‘[N]owe wee are pullinge downe of suche monopolies’, the Kentish parliamentarian Cheney Culpeper wrote excitedly to Samuel Hartlib in 1646,
but the greate monopoly [of political authority by the crown] muste firste downe; & then the monopoly of trade the monopoly of Equity … the monopoly of matters of conscience & scripture (a very notable monopoly), all these & many more wee shall have in chace … thus will Babilon tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble.Footnote 1
The so-called Hartlib circle, active especially during the 1640s and 1650s, was one of the most prolific groups of reformers in early modern Europe.Footnote 2 As Culpeper's letter suggests, the circle's reforming aspiration was multi-faceted, encompassing reforms in church and state, in law and economy. The underlying millenarian or ‘pansophic’ vision of the group has been well explored.Footnote 3 Daniel 12:4 was read as the sign of the imminent arrival of the millennium and the restoration of knowledge, abundance, and innocence that mankind had lost after the Fall. Under the influence of international Calvinism, Christians, especially Protestants, were urged to unite in order to spread the Gospel to far corners of society, regions, and the world. Francis Bacon's programme for developing experimental knowledge was adopted with enthusiasm, giving an impetus to the restoration of learning and the application of technology towards the increase of wealth and happiness. These sources of inspiration did not generate a single, well-defined movement, but stimulated a multitude of reforming initiatives, covering virtually every aspect of social life, including religious and lay education, medicine, alchemy, poor relief, and innovations in industry and agriculture. Drawing upon his extensive correspondence network, Hartlib set himself to become a ‘conduit-pipe’ to the public, circulating numerous manuscripts, editing and publishing some of them for wider audiences while applying for patents and petitioning parliament to press for particular schemes. In this network, we find close allies like Culpeper and the Scottish irenicist John Dury, but also a whole range of men and women from the relatively humble such as William Wheeler and Gabriel Plattes, the author of utopian tract Macaria (1641), to the wealthy Robert Boyle and Lady Katherine Ranelagh, from French Huguenot Peter Le Pruvost to Catholic Richard Weston and the royalist Anglican John Evelyn.
Historians are becoming increasingly cautious about portraying the Hartlib circle as a homogeneous entity. Although Charles Webster once highlighted state-led reformation as a defining feature of this group, recent works have also found a more introspective conception of reformation that emphasized spiritual renewal of the self in the image of Christ.Footnote 4 Historians of science have shown that the circle also drew upon a dazzling array of civic, metaphysical, alchemical and occult traditions in relation to the prospective reformation of knowledge and mankind. A series of case-studies of Hartlib's allies including George Starkey, Johan Moriaen, Benjamin Worsley, William Petty, and Ranelagh, alongside thematic studies of medicine, alchemy, linguistics, and silviculture, continue to reveal a bewildering richness of the group's activities that seem to defy meaningful generalization.Footnote 5 This interpretive move away from the group's coherence and unity has a wider resonance. As Alexandra Walsham put it, ‘ambivalence and contradiction should not be regarded as anomalies but normalities’ when studying post-Reformation European culture. ‘Room must also be made for the general untidiness of the human mind, for the eclectic intermingling of inconsistent opinions that is a perennial feature of individual and collective mentalities.’Footnote 6 In this field, as elsewhere in the humanities, we are facing a distinct danger of complicating our picture until we lose sight of a larger perspective.
The admission of untidiness, however, can be an exciting point of departure. Heterogeneity there certainly was, but it was not so much chaos as a structured complexity derived from a common set of experience. This article develops this perspective by integrating the analysis of binary concepts and illustrating how they helped the Hartlib circle to engage with complex societal, political, and religious issues. Bob Scribner has told us that polemical visual satires for Protestant Reformation sought to forge unity by fashioning themselves as the promoters of light, purity, and godliness, depicting the enemy as the agent of darkness, sin, and the anti-Christ.Footnote 7 Studies of witchcraft and ‘popular culture’ have also found ‘a predisposition to see things in terms of binary opposition’.Footnote 8 Peter Lake has shown that early Stuart politicians and courtiers were adept at legitimating their policies by exaggerating the impending threat of Catholic conspiracy or populist puritanism, each drawing upon a stark dichotomy between popery and reformation, and between ‘popularity’ and disciplined monarchy.Footnote 9
This mode of discourse exerted a profound impact during the Civil War period as well. Popery and other terms of abuse, as Mike Braddick puts it, ‘gave a comforting polemical clarity when debating complex issues’ in the run-up to, and during, the Civil Wars. Co-operation among parliamentarians, for example, was driven more ‘on the basis of fear rather than hope’, that is, ‘more by anti-episcopal views than by a positive vision of the proper constitution of the church’.Footnote 10 Culpeper's letter, quoted earlier, also reveals an implicit opposition between monopoly and reformation (presented as the imminent fall of Babylon). Many would have agreed that ‘monopolies’ – sometimes ridiculed as ‘projects’ – could be detrimental to reformation. Crucially, however, such broad agreement required little precision as to the specific measures that were to be taken to eradicate monopolies, or as to what exactly constituted proper reformation and what steps might be taken to achieve it.
