other Influences (8) Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge U.P., 1994), pp. 159, 232–3; cf. pp. 298–301. (9) One otherwise admirable scholar accused me of arguing that the primacy of the blood succeeded that of the heart ‘just as the power that had once resided in the power of the king was now distributed through the Commonwealth’ (Roger French, op, cit., p. 302). It would have been a remarkable feat if Harvey in 1628 had foreseen the Commonwealth of 1649. (10) Poems of Thomas Washbourne, D.D. (ed. A. B. Grosart, Fuller’s Worthies’ Library, 1868), pp. 107–9. (11) I can do no more than refer to this large subject: see J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge U.P., 1992), passim. (12) See p. 327 above. (13) The Tempest, act II, scene i. I owe my discussion of The Tempest to a forthcoming article by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, ‘Notes on The Tempest and the Origins of Atlantic Capitalism’. I am deeply indebted to them for sending me a copy in advance of publication. (14) Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Autonomedia, New York, 1995). (15) F. P. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War (1892–9), i. 64–69. Sec also my ‘Radical Pirates?’ in People and Ideas in 17th-Century England (16) Wilson, op. cit, pp. 53–55. (17) Ed. M. Oppenheim, The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson (Naval Records Society, ii. 902), p. 237. (18) Wilson, op. cit, pp. 86–87, 36. (19) Rediker, ‘“Under the Banner of King Death”: The Social World of AngloAmerican Pirates, 1716–1726’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, xxxviii (1981), pp. 203–27; Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge U.P., 1987), pp. 251–3.
Access brought to you by:
Page 7 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Unfinished Business Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0015
Abstract and Keywords The debates of the sixteen-forties and fifties gave wide circulation to ideas which had originated with critics of the old regime before 1640. The priesthood of all believers led some to advocate varying degrees of democracy based on respect for the individual conscience. The abolition of feudal tenures led to agitation for granting absolute property rights to copyholders, comparable with those which the gentry had voted to themselves. Voluntary service for Parliament against the King led to resentment at conscription for wars in whose righteousness not all conscripts believed. The reconquest of Ireland led William Walwyn and other Levellers to ask what right Englishmen had to be in Ireland at all. Ideas originally advanced with one object in view frequently backfired and were used against the original libertarians. This is what makes the discussions of the forties and fifties so fascinating and so revealing of pre-existing rifts in English society. Keywords: priesthood, democracy, feudal tenures, Parliament, William Walwyn, Levellers
THERE IS NO possibility yet of making final statements about the intellectual origins of the English Revolution. Even in the months during which I have been writing these afterthoughts, at least three significant contributions to this complex subject have been made, dealing with subjects as diverse as Catholicism in England, the discovery of America, and pirates.1 So far as I am concerned, I don’t think I have shifted my ground very much since 1965, though it would be nice to think I have got a little wiser. I have learnt a lot about Tyndale, thanks to David Daniell. I still think that ‘Puritan Revolution’ is the wrong name for the English Revolution; and that any description of it as Page 1 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business something other than a revolution is totally inadequate. The right approach is surely that of Professor Fussner, who sees the political revolution of the sixteenforties as part of a larger, broader European movement, occupying more than twenty years and embracing revolutions in science, history, literature, religion, leading on to the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century.2 But once we start thinking in these terms, we must be a little more discriminating in our generalizations. In particular, we must think again about Catholicism in England. Was it any more monolithic than Protestantism? In a valuable recent article Edward Terrar has challenged easy generalizations like ‘the North and South-West of England were preponderantly Catholic and therefore royalist during the civil war’—of which among others I have been guilty. Poor Catholic peasants were no less able than poor Protestants to perceive when they were being exploited; and they formed at least 80 per cent of the Catholic population. Some among them may have found aspects of Parliament’s policies attractive—abolition of Ship Money, for instance—and have (p.351) sympathized with radical ideas like abolition of tithes and opposition to monopolies and enclosure. Many Catholic tenants seized the opportunity of the civil war to refuse to pay rents and to loot landlord property, irrespective of creed. This seems common sense once it is stated, and Dr. Terrar is to be congratulated on drawing our attention to it, and providing a good deal of evidence to back up his case.3 Catholicism, as Pascal’s tirades against the Jesuits show, could adapt itself to a commercial society no less than Protestantism could, given the appropriate circumstances. Terrar’s article is a very good start here; but we may perhaps push it a little farther than he does. Need we think only of Catholic peasants? We do not often think about the way in which conscientious landlords in the seventeenth century approached new moral problems to which the development of capitalism in agriculture gave rise. Evidence is hard to come by. But consider the following advice which Henry Howard, chaplain to the popish recusant William Blundell, gave to his patron on 7 October 1654: I say that by the laws of England, as they have been expounded by diverse judges in open court, there is no tenant-right at all remaining when their leases are fully expired…. The land being the lord’s, the bargain is fully ended. There is a probable opinion commonly received by the best divines in England, that what is law betwixt party and party (as concerning the right of private persons, without any penalty for religion or delinquency), is also good and lawful in conscience. Wherefore, as by the laws of England there is no tenant-right at all when the lease is fully expired, so by their probable opinion there is no
Page 2 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business obligation of conscience for the landlord to give or grant anything for tenantright after the tenant’s lease is fully expired…. There has been formerly and peradventure there may still remain an opinion amongst many, that there is some such tenant-right brought in by custom, and, to grant unto them as much as can be required, that this their opinion should be allowed for probable and still in practice amongst many. Yet, notwithstanding,… it is without all doubt most certain that the opposite opinion that denies any such tenant-right brought in by custom is at the least probable…. Wherefore it is lawful not only by the laws of England, but also in conscience for any landlord to choose and follow whichever opinion he shall like the best. For it is a certain principle amongst divines, that in all cases where there are two opposite opinions and both probable, it is (p.352) lawful in conscience for any one in particular to follow which opinion he will, and if any therefore shall curse or clamour against him, it is for no fault he has committed, but a bad effect of their own malicious mind…. By the other opinion which admits no tenant-right after the lease is fully expired,…of an undeserving tenant you may take what you will more than you would of another, so you do not exceed the just price that strangers would give for it, and that you do not do it out of anger or ill will towards him, but for any good motive or virtue, to teach him and others by example how to perform their duty.’4 Blundell apparently did not follow this opinion but continued to favour old tenants against strangers in assessing entry fines. But the chaplain was doing his duty by trying to ease his patron’s path into the modern competitive world, by means of the doctrine of probabilism. This doctrine, attributed to Jesuits, was being demolished by Pascal in France at about this time. Its usefulness lay in preparing sensitive consciences to accept novel ideas. Casuistry perhaps played a bigger part in ushering in the modern world, even in Protestant countries, than we have recognized—because we have not taken seriously enough the religious basis of contemporary thinking. Why did well-to-do persons keep a private chaplain if not to solve ticklish socio-economic problems for them? The clergy were better equipped than the laity to produce novel solutions to novel problems when the time came for that. In Blundell’s case the probabilities appeared to be equally balanced, but a generation later most gentlemen would have had no difficulty in accepting the course of action most profitable for them. The doctrine of probabilism helped by enabling pious landowners to treat their tenants in a way which would have been sinful a generation earlier. Protestantism was perhaps even more subversive of existing laws than Jesuitry. Calvin declared that ‘no human law binds the conscience, because the importance of these does not lie in what they command, but that obeying them leads to good order and organization amongst us’.5 Many would notice the Page 3 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business liberalism of the first six words rather than the conclusion. The marginal notes of the Geneva Bible are full of guidance on contemporary problems. They draw attention to frequent examples (p.353) of resistance to kings in the Old Testament. Milton said that divorce was not a matter to be tried by Law but by Conscience, as many other sins are. The magistrate can only see that the conditions of divorce are just and equal. Once started, the move from ‘scholars’ closets to the shelves of the gentry, and the desks of merchants’ was rapid. The Catholic Blundell was a relatively kindly landlord, but others would take to the ‘probable’ new ideas less reluctantly, and make the most of their own while the going was good—as their neighbours did. It was not long before radicals in the sixteen-forties were rejecting all laws. John Goodwin in 1642 quoted royalists who asked, ‘is it fit to give way or allow that every private man should scan, examine, judge and determine either the righteousness or unrighteousness of the King’s command?’ They expected the answer ‘No’. But the God inside men’s consciences frequently answered ‘Yes’. The only alternative was to hold that kings are gods—as Tyndale had very nearly done.6 Part of the reason for the attack on English church courts had been that they put failure to perform ceremonies on a level with breaches of conscience. But to traditionalists the reference of all decisions to the individual consciences of private men seemed like anarchy. The appeal to conscience had its attractions for the lower orders, and—as their betters recognized—it could have powerful effects by playing to men’s irrational assumptions as well as to their rational discontents. Winstanley announced that ‘if we be suffered to speak, we shall batter to pieces all the old laws’. That must have seemed a good reason for silencing him and his like. Winstanley’s communist theories derive from his religion: the shift from what we would regard as the one to what we would regard as the other is imperceptible. Conscientious gentlemen consulted their spiritual advisers when faced with what they regarded as moral decisions about economic problems—ideas of the right to absolute property, the right to do what they would with their own, spread from speeches in the House of Commons in 1607–10 through the Petition of Right to Henry Howard and William Blundell. Just after the Restoration John Moore reminds us of Blundell’s chaplain, when he adjures his son to ‘serve God, and make much of your own; and as these new leases fall out raise your old rents according to my instructions, that you may have something to live on like other (p.354) neighbour gentlemen’.7 However conscientious they were, gentlemen had to live and keep up with their neighbours in a newly competitive world. It was not so long before Mandeville, with his accustomed effrontery and accuracy, was to say ‘the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor’, who ‘have nothing to stir them to labour but their wants, which it is wisdom to relieve but folly to cure’. ‘It is
Page 4 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor.’ ‘We have hardly poor enough to do what is necessary to make us subsist.’8 Perhaps neither Protestants nor Jesuits are to blame for recognition of the economic virtues. Perhaps those virtues (if that is the right word) emerge from the society—from its economic needs and its social divisions. People thought about the problems of their society in religious terms: theological solutions are a reaction to these problems, not a causal factor. Professor Fussner quotes Bacon on coupling events with their causes ‘in a historical way, not wasting time…in praise or blame, but simply narrating the fact historically’. Such a history would help ‘the learned’ to devise and establish ‘the best form of government’.9 He also quotes Nef to make the point that by the mid-seventeenth century England was unique in that it led ‘in the production of common commodities in which quantity and utility rather than quality and elegance were the main concern of the makers and consumers’.10 Mass production, utilitarianism. It was natural to extend the test of utility to monarchy and government in general. Natural, but unfortunate for Stuart monarchs. The Reformation too had been a political, social, and economic as well as a religious revolution. I have cited evidence to suggest that, in the ‘beleaguered isle’ in which Englishmen felt themselves to be living in the later sixteenth century, it was a religious and patriotic duty to increase the national wealth; if this should also increase the wealth of individuals, that was God’s reward.11 Much later, under James II, John Coad decided that ‘popery and arbitrary government did more visibly appear in continual unwearied plotting and contriving to weaken the Protestant party, which gave great cause of fear of the subversion of our religion and liberties’. So when he was called out to resist Monmouth’s invasion, he decided that to oppose ‘protestantism and liberty…was directly against my principle and conscience…. Better to incur the (p.355) wrath of an earthly king than an almighty God’. He was sentenced to transportation to Jamaica following the defeat of Monmouth’s rebellion, but was liberated after the Revolution of 1688–9 and returned to England in 1690.12 In time the novel ideas of individualism, perhaps starting from the priesthood of all believers, certainly encouraged by that doctrine, could become a selfish deviltake-the-unfortunate creed. Again religious links softened the transition. Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke provided a rationalization of novel ideas; the political breakdown of the sixteen-forties reinforced them and enormously accelerated the process.13 After the Reformation, paraphrases of Biblical stories offered an alternative to the all-pervasive classics, and revealed to ordinary readers a new, non-pagan lyric poetry, hymns for common people and New Model Army soldiers to sing. Men and women used the Bible to defend the humanizing virtues and the Page 5 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business educational powers of poetry and music, citing New Testament parables, David’s and Solomon’s poetry.14. Above all, the belief that the millennium was approaching gave courage and confidence to many of the dispossessed of society who badly needed reassurance. Partisans of Parliament used arguments against the King which after the civil war democratic radicals could use for ‘the people’ against Parliament itself The question ‘Who are the people?’ remained to cause confusion. The electorate? Men of property? How much property? Why should any such lines be drawn between the haves and the have-nots? Should votes be given to those who work for others, whether as servants, tenants, or employees? Or should the godly rule? How do we know who they are? Supporters of the Good Old Cause? But supporters at what date? Bacon’s separation of religion and science came from his religious beliefs. The godly recognized themselves and usually recognized one another, but there was far from universal agreement here. Some might think the self-proclaimed godly were the last people they would wish to trust with political power. Nowhere was certainty to be found. So the debates of the sixteen-forties and fifties gave wide circulation to ideas which had originated with critics of the old régime before 1640. The priesthood of all believers led some to advocate varying degrees of democracy based on respect for the individual conscience. The abolition (p.356) of feudal tenures led to agitation for granting absolute property rights to copyholders, comparable with those which the gentry had voted to themselves. Voluntary service for Parliament against the King led to resentment at conscription for wars in whose righteousness not all conscripts believed. The reconquest of Ireland led Walwyn and other Levellers to ask what right Englishmen had to be in Ireland at all. Ideas originally advanced with one object in view frequently backfired and were used against the original libertarians. This is what makes the discussions of the forties and fifties so fascinating and so revealing of preexisting rifts in English society. They led the propertied to think that the less discussion of fundamental social problems, the better for them; and so contributed to the restoration of monarchy in 1660. There were literary consequences—writing for readers without a university education led to a simpler, more direct, less self-conscious prose. Sprat thought that writing should be addressed to the level of mechanics and artificers— precisely those whose contribution to scientific inventions Bacon so prominently stressed—but also those who had formed the rank and file of the New Model Army. Ideas divided as well as uniting. Agrarian advance led peasants to detest and fear the art of surveying, which might be used to their ruin. Liberal ideas about the rights of women were not shared by all men. I quoted phrases like ‘the Puritan Revolution was secular rather than religious’, ‘the press of that day was more revolutionary than Puritan’, but they do not get us very far.15
Page 6 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Unfinished Business Notes:
(1) E. Terrar, ‘Royalists or Diggers? Catholics in the English Civil War’, Science and Society, vol. 57, no. 3 (1993); Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Autonomedia, New York, 1995). The third contribution is the forthcoming article by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, referred to in Chapter 14. (2) See pp. 291–2 above. (3) E. Terrar, op. cit, esp. pp. 321, 333–5, 338–9. (4) Ed. T. E. Gibson, Crosby Records: A Cavalier’s Note Book (1880), pp. 255–60. For an analogous piece of casuistical reasoning see a speech by Sir Raderick in act IV, scene i, of The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (acted 1601), in The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (ed. I. B. Leishman, 1949), pp. 310–1l;cf. pp. 66–67. (5) Quoted by Judy Sproxton, Violence and Religion: Attitudes Towards Militancy in the French Civil Wars and the English Revolution (1995), p. 8. (6) Goodwin in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (ed. W. Haller, Columbia U.P., 1935), Anti-Cavalierisme (1642), in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (ed. W. Haller, Columbia U.P., 1935), vii. 23; or Tyndale, cf. Chapter 10 above. (7) Ed. T. Heywood, The Moore Rental (Chetham Soc, 1847), p. 119. (8) Bernard de Mandeville, An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, in The Fable of the Bees (2nd ed., 1733), i. 328–9, 345 (my italics); cf. i. 212. (9) Ibid., p. 262. (10) Ibid., p. 309. Italics mine. (11) Cf. Ch 4 above. (12) Coad, Memoranda of the Wonderful Providences of God (1685?—printed 1849), pp. 1–3, 141–7, and passim. (13) See pp. 257–9 above. (14) See my The English Bible and the 17lh-century Revolution, Chapter 16. (15) Cf. p. 261 above.
Access brought to you by: Page 7 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0016
Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses the contribution of three Scottish thinkers: John Knox, George Buchanan, and John Goodman. All three of these defenders of a right of resistance by subjects were at least as well known in England as in Scotland. They played a prominent part in the formation of the political thinking of Buchanan's pupil, the future King of England. James learnt from them that ‘the ordering and reformation of religion with the instruction of subjects doth especially appertain to the civil magistrate’, ‘as God's Word most evidently declares’. James I always remained firmly hostile to papal claims though anxious to be tolerant to rank-and-file Catholics. However he reacted against ‘such infamous invectives as Buchanan's, or Knox's Chronicles’, and he learnt to be distrustful of popular initiatives from below in the name of religion, such as had led to his mother's deposition and ultimate execution. Keywords: John Knox, George Buchanan, John Goodman, England, Scotland, James I, right of resistance, religion
WHEN WE ARE thinking about the origins of the ideas of the English revolutionaries we do not recall often enough the contribution of Scottish thinkers. About John Knox most of us know only that he wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. This was aimed at Bloody Mary, Queen of England, but was published in the year of her death—just in time gravely to offend her successor, Queen Elizabeth. Knox was one of the self-made men whom the Reformation produced. He described himself as ‘of base condition’, and his birth was so obscure that we do not know even in what year it occurred. He died in 1575. He made his way by force of character, by Page 1 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I flaming eloquence, and an admirable prose style. He wrote many serious works which were published in London as well as in Scotland. The first three books of his Historie of the Reformation were destroyed in 1587 on the instructions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Knox had been one of six royal chaplains to Edward VI, and helped in the revision of the second prayer-book of the reign. But he declined the offer of the bishopric of Rochester. When Mary came to the throne in 1553 he fled from England, and played a big part in the events which led to the victory of Protestantism in Scotland with English help. Knox published four other tracts in 1558 over and above The First Blast. In The Appellation of John Knox…with his supplication and exhortation to the nobility, estates and commonalty [of Scotland] he insisted that ‘the reformation of religion in all points, together with the punishment of false teachers, doth appertain to the power of the civil magistrate’.1 But not only to magistrates. In case of necessity ‘the punishment of such crimes as idolatry [and many more] doth not only appertain to kings and chief rulers only, but also to the whole body of that people and to every member of the same, according to that possibility and occasion which God doth minister to revenge the injury done against his glory’—an occasion which offered itself to the lords of the congregation (p.358) in Scotland in and after 1558. It is lawful to punish the idolaters with death if by any means God give them the power’ (as he had done in Scotland). In England it should have been the duty of ‘the nobility, judges, rulers and people…not only to have resisted and againstanded Mary… but also to have punished her to the death’ when she strove to restore popish idolatory,’ which once most justly by common oath was banished from the realm.2 The Pope is Antichrist. Knox told Scotland’s Queen Mary to her face that if ‘princes exceed their bounds…and do against that wherefor they should be obeyed, it is no doubt that they may be resisted, even by force’. In 1564, in a debate in the General Assembly of Scotland, Knox told Maitland of Lethington, the Queen’s secretary, ‘that the prince may be resisted and yet the ordinance of God not violated’. ‘The people assembled together in one body of a commonwealth unto whom God has given sufficient force not only to resist but also to suppress all kind of idolatry… such a people are bound to keep their land clean and unpolluted’—by force if necessary.3 Knox sees God achieving his foreordained purposes through human agents, who must understand these purposes and not miss their God-given opportunity. For the godly free will and predestination coincided. George Buchanan (1506–82), tutor of James VI, in his De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) defended popular election of kings and limited monarchy; kings who became extremely wicked tyrants might be slain. Buchanan dismissed St. Paul’s ‘The powers that be are ordained of God’, on the grounds that the early church faced a situation very different from that of sixteenth-century Britain. Patrick Collinson has recently reminded us that Buchanan’s De Jure Regni was Page 2 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I published in London.4 His work was quoted with approval by Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, and Locke, and was ‘a standard work in the hands of MPs of the Long Parliament’.5 His Baptistes, a play insisting that we should fear God rather than man, was published in 1642 in English translation sometimes attributed (probably wrongly) to Milton. John Goodman (? 1520–1603) came of an old Cheshire family, but he spent much of his life in Scotland. He left England in Mary’s reign and in 1558 published in Geneva How superior Powers ought to be obeyed of the subjects, and where in they may lawfully be by God’s Word disobeyed and resisted. (p.359) This originated as a defence of Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary Tudor, and of popular resistance in general. Again the timing was unfortunate. Cecil told Sir Ralph Sadler in 1559 that Goodman’s name was the most odious of all his party to Queen Elizabeth. He did not dare to return to England in 1558, but Knox invited him to Scotland. All three of these defenders of a right of resistance by subjects were at least as well known in England as in Scotland. They played a prominent part in the formation of the political thinking of Buchanan’s pupil, the future King of England. James learnt from them that ‘the ordering and reformation of religion with the instruction of subjects doth especially appertain to the civil magistrate’, ‘as God’s Word most evidently declares’.6 James I always remained firmly hostile to papal claims though anxious to be tolerant to rank-and-file Catholics. But he reacted against ‘such infamous invectives as Buchanan’s, or Knox’s Chronicles’, and he learnt to be distrustful of popular initiatives from below in the name of religion, such as had led to his mother’s deposition and ultimate execution. James was frequently quoted by Sir Robert Filmer. The King never had any use for those whom he called ‘Puritans’, least of all when M.P.s were led by a ‘Puritanical itch after popularity’ to call his prerogative in question. For James the law was not antecedent to kings, for laws ‘are properly made by the King only’, though he may listen to his subjects’ wishes. It is not ‘lawful upon any pretext to control or displace the great provost and great schoolmaster of the whole land…. Shall it lie in the hands of headless multitude, when they please to weary of subjection, to cast off the yoke of government that God hath laid upon them, to judge and punish him whom-by they should be judged and punished?’ It is ‘sedition in subjects, to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power…. I will not be content that my power be disputed upon; but I shall ever be willing to make the reason appear of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my laws.’7 James’s speeches reveal a tremendous self-conscious desire to be appreciated for his moderation, as well as petulance when he was not. He defended a moderate absolutism, accepting the radical demand for the laws to be in English and agreeing with Coke on the necessity of codifying the law—though no doubt Page 3 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Scottish Political Thought and James VI and I on different lines from Coke.8 James was no fool, but—as Henri IV observed—not quite as clever as he thought (p.360) he was. He made many of his subjects think seriously about whether kingship was the best form of government. Unfortunately for the monarchy, Charles I forced on his subjects conclusions very different from those of his father. Scotland offered positive examples of resistance to the Lord’s anointed. And Mary Queen of Scots could be quoted as the only possible precedent for the trial and execution of her grandson. But Mary was not an English subject, but a refugee in England who was condemned for conspiring against the government of the country to which she had fled. Scotland had a much more definite tradition of anti-monarchical literature, from Knox’s Monstrous Regiment of Women of 1558, which limited itself to castigating female rulers. Both Knox and Buchanan wrote serious treatises arguing for the responsibility of monarchs to their peoples. Elizabeth was far too prudent to commit her ideas on the subject to print, though she no doubt agreed with James. His True Law of Free Monarchies (1603) was probably the unmentioned target of much discussion of monarchy in pre-revolutionary England. Notes:
(1) John Knox The Appellation, in, On Rebellion (ed. R. A. Mason, Cambridge U.P., 1994), pp. 77–96. (2) John Knox The Appellation, op. cit., pp. 99–104, 162, 170–4. (3) Ibid., pp. 10, 178, 192–6, 204. (4) See now Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’ (Raleigh Lecture), Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxxiv (1994), p. 86. This valuable lecture contains much that is relevant to my theme. See also Liam Mcllvennay, ‘Robert Burns and the Calvinist Radical Tradition’, History Workshop Journal, xl (Autumn 1995), pp. 136–9, and pp. 122–3 above. (5) Dictionary of National Biography. (6) The Appellation, in Knox, On Rebellion, p. 87. (7) On Rebellion, pp. 73–74, 76, 81–82, 183–4; cf. p. 261. (8) Ibid., p. 186.
Access brought to you by:
Page 4 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
The Norman Yoke Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0017
Abstract and Keywords The myth of the Norman Yoke insisted that before 1066 England was a free country with self-governing institutions. The Conquest changed all that, but Englishmen have fought back ever since. There is evidence for continuity of this theme at least from the late thirteenth century, when The Mirror of Justices was written by Andrew Horn. It was transcribed by a member of the Society of Antiquaries in Queen Elizabeth's reign and circulated widely in manuscript. Edward Coke quoted it in the House of Commons in 1621. This treatise stressed the unbroken continuity of English law from before the Conquest. It was published — symbolically — in 1642. In the preceding year, a fourteenth-century document entitled Modus Tenendi Parliamentum had been published under the authority of Parliament. This purported to describe the method of holding parliaments under Edward the Confessor — as an example to be followed. Edward was a popular saint, and Parliament was also popular in 1641. Keywords: Norman Yoke, England, Conquest, Andrew Horn, Queen Elizabeth, Edward Coke, treatise, Edward the Confessor, Parliament
IN MY original lectures I took my title as restricting my theme to the ideas of intellectuals. But of course there were other beliefs and myths contributing ultimately to revolution. I gave the Norman Yoke a single sentence on p. 172, as I had recently published a longish article on the subject.1 I should have said more. The myth of the Norman Yoke insisted that before 1066 England was a free country with self-governing institutions. The Conquest changed all that, but Page 1 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke Englishmen have fought back ever since. There is evidence for continuity of this theme at least from the late thirteenth century, when The Mirror of Justices was written (in French!) by Andrew Horn. It was transcribed by a member of the Society of Antiquaries in Elizabeth’s reign and circulated widely in manuscript. Coke quoted it in the House of Commons in 1621.2 This treatise stressed the unbroken continuity of English law from before the Conquest. It was published— symbolically—in 1642. In the preceding year a fourteenth-century document entitled Modus Tenendi Parliarnentum had been published under the authority of Parliament. This purported to describe the method of holding parliaments under Edward the Confessor—as an example to be followed.’3 Edward was a popular saint, and Parliament was also popular in 1641. Sir John Fortescue had written De Laudibus Legum Angliae, c. 1470, first printed 1537. Here he argued that ‘the realm has been continually ruled by the same customs as now’.4 Thomas Starkey, in his Dialogue (p.362) between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (early fifteen-thirties) made Cardinal Pole urge shaking off ‘the tyrannical customs and unreasonable bonds’ imposed by the Conqueror, emphasizing especially the feudal burdens of wardship and marriage and the fact that the common law remained in French.5 John Foxe and Archbishops Parker and Ussher all looked back to Anglo-Saxon times for the pure primitive English church. (The Pope, we recall, had blessed William’s expedition to England.) In 1581 the Commons imprisoned Arthur Hall for denying the immemorial antiquity of their House. In the same year Adam Blackwood put the opposite case, arguing that William the Conqueror’s power was absolute, and that any rights which Englishmen enjoyed in their property thereafter were due to his grace. Blackwood compared the position of American Indians after the Spanish conquest. His Apologia pro Regibus was reprinted in the reign of James I as anti-parliamentarian propaganda.6 In 1590 Edmund Spenser called the common law ‘that which William of Normandy brought in with his conquest and laid upon the neck of England’.7 William Perkins thought that William was a usurper and a tyrant, but he minimized the Norman Yoke, saying that the Conqueror’s rule became lawful only because ‘people willingly submitted to him’ and because William was content ‘to rule them by good and wholesome laws’.8. James VI while still King of Scotland claimed that English kings since 1066 were absolute owners of all English property.9 Bacon agreed that ‘the Conqueror got by right of conquest all the land of the realm into his own hands’, and distributed it on his own terms.10 Bishop Godfrey Goodman in his The Court of King James the First also defended this theory.11 So did Nicholas Ferrar and Archbishop Laud. The latter saw the appeal to the Anglo-Saxon past as a stimulus to rebellion. In 1642 the argument from conquest was repeated by the royalist H. Ferne in his Reply unto severall Treatises pleading for the Armes now taken up by Subjects.12 Page 2 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke Coke revived Fortescue’s doctrine of the continuity of English law and representative institutions in quite a different social context. ‘We (p.363) would derive from the Conqueror as little as we could’, he wrote. ‘The grounds of our Common Laws’, he told the House of Commons in 1621, ‘were beyond the memory or register of any beginning, and the same which the Norman Conqueror found within the realm of England.’ ‘The ancient and excellent laws of England are the birthright and most ancient and best inheritance that the subjects of this realm have’, leaving each to enjoy ‘his inheritance and goods in peace and quietness’.13 Defence of Anglo-Saxon liberties amounted to defence of property against the state, and against non-Parliamentary taxation. The Parliamentary franchise itself was seen as a property right. Charles I would not allow the later parts of Coke’s Institutes to be published. It was the Long Parliament that ordered them to be printed. Pym in the debate on the Petition of Right in 1628 had approved Coke’s position. ‘There are plain footsteps of those laws in the government of the Saxons. They were of that vigour and force as to overlive the Conqueror; nay, to give bounds and limits to the Conqueror…. It is true, they have been often broken, [but] they have been often confirmed by Charters of kings, by Acts of Parliaments. But the petitions of subjects upon which those charters and Acts were founded, were ever Petitions of Right, demanding their ancient and due liberties, not suing for any new.’14 In 1642 he appealed to ‘that contract which [William the Conqueror] made with this nation, upon his admittance to the kingdom’.15 Sir Robert Cotton thought, however, that William the Conqueror left the Saxons ‘in no better condition than villeinage’.16 I venture to disagree here with Professor Pocock, who thinks that I exaggerate the extent to which the theory of absolutism based on conquest was used by royalists.17 The printed evidence before 1640 is indeed scanty. But it is surely unlikely that men would controvert in print a position which King James had defended; and it is even more unlikely that refutations of the conquest theory would be so frequent as they were after 1640 if the theory was not current. I have quoted Bacon, Goodman, Laud, and Ferne, not insignificant characters. I suspect that less prominent persons may have used the conquest theory verbally —parsons, for instance. Nathanael Bacon tells us that he first became interested in the subject as the result of ‘a private debate concerning the right of an (p. 364) English king to arbitrary rule of English subjects as successor to the Norman Conqueror (so called)’.18 In 1627 the Dutch scholar Isaac Dorislaus was deprived of his newly established history lecturership in Cambridge, after the first lecture. It had been on Tacitus, a favourite authority on Germanic liberty; in it he had ‘placed the right of monarchy in the people’s voluntary submission’, and had praised the Dutch rebels against Spain.19 It is perhaps worth recalling that as long ago as 1556 John Ponet (a bishop) had declared that a prince may be a traitor to the Page 3 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke Commonwealth.20 This anticipation of the sentence on Charles I in 1649 should remind us that the existence of monarchy was not always taken for granted by everybody. Among other radical ideas, Ponet advanced a doctrine of tyrannicide. He was living in exile under Mary at the time. Tyrannicide was not to be defended again in print until Killing no Murder (1657), attributed to the Leveller Edward Sexby—also an exile. Lucy Hutchinson said that the English monarchy had been founded by the Norman usurper ‘in the people’s blood, in which it hath swum about five hundred years’.21 John Hare, insisted that the King should abandon his claim to rule by right of conquest. Milton wrote proudly in 1641 of ‘our progenitors that wrested their liberties out of the Norman gripe with their dearest blood and highest prowess’.22 Sir Henry Vane agreed that William and his successors lay as bars and impediments to the true national interest’. This was the cause ‘(upon a civil account)’ of the civil war.23 Radicals spoke of the birthright of Englishmen, meaning by that far more than the privileges of the propertied class. When they denounced ‘Norman freeholders’ we should remember that only 405. freeholders enjoyed the Parliamentary franchise—a small minority of the population.24 A lawyer in Henry I’s reign had laid it down that freeholders should frequent shire courts, but not ‘villeins, cottagers, far-thingmen and needy persons of this kind’.25 In 1604 Francis Trigge, defending the yeomanry as ‘the ancient glory (p.365) of England’, had argued that William the Conqueror had given common rights to the rank and file of his army. Lords of manors had therefore no right arbitrarily to take away what they had not given. ‘Enclosers take upon them as though they were not lords of manors but rather kings, and do make as it were a new Commonwealth and a new form of government.’26 The Norman Yoke theory stirred profound feelings of English patriotism and English Protestantism. Tyndale, whose views of early English history were very influential, remarked that William would not ‘have been able to conquer the land at that time [1066], except the spirituality had wrought on his side’. William established tithes, Tyndale claimed, in order to persuade the clergy to preach up the Norman Yoke—sufficient reason in itself for abolishing tithes. Tyndale insisted that they should be confiscated and the revenue divided among the poor after a sufficient maintenance had been provided for the ‘preaching of God’s Word’. Gerrard Winstanley (for whom the gentry were both Norman and Antichristian) also believed that tithes were bestowed on priests by the Conqueror in order to win their help in keeping the poor in submission. They should therefore be abolished in consequence of Parliament’s victory in the civil war.27
Page 4 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke The most thoroughgoing anti-Normanist was John Hare. He published in 1647 St. Edward’s Ghost: or Anti-Normanism, which he had written five years earlier. Hare thought that the ‘Norman’ nobility should be expropriated, that all laws introduced from Normandy should be abolished and replaced by the laws of Edward the Confessor—in English, of course. I quoted above Hare’s reference to ‘the general and inbred hatred which still dwells in our common people against both our laws and lawyers’. This hatred results from the Conquest, which ‘Norman-ized’ the laws ‘both in matter and form’. The language should be purged of Gallicisms. As a first political step the king should abandon any claim to rule by right of conquest. Otherwise, Hare observed shrewdly, ‘the alteration of the state will be to us but changing of usurpent masters’. Magna Carta was for Hare but a beggarly thing, extorted ‘by the nobility of those times, under the notion and quality of Normans and coheirs of the conquest’.28 Notes:
(1) In Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (ed. John Saville, 1954). Reprinted in my Puritanism and Revolution (1958). Dona Torr was the greatest single influence in my thinking about English history. (2) Ed. W. J. Whittaker, The Mirror of Justices (Selden Society, 1895); cf. Commons Debates, 1621 (ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Relf, and H. Simpson, New Haven Conn, 1935), ii. 197, 211; iv. 136; v. 56, 281; vi. 39, 214. Elizabeth disliked the Society of Antiquaries. (3) V. II. Galbraith, ‘The Modus Tenendi Parliarnentum’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xvi. 94; cf. P. Meier, ‘Reflexions sur langue anglaise’, La Pensée, 53 (1954), pp. 75–91. Maitland described the Modus as having ‘curious leanings towards liberty and equality’. It was strongly anticlerical. Cf. my Puritanism and Revolution, p. 66. (4) Fortescue, op. cit. (ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes, Cambridge U.P., 1949), chapter XVII, p. 39. (5) Starkey, op. cit. (ed. K. M. Burton, 1948), pp. 29–36. (6) Blackwood, Opera Omnia (1644), quoted in my Puritanism and Revolution, p. 68. (7) Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, in Works, p. 610. This work was completed by 1598, though not published till 1633. (8) Perkins, Workes (1609–13), i. 760. (9) Ed. C. H. Mcllwain, The Political Works of James I (1918), pp. 61–63. (10) Bacon, Works (1826), iv. 82–83, 101–4.
Page 5 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke (11) Goodman, op. cit. (ed. J. S. Brewer, 1839), i. 190. Goodman died a papist. (12) Ed. B. Blackstone, Ferrar Papers (1938), pp. 181–2; Laud, Works, vii. 627–8; Feme, op. cit., p. 26. (13) Coke, Reports, Part V, p. iii; Third Part of the Institutes, Proeme; Preface to Reports, Part VIII, quoted in Puritanism and Revolution, p. 72. (14) Rushworth, op. cit, i. 596, 527–8. (15) A Declaration of the Grievances of the Kingdome declared in Parliament by John Pym, in Somers Tracts (1750), vi. 161. (16) Cottoni Posthuma (1679), p. 20. (17) Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge U.P., 1957), pp. 54–55, 149–51. (18) N. Bacon, Historicall Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (1647), I, sig. A 4; of. chapter LVI, ‘a brief survey of the sense of the Writers concerning the point of conquest’. For views on the Conquest attributed to Archbishop Laud, see his Works (Oxford U.P., 1847–60), vii. 627–30. (19) Dorislaus was later assassinated by royalists whilst in the diplomatic service of the English Commonwealth. (20) Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politique Power (1642 ed.), p. 52. (21) Hutchinson, Memoirs…of…Colonel Hutchinson (ed. C. H. Firth, 1885), i. 6– 10. (22) Milton, Of Reformation in England (1641), in Complete Prose Works, i. 592. (23) Vane, A Healing Question (1656), in Somers Tracts (1811), vi. 306. (24) Puritanism and Revolution, p. 75. ‘Norman freeholders’ is a logical deduction from the assumption by Trigge and others that they are the descendants of the rank and file of William the Conqueror’s army. (25) Ed. H. W. C. Davis, Stubbs Charters (Oxford U.P., 1913), p. 125. (26) Trigge, The Humble Petition of Two Sisters: the Church and the Commonwealth, sig. F–F5 (27) Tyndale, Expositions, p. 294; Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652), in Sabine (ed.), op. cit., pp. 520–5.
Page 6 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
The Norman Yoke (28) Hare, op. cit., passim; and especially ‘The Norman Yoke once more uncased’, in Harleian Miscellany (1745), vi. 37–38. Hare should surely have an entry in the D.N.B.? For the Norman Yoke and religion, see also my Puritanism and Revolution, p. 124.
Access brought to you by:
Page 7 of 7
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Venetian Observers Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0018
Abstract and Keywords Venice in the mid-seventeenth century was still a significant participant in international politics. Formally Catholic, the Venetian republic was unlikely to allow its foreign policy to be influenced by religious considerations. France and Spain were both Catholic powers, and the Papacy was near at hand. Protestant England might be useful in helping to support a balance against Spain. Before and during the Thirty Years War Venice was neutral, with French leanings. Like Venice, England was precariously neutral in the Thirty Years War, but perhaps less immediately vulnerable than Venice. Representatives of the republic in England were concerned to see that country remain faithful to what they spoke of as ‘the common cause’. This did not imply that England was part of any alliance, but that it would also find an outright Habsburg victory detrimental to her interests. Or that at least seemed to Venetian observers the only rational course for England to pursue. Keywords: Venice, France, Spain, papacy, England, politics, foreign policy
PART OF THE problem in looking for sources concerning the intellectual origins of the English Revolution is that before 1640 there is no evidence that any Englishmen thought in terms of a coming revolution. Looking back after 1640 they would naturally reflect views more precise than they in fact held at the earlier date. What we need is an objective outside observer. The nearest I think we can get to this is in the despatches of Venetian ambassadors to their government.
Page 1 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers Venice in the mid-seventeenth century was still a significant participant in international politics. As I suggested in my original lectures, a large number of books were published in England on Venice. The republic still held a good deal of the gorgeous East in fee. Situated in northern Italy between the two warring powers, France on the one hand and Spain–Austria on the other, her position was precarious, especially after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. But neither side would wish to provoke Venice unnecessarily, and so risk losing access to eastern imports whilst adding the Venetian fleet to those of their enemies. If either France or Spain had emerged completely victorious, Venice’s position would have been very weak. So long as a balance was maintained between them she was relatively safe. What Venice most feared was an outright victory for the Habsburg combination.1 Formally Catholic, the Venetian republic was unlikely to allow its foreign policy to be influenced by religious considerations. France and Spain were both Catholic powers, and the Papacy was near at hand. Protestant England might be useful in helping to support a balance against Spain. Before and during the Thirty Years War Venice was neutral, with French leanings. Venetian ambassadors to England occasionally murmured if Parliament insisted on more than irritating persecution of Catholics; but they appreciated England’s political situation as a leading Protestant power in a world dominated by French-Spanish rivalries. For their own geographical reasons they shared England’s fear and (p. 367) hatred of Spain. When Ambassador Contarini had an interview with Charles I on 30 June 1628 he found him ‘Very favourably disposed towards [Catholics]. He would not consent to any bill against them.’2 Like Venice, England was precariously neutral in the Thirty Years War, but perhaps less immediately vulnerable than Venice. Representatives of the republic in England were concerned to see that country remain faithful to what they spoke of as ‘the common cause’. This did not imply that England was part of any alliance, but that she too would find an outright Habsburg victory detrimental to her interests. Or that at least seemed to Venetian observers the only rational course for England to pursue. But were England’s policies guided solely by reason in the sixteen-twenties and thirties? That was what worried Venetian diplomatic representatives in England. English politics in those years did not seem always wholly rational. At the end of the sixteenth century the Venetian ambassador in London foresaw that England could become the most powerful nation in the world if she built up a great navy to win and maintain commercial supremacy. But meanwhile, he told his government in 1607 that it was common opinion that King James ‘has not a sou’, as a result of Elizabeth’s expensive wars in Ireland and against Spain. So developments were closely watched. Under James I trading companies were described as ‘burdened and protected’ by the King. Yet by November 1641 the ambassador told his government that England had become a country useless to Page 2 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers all the world and consequently of no consideration. Ten years later, as a consequence of the English Revolution, his successor in the embassy reported that ‘merchants and trade are making great strides, as government and trade are ruled by the same persons’.3 But that is looking too far ahead. Venetian diplomats did not know that England was in a pre-revolutionary situation; but they were worried. The last thing they would wish to see was England reduced to political ineffectiveness as part of the anti-Spanish balance. They saw earlier than most foreign observers that this was likely to happen. So they took a cool view of English politics, but kept a watchful eye on any developments likely to weaken a power regarded as useful to ‘the common cause’. The ambassador noted that in the elections of 1624 the name of courtier was the surest passport to rejection by the electors. In 1625 he observed that leading figures from previous Parliaments had (p.368) been rejected ‘with the title of royalists’, since the electorate wished ‘to maintain the Parliament as moderator between the king and the public’. In the elections of 1628 those who had refused the forced loan were ‘good patriots, far more popular than courtiers’.4 ‘At our entry into this Kingdom’, wrote Vicenzo Gussoni on 3 July 1626, ‘we have gathered the views of many, and find an undesirable agitation which is widespread, and a feeling of resentment which seems incredible.’ He attributed it all to hatred of the Duke of Buckingham. ‘The kingdom is divided into two—the King, Buckingham and a few individuals’ against ‘all the rest of the country’. ‘The most experienced think that these two extremes cannot last long without the destruction of one or the other, and they discuss the subject perhaps too freely as one which can have no other result.’5 When a forced loan was mooted in September 1626 Contarini thought that ‘popular dissatisfaction has reached such a pitch both in the minds of men and in their language that it only remains to come to blows’. Everybody blames Buckingham, for whom hatred is ‘at its height and the love for the king greatly diminished’. Unpaid soldiers and sailors mutiny, and ‘the people clamour greatly, as they are not accustomed to be thus burdened with troops’. From the beginning of Charles I’s reign Contarini had been worried by the king’s ‘passionate love for the Duke of Buckingham’, which amounted to ‘infatuation’. Ambassadors had no illusions about Buckingham, whom they saw as a selfinterested adventurer with no political principles. But they also recognized that his self-seeking ambition created unpopularity for the king which might have consequences for international politics. So they reported on this point regularly, coolly, and rather more objectively than some recent historians who have tried to revive the image of Charles as a well-meaning patriot.6
Page 3 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers In November 1626 Contarini reported that the king wants to ‘establish a new fundamental law, putting an end to [Parliaments], to which he attaches much more importance than mere disbursements’. ‘He will do his utmost to obtain it.’ By 30 July 1627 Contarini was convinced that ‘evidently the king aims at absolute monarchy’ on the French model. ‘Profit and the need of money weigh more than all arguments…. The Spanish party will gain strength more and more and the rest of his subjects will become estranged from the king.’ At the end of February (p.369) 1628 he saw ‘great risk and peril of insurrection’ if the king relied on a proposal to introduce German cavalry, the Scottish and Irish troops proving insufficient.7 In April 1628 Contarini drew conclusions for Venice from the situation in England. ‘The issue of this Parliament is most important for the common cause no less than for the kingdom. If money is contributed [by Parliament] without investigation of many things which they pretend have been done illegally, the example would debar the people from their rights for ever. If they choose to examine matters the king will have recourse to absolute power to the destruction of Parliament with the risk of insurrection.’8 Some of the clergy had been particularly provocative at this juncture. In 1627 Contarini reported Sibthorpe’s sermon in which he said that the king is absolute master of the property of all his subjects. That was hitting where it hurt. When Parliament condemned the equally high-flying Roger Mainwaring for upholding the royal prerogative ‘against the people’ (Contarini’s phrase), Charles pardoned him and ‘gave him a good benefice’. By 1635 he was a bishop. The assassination of Buckingham in November 1628 solved nothing. Contarini had started with considerable respect for Charles’s determination to ‘be a King’. But in the Buckingham years hatred was extended from the Duke to the King. After Buckingham’s murder there was no one else to put the blame on as nonParliamentary money was raised by petty trickery. Contarini thought that ‘the hatred between the king and the people is so rooted that it can only be eradicated with difficulty’—especially as there was talk of pursuing Parliamentary charges against Buckingham, ‘although he is dead’. ‘The cause of all the mischief is that the king does not trust the people or the people the king. The people will not grant money unless they receive privileges, and the king will not content them unless he receives advantages. Neither party will be the first to make concessions…’ ‘These people hate the king and gladly avail themselves of whatever they can to cause him displeasure.’ A fortnight later Parliament was dissolved in anger.9 ‘Now Parliament is dissolved’, Contarini prophesied, ‘I believe it will never reassemble during the king’s life.’ He nearly proved right. ‘The kingdom of England must for some time count for nothing for the common cause, as even if she wished, she is not in the condition to do anything.’ ‘The king’s financial Page 4 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers situation is desperate.’ Some say that ‘the (p.370) nobility will make a loan, but they are too poor, the wealth of the country being in the hands of the merchants’. They presumably comprised no small part of those to whom the ambassador refers as ‘the people’.10 The ambassador saw international consequences of the dissolution. ‘Parliament was a great curb upon the affairs of Spain’, he wrote on 23 March 1629, ‘and so they revived at once on the dissolution.’ ‘What matters is that the King of Denmark cannot have any help from this kingdom, on which his chief hopes were placed…. I believe…he will make peace on any terms. His ambassador here is in despair, not without reason…. With her own house on fire, I do not seek how [England] can run to extinguish the flames which are destroying that of her neighbour.’ On 4 June he added: ‘It is impossible to persuade the merchants to pay the duties. Consequently trade is going to ruin.’ Contarini gives convincing detail: ‘All the carts go back to the country full, as no one buys…. A countless number of the poor will die of hunger from being out of work.’ Contarini now saw ‘no chance of the king becoming absolute master, not bound by the laws’. ‘This people would sacrifice their goods and their lives before they would consent to any diminution soever of their privileges.’11 But by January 1635 Contarini noted with approval Charles’s determination ‘to approach more nearly to…that independent dominion over affairs’ from which he has been ‘restrained by the ancient institutions of the realm, which it has obviously been his aim to attain by every means’. The ambassador’s successor, Vicenzo Gussoni, soon noted that ‘partisans of Spain…encourage [Charles’s] intention not to have a Parliament’. Two years later he decided that ‘if his majesty adopts gentle methods in his government and religion, he will attain his ends’. ‘He will become very rich, but will impoverish his people. The prince and the people cannot both be rich at the same time.’ ‘The Spaniards rejoice at these disputes’, and their ambassador fans the flames. By February 1638 ‘Charles has doubled the revenues of the crown from what they used to be 15 years ago’— that is, before his accession.12 But it was not quite as simple as that. Charles was not only King of England. In February 1638 Gussoni found himself considering what would happen ‘if the Scots decide to choose another king, as they claim they have just and legitimate cause for doing’. In July he observed that ‘His Majesty is inclined to use force to compel submission in Scotland, but lacks the affection of his people, and consequently money, and so (p.371) cannot use [force] without manifest danger of losing his other dominions as well…’13 The judges’ decision in the Ship Money case, Gussoni observed, was ‘received with incredible bitterness and maledictions against the judges,…with talk against the law sufficient to cause a revolt among the people’. He now thought that Ship Money had produced no real advantage for the king. ‘The king has few Page 5 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers friends in England, less in Ireland, and none in Scotland…. If he does not change the nature of his rule one foresees some irremediable disaster.’14, In October 1638 the newly arrived ambassador in England, Anzolo Correr, summed up: Charles I ‘has changed the principles by which his predecessor reigned’. It is impossible yet to see ‘if the road he has taken will lead him to absolute royalty, which is definitely the goal he has set himself, because the limited sovereignty, restricted by the laws and by disorder, was plotted against by his subjects in an indiscreet and ill– advised manner, thus putting him under the courageous necessity of extricating himself from their tutelage. The task is certainly difficult, but if it succeeds’, Correr added cautiously, ‘it is the greatest and most glorious that a prince ever took up…. A people that once was fierce, fond of liberty, lavish and warlike, has [since 1603] become meek, close–fisted, submissive and pacific…’15 Correr commented that Charles ‘inherited two things from his father…. hunting and the aversion not to say hostility of the people’. He has upset ‘the two great causes of religion and the diminution of the liberties of the people’, and ‘will be very fortunate if he does not fall into some great upheaval’. ‘If the people had leaders,’ Correr added, ‘which they have not, it would be impossible to quiet them.’ That was written on 24 October 1638. But religion, he added, seems ‘unlikely to disturb the felicity which this pacific kingdom at present enjoys’.16 What becomes increasingly clear in despatches of the 1630s is the wide-ranging nature of the many and devious expedients to which the king and his agents resorted for raising money. They must have been increasingly and cumulatively extremely irritating. Initially Buckingham was blamed for them, but they survived him. The history books tell us about large abuses like Ship Money but give no realistic impression of the scale on which money was extorted under trivial pretexts. And now there was no Buckingham to blame. Quite clearly the king himself (p.372) was responsible, and was deliberately trying to evolve a system for financing the government without resort to an assembly representing the taxpayers. The ambassadors endlessly report the various devices resorted to. What follows is only a very small selection: 1 March 1630 fines imposed on absentees from Charles I’s coronation in 1625; 9 January 1632 Proposals to withhold pensions which the king pays to individuals—and even to impose ‘some charge on the expenses of the court’; 29 July 1633 proposed ‘Voluntary’ aid for the Palatinate—withdrawn; 16 August 1635 storm over money to be raised for the king’s enclosure of a deer park at Oatlands with a long and very high fence; Page 6 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers 20 March 1637 ‘they have recently augmented the price of beer, coal, peat and soap’, raising over.£135, 000 more than these items used to bring in; 24 October 1638 Correr reports composition fines on Essex forest lands sold to private individuals, amounting to at least £300, 000— more than ten times the total collected in Ship Money. At one point it was suggested that all titled persons should buy for cash down confirmation of their privileges. The old grievance of wardship of children of tenants-in-chief who died leaving a minor as heir—who could not perform the long-obsolete military service originally required of tenants-in-chief—was revived. Wardship, Gussoni said, is used either to the advantage of the royal revenues or as a reward for the king’s particular servants or dependants. It ‘brings desolation instead of support to those unfortunate enough to be under age when their fathers died’.17 In December 1638, ‘22 monopolies recently granted’ were abolished ‘in these last days’.18 Often these exactions affected not only ‘the people’, men of substance, but the vulgar who had no voice in Parliament—even when it did meet. Their only resort was to riot. The exactions were also accompanied by mutinies of unpaid soldiers and sailors—600 of them in July 1626. In February sailors in bands of 300–400 roamed all over London, (p.373) seizing food because they claimed to be starving. Two months later they were said to be committing ‘outrages against the peasantry’.19 And so we could go on. When Correr came to the end of his tour of duty in England, he submitted the usual Relazione summarizing his impressions. Here he remarks that financial grievances and Parliament’s insistence on its rights and privileges were the main causes of dispute: religion was only a secondary cause.20 But a change had come when Laud ultimately succeeded to Buckingham’s place in the royal favour, though lacking the Duke’s sexual attractions. Laud’s policies were certainly provocative to Protestants already distrustful of the king. Correr comments on the appeal that Laudian ceremonial clearly had for Charles—so much so that Correr began to think the King might be won over to Catholicism. Charles spoke to the ambassador of his reluctance to enforce penalities against Catholics, as Parliament wished. The King was no doubt playing to his audience here. But Correr confirms that the newly arrived papal agent (the first in England since the reign of Bloody Mary) was a frequent visitor at the royal court at all hours, and had familiar access to the king’s ear as if one of his most intimate servants, without any distinction of place or time.21 The ambassador soon picked up the idea—which had been a favourite of James I’s—that sectaries were vulgar persons from the lowest social strata. They shared none of the sympathy which Correr showed to Parliament and ‘the people’.