Closer inspection reveals that the circle's seemingly inconsistent reforming activities owed much to the participants’ different responses to ‘a comforting polemical clarity’ of notions such as godly reformation and the greedy projector. This article shows this by exploring the circle's promotion of ‘useful knowledge’: technical knacks and ingenuities, know-how, observations, and more ‘scientific’ hypotheses, all concerned with ‘natural phenomena that potentially lend themselves to manipulation’.Footnote 11 Hartlib and his allies believed that until the Fall mankind had enjoyed complete knowledge of the world, and the land unlimited fertility. Thus, for the circle, the gathering of what was deemed useful – including alchemy and perpetual motion – was nothing less than the restoration of the lost knowledge, a daring attempt by which they could at best serve as a weak instrument for realizing the resurrection of Christ.Footnote 12 The promotion of useful knowledge was therefore at the heart of the circle's reforming ambitions.
After briefly surveying negative connotations of the terms ‘project’ and ‘projector’, the article will explore how Hartlib, his close allies, and a wider circle of collaborators tried to distance themselves from this negative image. They shared what those following Erving Goffman would call ‘stigma consciousness’ – awareness that their attempts at promoting useful knowledge could be discredited as unreliable, even nefarious, ‘projects’.Footnote 13 There was a degree of agreement in the reformers’ response, for example, that one should avoid looking like early Stuart projectors who, by procuring monopolies, profited themselves at the expense of the public. Yet beyond that there was little agreement, especially whether or not, and how, collaborators in the noble pursuit of reformation may be rewarded without descending into profiteering. The well-known proposals for setting up an Office of Address will be examined in this context, alongside hitherto-neglected informal negotiations with William Wheeler. Many shared the pursuit of reformation as a slogan, and the distrust of the projector as a practical problem. As Hartlib and his allies took differing approaches to this common set of experiences, however, their promotion of useful knowledge gave rise to strikingly ambivalent practices of collaboration and exclusion.
I
The terms ‘project’ and ‘projector’ came into circulation in response to a wave of technology transfer and economic improvements schemes that emerged in the later sixteenth century.Footnote 14 Against the backdrop of imperial competition amidst population rise and inflation, statesmen, scholars, artisans, and merchants brought together power, money, and useful knowledge in areas such as construction, hydrostatics, mechanics, mining, manufacture, and agriculture. Under the influence of humanism, their undertakings were promoted as public service, capable of developing national economy, improving welfare provisions, and enhancing public revenues at home, ultimately driving England's imperial ambitions abroad. Yet under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, many spurious ‘projects’ emerged under the colour of serving the commonwealth, such as procuring royal privileges to monopolize whole industries or pressing for controversial ‘improvements’ of forests, rivers, or fenland. While promising revenues to the crown, they threatened to disrupt the local economy by imposing fines and confiscation. The 1624 Statute of Monopoly condemned a number of monopolies, but left many loopholes.Footnote 15 The pursuit of economic improvement and innovation thus remained prone to perversion, not only by the self-interest of promoters, but also by the financial necessities of ambitious monarchs. At stake was not just the ancient problem of morality in the market but people's rights and liberty as well as social and political stability.Footnote 16
The concept of projecting captured precisely these problems. In Latin, proiecere could mean ‘to throw forward’ and ‘to display’, and jactare to ‘discuss, to boast of’, and to ‘make an ostentatious display’. Thus, the project was at best a vision of a future society and an audacious plan about realizing that vision through collective action.Footnote 17 Yet, more specifically, in the alchemical tradition the ‘powder of projection’ meant the ‘Philosopher's Stone’, ‘a Powder supposed to have the Virtue of changing any quantity of’ base metals ‘into a more perfect one, as Silver or Gold’.Footnote 18 As literary works like Jonson's Alchemist and Devil is an ass depicted, then, projects were at worst spurious ‘arts’, ‘inventions’, ‘secrets’, or ‘mysteries’, only seemingly capable of generating wealth. Between 1641 and 1642, following the collapse of press censorship, an unprecedented number of pamphlets attacked the early Stuart projector.Footnote 19 While neutral usage of the term ‘project’ as a plan or a scheme did not completely disappear, the image of the projector had become something of an established literary stereotype. In the context of political economy, the projector came to stand for the rent-seeker who pretended public service to pursue their self-interest and that of the crown at the expense of people's rights and properties. More generally, the figure stood for a deluded dreamer advancing wild and impossible schemes, or a relentless conman defrauding others through bogus schemes.