Page 7 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers There are three Protestant sects in England, Correr told his government— Anglicans, who observe the rites and theology of the English church; Puritans, who reject these rites; and lastly ‘Brownists’, under whom he lumps all sectaries. The first two sects have doctrine and learning, but Brownists abhor letters, study, learned men, and think that ignorance is the only key to heaven. Fortunately, he added, they have recently started to emigrate to New England.22 ‘Brownists’ were thus beyond the pale for Correr. But the sharp distinction which he draws between them and ‘Puritans’ gives us some idea of those Englishmen he talked to in diplomatic social circles, or those who came to see him. The ambassador recognized the folly of alienating middle-of-the-road Puritans, presumably the majority of the political nation. ‘The wisest’ were disgusted by the behaviour of Laud’s victims, Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, ‘but the senseless people and those full of the spirit of faction had compassion on them, collecting their blood and exalting their (p.374) ignominy to the rank of martyrdom’. The desire of Puritans to strip worship of ceremonies was the cause of Charles’s cultivation of the Roman faction. But Puritans were the bulk of the nation, even having the support of a few lords excluded from access to the royal court. Three Englishmen out of five were ‘Puritans’, Venetian diplomats estimated between 1637 and 1639; their number had recently increased to make them the strongest party in the kingdom.23 Nobody had told the Venetian ambassadors that they were watching and trying to understand a ‘Puritan Revolution’ or ‘the last of the religious wars’. If you had put such a suggestion to them they would have dismissed it. They thought (and said)24 that what was taking place in England was a great political struggle between a king trying to make his power absolute and an assembly representing the propertied classes which was determined to stop him achieving arbitrary power and to replace his authority with the sovereignty of Parliament—that is, of themselves. To achieve their ends they were prepared even to unleash the ManyHeaded Monster, at the risk of seeing it trying to set up its own lower-class republic. Their gamble proved to be a safer one than the King’s. The Venetian ambassadors changed their minds frequently in a fluctuating situation. But they grasped the essentially secular nature of the political struggle. In 1660 the Venetian resident in London was as surprised as Charles II was by the restoration of monarchy.25 But of course it was not Charles I’s monarchy. In general throughout the revolutionary decades the judgements of Venetian residents are sound, and might with advantage be studied more carefully by present–day historians. Notes:
(1) See pp. 26, 246–8 above, and cf. p. 184 n. (2) Letters from the Venetian Ambassador (ed. Allen B. Hinds, 1924), i. 102.
Page 8 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Venetian Observers (3) Calendar of Stute Pupers, Colonialo, or Venetian., Venetian, 1640–2, pp. 77– 78; my Reformation to Industrial Revolution, pp. 52, 81, 101, 155. (4) Letters from the Venetian Ambassador, i. 2. (5) Ibid., pp. 50, 54, 59. (6) Ibid., pp. 60, 64, 67, 78–79. (7) Ibid., pp. 70, 73, 84–88. (8) Ibid., p. 89. (9) Ibid., pp. 108, 112–13. (10) Letters from the Venetian Ambassador, above n. 2, pp. 116–17. (11) Ibid., pp. 117, 119, 121. (12) Ibid., pp. 144, 152, 167–8, 172. (13) Ibid., pp. 176, 186. (14) Ibid., pp. 184–5. (15) Ibid., pp. xxv–xxvi. (16) Ibid., pp. xviii, xxx. (17) Letters from the Venetian Ambassador, above n. 2, p. xxiv. (18) Ibid., p. 190. (19) Ibid., pp. 54, 88, 92. (20) Ibid., p. xxx. (21) Ibid., p. 164. (22) Ibid., p. xxxvi. (23) Letters from the Venetian Ambassador, above n. 2, pp. xxxv, xxxi; cf. a review by P. W. Thomas in Essays in Criticism, xx (1970). (24) See p. 367 above. (25) Calendar of State Papers. Colonial, or Venetian., 1659–61, p. 136.
Access brought to you by: Page 9 of 9
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Literature and Revolution Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0019
Abstract and Keywords The historical revolution, replacing medieval chronicles with modern history, was part of the whole revolutionary transition of the seventeenth century. Both the scientific and the historical revolutions were influenced, directly or indirectly, by what was taking place in other sectors of learning, and by changes in the fundamental structure of society. Professor F. S. Fussner sees a pattern in all spheres — philosophy, religion, politics, literature, and science: one cannot isolate any of them. Attacks on authority, appeals to experience, an extension of the quantitative method, elevation of the Moderns over the Ancients, the idea of progress — all relate to changes in society. A static view of history came naturally to those who lived in a static economy. The historical revolution is part of the whole seventeenth-century revolution. Keywords: revolution, F. S. Fussner, philosophy, religion, politics, literature, science
I But such Scriptures you could not brook As bade you give ought to the poor; You wished them out of the book; But you were sure to have in store Plenty of scriptures, evermore, To prove that you might aye be bold With your own to do what you would.
ROBERT CROWLEY, ‘Pleasure and Pain, Heaven and Hell’ (1551), in Select Works, ed. J. M. Cowper, Early English Text Society, 1872, p. 115. Crowley
Page 1 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution attributes the words to Christ, citing Matthew 10 in which Christ says ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, but a sword’. SOME HISTORIANS have looked for the equivalent in England before 1640 of the Girondins and Jacobins of the French Revolution, or the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. Naturally they have not found them, and so they rather helplessly assume that there can have been no antecedents of the English Revolution. But Girondins and Jacobins, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, looked back to the experience of earlier revolutions, especially the English Revolution. American revolutionaries of the 1770s looked back to 1641. But the English Revolution had no significant predecessors. Some lessons were drawn from the Revolt of the Netherlands, but that was a national rebellion against an alien occupying power. Revolutions are made by people, whose growing discontent with their rulers accumulates until it reaches breaking-point. Normally any régime which provokes that sort of hostility is repressive, and discontent cannot be expressed publicly: we have to look for signs of it elsewhere. In seventeenth-century England there were many converging (p.376) causes, affecting different social groups.1 Questions of foreign policy loom large. Some wanted an aggressive anti-Spanish foreign policy, either in the interest of national defence or of Protestantism in general, or more specifically to establish English bases for plunder and trade in the New World. Here ‘the Protestant interest’ might (or might not) be a convenient cover. Those who genuinely aspired to convert American Indians to Christianity, in order (among other things) to expedite the coming of the millennium, turned out to be a minority in the long run as the millenarian hope faded; but it was always a useful screen for more directly commercial interests. As it became clear that American Indians had not degenerated from a previously existing form of Christianity, but had never known the truths of that religion, their ignorance had to be explained as punishment for their hopeless sinfulness, which justified treating them as inferiors and slaves, with no rights even to the land they occupied. More’s Utopia was a fiction which did not establish a tradition of interest in the religious views of native Americans. But, as Utopia showed, the discovery of an inhabited new world did raise serious questions. Why had the Christian dispensation never been made known to the American Indians? How could this be reconciled with the existence of a benevolent and just Creator? Long-distance sea voyages revealed civilizations in China and India which had quite different social and political customs and structures from those of Europe. More important perhaps for our purposes than the discovery of America was a series of crises internal to Britain, and ideas associated with them. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 laid bare class resentments which survived until (and after) the Page 2 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution seventeenth century. Continuing wars with France were financially exhausting and cumulatively produced heavy casualties. By the fifteenth century it had come to be noticed that plebeian bowmen were more effective in winning battles than knightly horsemen: so a main justification for the privileges of the latter came in question, especially as the Wars of the Roses between rival gangs of aristocrats brought ruin and confusion upon the country. Meanwhile the Lollard heresy, which came to prominence around the time of the Peasants’ Revolt, continued a persecuted underground existence and was an important contributory stream to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Historians disagree about the (p.377) extent of the Lollard contribution to the English Reformation, which some suppose was a German import. It is difficult to find decisive evidence about underground movements which are successful in surviving over long periods, but their survival proves the existence of some organization. Tyndale certainly drew as much or more on the Lollard tradition in which he grew up as on German Lutheranism. Thanks to the invention of printing, he and other early reformers were able to spread their emphasis on the importance of the congregation rather than on an international or national church, and so prepared for the building up of Protestant sects which ultimately formed the basis of nonconformity. Translation of the Bible into English and Welsh had an incalculable influence on popular thinking. For the first time in British history any literate man or woman was able to read God’s Word for him- or herself, and to discuss it with other lay people. In Germany the subversive teachings of the Bible, together with Luther’s preaching, immediately revolutionized the peasantry. In England the effects of the vernacular Bible revealed themselves more slowly, and it is difficult for the historian to evaluate them just because of their omnipresence. It may be helpful to quote Bishop Jewell, who in the second edition of his Defence of the Apologie of the Church of England (published in 1570) cited Thomas Harding’s defence of the papacy: before the Reformation ‘the unlearned people were kept from the reading of the Scriptures by the special providence of God, that precious stones should not be thrown before swine’; whereas now we have ‘the prostitution of the Scriptures…to the ungodly, unlearned, rascal people,…prentices, light persons and the riff-raff of the people’.2 Protestants emphasized the Bible as the source of all wisdom on all subjects; many ordinary Bible-readers found texts which would be interpreted as highly critical of English society and the English church. The spread of printing and of literacy, and the educational revolution,3 made the stories and songs of the Bible part of the cultural heritage of every English man and woman. From the 1620s there was an organized system of bootlegging illegal Bibles into England from the Continent. This created new centres for popular discussion, reinforced from the fifteen-eighties onwards when organized dissenting congregations emigrated to the Netherlands and later to New Page 3 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution England. In the early seventeenth century privately circulated newsletters, and the printing (p.378) of M.P.s’ speeches, as well as discussions among themselves during meetings of Parliament, created something like a public opinion (or public opinions) among the educated classes. Together with the stage, the pulpit was an important source of ideas. In the revolutionary decades, election to church livings in many parishes replaced appointment by a lay patron or a bishop. Where congregations could not get rid of their parson they turned to itinerant preachers—of many varieties of theology —more discussion and argumentation, different interests. Compare later the Quakers—pacifists only after 1660. Itinerants carried new religio-political ideas into areas hitherto relatively backward—the fens and forests which were being developed for cultivation in the decades before the English Revolution, to the discomfort of their inhabitants, who rapidly developed radical ideas and forms of organization—turning especially to Quakers. Itinerant preachers helped to unite religious groups into what were to become sects, whose members protected and supported one another across geographical boundaries, and provided valuable trading links. London became the centre towards which they all looked, as it became the refuge for immigrants who had been evicted from their landholdings in the villages, forests, and fens. As old social structures broke down, traditional hierachical ideas about society came to be questioned by individuals thinking and observing for themselves. New hymns helped to strengthen congregational solidarity, and again to establish links between congregations. The importance of hymn-singing and hymn-writing in this context has not yet been properly studied. In no epoch of English history before 1640 did ideas mature and change so rapidly and so fundamentally. New questions were asked about the position of women in an eager controversy in print in James I’s reign. The literary genre of criminal biography dates from the 1640s. All sorts of traditional values came to be questioned in the developing mobile society. As population increased, primogeniture meant that there was not enough land for younger sons of gentlemen, who were forced to look elsewhere for a living—especially to seafaring, where piracy offered windfall profits as well as losses and death. Pirate crews developed new forms of democratic organization.4 Unemployed Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates were also forced to take to the roads, where they helped to spread novel criticisms of society. The Reformation authorized clerical marriage, and produced generations of sons of (p.379) the clergy who had the ambitions of the educated without the inheritance which had supported such ambitions in sons of the gentry. Impoverished younger sons were forced into emigration, some returning from foreign parts as subversive Catholic priests. The aspirations of
Page 4 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution both these groups cut across traditional social hierarchies. For Protestants, the Netherlands formed both a religious refuge and a republican model. Most boys and girls learnt to read through the Bible. It offered readers a new— to them—prose narrative, which raises all sorts of social and moral issues, with an authority even greater than that of the Greek and Roman classics. The latter had been the property of the body of professional scholars. But no special education was needed to read the Bible in the vernacular, thanks especially to Tyndale’s exceptional virtues as a translator. His version remained basic to all later English versions, down to and including the Authorized Version. The Bible was for everyone. The authority of its text, hitherto unknown to any but clerical scholars, offered to any Englishman or woman born in the century before 1640 a new and overwhelming authority to help in coping with novel problems. A poem first published in 1640 described the Bible as ‘The Book of Books’, On which who looks As he should do, aright, shall never need Wish for a better light To guide him in the night…. God’s cabinet of reveal’d counsel ’tis Whose weal and woe Are ordered so That every man may know Nor can he be mistook That speaketh by this Book.5
Bible-reading became a preface to reading other texts, with a new critical confidence. The universities lost their special prestige and cachet. This cut both ways. In New England some preferred a heretic to a preacher trained at ‘the ninnie-varsitie’.6 Bible-reading was a solitary exercise in which members of congregations could convince themselves of truths at their leisure—as Bunyan describes himself doing. If enough ordinary people agree on the social (p.380) desirability of a course of action recommended in the Bible, that is its justification. The Bible which had destroyed the authority of the Pope could undermine the authority of bishops. Before 1640, John Goodwin tells us, ‘the spirits and judgments and consciences of men [had] been as it were cowed and marvellously embased and kept under (and so prepared for Antichrist’s lure) by doctrines and tenets excessively advancing the power of superiors over inferiors, and binding iron yokes and heavy burdens on those that were in subjection’.7 This, it will be noted, is a political as well as a religious complaint.
Page 5 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution Only after the collapse of traditional authority were laymen able to fight back. Thomas Edwards gives us a fascinating glimpse of the self-taught William Erbery spending a night in Marlborough en route for Wales and getting involved in a discussion in which he denied the divinity of Christ. One of his auditors took him up, citing 1 John 5: 7. Erbery replied ‘it was not so in the original…. Those words were not in the Greek, but put in by some who were against the Arians.’ There must have been many such exchanges all over the country in the mid-forties, as self-educated men were newly liberated to struggle uninhibitedly with fundamental theological problems.8 Too many people read and believed the Bible to be put off by the experts—so often proved wrong. The revolution of the common man produced a theology of the common man too. Gerrard Winstanley was reading revolution into the Bible in the years 1648–52—more than anyone else. He was not just mouthing texts but struggling with real creative thought. But the Bible proved a sword to divide. In the early seventeenth century, as the élite and popular cultures pulled apart, men became more aware of class differences—for example, between the popular and ‘coterie’ theatres. Orthodox values came to be more openly questioned, from the Ralegh circle of the fifteen-nineties onwards. During the revolutionary decades separatist congregations escaped from the control of parson and squire, preaching and publishing unorthodox views. Ranters openly ridiculed accepted ‘Puritan’ values and the hypocritical godly rich, as they saw them. They treated the resurrection, heaven, and hell as allegories, denied the authority of the Scriptures, proclaimed that God was in all men and women, not only in an elect minority. They attacked private property, a state church, and government in general, whether of King, Parliament, or Army. Such (p.381) threatening ideas had no doubt long been preached verbally, but now appeared in print only to be controverted.9 It was ‘under pretence of religion’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘that the looser sort of citizens…do challenge liberty to themselves’. Milton took considerable pleasure in telling English Presbyterians that his arguments defending regicide were those which their Presbyterian predecessors had used in the early sixteenforties, emphasizing revolt by the lesser magistrates who would be propertyowners. There was no danger now of the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers encouraging the poor to expropriate the rich.10 The only authority greater than the King is God, or Jesus Christ in his Second Coming. There was an independent scholarly consensus to the effect that the most plausible interpretation of the mysterious biblical passages on this subject suggested that the return of Jesus Christ and the millennium were likely to occur in or soon after the mid-seventeenth century. This view was supported by chronologists, and accepted by Presbyterian preachers and by Parliament, as well as by such representative radical intellectuals as John Milton and Sir Henry Page 6 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution Vane.11 So theories alleging the superiority of Parliament or the people to the King were superfluous. The way must be cleared for King Jesus. Not much overt millenarianism found its way into print before 1640, but many nonconformists under Elizabeth thought that what they took to be the provision for divine worship laid down in the New Testament overruled the law of the land. Of the two kings, King Charles and King Jesus, the latter was the greater. By 1645 John Goodwin had come to see Charles as one of the ten kings of Revelation 17 who had given their powers to the Beast in ‘the last times of these kingdoms’.12 How could one continue to obey such a king? If we ask ourselves whether the ideology of Protestantism led to capitalism or capitalism created Protestantism, the answer—as so often with such trick questions—must be ‘both’. The important thing in the long run was not what your conscience or your chaplain said, but what your successful neighbours did. Here we must return to Fussner, who insists that ‘the new historical attitude which became a characteristic of European thought in the (p.382) seventeenth century was the result of far more general causes—social, economic and intellectual, as well as political and religious’.13 The historical revolution, replacing medieval chronicles by modern history, was part of the whole revolutionary transition of the seventeenth century. Both the scientific and the historical revolutions were influenced, directly or indirectly, by what was taking place in other sectors of learning, and by changes in the fundamental structure of society. Fussner sees a pattern in all spheres—philosophy, religion, politics, literature, and science: we cannot isolate any of them. Attacks on authority, appeals to experience, an extension of the quantitative method, elevation of the Moderns over the Ancients, the idea of progress—all relate to changes in society. A static view of history came naturally to those who lived in a static economy. The historical revolution is part of the whole seventeenth-century revolution. Selden, in his History of the Tithes (1617), distinguished between matters of fact and value-judgements, treating the church as a human institution, the study of which should be subject to the laws of evidence. He undermined the authority of the Bible by insisting that we should decide that ‘the Thing itself be so before asking The Reason of a Thing’.14 There is much evidence in English literature before 1640 for social tensions and hostility—in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in King Lear, in Henry VI, as well as in the plays of Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Deloney, Beaumont; and in works by Barnaby Googe, John Collop, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, Ralph Knevet, Sir John Oglander—and many more. Lever in 1550 had noted the addiction of the lower orders to communism, and Archbishop Whitgift declared that ‘the people…are…most ready to receive that doctrine that seemeth to be contrary to the present state and that inclineth to liberty’.15 What does that tell us about ‘the present state? In Sidney’s Arcadia ‘the unruly sort of clowns’ were Page 7 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution ‘carried, they themselves knew not whither…like a violent flood’, ‘like enraged beasts’. Sidney, adds, with horror, ‘the country was theirs’, and ‘they had the glorious show of a Commonwealth with them’. Spenser’s communist giant denounced ‘tyrants, that make men subject to their law’. Then I will suppress, that they no more may reign And lordings curb that common over-awe, And all the wealth of rich men to the poor will draw.
(p.383) In Mother Hubberd’s Tale, Spenser’s Fox advocated a division of landlords’ land and rejected wage labour, though he attributed communism to laziness.16 At about the same time Bishop Cooper was denouncing Anabaptists who wanted communism and equality. That Puritanism led to communism was still being alleged in verses of 1631.17 I quoted above Nashe’s revealing jibe, that Anabaptists were ‘such as thought they knew as much of God’s mind as richer men’. It was after 1640 that Cheynell wrote ‘every man is now accounted an Anabaptist if he does not maintain monarchy to be jure divind’.18 In the very different political climate of 1655 one of their defenders told Oliver Cromwell that ‘the Anabaptists were men that will not be shuffled out of their birthright as freeborn people of England’.18a The increasing practice of landed families—like the Cromwells—repairing their decaying fortunes by City marriages had social as well as economic consequences. The pamphlets Hic Mulier and Haec Vir (1620) started a literary controversy by attacking female usurpation of male garments and male prerogatives—a controversy in which King James participated—against women, of course. Such a discussion of male anxieties in print was a very new consequence of the social changes resulting from the rise of capitalism.19 The essay as a literary form emerged in the early seventeenth century, starting with Bacon and expanding rapidly during the revolutionary decades. Narrative fiction, leading up to the novel, got going later, despite promising beginnings under Elizabeth by Nashe and others. Biblical preaching by nonconformist ministers had similar effects to London theatres in stimulating popular discussion. After the free-for-all controversies of the sixteen-forties scholars had to fight back hard to recapture the Bible from the common people, by a new use of textual criticism in reconciling its apparent contradictions and inconsistencies. Vanbrugh’s Lady Brute cheerfully used the methods of the higher criticism to escape from the biblical adjuration to return good for evil: ‘that may be a mistake in the translation.’20 (p.384) In the sixteen-thirties John Lilburne, a gentleman’s son, was whipped through the streets of London for distributing illegal literature. Burton and Bastwick, respectively a parson and a physician, were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The Laudian régime no longer regarded gentlemen and university graduates as immune from plebeian punishments, thus almost forcing its victims Page 8 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution into alliance with their social inferiors. Milton found himself ‘church-outed by the prelates’. Their personal sufferings and hardships led them to take seriously radical ideas already in circulation. The very rich John Hampden took the lead in opposing Ship Money: his cousin Oliver Cromwell supported the Bedford corporation in its opposition to the government. John Pym was Treasurer of the Providence Island Company. Peers considered emigrating to New England. There was plenty for intellectuals to be restive about.
II Carefully interpreted, literature can tell us more about the life of a society than any number of state papers, speeches in Parliament, correspondence of the gentry, and demographic statistics. It does not give us an exact representation of the way people behaved; but it can convey the ethos of a society, what its members thought right and proper behaviour as well as what they thought outrageously possible. As we have learnt in our own day, government statements are often works of fiction which call for careful literary analysis before we can make use of them as evidence for what is actually happening. Poetry in particular deserves more serious attention than it has received from historians. I have written about this subject at some length, and can only summarize here.21 The ‘metaphysical’ poets are a peculiar feature of early seventeenth-century society. They were not rebels or way-out revolutionaries. They include some of the most respected members of society—John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s; Fulke Greville, favourite of Queen Elizabeth and chancellor of the exchequer under James I; George Herbert, from a well-known aristocratic family. They tell us, among other things, that the official religion of the society no longer satisfied the intellectual requirements of its more thoughtful members. They reacted with scepticism, alarm, sometimes with despair: (p.385) ‘Our age was iron, and rusty too’. ‘New philosophy calls all in doubt… Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’. ‘For I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’
That was Dean Donne.’22 George Herbert was no less dissatisfied: My thought are all a case of knives Wounding my heart.
Addressing God, Herbert said: Perhaps great places and thy power Do not agree.23
Page 9 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution Henry Vaughan: Here in dust and dirt, oh here The lilies of his love appear.24
Robert Heywood summed up what many must have felt: My womb two nations doth embrace.25
Sidney’s admirer, Fulke Greville, set the truth of the heart against traditionally accepted authority: the words are those of a Chorus of Priests: Oh wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound: Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Greated sick, commanded to be sound…. Yet when each of us in his own heart looks, He finds the God there far unlike his books.26
The metaphysical poets and their contemporaries had their own way of pinpointing controversial questions which cried out for discussion. (p.386) After Shakespeare, Donne is the master here. Others are more directly political. Thus William Browne: Thought hath no prison, and the mind is free Under the greatest king and tyranny.
Or Daniel: He sees, what chair soever monarch sate Upon, on earth the people was the state.
Sir Francis Hubert denounced peers who Raise men that are popular, Make pretences (for the common weal) Of reformation, of religious zeal.
As Wither put it, ‘Tis not the cutting off of one man’s ears Will stop the voice which everybody hears.
Or, on the clergy in 1628: One of these will for preferment strive By lifting up the king’s prerogative Above itself. They shall persuade him to Much more than law or conscience bids him do And say, ‘God warrants it’. To be thy shepherds wolves are entered in… Page 10 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution Men use religion as a stalking horse To catch preferment….
Or Traherne: The honey and the stings Of all that is, are centred in a thought.
The metaphysical poets reveal the ‘double heart’, the conflict of interests and objectives, which social problems were forcing into prominence.27 Before the seventeenth century any cultivated Englishman needed (p.387) to have some acquaintance with Italian, French, and Spanish literature. But Italians, Frenchmen, and Spaniards did not feel a similar pressure to learn English, Chaucer notwithstanding. During Elizabeth’s reign there was a strong reaction to the sense of England’s cultural inferiority, and especially the inferiority of the English language. Spenser and his circle aspired to establish a native literature of which account would have to be taken, parallel to the emergence of England as a significant European power. Samuel Daniel rejected the Greek and Roman model and looked back to the wonderful Gothic architecture and to the good old days of the free Anglo-Saxons which had been brutally interrupted by the Norman Conquest. ‘England’s verse is Gothic,’ said Daniel, ‘and so is the English state.’28 There was a literary revival of English Protestant nationalism after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which embraces Shakespeare’s history plays as well as The Faerie Queene, and Sidney’s dream of planting an English empire on the mainland of America, to drain off surplus population, increase trade, and cut off the Spanish supply-line to the Old World. The battle to get English accepted as one of the great European languages was raging in Shakespeare’s day. In Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Richard Helgerson compares Spenser’s determination to write a great English poem with Coke’s claim that England had ‘no dependency upon any foreign law whatsoever’.29 In the early seventeenth century, as the élite and popular cultures pulled apart, men became more conscious of class differences— for example, between the popular and coterie theatres. Orthodox values came to be more openly questioned, from the Ralegh circle of the fifteen-nineties onwards.30 The thrust of George Hakewill’s Apologie…of the power and providence of God in the government of the world31 was against the tyranny of the Greek and Latin classics which formed the basis of university education. Hakewill had little use for the early Christian Fathers or for medieval scholasticism. In the Bible he saw no justification for theories of degeneration, whether in the universe or in human beings. He distinguished sharply between the authority of the infallible Bible and the right of the individual to interpret it for himself. It took the free discussions (p.388) of the sixteen-forties to bring to Page 11 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution popular attention the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible, and led brave thinkers like Walwyn, Winstanley, Clement Writer, and Samuel Fisher to conclude that it could not be the Word of God. Hakewill relied on human reason, which is the reason of the individual Bible reader and so changes over time. Bishop Godfrey Goodman thought that such an approach opened the door to atheism.32 In this context I want to look briefly at those who have been called ‘the Spenserian poets’.33 Among these we may list Christopher Brooke, William Browne, Samuel Daniel, John Davies of Hereford, Michael Drayton, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Fulke Greville, Middleton, Quarles, Sylvester. Some add Sir Arthur Gorges, Henry Vaughan, Glapthorne, Rudyerd, Massinger, George Sandys, Tom May; and Milton might be included as a late example. Among lesser characters we may include Samuel Austin, Unton Crook, and no doubt many others. Several of these poets were close acquaintances and friends of Camden, Selden, and Ben Jonson.34 The Spenserians did not form a school, and were by no means a political group. The post-1640 Parliamentarian alliance was not prepackaged: if it had been there would have been no civil war. It arose in reaction to a combination of different grievances—political, social, and intellectual, which have no preordained cohesion. But many of the grievances were shared by these poets. Their attitudes may have helped, when Parliament finally met, to unite those who attacked what they regarded as arbitrary royal power. Charles meanwhile refused on principle to defend himself or his unpopular policies. Roger Brearley of Grindleton quoted (as if they were his own) lines from Joshua Sylvester which express the ‘double heart’ central to metaphysical poetry: Unto myself I do myself betray… Myself agrees not with myself a jot…. I trust myself, and I myself distrust. I cannot live, with nor without myself.35
(p.389) The Spenserian poets shared predispositions towards certain kinds of political and social action. Some of them preferred the religion of the heart to formal liturgies. Most of them supported an aggressive policy in America and the West Indies. Many were also critical of enclosures of commons and waste lands by rich landowners, often new purchasers. The two themes are linked by the fact that many of the colonizers of New England were motivated (or driven) to emigrate by land hunger. There was, I have insisted, no organized opposition party before the meeting of Parliament in 1640. How could there be, without the experience of previous revolutions which made this possible in the French and Russian revolutions? But discussions in and out of Parliament, among the gentry meeting in Quarter Sessions when the King failed to summon Parliament to discuss the grievances of the subjects, among trading companies (including some gentlemen) Page 12 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution advocating foward foreign policies—all these led to a recognition of shared attitudes, of preferences, of prejudices formed during the decades when the monarchy was failing to meet the wishes of large sections of the men of property. This failure was contrasted with the golden days of Good Queen Bess, when sea-dogs like Drake and Ralegh acquired fame. Spenser’s Faerie Queene as well as his View of the Present State of Ireland deal with problems of colonization and with relationships between old inhabitants and new settlers. Ralegh and Hakluyt produced a new literature of travel and discovery, trade and conquest. Spenser himself accepted the necessity of monarchy, but was unhappy about the competing court factions which aspired to control or determine Elizabeth’s policies. Spenser’s successors looked for a reformed English Protestantism and a reformed English monarchy. They shared criticisms of bishops, of usury, of enclosure for agricultural ‘improvement’. They wanted law reform. One commentator has suggested that ‘the rhetoric of Spenser’s ecclesiastical eclogues is at least superficially similar’ to the propaganda of the radicals of Edward VI’s reign.36 When the Spenserian William Browne writes of ‘the prelate in pluralities asleep’, he anticipates not only the Milton of Lycidas but also the radical Puritan revolutionaries of the 1640s. The crown itself was an enclosing landlord, and courtiers exploited royal favour to acquire lands—for example, of tenants-in-chief who failed to leave an adult male heir and whose lands therefore temporarily reverted to the crown. Favoured courtiers took advantage of their position, which led to increasing and shared distrust of the monarchy.37 (p.390) When pens were set free, John Goodwin looked back and said: ‘The spirits and judgments and consciences of men [had] been as it were cowed and marvellously embased and kept under…by doctrines and tenets excessively advancing the power of superiors over inferiors, and binding iron yokes and heavy burdens upon those who were in subjection.’ The object of this, he thought, was to prepare for the acceptance of ‘Antichrist’s lure’. But now ‘men of ordinary rank and quality’ would execute God’s judgments upon Antichrist.38 ‘It is neither rebellion nor treason’, wrote Francis Cheynell, ‘to fight for the King to recover his power out of the hand of the Beast.’39 Charles I would no more have agreed that the Parliamentarians were fighting to rescue him than that he was in the power of Antichrist. The identification of the Pope with Antichrist goes back at least to Wyclif, and has a number of very diverse supporters—Bishops Ponet and Jewell, Martin Marprelate, the Elizabethan separatists Henry Barrow and Francis Johnson, Thomas Beard, William Ames, Archbishop Usher, Nicholas Ferrar, Bastwick and Lilburne, John Owen and John Milton. Not least of those who so denigrated his holiness was King James I, balanced in 1641 by the Root and Branch Petition.
Page 13 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution III Writers in the early seventeenth century were very conscious of the censorship (including that of private letters). In 1599 satires by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Marlowe, Marston, Nicholas Breton, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Davies were called in and burnt. In 1598 Chapman had observed that Thomas Hariot’s writing could not be published ‘now error’s night chokes earth with mists’. Hariot himself wrote to Kepler a few years later: ‘I still cannot philosophize freely. We are still stuck in the mud.’ John Everard in 1618 declared that ‘the liberty of the pulpit is too little, but that of the press…is much less’. ‘The times are dangerous, and the world grows tender and jealous of free speech’, said John Chamberlain in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton four years later. Censorship presents problems for the historian trying to assess literature for his purposes. But the breakdown of censorship in 1640, and its irregular presence between 1640 and 1660, offer us valuable material (p.391) which is lacking earlier and later. We can learn a lot from observing that Hobbes published no original work until 1642, when he was 54 years old. Laud was alleged to have refused licences to reprint religious classics like Luther’s Table Talk, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Bishop Jewell’s Apology for the Church of England, Bishop Bayly’s Practice of Piety, the last three books of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—and even the Geneva version of the Bible.40 Scientists like Hariot and Gilbert, Biblical scholars like Joseph Mede, did not publish. Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney was not published in the author’s lifetime, finally appearing in 1652. Other important works which had to wait until after 1640 include plays by Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Ford, Shirley, poems by George Herbert and Suckling, sermons by Donne, works by Bacon, Ralegh, and Coke, Camden, Hakewill, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Simonds D’Ewes. Harvey’s De Motu Cordis was printed in Germany in 1628; there was no English translation till 1653. His De Generatione was published both in Latin and English in 1651–3. Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores (1597), George Wither’s Psalms of David (1632), and all Thomas Brightman’s treatises interpreting the Biblical prophecies had to be published overseas.41 It is impossible to guess how many of these works were read in England before 1640. The penalties for infringing government publishing regulations were alarming. Corporal punishment was inflicted even on gentlemen and clergymen. George Wither was regularly in and out of prison. In the sixteen-thirties William Prynne lost his ears (twice): Henry Burton and William Bastwick lost theirs (once each). The Revd Alexander Leighton, in addition to having his ears cropped and his nose slit, was whipped, branded, and imprisoned for life. John Lilburne was flogged through the streets of London. A list of those who at one time or another were in trouble with the censor includes Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Marlowe, John Davies, Michael Drayton, George Herbert, Holinshed, Nashe, Selden, Sir Henry Spelman, Archbishop Ussher. Sir John Hayward was Page 14 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution imprisoned and threatened with torture for his First Part of the Life and Reigne of Henry IV. Sir Francis Hubert’s long poem on Edward II was forbidden publication in 1597, and modifications had to be made before it appeared in 1629. Drummond of Hawthornden rejoiced in the sixteen-forties that books were now appearing ‘which to read in the days of Queen Elizabeth and (p.392) King James was treason and capital’. After the Restoration the Royal Society had to collect the writings which Hariot had been unable to publish. Many Parliamentary speeches and political tracts from the reign of James I had been remembered and were reprinted in the sixteen-forties. This is a little difficult to square with Sir Geoffrey Elton’s denial of any ‘high road’ to the civil war. The Long Parliament ordered the publication of suppressed books by (among others) Mede, Ames, and John Hales. Two of David Paraeus’s works, ordered to be publicly burnt in 1622, were republished twenty-two years later. Many other books appeared which had been held up by ‘the malice of the clergy’, ‘the iniquity of the times’. What is difficult to assess is the effectiveness of the censorship. Its long arm extended even to those who had chosen exile, or who tried to publish abroad. Before 1640 seditious lower-class ideas could not legally get into print, except when they were being refuted.42 It is impossible to tell how many suppressed works were in fact read. Thomas Scott’s Vox Populi—smuggled in—went through five editions between 1621 and 1623: some indication of its popularity. Bownde’s treatise on the Sabbath doubled in price after suppression, ‘as commonly books are then most called for when they are called in’, as Fuller neatly put it. ‘It ran the faster from friend to friend in transcribed copies’—which tells us something of the ineffectiveness of censorship for books which were really in demand. It is confirmed by much other evidence. In terms of effectiveness, early seventeenthcentury censorship was like bows and arrows compared with atomic bombs. Sixty-five per cent of the books published in 1640 were apparently unlicensed— though admittedly that was in the first year of freedom. Despite the censorship, the stage managed to open up for discussion many issues which were to come to the surface after 1640. Shakespeare’s King Lear saw himself as ‘a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’, ‘a very foolish fond old man’. He suffered the fate of the poorest outcasts in his kingdom. He hardly fits the concept of the divine-right king. When the ruler had no divine inheritance to fall back on, it was the success with which his job was done that mattered—for example, in Coriolanus. In the sixteen-thirties the censor was especially careful to spot undesirable references to the poverty of the common people and the possibilities of revolt.43
Page 15 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution (p.393) Parliament closed the theatres in 1642, not because of puritanical religious prejudice but because the theatres were too radical for the Parliamentarians who had effectively taken over the government of London.44 M.P.s knew the power of the stage. For similar reasons they abolished bishops, but not lay patronage of livings or impropriations. Parliament was interested in freeing the gentry from the control of the central government, not in establishing freedom for ordinary people. Shakespeare’s ambivalent treatment of the arguments of lower-class rebels reminds me that historians and literary critics have not yet sufficiently considered the possibility that some of the clichés of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, not only of drama, may have been intended ironically—‘the great chain of being’, for instance, is defended too often and too urgently for us not to have doubts about its universal acceptance. So too with ‘Christian humanism’ and many other agreeable ideas which scholars have found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. I have tried to suggest some possibilities here in my ‘Censorship and English Literature’. But more work is necessary—also on the evasive techniques which writers used to circumvent the censorship. Walwyn offers instances of such irony—for example, mock-serious description of Thomas Edwards’s repentence and denunciation of ‘that liberty which plain men took to try and examine all things’.45 We could find plenty of intellectual origins if we restricted ourselves to reading Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—not because the playwrights were cryptorevolutionaries, but because they faithfully represented the reality of a society moving inexorably towards revolution. It was the society and its problems that created the theatre—not just the political problems which look forward to the English Revolution; what gives the dramatists their power is their realism, their ability to criticize, to reject, to re-create human relationships—as in King Lear. The theatre was often the scene of conflict within the audience. There was organized opposition to some plays—catcalls, disruption, and scuffles. It was because the theatre was the centre of public discussion of ideas, including ideas that look forward to the revolution, that made it worth while trying to destroy a play—or to defend it. The theatre was pulled different ways by royal censorship and box-office demands. The theatre—and literature generally—was only one of the scenes of the battle of ideas, of reformulation of attitudes. But the theatre (p.394) stimulated general—and novel—discussions about intellectual issues. Although there was no organized republican party, there were plenty of ideas subversive of traditional certainties, opening wider doors in religion, politics, and social relations. Pretences were torn away, shackles were shaken off Within limits the players were able to say in public what men thought privately. Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1984), indeed, explains the collapse of government and church in 1640 by ‘the undermining of these institutions’ by ‘a theatre in which Page 16 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution they and their ideological legitimation were subjected to sceptical, interrogative and subversive representation’. The crisis of confidence in those holding power is addressed in play after play.’46 Shakespeare’s skill as an interpreter of his age shows up especially in his crowd scenes of revolt. For our purposes his depiction of lower-class sedition is interesting. Cade and his like in 1 Henry VI are shown as ignorant and foolish; they are there for laughs, or to reinforce our disapproval of rebellious members of the lower orders, in order not to take them too seriously. ‘Break open the jails and let out the prisoners.’ ‘Kill all the lawyers.’ ‘Burn all the records of the realm.’ ‘The King’s Council are no good workers.’ ‘Let the magistrates be labouring men.’ ‘There shall be no money.’ ‘It was never merry world since gentlemen came up.’ Yet many of these apparently extreme sentiments were to be considered seriously by legal reformers in the sixteen-forties, and others were lower- class complaints of long standing. Shakespeare must have been a good listener. His peasants, from Henry VI to Coriolanus, are very class-conscious. In Hamlet, ‘there is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession’; and the rhyme of the rebels of 1381 is picked up: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman?’ In Richard II, Act II, scene 10, it is suggested that gardeners could run the state better than any present rulers. But sometimes, amid all the buffoonery, one of the rebels hits home at his betters. Cade’s ‘Because they could not read thou hast hanged them’ is in fact an accurate description of the way in which ‘benefit of clergy’ worked. Education, which only the rich could afford, gave them class privileges which enabled Oxford and Cambridge graduates literally to get away with murder if they could stumble through the ‘neck-verse’. When Cade said of Lord Saye and Sele, ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor’, he was drawing on the popular myth of the Norman (p.395) Yoke. It is difficult to think that Shakespeare was not conscious of what he was doing when he so frequently opened up questions which were to lead to revolutionary actions thirty years after his death. The contrast between the prosperity of enclosing landlords and the poverty of evicted tenants was sufficiently novel and blatant to be obvious to the former as well as to the latter. Already it was giving the upper classes cause for concern. And of course it is not only Shakespeare: characters in Marston’s Histriomastix (1610) claim ‘We come all of one father, Adam’, and this biblical sentiment is followed by demands for equality, and that ‘all shall be common,… wives and all’. The mad King Lear, because he is mad, can reveal the most outrageous social truths. He made many points which were to be repeated by sober radical critics when they were free to publish such sedition. ‘See how yon justice rails upon
Page 17 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution yon simple thief…Change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ ‘A dog’s obeyed in office.’ Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand, Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back: Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whip’st her…. Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. (Act IV, scene 6. See also: Act III, scene 2; Act II, scene 5, Act V, scene l)
In Coriolanus the rioters ask ‘What is the city but the people?’ The play shows that the ‘patriotism’ of Coriolanus and the patricians is self- and class-interested. For Coriolanus himself ideas of aristocratic honour are more important than patriotism. The play seems to offer only two alternatives when starving people revolt: beat them down (Coriolanus) or fool them into submission (Menenius). We should think a good deal more than we do about the prevalence of pastoral and allegory in this period. Some literary critics associate pastoral exclusively with the court. In fact Sidney justified allegory as ‘an enabling of freeborn spirits to the greatest affairs of state’. Spenser ‘chose the history of King Arthur as… furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of the present time’. The Spenserian succession of poets continued to use allegory as a cover, though this became superfluous after 1640. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, made his riskiest points by quoting classical authorities. Historians are familiar with (p.396) the use of extravagant praise of Elizabeth’s policies when the intention is to criticize James I or Charles I. Puritans were accused of taking up ‘a canting language…abusing phrases of Scripture, thereby to understand one another, to colour their seditious practices’. That too is worth thinking about. It has perhaps been insufficiently recognized by those who take the religious professions of seventeenth-century controversialists at their face value. I am not suggesting that early seventeenthcentury writers deliberately wrote in recognizable codes. But many of them wished to say things to which they knew the censor was likely to object, and so they adopted techniques calculated to evade his attention—or they could not have published at all. Some at least of their readers would be aware of this fact oflife. Professor Hexter usefully reminded historians that ‘sometimes a passage from an imaginative genius provides one with an intimacy of insight quite unattainable any other way’.47 But it is not only imaginative geniuses who can help us: off-the-cuff remarks by hack journalists or alehouse politicians can also
Page 18 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution reveal secrets concealed from scholars who think that the only valid evidence is that which has lain concealed in archives for three-and-a-half centuries. In 1559 John Knox assured William Cecil that all that was needed to establish concord between England and Scotland was the preaching of Christ crucified.48 Anxiety to further preaching in the dark corners of Wales and the North and West of England was no doubt motivated by religion; but economic considerations and concern for England’s national security also entered into the calculation. Bernard Gilpin, ‘The Apostle of the North’, pleaded in 1570 for an extension of religion to the dark corners of the land. ‘The money best laid out was, in his opinion, that which encouraged industry’—thus preventing the poor from sinking under the burden of debt.49 We perhaps fail to ponder sufficiently the role of the theatre in the decades before 1640. Plays were not new, but regular professional theatres in London were. Medieval drama had tended to confirm the known truths of existing authorities. The Shakespearean theatre was the product of a society undergoing changes focused on London, and it provided a forum in which social rights and wrongs could be discussed—as they were in Hamlet and King Lear. These problems would be familiar (p.397) to every citizen and to visitors to the capital. So familiar that we have taken them for granted. The theatre was indeed an ambiguous institution. James I prudently established considerable control over the theatres, but box-office considerations ensured that unorthodox opinions were heard on the stage. From the 1590s plays dealing with English history were forbidden: they might come too near to contemporary political problems, including the succession to Elizabeth. So dramatists turned to themes from classical antiquity, or located in Mediterranean countries, which nevertheless could be seen to have a bearing on England. The so-called ‘pretender plays’ of the 1630s, because the ruler in them had no divine status, could compare his actual performance with the expected conduct of a legitimate king. Writers remained concerned with contemporary affairs. Fulke Greville had to write his plays even if they could not be perforacprof: but he thought it wise not to publish them even though he placed the action in the Ottoman Empire. So although governments from James I onwards tried hard to control the theatre, playwrights were too subtle and indirect to be ruled by the censor. What mattered was not their words or phrases but their intellectual attitudes—about human problems as well as about affairs of state. Hamlet’s ‘The times are out of joint’ picks up the social and political anxieties of the last years of Queen Elizabeth: Macbeth was too powerful to be a subject, and yet remained in subjection. The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet were not far removed from the experience of Jacobean audiences.
Page 19 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution Shakespeare is so quotable because he listens to and speaks for the common man entering the commercial society in which we still live—with its virtues and paradoxes as well as its vices. But it was then a startlingly new society. The greatest poets of the age turned to the theatre, or the theatre gave greatness to those who turned to it. The theatre opened up political imaginations by its realism. Shakespeare must have talked to many sailors before writing The Tempest—another advantage of London’s metropolitan character. The fact that English players were invited to tour the continent acting in a language not well known outside England tells us something about the new status of actors, until recently vagabonds. Notes:
(1) On this see especially David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (1985), pp. x, 18, 178 and passim: and my ‘Literature and the English Revolution’, A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (1990). (2) Jewell, Works (Parker Society, Cambridge U.P., 1845–50), iii. 122. (3) Lawrence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640’, Past and Present, xxviii (July 1964). (4) See p. 348 above. (5) Christopher Harvey, Complete Poems (ed. A. B. Grosart, 1874), pp. 19–21. (6) See p. 10 above. (7) John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme (1642), in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, ii. 249. (8) Edwards, Gangraena, iii. 89–90. (9) See p. 344 above. (10) See p. 355 above. (11) W. M. Lamont, Godly Rule (1969), passim;cf. my Antichrist in nth-Century England (Oxford U.P., 1971), passim. (12) N. H. Mayfield, Puritans and Regicide: Presbyterian-Independent Differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) Stuart (1988), pp. 64, 108;cf. pp. 103–4. (13) Fussner, op. cit, pp. 48, 309. (14) Ibid., pp. 230, 283, 286, 298–309, 313, 316.
Page 20 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution (15) T. Lever, Sermons (ed. Arber, 1901), pp. 28–29; Whitgift, Works (Parker Society), i. 466. (16) Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, pp. 118–23; Spenser, Works (ed. A. Morris, 1924), p. 514. (17) Cooper, An Admonition to the People of England (ed. Arber, 1895, p. 9); ed. P. A. Kennedy, ‘Verses on the Puritan Settlement in North America, 1631’, in A Nottinghamshire Miscellany, Thoroton Soc, Record Series, xxi (1961). (18) T. Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, p. 275; F. Cheynell, The Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianisme (1643), p. 57. (18a) J. Sturgion, Queries for His Highness to Answer (1655), quoted by D. B. Heriot, ‘Absolutism in England during the 17th century’, Transactions of the Congregational History Society, xiii (1937–9), p. 29. (19) See the pioneering chapter, ‘The Popular Controversy over Women’, in L. B. Wright’s admirable Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (North Carolina U.P., 1935). (20) Vanbrugh, The Provok’d Wife, Act I, scene i. (21) See my Writing and Revolution, Chapters 1 and 2; A Nation of Change and Novelty, Chapters 10 and 11. (22) Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (ed. J. Hay ward, 1929). This and the following paragraphs draw on my ‘Literature and the English Revolution’, published in A Nation of Change and Novelty, where further details and full references may be found. Several articles in my Writing and Revolution in 17th-entury England are also relevant. (23) Herbert, Works, pp. 86, 94. (24) Vaughan, Works (ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford U.P., 1914), ii. 643; of. pp. 416–18, 476. (25) Heywood, Observations and Instructions, Divine and Mora II, in Verse (ed. J. Crossby, Chetham Society, 1869), p. 33. Heywood died in 1645, but his reputation as a poet dates from much earlier. (26) Greville, Mustapha, Act V, Chorus of Priests. As late as 1680 Richard Baxter was surprised that such dangerous ideas could be published. (27) For this see my Writing and Revolution in 17th-century England, pp. 22–25, where among others I quote Sibbes’s ‘a double eye as well as a double heart’ (p.
Page 21 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution 30). Cf. Joseph Hall: ‘Now Lord…set me at war with myself, that I may be at peace with thee’ (Works, 1827–9, viii. 147). (28) R. Helgerson, ‘Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature (ed. H. Dubrow and R. Strier, Chicago U.P., 1988), expanded in Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writings of England (Chicago U.P., 1992). (29) Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 104. (30) See my A Nation of Change and Novelty, pp. 202–6. (31) Op. cit. (3rd ed., 1635), esp. pp. 53, 73–74, 83–87, 152–3 and 331–46. (32) Op. cit. (3rd ed. 1635), pp. 7, 57, 63–64: (33) See esp. Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets: A Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry (1969); David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Revolution (1989); my ‘Literature and the English Revolution’ in A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), pp. 224–6, 236. See also p. 124 above. (34) See Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (ed. K. Sharpe and P. Lake), Chapter 3. (35) Brearley, ‘Self-civil war’, in A Bundle of Soul-convincing…and Comforting Truths (1671). Brearley died in 1637. The textual history is a little complicated. Sylvester’s ‘Auto-Machia: the Selfe Civil War’ (1607), was said to be translated from the Latin of George Goodwin (in Sylvester’s Complete Works (ed. A. B. Grosart, 1880), ii. 363). (36) D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 60, quoting Ash brook. (37) Cf. Chapter 11 above. (38) Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme (1642), in Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, ii. (39) Cheynell, Sions Memento and Gods Alarum, Fast Sermons, vi. 208. (40) My Writing and Revolution, p. 37. On pp. 39–40 I list sixteen playwrights who suffered in one way or another from Elizabethan or early Stuart censorship. There are, I am sure, many more. (41) See my Writing and Revolution, Chapter 2, for further examples. (42) Sec my ‘Censorship and English Literature’ in Writing and Revolution, Chapter 2. Page 22 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Literature and Revolution (43) M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (1980), p. 142. Cf. my ‘Literature and the English Revolution’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty, pp. 205–12; ‘The Restoration and Literature’, Ibid., pp. 220–2. (44) Heinemann, op. cit, pp. 235–6, made this important point. (45) Walwyn, A Prediction of Mr. Edwards his Conversion and Recantation (1646), in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, iii. 343. Cf. my ‘Censorship’ in Writing and Revolution, pp. 55–62. (46) Op. cit., p. 4. (47) J. M. Hexter, ‘Property, Monopoly and Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Culture and Politics (ed. P. Zagorin, California U.P., 1980), p. 18. (48) See p. 357 above. For Knox see index. (49) William Gilpin, The Life of Bernard Gilpin (2nd ed., 1753), pp. 191–2.
Access brought to you by:
Page 23 of 23
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
Postscript to the Revised Edition Christopher Hill
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.003.0020
Abstract and Keywords There seems to have been a generation gap between those who accepted the new ideas and those who rejected them, as one can see in John Milton's relationship to his father. However, John Milton senior died in 1647, when his son had published only one small volume of poems. He was better known as the author of controversial divorce pamphlets, and of Areopagitica. However he had not yet won the political fame that was to be his in the sixteen-fifties, consequent on his remarkable success as defender of the English Revolution, whose achievements he claimed as ‘the most heroic and exemplary… since the foundation of the world’, apparently not excepting the life and death of Christ. So Milton's father had not known of his son's fame to come, when foreigners thought ‘learned Mr. Milton’ the next most important sight in England after Oliver Cromwell; nor of his defeat and degradation in 1660, when he nearly suffered a traitor's death. Keywords: John Milton, relationship, father, Areopagitica, English Revolution, England, Oliver Cromwell
AN IMPORTANT article by Wilfrid Prest identifying some manuscripts by William Lambarde unfortunately appeared too late for me to take account of them in the first edition of this book (Journal of British Studies, 34, Oct. 1995). One manuscript annotated ‘Against Auricular information of Judges: 1590: W.La.’ denounces attempts to influence judges out of court, and the readiness of some judges to listen to private informers’. Lambarde assumed that ‘some judges might seem to defend and justify the receipt of private information about suits in progress before them’. Judges, he thought, should refuse to listen to private Page 1 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Postscript to the Revised Edition informers not directly involved in the case. Lambarde died in 1601. Two nearly identical versions of his manuscripts were published, in 1631 and 1642, though neither specifically identifies him as the author. The 1642 edition was attributed to ‘W.L., Esq.’. The year 1642 was an interesting one in which to publish ‘radical and indeed revolutionary’ proposals for legal changes which, in Professor Prest’s words, ‘prefigure those of mid-seventeenth-century Puritan barrister law reformers’ (p. 476). As Prest insists, ‘the posthumous printing of Lambarde’s tracts points to an underlying continuity of concern with the system’s shortcomings, from at least the 1590s until…1642, and beyond’, and is ‘a salutory corrective to recent historiographical fashion’, influenced by Sir Geoffrey Elton (p. 478–9). There may not have been ‘a high road to civil war’ but many converging by-ways led in that direction. There seems to have been a generation gap between those who accepted the new ideas and those who rejected them, as we can see in Milton’s relationship to his father, in Samson Agonistes (1647–53) and Poems (p. 33). Manoa may recall the elder John Milton. Ad Patrem, written by Milton at some time in the 1630s, shows John Milton senior as a sympathetic and understanding though not uncritical father. He had not told his son to earn lots of money (as he himself had done), nor had he forced him to become a lawyer, as the younger brother Christopher had. John senior either had financed, or was to finance John (p.399) Junior’s leisured studies at Horton, and his Italian journey in 1638–9. Milton had urged his father, a talented musician, not to despise the muse of poetry, and claimed that he had already acquired a lowly standing among the learned.1 But John Milton senior died in 1647, when his son had published only one small volume of poems. He was better known as the author of controversial divorce pamphlets, and of Areopagitica. But he had not yet won the political fame that was to be his in the sixteen-fifties, consequent on his remarkable success as defender—before the whole European intelligentsia—of the English Revolution, whose achievements he claimed as ‘the most heroic and exemplary…since the foundation of the world’, apparently not excepting the life and death of Christ. So Milton’s father had not known of his son’s fame to come, when foreigners thought ‘learned Mr. Milton’ the next most important sight in England after Oliver Cromwell; nor of his defeat and degradation in 1660, when he nearly suffered a traitor’s death. What would John Milton have thought of his son if he had lived longer? How would the son have justified his career? He had abandoned the church, in which he might have become a bishop; he had escaped the law, in which his royalist younger brother was doing well, and would ultimately become Sir Christopher. Were John’s twenty years of political activity wasted? Before Samson Agonistes was published in 1671 he had written Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (also Page 2 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Postscript to the Revised Edition published in 1671), with which he knew he could be well satisfied. But would they have satisfied his father? In Samson Agonistes Manoa thought that his son, Samson, should have chosen the path of surrender to and compromise with the Philistine enemy. Is Manoa more like Sir Christopher? Did Milton think his greatest triumphs were still to come—the De Doctrina Christiana, for instance, his best and dearest possession? Could Samson Agonistes be seen as a poem about the education of Manoa as well as of Samson and the Chorus? Manoa was proud of his son’s politico-military triumphs: That invincible Samson, far renowned, The dread of Israel’s foes…who single combatant Duelled their armies ranked in proud array Himself an army. (341–6)
(p.400) That could refer to Milton’s victory over Salmasius too. But Manoa now wished that his prayer for a son had not been answered (352–67). He could not praise his son’s marriage choices; what did John Milton senior think of his son’s marriage to the daughter of a royalist? In the tragedy Manoa is concerned only to win as much safety and comfort for his stricken son as possible: Act not in thy own affliction, son, Repent the sin, but of the punishment Thou canst avoid, self-preservation bids.
He must implore mercy, sue for life (503–12). (That was no doubt the advice the future Sir Christopher gave to John Junior in 1661.) For his redemption all my patrimony If need be, I am ready to forgo. (147–84)
Manoa wanted Samson to accept defeat, to compromise with the world. But Samson knows that all the contest is now Twixt God and Dagon. (461–2)
Manoa finally came to see that his son was right. He learns, in the course of the tragedy, what Adam learnt from his preview of human history, by small Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak Subverting worldly strong. (Paradise Lost, xii. 566–9) Page 3 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Postscript to the Revised Edition The Philistines came to destruction because of their own boastful triumphing, their temptation of God. As the Chorus put it, So virtue, given for lost, Depressed, and overthrown, as seemed… Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most inactive deemed. (1697–705)
So the tragedy may be not only about the re-education of the Chorus, those confused, rather worldly supporters of Samson’s defeated Cause. It may also be continuing the re-education of John Milton senior, begun in Ad Patrem. Christopher, I fear, was no longer educable. Notes:
(1) W. R. Parker, Milton, A Biography (Oxford U.P., 1968), i. pp. 125–42; my Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 43–49.
Access brought to you by:
Page 4 of 4
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited Christopher Hill
Print publication date: 1997 Print ISBN-13: 9780198206682 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206682.001.0001
(p.401) Index Abbott, George, Archbishop of Canterbury 19, 23, 64, 89, 146, 160, 290 Aboyne, James Gordon, Viscount 7 absolutism 12, 136, 246, 287, 295, 297, 306, 314, 323, 359, 362–3, 368–71, 374 Acontius, Jacobus 92, 157 Adam 136, 334, 340, 395 Adams, William 61 Admiralty, Court of 158, 210, 212–14, 220 Africa 348 agrarian revolution 319–20, 323, 356 alchemy, alchemists 8–9, 23, 34, 66, 79, 81–2, 86, 110, 128, 130, 132–4, 241, 247, 265 Alexander the Great 143, 174 algebra 126 Algiers 142, 348 All Hallows, London 51 allegory 395 Allen, Thomas 95, 130, 134, 148, 155, 277 Allen, William, Cardinal 320 almanacs, almanac makers 19, 41, 45–7, 52–3, 57, 59, 105–6, 128 Alvey, Henry 247 Amboyna, Massacre of 12 America: colonization of 11–12, 61, 118–20, 122, 139–40, 143, 146, 389 discovery of 9, 120, 122, 346, 376 American Revolution 286, 349, 375 Ames, William 98, 104, 193, 239, 252, 260, 329, 390, 392 Amsterdam 261 Anabaptists 10, 70, 83, 253, 324, 330, 333, 383 anatomy 23, 26, 34, 47, 50–1, 56, 62, 69, 71, 83, 102, 110, 127, 179, 191, 270–1, 276, 280 Ancients, the 4, 12–13, 28, 41, 47, 59–60, 81–2, 121, 128, 132, 164, 179, 181, 199, 264, 292, 308, 344, 382 Page 1 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop of Winchester 12, 89 Andrews, Richard 58 Anger, Jane 244 Anglo-Saxons 180, 229, 313, 362–3, 387 Anne of Denmark, Queen of England 26, 131 Annesley, Sir Arthur 90 Antichrist 23, 82, 140, 160, 294, 300, 302, 312, 329, 358, 365, 380, 390 antinomianism 316 Antiquaries, Society of 47, 155, 159, 178, 191, 361 Antwerp’s Bourse 250 apothecaries 65, 70, 72–6, 131, 211, 309 Apothecaries, Society of 56, 68 Apprentices, Statute of 210 apprenticeship 48, 68, 72, 75 Apsley, Lady 131 Archer, John 302 Archimedes 50 architecture 22, 387 Argent, John 110 Aristoteleans 30, 50, 59, 72, 86, 132, 152 Aristotle 18, 27, 34–5, 50–1, 59, 72, 81–2, 86, 107, 111, 116, 132–3, 157, 163, 169, 171, 174, 183, 260, 263, 269–70, 275, 280, 344 arithmetic 18, 33, 36, 42, 56–8, 63, 271 Armada, the Spanish 11, 31–2, 61, 85, 120, 143, 156, 162, 320, 387 Arminians 42, 52, 178, 252, 260, 272 Army, New Model 65, 182, 226, 233, 238, 259, 314, 338, 355–6 army, standing 176, 289, 293 Arnold, Matthew 167 Arthur, King 229 artificers, artisans 7, 10–11, 16–18, 20–1, 26, 28, 56, 59–60, 62–3, 67, 70, 78–81, 85–6, 99, 108–11, 113–14, 116, 133, 163, 180, 199, 234, 242–3, (p.402) 257, 260–1, 264–5, 285, 308, 310, 324, 343, 356 Ascham, Roger 262 Ashley, Robert 63 Aston, Sir Thomas 251, 298, 334 astrology 8, 23, 34, 41, 45, 62, 72, 83, 130, 132, 134, 241, 265 astronomy 9, 16, 20, 23–5, 27, 32–3, 35–7, 41, 45–7, 49–50, 54–7, 59, 62–3, 65–7, 83, 86, 97, 103, 106, 110, 124–8, 134, 164, 241, 252, 270–2, 275, 277–80, 345 atheism 60, 72, 83, 114, 118, 129, 152, 154–5, 162, 166, 170, 388 Athens 47 Atlantic Ocean 143, 199 atomism 63, 130 Attaway, Mrs. 5, 342 d’Aubigné, Théodore Agrippa 249 Aubrey, John 41, 43, 50, 106, 130, 134–5, 156, 189 Audley, Lord 12 Austin, Samuel 388 Austria 366 Aylmer, John Bishop of London 294 Page 2 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Bacon, Lady Alice, Francis’s wife, see St. Albans, Viscountess Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans 4, 11–12, 15–16, 25, 30–1, 47, 49–51, 63, 65–8, Chapter 3 passim, 122, 124–5, 128, 131–2, 134, 136, 139, 142, 156–7, 162–4, 166–7, 172, 177–81, 185–7, 189–93, 195–202, 204–8, 212, 218–31, 234–52, 255, 257–60, 263–6, 275, 293, 308–11, 333, 354–6, 383, 391 Bacon, Nathaniel 188, 363 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, Francis’s father 124 Baddiley, Captain William 45, 188 Baffin, William 19, 63 Bagg’s Case 225 Bagot, Sir Anthony 118 Bainbridge, Jeremiah 56, 279 Baker, Matthew 16 Balaam’s Ass 167 Bale, John, Bishop of Ossory 241 Balliol College, Oxford 272, 281 ballistics 20 ballot, secret 146 Baltic Sea 139 Bancroft, Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury 10, 51, 203, 220, 222, 248, 254, 295, 297, 332, 343 Bánffyhunyadi (Hans Hunneades) 53–4, 95 Bannister, John 69 Banos, Theophilus de 120 Barber-Surgeons’ Company 56, 68, 70–1, 76 Barber-Surgeons’ Hall 47, 56, 76 Barclay, John 204 Barclay, Robert 342 Barlow, William 36, 38, 60, 64, 192 Barnes, Alderman George 32 Barnes, Ambrose 188 Barrett, William 52 Barrington, Sir Thomas 90 Barrow, Henry 329, 390 Barrow, Isaac 273, 329 Bartas, Guillaume Salluste du 192, 249, 304 Bastwick, John 90, 242, 252, 279, 373, 384, 390 Bastwick, William 391 Bate’s Case 178, 219 Bath MSS 155 Baxter, Nathaniel 120 Baxter, Richard 8, 104, 122, 262, 285, 300, 305, 342 Bayley, Lewis, Bishop of Bangor 13, 242, 391 Beard, Dr. Thomas 161, 187, 240, 390 Beaumont (and Fletcher) 11, 257 Bedell, William, Bishop of Kilmore 191, 247, 279 Bedford 384 Bedford, Francis Russell, Earl of 90, 214 Bedford, Lucy Russell, née Harrington, Countess of 191, 193 Page 3 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Bedingfield, Thomas 183 Bedwell, Thomas 41 Bedwell, William 24, 41, 46, 53, 58, 62, 171, 260 Beedome, Thomas 239 Behn, Aphra 245 Bell, H.E. 318 Bellers, John 291 Benlowes, Edward 189 Berkenhead, Sir John 115 Bermuda Company 53 Bermuda Islands 53 Bessus 143 Best, Chief Justice 227 (p.403) Beza, Theodore 254 Bible 4, 8–9, 11, 14, 28, 41, 45, 52, 60, 82, 95, 102, 143, 154, 167–8, 170, 173, 197, 225– 8, 230, 246, 264–5, 286, 288, 299, 303, 306, 308, 315–16, 328, 332, 344, 353, 355, 377, 379–83, 387–8, 391, 396 the Geneva 352–3 Biddle, John 278, 342 Biggs, Noah 75, 110, 265 billeting 211 Billingsley, Sir Henry 18–20, 42, 92, 111, 155 biology 54, 128 Birch, Thomas 195 Birmingham 57 Blackstone, Sir William 227 Blackwood, Adam 362 Blagrave, John 36 Blagrave, Joseph 306 Blake, Admiral Robert 50, 142 Blasphemy Ordinance 342 Blundell, William 351–3 Blundeville, Thomas 29, 36, 38, 156–7, 272 Bodin, Jean 134, 164, 171, 183, 211 Bodleian Library, Oxford 11, 24, 33, 194 Bodley, Sir Thomas 24, 178 Bohemia 254 Boleyn, Anne 314 Bolsheviks, the 287, 375 Bolton, Edmund 193 Bolton, Edward 123 Bond, Henry 44, 46, 57 Bonham’s Case 69–70, 210–11 Book of Sports 290 Booker, John 47 Boorde, Andrew 45, 68–9, 156, 263 Borough, Stephen 21 Borough, William 21, 36, 56, 66 Bostock, Richard 25, 28, 72, 133 Page 4 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index botany 37, 44, 62, 71, 169, 252, 270 Botero, Giovanni 183 Bourne, William 16, 21, 24, 58 Bowles, Edward 334 Bownde, Nicholas 117, 392 Boyle, the Hon. Robert 8, 67, 84, 92, 95–6, 98, 113–15, 131–2, 156, 265 Bradbrook, Miss M. C. 196 Bradford, Governor William 161 Bradshaw, William 306 Brahe, Tycho 24, 106, 108, 127 Brasenose College, Oxford 128, 280 Brearley, Roger, of Grindleton 388 Brereton, Sir William 252 Brerewood, Edward 47–8, 54–6, 155, 272 Bretnor, Thomas 46 Breton, Nicholas 390 Bridge, William 252 Briggs, Henry 35–44, 46–7, 49–52, 56–7, 80, 90, 95, 111, 126, 128, 145, 192, 194, 258, 260, 264, 272, 276–7 Bright, Timothy 62, 68, 120, 160, 278 Brightman, Thomas 295, 391 Brill, Buckinghamshire 97 Bristol 57, 111 Britons, ancient 229 Brooke, Christopher 388 Brooke, Robert Greville, Lord 90, 94, 104, 158, 187, 207, 228, 240, 252, 276, 328, 330 Brooke, Samuel 52 Broughton, Hugh 102, 153 Browne, Robert 102, 254, 329 Browne, Sir Thomas 132, 156, 189, 197, 252, 317, 382 Browne, William 13, 124, 194, 386, 388–9 Brownists 153, 373 Bruno, Giordano 9, 20, 22, 37, 47, 67, 121, 127, 133, 270, 273, 345 Brushfield, T. N. 183 Brutus legend 171, 229 Buc, Sir George 57, 155, 159 Buchanan, George 4, 121–2, 135, 254–5, 358–60 Buckingham, Sir George Villiers, Duke of 19, 55, 84, 89, 101, 193, 214, 217, 256, 279, 368–9, 371, 373 Buckinghamshire 277, 301 Bull, John 33, 192 Bullein, William 23, 162 Bunyan, John 102, 117, 188, 264, 315, 379 Burges, Anthony 97, 104, 279 Burges, Cornelius 275 Burges, John 193, 252 Burleigh, Lord, see Cecil, William Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury 109, 113, 262 Burrough, Edward 109 Page 5 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Burroughs, Jeremiah 295, 334 Burton, Henry 275, 302, 391 Burton, Robert 10, 12, 63, 74, 120, 130, 233, 238, 250, 270, 273, 304, 373, 382, 384, 395 Bush, Professor Douglas 116, 197 Bushell, Thomas 105 (p.404) Butler, Samuel 112, 305, 331 Butterfield, Professor Herbert 4, 100, 220 Button, Thomas 63, 194 Byfield, Nicholas 48 Bylot, Robert 63 Caesar, Sir Julius 321 Caius, John 71 Caius College, Cambridge 37, 272, 279 Calamy, Edmund 341 calendar, Gregorian 19, 241 Calvin, Jean 4, 52, 82, 84, 120, 133, 165, 253, 255, 260, 340, 352 Calvinism 10, 42, 53–4, 82, 90, 111, 129, 158, 247, 252–5, 260–1, 272, 340–1 Cambridge, University of 11, 16–18, 30, 33, 35, 48–9, 51–5, 57, 59, 75, 87, 91, 109–12, 114, 157–8, 178–81, 239, 241, 247, 250–2, 260, 268–71, 273–7, 364, 378, 394 Cambridge Platonists 91, 111, 279 Camden, William 11, 58, 158–9, 166, 228, 276, 388, 391 Campanella, Tommaso 27 Campion, Thomas 11 Canne, John 330 canons: (1604) 36, 75, 203–4, 294 (1606) 203 (1640) 275, 295 capitalism 261, 289, 319, 325, 351, 381, 383 Carew, Richard 122 Carew, Thomas 12 Carey, W. 203 Carleton, Sir Dudley, Viscount Dorchester 178, 309 Carlisle, Lucy Hay, née Percy, Countess of 128 Carpenter, Nathanael 188, 272–3, 281 Carr, E. H. 164 Carthage 144, 182 cartography 37–8, 124 Cartwright, Thomas 23, 120, 252–3, 329 Castelvetro, Giacopo 129, 191 casuistry 352 Catholics, Roman 12, 23–6, 28–9, 33, 83, 100, 130, 140, 153–4, 168, 222, 257, 261, 264, 286, 297, 300–1, 305–7, 324, 331, 344, 350–1, 354, 359, 366–7, 373–4 causes, first and second 23, 72, 86, 98, 112, 136, 162–3, 166–8, 171, 198, 260 Cavendish, Henry 37, 66 Cawdrey’s Case 220 Cecil, Sir Robert, Lord Cranbourne and Earl of Salisbury 139, 155, 197, 205, 249, 273, 320, 337, 359 Page 6 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Cecil, Sir William, Lord Burleigh 29 Cecil, William 396 Cellier, Elizabeth 76 censorship 11, 14, 22–3, 27, 30–1, 47, 86–7, 106–7, 110, 127, 242, 255, 293, 338–9, 344, 390–3, 396–7 Chaderton, Lawrence 260, 279 Chaldeans 169 Chaloner, Sir Thomas, the Elder 191 Chaloner, Sir Thomas, the Younger 89, 191 Chaloner, Thomas, regicide 191 Chamberlain, John 214, 337, 390 Chamberlen, Peter, the Elder (d. 1631) 26, 68, 70 Chamberlen, Peter, the Younger (1601–83) 26, 58, 74, 108, 133, 279 Chancery 203, 213–14, 217, 220, 310 Channel, the English 289 Chapman, George 11, 127–9, 141, 192, 194–5, 238, 390–1 Charles I, King of England 6–7, 16, 19, 26, 40, 54–5, 89, 91–2, 95, 98, 109, 122, 142–3, 145–6, 158–9, 173, 178, 186, 189, 204–5, 213, 216, 218–19, 228, 234, 240, 251, 255–6, 279, 288–9, 293, 296–8, 302, 307, 317, 319, 325, 336, 338, 360, 363–4, 367–74, 381, 388, 396 Charles II, King of England 26, 94, 112, 299, 321, 374 Charleton, Walter 3, 106, 278 Charron, Pierre 171 Chatham 46, 57 Chaucer, Geoffrey 387 Chelmsford 332, 334 Chelsea College 94 chemistry 8, 27, 37, 72, 106–7, 110, 128, 131–3, 156, 179, 181, 241, 252, 265, 272 Cheshire 298 Chestlin, Francis 294 Cheynell, Francis 297, 313, 383, 390 Child, Robert 247, 252 Childrey, Joshua 106 Chiliasts 180 Chillingworth, William 6 China 376 (p.405) Christianity 305, 346, 376 Christ’s College, Cambridge 279 chronology 9, 66, 109, 170, 170–1, 278 church courts 75, 203, 211–12, 220–2, 228, 231, 279, 290, 293, 302, 309, 331, 344, 353 Church of England 5, 7, 10, 14, 25, 30, 48, 115, 160, 203, 211, 229, 235, 253, 257, 259, 268–70, 290, 293–7, 300, 302, 309, 312–13, 324, 327, 329, 342, 358, 373 Churchyard, Thomas 119 Cicero, M. Tullius 27, 121 Clare, John Holies, Earl of 186 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 54, 158, 166, 222, 281, 294, 296, 310–11, 321 class, social 8, 45, 81, 131, 173, 226, 234, 238, 240, 244, 261, 265, 281, 285, 296, 301, 304–6, 309–10, 318–20, 322, 324, 328, 331–5, 340, 342–3, 347, 354, 376, 378–80, 387, 392–5 Page 7 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index classics 8, 27, 30, 50, 59, 124, 246, 379, 387 Claydon House 348 Clayton, Thomas 37 Cleaver, Robert 24, 304, 306 Cleland, John 191 clergy 7, 87, 112–13, 290, 293–7, 312–14, 322–5, 333, 335, 342, 352, 369, 378–80, 391 Cleveland, John 339 clothing industry 149, 289 Clotworthy, Sir John 90 Clowes, William 29, 34, 69, 71 Coad, John 354 Cokayne project 12, 88 Coke, Sir Edward 4, 11–12, 40, 57, 68, 72, 87–8, 107, 134, 145, 156, 159–60, 170, 186, 196, Chapter 5 passim 237, 241–3, 247, 249, 255–9, 264, 308–11, 355, 359, 361–3, 387, 391 Coke, Elizabeth, see Hatton, Lady Coke, Frances, Lady Villiers 202 Coke, Roger 222 Coke, Sir John 293 Cole, Humphrey 16, 119 Cole, William 232, 251 Coligny, Gaspard de 248 Collier, Jeremy 295 Collins, Samuel 252 Collinson, Patrick 358 Collop, John 28, 339, 382 Columbus, Christopher 199 Comenian group 41–2, 90–7, 115, 262 Comenius, John Amos 53, 111, 116, 179, 189, 245, 252, 260, 266, 275 comets 62, 126, 166, 277 Commissioners, Parliamentary 45, 50, 54, 276 Commons, House of 89, 91, 93–4, 97, 145–7, 160, 186, 201, 203, 226, 228, 233–5, 255, 294–5, 309, 313, 317, 319, 324, 335–6, 353, 361–3 Commonwealth 41, 75, 92, 95, 105, 108–9, 111, 122, 156, 165, 173, 177, 192, 215, 232– 3, 280, 289, 364–5, 382 communism 329, 353, 382–3 congregation 102, 312–13, 324, 327–8, 332, 343, 377 Conley, C. H. 27–8 Conquest, Norman 313–14, 361, 365, 387 Contarini, Venetian ambassador 367–70 contract theology 239–40, 260 Convocation of Canterbury 53, 280 Cook, John 108 Cooper, Bishop 294, 333, 382 Cooper, Thomas 300–1 Copernicanism 21, 27, 30, 41, 46–7, 106, 113, 170, 192, 345 Copernicus, Nicholas 6, 8, 19–21, 24–5, 27, 30, 45–7, 50, 59, 90, 100, 106, 108, 113, 132–4, 170, 189, 241, 263, 276, 345 Coppe, Abiezer 200, 316, 341 Page 8 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Coppin, Richard 330, 342 copyholders 210, 231, 289, 302, 310, 318, 321–2, 324–5, 356 Corbet, Clement 52 Corbet, Miles 52 Corbett, Richard, Bishop of Oxford 62 Cork, Richard Boyle, Earl of 132, 172 Cornwall 66, 215 Cornwallis, Sir Charles 191, 249 Cornwallis, Sir William 191 corporal punishment 391 Corporations, Case of 210 Corpus Christi College, Oxford 275–6 Correr, Anzolo 371–3 Corsair Republics 348–9 Coryate, Thomas 192 cosmography 29, 35, 45, 57, 59, 61, 124, 127–8, 192, 264, 269, 271, 275, 277 Costello, W. T. 269–70 Cotta, John 72 Cotton, John 239 (p.406) Cotton, Sir Robert 135, 155, 159, 171–2, 186, 191, 301, 363 Counter-Reformation 17, 26 courage 174 Court, the Royal 13–14, 118, 151, 184–5 covenant theology 259–60 Coventry 45 Cowell, Dr. John 52, 203–5, 235 Cowley, Abraham 117, 339 Crab, Roger 330 Crabbe, George 188 craftsmen, see artificers Cranbourne, Lord, see Cecil, Sir Robert Crashawe, William 52, 145, 192 Croke family 55 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector 4, 40, 61, 65, 74, 91, 93, 98–9, 101, 105, 107–8, 112, 114, 117, 135, 142, 145, 147, 149, 161, 173, 175, 181, 187, 194, 198, 214, 216, 230, 234–5, 238, 247–8, 280, 287–8, 293, 296, 301, 306, 321, 330, 383–4, 399 Cromwell, Richard, Lord Protector 61, 98, 187 Cromwell, Sir Oliver 145 Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex 238, 263, 288 Croome, William 58 Crowley, Robert 305–6, 375 Crowne, Johnny 239 cryptography 129 Cudworth, James 91 Cudworth, Mrs., née Machell, later Mrs. John Stoughton 192 Cudworth, Ralph 60, 91, 192, 279 Culpeper, Nicholas 28, 65, 70, 72–4, 107, 109–10, 133, 309 Cumberland, George Clifford, Earl of 37, 147 Cunningham, William 29, 45, 62, 71 Page 9 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Curtis, Professor Mark H. 268–81 Cushman, Robert 169 custom 223–4 cyclical theory 164, 176, 179–80 Dalton, Michael 218 Daniel, Samuel 11, 159, 183, 386–8 Daniell, David 312, 350 Danvers, Sir John 202 Darcy, Sir William 193 Darwin, Charles 132 Davenant, Sir William 270, 289, 329 Davenport, John 90, 275 Davies, John, of Hereford 194, 388, 390–1 Davila, H. C. 4, 248 Davis, John 31, 40, 44 Deal 57 death 199–200, 257 Dee, John 8, 18–22, 24, 28, 30, 32, 44–5, 53, 58–9, 62–3, 66, 79–80, 92, 111, 119, 124, 126, 130, 133–4, 142, 155–6, 241, 271 deference 329, 340 Defoe, Daniel 117, 188 Dekker, Thomas 11, 13, 58, 382, 391 Delamain, Richard 42 Dell, William 101, 104, 107, 110–11, 251, 315, 331, 340 Deloney, Thomas 11, 13, 382 democracy 231, 286, 342–3, 356 Democritus 130 Denmark 95 Denne, Henry 330 Dent, Arthur 13, 238 Deptford 39–40, 44 Derby, James Stanley, Earl of 188 Dering, Sir Edward 334 Descartes, René 27, 34, 61, 126, 157, 264 destiny 240, 258, 265 Devon 215 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds 185, 246, 273, 336, 391 Dickens, A. G. 338–9 Diderot, Denis 3, 6 Digby, Sir Kenelm 44, 53, 92, 131, 134, 189, 277 Digby, Venetia, née Stanley 44 Diggers 4, 103, 116, 232, 265, 305, 316, 342 Digges, Sir Dudley 19–20, 24, 44, 63, 80, 116, 146, 156 Digges, Leonard 19, 22, 45, 282 Digges, Thomas 19–22, 32, 45–6, 119, 133–4 Diodati, Theodore 26, 252 divorce 353 Dod, John (Decalogue) 117, 304, 306 Dolman, John 27 Page 10 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Donne, John 9–12, 145, 189, 194, 197, 384–6, 391 Dorislaus, Isaac 54, 157–9, 250, 252, 364 Dover 19, 57 Downham, George 24, 260 Downing, Calibute 254 Dowsing, William 315 Drake, Sir Francis 18, 32, 37, 64, 66, 389 (p.407) drama 11, 13, 30, 58, 120, 156, 243–4, 292, 378, 383, 392–7 Drant, Thomas 124 Draperies, New 139 Drayton, Michael 9–10, 11, 159, 194–5, 303, 388, 390–1 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 9, 188, 194, 197, 391 Dugdale, Sir William 249 Dunkirk 143 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe 122, 249 Duport, James 275 Durham 98 Durham, College of 98, 251, 278 Dury, John 48, 77, 90–8, 105, 107, 114, 157, 165, 192, 239, 248, 252, 275 Dyer, Sir Edward 119–20, 123–4 Dyer, Sir James 207 Earle, John, Bishop of Salisbury 116, 260, 273 East Anglia 249 East India Company 11, 19, 32, 38–9, 57, 63–4, 143, 194, 1433 Eastland Company 96 Eden, Richard 63 Eden, Thomas 55 Edinburgh 38, 108 Edinburgh, University of 247 education 32, 35, 42, 45, 54–5, 285, 293, 333, 377–8, 394 Edward, St., the Confessor 361, 365 Edward II, King of England 61, 391 Edward VI, King of England 22, 241, 278, 338, 347, 357, 389 Edwards, Charles 106 Edwards, Thomas 91, 324–5, 338, 380, 393 Egerton, Sir Thomas, Lord Ellesmere 219, 227, 246 Eikon Basilike 7 Eliot, Sir John 4, 90, 104, 172, 175, 182, 186, 205, 230, 238, 241, 248 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 7, 13, 18–19, 23, 28–9, 31, 37, 46–7, 58, 60, 64, 69, 77, 88–9, 118, 124, 141–3, 145, 149, 153, 159–60, 173, 189, 193, 195, 201, 206, 212, 232, 246, 253–4, 278, 307, 317, 320, 338, 359–61, 367, 381, 383–4, 387, 389, 391, 396–7 Elizabeth, Princess Palatine and Queen of Bohemia 26 Ellesmere, Lord, see Egerton, Sir Thomas Elliott, Benjamin 276 Elton, Edward 306 Elton, Professor Geoffrey 335, 339, 392, 398 Elyot, Sir Thomas 28 Emmanuel College, Cambridge 24, 45, 59, 91, 97, 247, 278–80 Empiricus, Sextus 166, 183 Page 11 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index enclosure 303–5, 324, 327, 333–4, 351, 389, 395 Encyclopaedists, French 265 Enlightenment 291 Ent, George 279 Epicurus 130 equality 101, 238, 245, 298, 315, 327, 333, 335, 383, 395 Erasmus, Desiderius 191 Erbery, William 380 Escluse, Charles de l’ 252 Essex 299, 334, 372 Essex, Robert Devereux, second Earl of 119, 127, 137, 153 Essex, Robert Devereux, third Earl of 90, 153, 240 Euclid 18, 28, 50 Evans, Arise 303 Eve 340 Evelyn, John 156 Everard, John 390 Exchange, Royal 33, 250, 258 Exeter 111, 305 Exeter College, Oxford 178, 244, 272 exiles, Marian 23–4, 54, 147, 288 experiment 8, 18, 20, 28, 34, 36, 41, 60, 78, 93, 101–2, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 131, 157, 261–2, 264–5, 269, 272, 308, 344–6 Eyre, Adam 187 Fabyan, Robert 155 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, Lord 98, 248 fairies 106 Falkland, Henry Cary, Viscount 159 Fall of man 80–2, 112, 133, 178, 180, 198–9, 340–1 familists 343 famine 320, 327 Farnsworth, Richard 330 Farrington, Professor Benjamin 79 Fathers, early Christian 132, 387 Featley, Daniel 275 Fell, Margaret 331 (p.408) Fenner, Dudley 30, 239, 260 fens, drainage of 88, 214–16, 304, 327, 334, 378 feoffees for Impropriations 90 Ferne, Henry 362–3 Fernel, Jean 33–4, 69, 72, 189 Ferrabosco, Alfonso 196 Ferrar, Nicholas 13, 40, 51, 103, 362, 390 feudal tenure 210, 288–9, 291, 302, 314, 318–26, 333, 351–2, 356 Field, Dr. John 45 Field, John, Puritan 254, 298 Fielding, Henry 101 Fifth Monarchists 235, 240, 306 Filmer, Sir Robert 136, 189, 248, 251, 253, 359 Page 12 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index finance 289, 291, 321–2, 325–6, 335, 354, 369–72, 376 Fink, Professor Z. S. 246 Fish, Simon 241 Fisher, Samuel 330, 342, 388 Fitzherbert, Sir Anthony 207 Fleetwood, Major-General Charles 233 Fletcher, Giles 388 Fletcher (and Beaumont) 11, 257 Fletcher, Phineas 388 Flood, Noah’s 164, 169 Florio, John 47 Fludd, Robert 53, 59, 134 Ford, John 12, 391 foreign policy 291–2, 297, 300–1, 323, 335–6, 376, 389 of Ralegh 138–45, 194, 196 forests 220, 304, 378 Forster, Richard 45 Fortescue, Sir John 361–2 Foster, Samuel 24, 39, 42, 44–7, 49, 53, 55–6, 92, 95, 279 Fox, George 109, 262, 264, 330, 338, 342 Foxe, John 4, 11, 44, 63, 120, 140, 142–3, 156, 160–1, 164, 172–3, 176, 187, 229, 242, 258, 362, 391 Foxe, Captain Luke 42, 44 Frampton, John 119 France 17, 26, 100, 144–5, 174, 182, 209, 248, 254, 300, 320, 335, 348, 352, 366, 368, 376, 387 Francis, Sir Alexander 131 Franeker, University of 270 Fraunce, Abraham 120, 259 freemen 302–3 French, Roger 345 French Revolution 3, 6, 10, 286–8, 318, 323, 375, 389 Frith, John 329 Frobisher, Sir Martin 17–18, 37, 124, 142 Fulke, William 23, 162 Fuller, Thomas 278, 382, 392 fundamental law 163, 211 Fussner, Professor F. S. 166, 291–2, 350, 354, 381–2 Gale, Thomas 28, 69, 71 Galen 26, 28, 33–5, 51, 68, 72, 74–5, 116, 133, 263, 344 Galenists 28, 72, 75 Galileo Galilei 16, 26–7, 32, 36, 90, 105, 126, 132, 189, 247, 345 Gammon, Hannibal 66 Gardiner, Francis 271, 285 Gardiner, S. R. 7, 87 Gascoigne, George 30, 44, 122–4 Gascoigne, William 271 Gassendi, Pierre 98 Gataker, Thomas 51, 193 Page 13 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Gauden, John, Bishop of Worcester 94 Gellibrand, Edward 53 Gellibrand, Henry, the Elder 53 Gellibrand, Henry 21, 38–41, 43–4, 46, 52–3, 55–6, 97, 160 Gellibrand, Samuel 53 Gellibrand, Major Thomas 53 General Assembly of Scotland 358 Geneva 130, 261, 358 Gentleman, Tobias 142, 145 gentry 5, 10, 29, 51, 115, 124, 147, 150, 173–5, 185, 210, 216, 237–9, 257, 269, 277, 285, 291–3, 296–9, 302, 306–7, 320–1, 323–5, 332, 334–5, 342, 353–4, 356, 365, 370, 376, 379, 389, 391, 393 geography 22, 27, 32–3, 54, 57, 59, 61–2, 127, 169, 171, 188, 264, 272, 278 geometry 32–3, 36, 39, 42, 49–51, 56, 106, 126, 128, 270–1, 280 George III, King of England 258 Gerarde, John 24, 37, 71, 131 Gerbier, Sir Balthazar 92, 108 Geree, John 7 Germany 8, 17, 93, 122, 297, 301, 307, 377, 391 Gibbon, Edward 188 Gifford, George 23, 343 Gifford, John 102 Gilbert, Adrian 19, 124 (p.409) Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 19–20, 22, 44, 124, 126, 164, 272 Gilbert, William 21, 24, 29, 31, 34, 36–7, 49, 59–60, 64, 66, 77–8, 80, 99, 111, 127, 130, 133, 156, 192, 194, 271–2, 276, 328, 391 Gilder, George 46, 57 gilds 208, 212, 219, 228, 236 Gill, Alexander 279 Gilpin, Bernard 396 Girondins 288, 375 Glanvill, Joseph 113, 179 globes 32, 40, 63, 64, 128, 247 Gloucester Hall, Oxford 158, 277, 279 Gloucester, Statute of 210 Gloucestershire 298, 312, 324 Goddard, Henry 40 Goddard, Jonathan 40, 45, 96, 279–80 Godwin, Francis 294 Golding, Arthur 249 Gondomar, Spanish ambassador 118, 146, 173, 184, 230, 336 Goodall, Charles 68, 72, 75 Goodman, Godfrey, Bishop of Gloucester 28, 101, 123, 179, 189, 240, 253, 260, 273, 295, 344, 362–3, 388 Goodman, John 358–9 Goodwin, John 74, 92, 157, 247, 250, 380–1, 390 Goodwin, Thomas 104, 247, 275, 341, 353 Googe, Barnaby 382 Gorcham 184 Page 14 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Gordon, James 7 Gorges, Sir Arthur 15, 121, 125–6, 128, 135, 149, 183, 190, 192, 194–5, 388 Gott, Samuel 104 Gouge, William 41, 90, 260, 275, 330 Grafton, Richard 46, 159 Grand Remonstrance 185, 216, 334 Graunt, John 59, 243 gravitation, the law of 9, 24, 36 Gray, John 102 Gray, Robert 163 Gray’s Inn 228 Great Seal 175 Greaves, John 42, 47, 54, 56, 95 Greece 246 Greek 30, 43, 156, 271 Greene, Robert 11, 47, 155, 238 Greenham, Richard 24, 103, 294 Greenwood, John 313, 329 Grenville, Sir Richard 125 Gresham, Edward 46 Gresham, Sir Thomas 33, 64, 77, 125, 183, 191, 250; Gresham’s Law 242 Gresham College 33–42, 44–58, 60–1, 77, 79, 86, 92, 95–7, 102, 110–12, 116, 128, 241, 258, 262, 274–6, 279 Greville, Fulke 11–12, 47, 58, 85, 120–3, 145, 157, 159, 166, 240, 262–3, 301, 384–5, 388, 391, 397 Grimston, Harbottle 55 Grindleton 338 Grocers’ Company 68 Grotius 104 Guiana 118, 131, 138, 140, 142–3, 145, 149, 194, 245 Guicciardini 24, 157, 165 Guildhall 74 Guise, Christopher 278 Gulston, Theodore 145, 193 gunnery 17, 58 gunpowder 78 Gunpowder Plot 127 Gunter, Edmund 38, 40, 43–6, 49, 50, 53, 55–7, 59, 61, 126, 264 Gussoni, Vicenzo 368, 370–2 Gwinne, Matthew 35, 37, 47, 56, 58–9, 71, 194 Haak, Theodore 42, 90, 95–6, 252, 279 Habsburg dynasty 323, 366–7 Hackney 342 Hague, The 147 Hakewill, George 12, 31, 41, 61, 64, 71–2, 81–2, 86, 101, 104, 123, 128, 145, 158–9, 164, 177–9, 181, 194, 199, 203, 239–40, 259–60, 270, 272–3, 277, 387–8, 391 Hakewill, William 24, 178, 217 Hakluyt, Richard, the Elder 138–41, 143 Page 15 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Hakluyt, Richard, the younger 11–12, 18, 32, 37, 39–40, 44, 58, 63–4, 88, 116, 120–2, 124–9, 138–47, 153, 160, 169, 172–3, 199, 258, 264, 271, 275, 301, 389 Hale, Sir Matthew 56, 233 Hales, John 392 Halifax, Sir George Savile, first Marquis of 113, 188 Halifax, Yorkshire 35 Hall, Arthur 362 Hall, John 80, 98, 110, 156, 270–2 Hall, John, of Richmond 302 Hall, Joseph 188, 193, 245, 304 (p.410) Hall, Thomas 273 Halle, Dr. John 23, 69 Halley’s Comet 126 Hampden, John 4, 135, 178, 186, 248, 334, 384 Hampton Court Conference 31 Handson, Raphe 39, 53, 63 Harcourt, Robert 194 Harding, Thomas 377 Hare, John 364–5 Hariot, Thomas 31–2, 39–40, 49, 55, 61, 89, 125–30, 141, 143, 145, 148, 152, 154–5, 168, 170, 179, 190, 271, 277, 317, 390–2 Harley, Edward 188 Harley, Lady 273 Harrington, James 5, 104, 107, 134, 136, 167, 174–7, 180–1, 188, 242, 265, 302, 323 Harrington, Sir John, of Exton 191, 193 Harrington, Sir John, of Kelston 193 Harris, V. 12 Harrison, William 57, 262, 270, 273 Harsnett, Samuel, Bishop of Chichester 290 Hartlib, Samuel 67, 90–8, 108, 110–11, 114, 149, 157, 192, 247, 322 Harvard College 53 Harvey, Gabriel 9, 16, 123, 163 Harvey, William 6, 10, 22, 26, 31, 34, 44, 49, 54, 67, 69–71, 90, 100, 102, 106, 111, 128, 179–80, 189, 247, 262, 271, 329, 344–6, 391 Harwood, George 90 Hatton, Sir Christopher 40, 156, 202 Hatton, Elizabeth, Lady 156 Hatton, Sir William 156 Hawkins, Sir John 19, 142 Hawkridge, William 63 Haydn, Professor Hiram 133, 266 Hayward, Sir John 158, 391 Heale, William 244 hearsay evidence 204 Heath, Robert 99 Heath, Thomas 58 Hebrew 30, 271 Helgerson, Richard 387 heliocentric theory 8, 20, 46, 130 Page 16 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Henderson, Alexander 91 Henri IV, King of France 248, 359 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 26, 52, 300 Henry I, King of England 197, 364 Henry V, King of England 314 Henry VIII, King Of England 22–3, 33, 69, 253, 307, 313, 317 Henry, Prince of Wales 13, 52, 64, 89, 92, 190–5, 197, 213, 249, 256 Herbert, Edward, Lord of Cherbury 61–2, 264, 391 Herbert, George 11, 13, 304, 384–5, 391 heresy 4, 8–9, 129, 161, 180, 229, 265, 293, 312–13, 316–17, 329, 338–40, 342, 344–5 Hering, Julines 53 Hering, Samuel 108, 233 Herle, Charles 330 Herrick, Robert 12 Hertford 333 Hester, John 16, 22, 29, 71, 131, 133 Hexter, Professor J. H. 96, 336, 396 Heywood, Robert 385 Heywood, Thomas 49, 183, 194 High Commission 221–2, 290, 293, 321 Hildersham, Arthur 193 Hill, Nicholas 6, 58, 63, 83, 99–100, 130, 133, 291 Hill, Thomas 21–2, 24, 30, 46, 51, 62 Hilles, Richard 58 Hilton, Rodney 339 Hippocrates 26, 33, 35, 51, 72, 74 history 27, 30, 110, 124, 155–71, 174–82, 187–8, 197–8, 256, 262, 265, 267, 270–1, 276, 292, 314, 382, 397 Hitchcock, Robert 142 Hobart, Sir Henry 191, 211, 213 Hobbes, Thomas 51, 101, 110–12, 129–30, 134–6, 167, 175, 177, 181, 189, 211, 219, 226, 235, 240, 242–3, 246, 250, 260, 270–1, 277, 291, 306, 334, 381, 391 Hobday, Charles 135, 155 Hobsbawm, Eric 325 Hobson, Colonel Paul 65 Holdsworth, Richard 6, 41, 44, 52–4, 56, 59, 87, 90, 172, 191, 213, 274–5, 279, 281 Holinshed, Ralph 156, 159, 164, 391 Holies, Denzil 187 Holies, Gervase 188 Holt, Sir John 214 Homer 128, 169 honours, sale of 12, 190 Hood, Thomas 24, 32, 40–1, 49, 56, 58, 63–4, 71, 80, 131, 260 Hooke, Robert 115 (p.411) Hooker, John 122 Hooker, Richard 11, 222, 260, 301, 341, 391 Hooker, Thomas 103 Hopton, Arthur 46, 272 Horn, Andrew 361 Page 17 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Horrocks, Jeremiah 24, 45, 92, 279 Horton, Thomas 52, 399 Hoskyns, John 186 Hotham, John 299 Houghton, John 117 How, Cobbler 330 Howard family 194, 214, 244 Howard, Henry 351, 353 Howe, William 58 Howell, James 138, 184, 188 Hubert, Sir Francis 158, 386, 391 Hudson, Henry 19, 63 Hues, Robert 40, 49, 61, 64, 127–8, 156, 272 Huguenots 6, 122, 248, 254, 260, 336 Hull 57, 298 humanism 8, 237, 393 Hungary 53 Hunneades, Hans 53, 54, 95 Huntingdon 216 Hunton, Philip 251 Hurstfield, J. 319 Hus, Jan 24 Hutchinson, Anne 329 Hutchinson, John 131 Hutchinson, Lucy 131, 364 Hutchinson, Mrs 317 Huyberts, A. 74 Hyde, Edward, see Clarendon, Earl of hymns 355, 378 Ideas, history of 15 idleness 80, 151–2, 173, 300, 304–6, 332 imperialism 88, 119, 136–42, 147, 173, 241, 258, 287, 289, 297, 300–1, 307, 323, 333, 347 Independents 91, 107–8, 128, 157, 164, 255, 275, 288 Index, Roman 24, 27 India 44, 72, 376 Indians, American 40, 125, 139–40, 145, 148, 169, 301, 362, 376 Indies, East 72, 87, 263 Indies, West 87, 139, 143, 147–8, 169, 184, 194, 263, 389 individualism 8, 262–3, 299, 303, 306, 327–9, 343, 353, 355–6 Indulgence, Declaration of 307 Industrial revolution 116, 289, 291, 320, 325 Ingram, Sir Arthur 149, 217 Inns of Court 56, 86, 228, 269 Inquisition 26, 119, 129, 147, 246 Instrument-makers 36, 43, 45, 49, 61, 64, 66, 170, 199 introspection, poetry of 196, 263 Invisible College 95 Ipswich 184 Page 18 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Ireland 11, 65, 88, 288, 290, 300–1, 314, 333, 356, 367, 371 Ireton, Henry 205 Ironside, Revd Ralph 153 Isle of Ely 214 Israel, Menassah ben 92, 266 Italy 17, 26–7, 246, 366, 387 Jacie, Henry 92, 104 Jackson, William 147 Jacob, Henry 193 Jacob, Robert 58 Jacobins 287–8, 375 Jamaica 142, 147, 301 James I, King of England 5, 16, 19, 26, 31, 40, 51–2, 58, 64–5, 76–7, 88–9, 102, 118, 124, 135, 137–8, 141–8, 159, 161, 170, 173, 175, 178, 181, 184, 186, 189, 193–5, 199, 239, 246–7, 251–2, 254–5, 294–5, 307, 310, 338, 348, 358–60, 362–3, 367, 373, 378, 384, 390, 392, 396–7 James II, King of England 149, 307, 354 James, John 251 James, Margaret 108 James, Richard 135, 172 James, Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian 24, 194, 328 James, Thomas, captain 43–4, 239, 264 Jenkins, David, Judge 189, 211 Jersey 149 Jesuits 152, 270, 286, 307, 351–2, 354 Jesus College, Oxford 106 Jewell, Bishop 377, 390–1 Jewish history 162, 165, 171 Jews, admission into England 92 John, King of England 314 Johnson, Professor F. R. 15–16, 18, 276 Johnson, Francis 52, 312, 390 Johnson, Dr. Samuel 188 Jones, Inigo 56, 192 Jones, John 62, 187, 232, 235 (p.412) Jones, R. F. 15, 30 Jonson, Ben 11–12, 39, 47, 171, 195–6, 207, 238, 241, 388, 390–1 Jordan, Professor W. K. 10, 168, 243, 259 Journal of the History of Ideas, The 15 journalism 344 judges 12, 137–8, 174, 205, 209, 214, 218, 221, 224, 226–7, 232–5, 293, 297, 310, 313, 323, 335, 343, 398 Judson, Professor M. A. 335 Kelsey, Major-General Thomas 243 Kemyis, Lawrence 141–2, 272 Kent 215 Kepler, John 31, 90, 126–7, 133–4, 390 Kett, Francis 153, 317 Keymer, John 183 Page 19 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Kiernan, Victor 292 Kingsley, Charles 148 Kirk of Scotland 108 Knevet, Ralph 382 Knox, John 4, 253, 315, 332, 357–60, 396 Knyvett, Sir Thomas 273 Kocher, Professor P. H. 30 Kynaston, Sir Francis 39, 51 La Rochelle 261, 290, 336 Lacy, J. 68 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 325 Lambarde, William 262, 398 Lambeth 75 Lancashire 298–9 land register 149 Langhorne, John 258 Langley, Thomas 16 languages 57, 124, 193 Laskey, S. V. 18 Latham, Agnes 197 Latin 16, 23, 30, 33, 43, 55, 68, 71, 74, 116, 172, 345–7, 391 Latitudinarians 93 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 10, 14, 27, 46, 52–3, 68, 75, 87, 89, 91, 107, 158, 160, 172, 189, 205, 225, 235, 242, 254, 256, 260, 278, 280, 289–90, 293, 297–8, 313, 362–3, 373, 391 Laudian Statutes 50, 158, 278, 280 Laudians 27, 264, 270, 276, 323, 384 Laune, Gideon de 26 Lavoisier, A.-L. 265 law, common 33, 35, 201, 203–20, 222–36, 242, 258–9, 262, 264, 267, 290, 292, 302, 309–10, 314, 352–3, 359, 361–3 law merchants 212–14 law, rule of 98, 176 Lawson, George 256 lawyers, common 72 Le Febure, N. 131 lectures 32–3, 35, 48, 50, 55–7, 64–5, 71, 102, 109, 222, 242, 298, 364 Leghorn 150 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 19–20, 22, 28–9, 31, 36, 45, 64, 90, 119, 124, 130, 157, 159, 173, 246, 249, 251, 277 Leiden, University of 49, 75, 92, 157, 170, 193, 251–2, 260, 270 Leighton, Alexander 68, 144, 250, 315, 391 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (Ulyanov) 100 Lennard, S. 171 Levellers 4, 24, 70, 108, 116, 130, 187, 200, 225, 230–2, 235, 241, 251, 265, 305, 310, 313, 318, 321–2, 340, 342, 356, 364 Lever, Thomas 382 Lewis, John 187 liberalism, economic 88, 119, 148, 151, 208–9, 211, 230, 247, 249, 308 Page 20 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index liberty 228–9 Ligue, the 248 Lilburne, John 4, 161, 180, 187, 204–5, 211, 228, 232, 235, 254, 329, 384, 390–1 Lilburne, Richard 130 Lilly, William 41, 52, 111 Lincoln’s Inn 56, 295 Lipsius, Justus 116, 183 Livy, Titus 164 Llanrhaiadr 106 Locke, John 6, 91, 113, 130, 134, 188, 358 logarithms 9, 23, 38–9, 43–4, 58, 61, 128 Lok, Michael 120, 122 Lollards 4, 160, 277, 312, 314, 338–9, 376–7 London 13, Chapter 2 passim, 16–17, 33, 47, 55, 57–9, 65, 67, 69, 72–3, 75, 80, 86, 92, 97, 107, 109–12, 121, 124, 208, 210, 213, 243, 249–50, 260–1, 271, 274, 298, 310, 313, 330, 333, 313, 378, 383–4, 391, 393, 396–1 London, Lord Mayor of 18, 33, 68, 70, 147, 159, 212, 233, 301 London, William 17 (p.413) Lords, House of 7, 147, 189, 295, 317, 334, 336–7 Louis XIII, of France 336 Louis XVI, of France 285, 288 Loyola, Ignatius 263 Lucan 129, 135, 190 Lumleian lectures 71, 191 Lumley, John, Lord 155, 191 Luther, Martin 4–5, 8, 25, 82–3, 133, 224, 229, 231–3, 252–3, 261, 312, 377, 391 Lydiat, Thomas 170, 192 Macedonia 161, 164–5, 172 Machiavelli, Niccolo 9, 31, 104, 132, 134, 157, 165–6, 171, 183, 263 Macpherson, Professor C. B. 177 Madox, Richard 275 Madrid 184 Magdalen Hall, Oxford 106, 277–9 magic 8, 25, 79, 132–3, 194 magistrates 257 Magna Carta 70, 137, 189, 208, 211, 218–19, 225, 229–31, 365 magnetism 20, 36, 44 Mainwaring, Roger, Bishop of St. David’s 205, 290, 369 Maitland, F. W. 203, 302–3 Maitland of Lethington 358 Malament, Barbara 235–6 Malmesbury 278 Malynes, Gerard 213, 242 Man, John 40 Manchester 98 Mandeville, Bernard de 354 Mandeville, Edward Montague, Lord 90 Mandrou, Robert 287 Manning, B. S. 201 Page 21 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Mansell, Sir Robert 142 Many-headed monster 253–4, 309, 327–37, 374 mariners 17–19, 22, 32–3, 36–8, 45, 55, 51, 59, 66, 116, 199, 348, 372, 397 Marlborough 380 Marlowe, Christopher 11, 128–9, 133, 135, 148, 152–3, 156, 195, 238, 248, 259, 390–1 Marprelate, Martin 293, 329, 338, 390 Marprelate Tracts, the 11, 13, 153, 241, 298, 333 marriage 243, 245, 319, 323, 325, 362, 378, 383 Marshall, Stephen 275 Marston, John 11, 390, 395 Marten, Colonel 245 Marten, Henry 135, 187, 222, 245, 295 Martindale, Adam 18 martyrs, Marian 52, 140, 142, 161, 180, 338 Marvell, Andrew 123, 135, 188, 246, 265, 295–6, 307 Marx, Karl 3, 5, 81, 84, 99, 242, 256, 285 Mary, Queen of Scots 7, 253, 338, 359, 360, 364 Mary I, Queen of England 7, 19, 23, 29, 155, 204, 357–8, 373 Mary II, Queen of England 181 Massachusetts 53, 91, 218, 234 Massinger, Philip 12, 14, 382, 388, 391 mathematics 17–19, 21–2, 27–9, 31–2, 35–6, 41–3, 45, 47, 49, 51, 55–67, 86, 91, 108, 110, 115–16, 124–30, 179, 192–3, 241, 243, 247, 264–5, 269–73, 275, 277–80 Matthew, Gospel according to 176 Matthew, Toby 185 Matthieu, P. 249 May, Thomas 59, 135, 388 Mayerne, Sir Theodore 26, 68, 71–2 Meade, Joseph 240 mechanics, see artificers Mede, Joseph 391–2 medicine 26–9, 35, 49, 56–7, 62, 64–75, 86, 106–8, 120, 124, 127–9, 131–2, 134, 162, 179, 241, 247, 251–2, 265, 271, 278–9, 291, 309 Mediterranean Sea 289 melancholy 10, 120, 195, 199 Melville, Andrew 297 Mensheviks 375 Mercator, Gerard 19, 24, 37, 61 Mercers’ Company 33, 96 Merchant Taylors’ Company 58, 159 merchants 7–8, 10–11, 16–19, 26, 29, 33, 41, 58, 62–4, 66, 69, 79, 85–6, 93, 110, 116, 140–1, 143–5, 147–8, 150–1, 168, 172–5, 199, 209, 212–14, 242–3, 257, 261, 264, 285, 289–92, 298, 302, 308, 310, 312, 323–4, 353, 367, 370 Mercurius Rusticus 111 Meres, Francis 123 Mermaid Club 195 Merrett, Christopher 279 Mersenne, Marin 44, 48, 61, 95 Merton College, Oxford 54, 280 Page 22 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index metaphysical poetry 384–6, 388 (p.414) metaphysics 269 meteorology 23, 62, 128, 162, 271 microscopes 19, 22 Middelburg 30, 53, 182, 312 Middleton, Thomas 11, 14, 47, 382, 388, 390–1 middling sort 7–8, 73, 107, 137, 151, 172, 176, 185, 234, 261, 265, 335 Midlands 305 midwives 70, 75–6 millenarianism 8, 300, 329, 376, 381 Milton, Christopher 398–400 Milton, John 4, 12–14, 80, 82, 87, 92, 103–4, 109, 111, 116, 121, 124, 132, 148, 158, 160, 164–5, 173, 179, 182, 187, 197, 238, 240–3, 248–9, 251, 254–5, 258, 270, 287, 304, 314, 316, 324–5, 329, 331, 338, 353, 358, 364, 381, 384, 388–90, 398–400 Milton, John, Senior 398–400 miracles 25, 62, 167, 261 Misselden, Edward 242 mobility, social 285, 340, 378 Moderns, the 4, 12, 28, 34, 41, 47, 59, 81, 130, 132, 164, 178–9, 181, 199, 240, 292, 344, 382 Modyford, Colonel Thomas 139 Moffet, Thomas 37 Molyneux, Emery 40, 63, 128 monasteries, dissolution of the 141, 175, 296–7, 304, 307, 320 Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 354 monopolies 12, 68–9, 72–4, 88, 149, 208–9, 211, 217, 219, 228, 309, 351, 372 Monson, Sir William 64, 348 Montague, Sir Henry, Earl of Manchester 170, 217 Montague, James, Bishop of Winchester 193 Montague, Richard, Bishop of Chichester 51, 193, 260, 295 Montaigne, Michel de 9 Montesquieu, Charles, Baron de 3, 6 Moore, John 353 More, Henry 279 More, Richard 42 More, Sir Thomas 230, 250, 312–13, 327, 345–7, 376 Mornet, Daniel 3–4 Morris, Christopher 315 mortalism 316–17, 329, 345 mortality 291 Morton, A. L. 339 Moses 60, 168–9 Mountayne, George, Archbishop of York 52 Muggleton, Lodowick 331 Muggletonians 245, 317 Mulcaster, Richard 58 Mun, Thomas 150, 242 Murray, Mungo 55 Musaeum Minervae 57 Page 23 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Muscovy Company 17–19, 21, 32, 63 Myddelton, Sir Hugh 38 Myddelton, Sir Thomas 149 Namier, Sir Lewis 5, 285 Napier, John, of Merchiston 9, 23, 38–9, 49, 111, 126–7, 133–4, 240 Napoleon I, Bonaparte, of France 288 Naseby, battle of 45, 161, 198 Nashe, Thomas 11, 47, 250, 258, 293, 383, 391 Naunton, Sir Thomas 150 navigation 21, 22, 29–30, 32–3, 36–40, 43, 46, 56–8, 60–1, 66, 79, 97, 124–6, 128, 130, 142, 145, 169, 179, 199, 241, 258, 264, 272, 275 Navigation Act 98, 144, 150, 242, 289 navigators, see mariners navy 44, 65, 142, 195, 287, 289, 291, 348, 367 Nedham, Marchamont 72, 104, 106 Neile, Bishop 294 Netherlands, the 26–7, 41, 52, 87–8, 93, 102, 107, 110, 122, 136, 144–5, 148, 150, 157, 175, 184–5, 193, 248, 250, 270, 300, 308, 343, 348, 377, 379 Netherlands, revolt of the 6, 17, 249–52, 254, 260, 286, 288, 364, 375 Nevile, Henry 4, 255 New River Scheme 38 New World 91, 103, 139, 147, 169, 247, 300, 329, 346, 373, 376–7, 379, 384, 389 Newbury, battle of 65 Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of 107 Newcastle, William Cavendish, Duke of 107, 188 Newfoundland 139 Newgate 232, 330 Newton, A. P. 96 Newton, Sir Adam 191 (p.415) Newton, Sir Isaac 9, 24, 36, 38, 91, 162, 240, 258, 265, 345 Nielson, Captain Marmaduke 97 Nimrod 136 Ninias 189 Norfolk 61 Norman, Robert 16, 20–1, 28, 36, 49, 60, 66, 99, 101 Norman Yoke 172, 313–14, 318, 322, 361–5, 395 North, Council of the 220 North family 189 North-East Passage 19 North-West Company 19, 63 North-West Passage 19, 42, 43–4, 63, 126, 145, 194 Northamptonshire 72, 299, 342 Northumberland, Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of 127–30 Northumberland, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of 22, 29, 31, 64, 89, 92, 131, 191, 277 Norton, Robert 53, 58 Norwich 75, 98, 111, 184, 289 Norwood, Richard 53 Norwood, Robert 330 Notestein, Professor Wallace 245 Page 24 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Nowell, Alexander 24 Noy, Edward 205, 233–4 Nye, Philip 275 Oates, Samuel 342 Oates, Titus 342 Oatlands 372 office, sale of 217 Oglander, Sir John 189, 299, 382 Oldenburg, Henry 92, 96 Oldys, William 182 Olivares, Count 320 Ophir 169 optics 23, 44, 66, 106, 126, 128 Ordinance (1646) 296 Ortelius, Abraham 24, 58 Osborn, Francis 51, 62, 104, 171–2, 179, 188, 271 Oughtred, William 41, 45, 49, 59, 64, 95, 97, 270–1 Overall, John, Bishop of Norwich 136 Overbury, Sir Thomas 47 Overton, Richard 104, 108, 161, 187, 241–2, 317, 330, 338 Ovid 391 Owen, John 341, 390 Owen, Sir Roger 146, 183, 295 Oxford, University of 11, 16–18, 24, 33, 35, 37, 40, 43, 45, 47–51, 53–7, 71, 75, 87, 91, 108–10, 112, 114–15, 121, 155–6, 158, 247, 251–2, 254, 268–73, 275–81, 378, 394 Oxfordshire 299, 312 Oxinden, Henry 298, 335 Paddy, Sir William 47, 58, 71, 252 Padua, University of 26, 49, 75, 119, 246, 247–8, 252, 261, 270, 279 Paine, Thomas 244 Palatinate 42, 90, 145, 254, 372 Palavicino, Sir Horatio 239 papacy 246, 307, 314, 366 papists, see Catholics, Roman Paracelsan chemistry 8, 25, 28, 68, 71–2, 81, 86, 109, 131, 133, 263 Paracelsus, Theophrastus 8, 24, 29, 53, 66, 116, 132–4 Paraeus, David 254–5, 392 Paré, Ambrose 108 Parigiano 345 Paris 260 Paris, Parlement de 26 Parker, archbishop M. 332, 362 Parker, Henry 228, 250, 254, 264 Parker, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford 114, 295 Parkinson, John 71 Parliament 7–8, 74, 137, 208, 215, 221, 223, 225, 229, 268, 274, 319, 322, 361, 363–4, 367–70, 373–4, 378, 381, 393 Barebones 108, 158, 187
Page 25 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Long 19, 31, 59, 90–1, 94–5, 135, 216, 218, 233, 247, 280, 296–7, 320, 322, 325, 358, 363, 392 (1593) 153, 205 (1597) 205 (1598) 320 (1601) 118 (1603–4) 320 (1604–10) 149, 204, 320 (1614) 146, 149, 191, 320 (1621) 70, 193, 216–17, 220, 225, 242, 255–6 (1622) 309 (1624) 147, 186, 217 (1626) 186, 320 (1628) 148, 186, 219, 250 (1629) 148 (1640) 389 (1646) 320 (1655) 287 (p.416) (1656) 188 (1660) 321 Parliamentarianism 4, 6, 13, 51, 55, 65–6, 69, 76, 240, 243, 247, 248, 253–4, 257, 277, 279, 288, 294, 298–9, 305, 324, 329, 355–6, 388, 390 Parliamentarians, Bacon and from 77–117 Parliamentarians, Coke and 201–36 Parliamentarians, Ralegh and 118–200 Parr, Richard 42 Pascal, Blaise 264, 351–2 pastoralism 13, 395 pathology 34, 69, 71 patriotism 27, 119, 139–40, 142, 156, 160, 172–3, 185, 230, 257, 285, 307, 365, 387, 395 Patrizzi, Francesco 157 patronage 20, 26, 29, 52, 64–5, 112, 114, 119, 124, 130, 147, 157, 159, 173, 195, 246, 258, 296, 393 Paulus, L. Aemilius 165 peace 22, 203 Peacham, Henry 194, 273 Pearson, Anthony 322–3 Peasant Revolt (Germany) 253, 316 Peele, George 127 Pell, John 41, 49, 96, 271 Pembroke Hall, Cambridge 23 Pembroke, Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of 90 Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl of 158, 184 Penn, William 109, 188 Penney, Thomas 23, 37 Pepys, Samuel 151, 156 Percy, George 130 Perkin, Professor H. J. 320 Perkins, William 11, 24, 51, 143, 151, 166, 238–9, 260, 303, 362 Page 26 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Persons, Robert 239 Peru 140. Peter, Hugh 104, 107, 110, 147, 192, 232, 245, 251, 260, 295, 300 Pett, Peter 194 Pett, Phineas 43, 194, 279 Petty, Sir William 50, 67, 83, 96, 104, 111, 167, 195, 242–3, 251–2, 265, 271, 280 Pharmacoepia Londinensis 72–3 Philip II, King of Spain 136, 143 philosophy 9, 35, 50, 56, 67, 79, 81, 84, 87, 105, 132, 270–1, 273, 276 philosophy, experimental 59, 100, 107 philosophy, natural 92, 106, 110, 112–13, 247 physic 33, 56, 51, 63, 75, 280 physicians 65, 68, 71–6, 102, 211, 309 Physicians, College of, London 28, 37, 45, 56, 67–76, 108, 110, 114, 191, 210–11, 247, 290, 309, 345 Physicians, College of, Paris 26 Physicians, College of, Scotland 108 Picts 125 Piers Plowman 124 Pilgrim Fathers 102, 107, 146–7, 252, 331 Pilgrimmage of Grace 253 pirates 139–40, 173, 289, 348–9, 378 Plato 35, 50, 250 Plattes, Gabriel 94 Pliny 35 Plockhoy, Peter Cornelius 108 Plowden, Edmund 207 Plymouth 298 Pocock, J. G. A. 363 poetry 11–12, 195–6, 355, 384, 397, 399 Poland 92 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 278, 319, 362 Policies and Assurance Courts 212 Polter, Richard 40 Pomponazzi, Pietro 154 Ponet, John, Bishop of Winchester 238, 253, 288, 301, 364, 390 Poor Act (1543) 68 Pope 300, 329–30, 344, 358, 362, 377, 380, 390 Popham, Sir John 170 population, over- 88, 139, 141, 145–6, 169 Porto Rico 147 Portugal 139 potatoes 148 Potter, Francis 240 poverty 152, 173, 285–6, 300, 325, 327, 333, 335, 340, 392, 395 Power, Henry 237 Prague 189 preaching 4–5, 10, 23, 109, 238, 298, 329, 337, 344, 378, 383, 396 precedents 7, 177, 223–4, 226–7, 231, 235, 262 Page 27 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index predestination 47, 198, 225 prerogative courts 203, 211, 216, 259, 290–1, 302, 309, 321, 359 Presbyterianism 52–3, 92, 239, 253, 255, 260, 275, 281, 288, 296, 298, 306, 324, 330, 332, 335, 343, 381 (p.417) Prest, Wilfrid 398 Preston, John 24–5, 52, 98, 170, 239, 279 pretender plays 397 Priestley, Joseph 265 primitivism 154, 164, 180, 362 printing 8, 78, 242, 262, 303, 339, 344, 377 Privy Council 19, 32, 44, 64, 75, 90, 159, 202, 212, 214–16, 218–19, 235, 255–6 probabilism 352 proclamation 219, 309 property 149, 174–5, 203, 205, 209, 226, 228–9, 233, 239, 257, 286, 288, 294–7, 299, 302, 306, 309–10, 318–20, 322–3, 325–6, 335, 340–2, 351, 353, 355–6, 362–4, 368 prose 116–17, 124, 241 protectorate 95, 105, 148 Protestantism 8, 22, 25–7, 29, 31, 34–5, 48, 81–4, 90, 96, 100–1, 110–11, 145, 147, 151, 160, 167, 170, 173, 180, 185, 195, 228, 246, 248, 252–3, 257, 260–1, 264–5, 285–6, 289, 300, 303–7, 312–13, 323–4, 327–9, 344, 350–2, 354–5, 357, 365–6, 373, 376–7, 379, 381, 387, 389 providence 3, 165, 172, 181, 248 Providence Island Company 90, 147, 384 Prynne, William 6, 14, 53, 160, 187, 205, 226, 315, 373, 391 Ptolemy 35, 46, 50, 54, 106, 263, 345 Purchas, Samuel 12, 40, 146, 272 Puritanism 6–7, 13, 23–4, 26–7, 30–1, 42, 49, 52–3, 65, 76, 79, 82–4, 86, 90–1, 95, 98– 103, 109–11, 115–16, 118, 120, 140–1, 145, 148, 151, 153–4, 162, 173, 178, 184, 189, 193, 195, 198, 222, 230, 237–9, 241, 243–4, 250, 253–4, 257, 259–61, 265, 267, 275, 277–81, 286–7, 291–2, 298, 300, 304, 324, 330, 332, 356, 359, 373–4, 380, 383, 389, 396, 398 Puttenham, George 123, 337 Pym, John 90, 94, 96–7, 128, 135, 147, 158, 180, 186, 205, 277, 295, 363, 384 Pyramids 54 quadrant 43, 45 Quakers 109, 245, 291, 329, 338, 340, 342, 344, 378 Quarles, Francis 12, 388 Queens’ College, Cambridge 241 Quinn, Professor D. B. 37, 140 Quintilian 116, 167 Raab, Dr. Felix 177 radicalism 22, 26, 29, 31, 35, 75, 98–9, 101, 103, 107–10, 112, 114, 116, 133–4, 153, 160–1, 168, 181, 187, 193, 232–3, 241, 245, 261, 265, 277, 296–8, 291, 303, 305, 315– 18, 321–2, 329, 331, 339–40, 342, 344, 351, 353, 355, 364, 378, 384, 389, 393 Rainolds, John 275 Rakosi, George 91 Ralegh, Carew, Sir Walter’s son 188 Ralegh, Lady Elizabeth, Sir Walter’s wife 134
Page 28 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Ralegh, Sir Walter 2, 4, 11–12, 18–19, 30–2, 40–1, 54, 63–5, 83, 87, 89, 92, 104, 107, Chapter 4 passim, 202, 204–5, 209, 212, 227–8, 237–8, 240, 240–6, 248–9, 249, 254–9, 258, 263, 272, 289, 308–11, 327, 342, 355, 380, 387, 389, 391 Ralegh, Walter, Walter’s son 125, 152 Ramsay, Sir Thomas 49 Ramus, Petrus 18, 30, 32, 36, 41, 51, 58, 84, 116, 120–1, 133, 165, 241, 249, 259–60, 279 Randolph, Thomas 12 Ranters, the 265, 316–17, 341–2, 344, 380 Rathbone, Aaron 39 Ravenscroft, T. 15 Ray, John 113 Read v. Jenkins 211 Read, Alexander 127 reason 60, 82, 109, 163–5, 167, 171, 177, 180, 223–6, 228, 234, 236, 256, 259, 262, 310, 367, 388 Recorde, Robert 17–18, 20–2, 24, 29–30, 49, 53, 59, 62–3, 80, 133–4, 155–6 Rediker, Marcus 349 Reeve, John 342 Reformation, the protestant 8–9, 22, 25–6, 109, 173, 220, 261, 269, 277, 285, 299, 304, 312, 327, 331, 339, 354–5, 357, 376–8 regicide 108, 191, 202, 228, 245, 286, 288, 291, 381 religious wars, France 6, 154, 249, 252, 286, 288 Renaissance 9, 164, 170, 237 (p.418) republicanism 88, 135, 246, 254–6, 394 Requests, Court of 220 Restoration 74, 98, 114, 148, 252, 261, 281, 289, 299, 321, 329, 342–3, 353, 356, 374, 392 Rich, Sir Nathaniel 90 Richard II, King of England 160, 314 Richmond, Manor of 190 Ridley, Mark 41 Right, Petition of 19, 53, 204, 234, 336, 353, 363 Robartes, John, second Lord 66 Robartes, Richard, first Lord 65 Roberts, Lewes 212, 247 Roberts, R. S. 73 Robinson, Henry 249 Robinson, John 102, 104, 107, 252, 331 Robinson, Matthew 271 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of 262 Roe, Sir Thomas 90 Rogers, Daniel 121 Rogers, Thomas 343 Rolle, Henry 218 Rollinson, David 312 Romans 156, 164, 172 Rome 47, 144, 183, 246 Rooke’s Case 215 Page 29 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Root and Branch Petition (1641) 390 Rosenberg, Eleanor 27, 29, 119 Roses, Wars of the 160, 314, 376 Rosicrucians 134 Ross, Alexander 34, 182, 189 Rostvig, Maren–Sophie 13 Rotterdam 130, 245 Rous, Francis 158, 252 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 3, 5, 256, 285 Rovenzon, John 194 royal prerogative 135, 184, 204, 211, 218–19, 225, 228, 289–90, 309, 335, 331, 369 Royal Society of London 9, 36, 42, 44–6, 49, 53, 56–8, 66, 83, 91–2, 94–7, 106, 111–17, 126, 134, 146, 156, 158, 195, 243, 247, 258, 345, 392 royalties 309 Roydon, Matthew 128–9, 133, 238, 244 Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin 90, 158, 186, 243, 388 Rumler, Wolfegang 26 Rushworth, John 185 Russia 19, 41 Russian revolution 100, 286–8, 318, 375, 389 Rutherford, Samuel 239, 254 Ryves, Bruno 332 Sabbatarianism 48, 300 Sadler, Sir Ralph 359 sailors, see mariners St. Albans, Lady Alice Bacon, Viscountess 202 St. Alban’s Abbey 307 St. Antholin’s Church, London 49, 146 St. Bartholomew, Massacre of 120–1, 260 St. Germain, Christopher 240 St. John Chrysostom 156, 191 St. John family 194 St. John, Oliver 74, 90, 228 St. John, Sir Oliver 194 St. John’s College, Cambridge 23, 52 St. Margarets Chapel, Westminster 177 St. Mary’s College, Youghal 120 St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford 277 Salee 348 Salisbury, William Cecil, Earl of 90 Saltmarsh, John 104, 110 Saltonstall, Captain Charles 101 Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 274 Sanderson, William 63, 149 Sandys, Sir Edwin 58, 146–7, 247 Sandys, archbishop 294 Sandys, George 12, 388 Sansovino, Francesco 183 Sarpi, Paolo 147, 191, 246–7, 308 Page 30 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Savile, Sir Henry 50, 121, 155, 248, 276 Savonarola, Girolamo 24 Saxony 34 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 170 scepticism 25, 72, 122, 166–7, 171, 198, 259, 328, 331, 338 scholasticism 12, 34–5, 77–8, 81, 86, 113, 257, 269, 387 Science 12, 15, 16 the scientific revolution 4 Scot, Reginald 23 Scotland 11–12, 88, 145, 254, 260, 290, 297, 302, 320–1, 357–60, 370–1, 396 Scots 275 Scott, Thomas 14 n., 184–5, 195, 242, 250, 392 Scottish school 181, 265 Scotus, Duns 133 Scudamore, Sir John, Lord 189 (p.419) scurvy 69, 71, 131, 264 seamen, see mariners second coming 180, 381 sectaries 26, 101, 107, 116, 153, 232, 239, 245, 256, 260, 287, 324, 335, 339, 343, 373, 378 Sedley, Sir Charles 276 Selden, John 55–6, 90, 94, 97, 134, 146, 156, 158–9, 172, 186, 242, 246, 260, 295, 382, 388, 391 Self-Denying Ordnance 128 Semiramis, Queen 189 Servetus, Michael 133, 189 Sewers, Commissioners of 214–16, 220 Sexby, Edward 364 Seynbury Hill, Gloucestershire 17 Shaftesbury, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of 135, 188 Shakespeare, William 11–13, 73, 120, 156, 160–1, 182, 197, 243–4, 292, 333, 347, 382, 386–7, 392–5 Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford 114 Sherborne Castle 196 Sherburne, Sir Edward 40 Ship Money 290, 307, 350, 371–2, 384 Shogun of Japan 61 Short Title Catalogue, the 17 shorthand 120, 278 Shrewsbury, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of 240 Shute, John 16 Sibbes, Richard 90, 104, 239, 275, 305 Sibthorpe, Robert 222, 290, 369 Sidney, Sir Henry 22, 122 Sidney, Lady Mary, later Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip’s sister 120, 124 Sidney, Sir Philip 11, 13, 19, 24, 47, 119–25, 128, 135, 139, 155, 157, 160, 166, 170, 172, 190, 244, 246–8, 252, 254, 258–9, 278, 332, 358, 382, 385, 387, 395 Sidney, Robert, Viscount Lisle and Earl of Leicester 121, 125, 145, 157 Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 279–80 Page 31 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Sierra Leone 143 sin 25, 111, 160–2, 331, 340–2 Sion College 92 Sion House 127 Skytte, Johan 260 slavery 142, 289 slide rule 32, 39, 42, 49 Smith, Adam 265 Smith, Sir Thomas: merchant 19, 32, 44, 46, 57, 63, 146, 149 secretary of state 11, 141, 241–2, 246–7, 262 Snell, George 110 Socinianism 51, 278 Solomon’s House 110, 113 Somerset 228, 268 South, Robert 114, 295 sovereignty 136–8, 145, 211, 225, 256, 342, 371 Spain 11, 17, 27, 87, 118, 122, 135, 138–48, 152–3, 160, 162, 172–3, 175, 178, 184, 186, 190, 199, 230, 250, 257, 286, 288, 300–1, 327, 335–6, 362, 364, 366–8, 370, 376, 387 Spanish Company, the 212 Speed, John 11, 125, 159, 228 Speidall, John 38–9, 57 Spelman, Sir Henry 156, 172, 242, 314 Spenser, Edmund 12–13, 58, 123–4, 151, 172–3, 178, 180, 195, 238, 243–4, 314, 333, 362, 382–3, 387, 389, 391, 395 Spenserian poets 388–90, 395 spinsters 243 Spittlehouse, John 330 Sports, Book of 290 Sprat, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester 15, 45, 55, 57, 112, 114–16, 148, 239, 276, 280, 356 Staines 215 Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili) 288 Stanley, George 110 Stannaries, the 118, 149 Staplers’ Chapel, Leadenhall 32, 71 Stapleton, L. 134 Star Chamber 220, 225, 235, 321 Starkey, Thomas 230, 240, 246, 319, 361 stars 166, 168 State, Council of 41, 108, 218 Stationers’ Company 159 statistics 243 Stella, Aldo 132 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames 203, 204 Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of Worcseter 188 Stock, Richard 310 Stocker, Thomas 249 Stoicism 13 Page 32 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Stoughton, Israel 91 (p.420) Stoughton, John 91, 192, 279 Stoughton, William 231 Stow, John 11, 159, 228 Strabo 35 Strafford, Earl of, see Wentworth, Sir Thomas Strathman, Professor E. A. 151 Streete, Thomas 65 Strickland, Lord 339 Stubbe, Henry 114, 330 Stukeley, Sir Lewis 185 Sturtevant, Simon 64, 194 Suarez, Francisco 269 supernatural, the 25, 162 surgeons 23, 27–8, 56–7, 64–5, 68–9, 71–5, 271 surveyors 17, 22, 38–9, 42, 59, 66, 356 Sweden 90, 92–3, 189, 196, 260 Swift, Jonathan 117, 132 Switzerland 93, 145 Sydenham, brothers of Thomas 65 Sydenham, Thomas 65, 278, 280 Sylvester, Joshua 124, 192, 249, 304, 388 Syria 143, 153 Tacitus 156, 364 Tapp, John 46, 64 Tawney, Professor R. H. 5, 7 taxation 119, 150–1, 251, 287, 289–90, 294–5, 301, 309, 319–20, 323, 325, 335, 363, 372 Taylor, Professor E. G. R. 15 Taylor, Jeremy, Bishop of Down and Connor 197 Taylor, John, the Water–Poet 194 Taylor, Thomas 90, 102, 275, 328 telescopes 16, 19, 22, 61, 126 Temple, William 120, 247 Temple, Sir William 105–6, 110 Temple, London 222 Terrar, Edward 350–1 textbooks 17–19, 32, 34, 39, 51, 64, 68–9 Thames, the 215 theodolite 20 Thirty Years War 12, 184, 288, 297, 300, 366–7 Thomas, Sir Keith 245, 338 Thomlinson’s Case 213 Thompson, Edward 124, 319 Thompson, Maurice 147 Thomson, J. A. F. 339 Thorne, Professor S. E. 203, 209 Throckmorton, Sir Arthur 32 Thurloe, John 91, 228 Tillotson, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 83, 116 Page 33 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index tithes 294, 296–7, 313, 323, 329, 344, 351, 365 tobacco 146, 148 Toland, John 182 toleration, religious 6, 92, 107, 119, 154, 157, 196, 241, 246, 251, 291, 307–8, 331, 343 Tolley’s Case 210 Tolnai Dali, John 91 Tomlins, Richard 50, 276 Torporley, Nathaniel 130 torture 27, 217–18, 241, 391 Toulouse 27 Tourneur, Cyril 11, 194 Tower Hill, London 57 Tower of London 58, 64, 89, 118, 126–7, 131, 171, 218, 230, 239 trade 72, 87–8, 144–5, 148, 150, 179, 190, 208–9, 236, 242, 258, 289–90, 301, 308, 367, 370, 376, 378 Trade, Council of 98 Trades, History of 67 Tradescant, John 19 translation 18, 27–32, 124, 233, 247, 377, 379, 391 Transylvania 54 Trapp, John 188 Travers, Walter 24, 222, 247, 273 treason 204, 288 Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. 118, 291–2 Triennial Act 290 Trigge, Francis 364 trigonometry 36, 39, 58 Trinidad 140 Trinity College, Cambridge 273 Trinity College, Dublin 121, 247 Trinity College, Oxford 277 Trinity Hall, Cambridge 55 Trinity House 40, 44 Turgot, Anne–Robert 87 Turkey 153, 348 Turner, Peter 54 Turner, Samuel 54–5 Turner, William 23, 37, 54 Twyne, Brian 275–6 Twyne, Thomas 162 Twysden, Sir Roger 55, 205 Tyler, Wat 339 Tyndale, William 17 n. 253, 312–17, 324, 328–9, 342, 350, 353, 365, 377, 379 (p.421) tyrannicide 364 Tyringham’s Case 210 Udall, John 153 Udall, Nicholas 23 Ulster 141 Uniformity Act (1662) 76 Page 34 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index universe 19–20, 24–5, 28, 62, 79, 98, 130, 162, 178–9, 196–9, 239, 264, 345 universities 10–11, 34–5, 38, 48–9, 51–2, 57, 59, 81, 86, 94, 98, 101, 109–11, 156–7, 163, 265, 268–81, 329–30, 332, 356, 379, 387 University Press 50 Ussher, James, Archbishop of Armagh 42, 52, 54, 94, 170, 188, 272, 362, 390, 391 utilitarianism 18, 55, 63, 83–6, 109, 115, 259, 261, 354 Utrecht 184 vagabonds 151, 167, 303–4, 306, 327 Vanbrugh, John 383 Vane, Sir Henry 135, 364, 381 Vanini, Lucilio 27 Vatican, the 12 Vaughan, Henry 385, 388 Vaughan, Rowland 215 Venice 26, 219, 246–8, 270, 308, 366–74 Venner, Thomas 240 Venus, transit of 16, 24 Vere, Sir Horace 193 Vergil, Polydore 16 Verney, Sir Francis 348 Verney, Sir Ralph 278 Verney, Thomas 188 Verstegan, Richard 264, 282 Vesalius 24, 26, 247 Vicary, Thomas 68 Vico, Giambattista 125 Villiers, Sir John 202 Vintners’ Company 64 Viraginia/She–land 245 Virginia 118, 125, 130–1, 143, 154, 301, 333, 347 Virginia Company 32, 40, 44, 52, 63–4, 125, 145–7, 209, 301 Voltaire, François–Marie 3, 6, 338 Vorstius, Conrad 252 Vossius, Gerard John 252 Wadham College, Oxford 45, 262, 279–80 Wagner, D. O. 208–9, 211, 236 Wales 98, 105, 187, 330, 396 Wales, Council in the marshes of 220 Wall, Moses 265–6 Waller, Edmund 222, 296, 333 Waller, Sir William 90 Wallis, John 45, 49, 58–9, 92, 95, 97, 115, 126, 265, 270–1, 273, 279–80 Walsingham, Sir Francis 19, 31, 120, 241, 247, 278, 317 Walton, Izaak 179, 294 Walwyn, William 102, 104, 108, 110, 161, 356, 388, 393 Ward, Captain 348 Ward, Samuel, of Ipswich 265 Ward, Samuel, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 24, 96, 110, 275, 279 Ward, Seth, Bishop of Salisbury 49, 51, 92, 113, 269, 280 Page 35 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index wardship 241, 288, 318–23, 325, 362, 372, 389 Warner, Walter 130 Warner, William 128–9, 195 Warr, John 232 Warsaw 108 Warwick, Robert Rich, Earl of 90, 94 Warwick, Sir Philip 248 Washbourne, Dr. Thomas 106, 346 Waterhouse, Edward 40 Waters, Commander D. W. 15, 60–1 Weald 289 weavers and heresy 8, 231 Webster, John, dramatist 11, 194, 197, 238 Webster, Revd John 96, 100, 107, 110–11, 114, 133–4, 238, 265, 272–3, 277 Weckherlin, Georg Rodolf 95 Wedgwood, C. V. 7 Wells, John 39–40, 43 Wentworth, Peter 226 Wentworth, Sir Thomas, Earl of Strafford 172, 205, 218–19, 228, 249, 256 Wesenbeck, Matthaius 34–5 Western Design 147, 301 Westminster 98 Westminster Assembly of Divines 55, 66, 92, 94–5, 97, 147, 275 Westminster Hall 227, 310 Weyer, Johannes 27 wharfingers 208 Wharton, Philip, Lord 90 Wheare, Degory 50, 66, 158, 188, 277 (p.422) Wheeler, John 242, 247 Whistler, Daniel 252 White, John, artist 37, 125 White, Revd John, of Dorchester 90–1, 275 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 55, 92, 192, 233 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 10, 253, 278, 294, 297, 382 Whitney, Geoffrey 252 Wight, Isle of 255, 299 Wightman, Edward 221, 317 Wilkins, John, Bishop of Chester 45, 53, 56, 60, 77, 83, 93, 95–6, 98, 103, 105, 116, 130, 189, 279–80 William I, the Conqueror, King of England 226, 229, 313–14, 319, 362–5 William III, King of England 181, 226 Williams, John, Archbishop of York 49, 90, 94, 271 Williams, Roger 222, 239, 272, 330 Williamson, Edward 55 Willis, Richard 61 Willobie his Avisa 244 Wilson, Arthur 273 Wilson, Peter Lamborn 348 Wingate, Edmund 42, 53, 61, 65 Page 36 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020
Index Wingfield House 36 Winstanley, Gerrard 101, 103–4, 109–10, 112, 116, 151, 161, 200, 230, 232, 242, 264, 273, 322, 328, 340, 342, 353, 365, 380, 388 Winston, Thomas 56, 145 Winthrop, John, the Younger 47, 53, 98, 272–3, 301 Winwood, Sir Ralph 138, 256 witches 9, 27, 72, 83, 106, 108, 111, 132 Wither, George 12–14, 103–4, 124, 194, 203, 232, 238, 246, 271, 273, 386, 391 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas 313 Wolstenholme, Sir John 19, 32, 44, 63 women 5, 243–5, 338, 356, 378, 383 surgeons 75 Wood, Anthony 156, 281 Wood, Thomas 30 Woodall, John 64–5, 69, 133 woodmongers 208 Woodward, Hezekiah 91 Woodward, John 56 Worlidge, John 304 Worsley, Benjamin 98 Worsop, Edward 21 Wotton, Anthony 51, 260 Wotton, Thomas 262 Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Ely 55, 250 Wren, Sir Christopher 37, 55 Wright, Edward 24, 36–9, 43, 49, 53, 51, 60–1, 63–4, 141, 191–2, 271–2, 275 Wright, Professor L. B. 244 Wright, Lawrence 247 Writer, Clement 388 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 19, 359 Wyclif, John 24–5, 133, 160, 339–40, 390 Wye, River 215 Wyllyams, Robert 17 Xerxes 143 yeomanry 8, 174, 241, 285, 298, 323–4, 364 York 75, 98, 111 Youghal 120 Zeeveld, W. G. 122 Zurich 41 (p.423) (p.424)
Access brought to you by:
Page 37 of 37
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 18 July 2020