These stereotypes of the ‘projector’ were particularly problematic for Hartlib and his allies because they sought support from the Long Parliament, which had denounced Stuart projectors. But more importantly, the emphasis Hartlib and his allies placed on public service threatened to expose them to the kind of criticism that had been aimed at projectors of the preceding decades:
Hartlibeans were acutely aware of such suspicion. As early as in 1634, John Dury complained that advocates of reform were all too often ‘counted a subtill projector … inconsiderate & presumptuous foole’.Footnote 21 As Mark Jenner points out, they too were ‘in danger of collapsing under the weight of their own grandiloquent pretensions’.Footnote 22 At stake was a serious question about credibility, as Adrian Johns puts it: ‘Why should anyone have believed any of Hartlib's promises?’Footnote 23 Given the prominence of the projector stereotype and the important problems it captured, we can reformulate the question: Could projector-like promoters ever be trusted in the joint quest for reformation? How did Hartlib and his allies respond to the negative stereotypes, and to the underlying challenge of how to promote reformation without descending into profiteering or infringing upon others’ liberty and property?
II
One, perhaps predictable, response was to avoid seeking monopolistic patents and avoid imposing fines and confiscation – a violation characteristic of early Stuart monopolists and projectors. In this respect, Hartlib and his allies displayed a degree of shared response. When a London-trained barber-surgeon, Benjamin Worsley, promoted a scheme for producing saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in 1645, for example, he carefully trimmed its monopolistic elements. Saltpetre was a constituent of gunpowder, and, as Sir Edward Coke put it, its production was deemed vital ‘for the necessary defence and safety of the realm’.Footnote 24 As the chemical process was not fully understood, domestic production depended on searching and digging the floors of stables and dovecots where saltpetre occurred naturally.Footnote 25 Under the royal authority, the licensees, so-called saltpetremen, were permitted this intrusion. Even Robert Boyle had to pay bribes to stop ‘those undermining two-legged moles’ from digging his cellar and stables. Indeed, the 1641 Grand Remonstrance highlighted their ‘vexation and oppression’ upon ‘the liberties of the subjects in their habitation’ alongside those of other monopolists and projectors.Footnote 26 Worsley was promoting his scheme at a time when the procurement of this material, urgently needed for the ongoing war efforts, had a problematic association with the imposition of royal authority of the previous decades.
His proposal was to set up workhouses for the poor in London in which residents would oversee the production using their own waste. Worsley wrote some draft proposals anonymously. One of them asked that ‘none’ but he and his associates ‘maie make [saltpetre] their waye or with their materials’. Another went even further, seeking a monopoly over the saltpetre production itself once the poor houses began to produce it sufficiently.Footnote 27 As these proposals resembled early Stuart monopolies, they were probably not well received by Hartlib and his associates, to whom Worsley had just been introduced.Footnote 28 As if these anonymous proposals were there to gauge responses without risking his own reputation, Worsley carefully dropped the requests for monopoly when submitting another version of the proposal to London aldermen. Unlike unscrupulous projectors, he now reassured, ‘I goe not about to establish my owene good by injury, or with Carelessenesse to the good of others.’ That is, ‘by a new way of making … Salt Peter, I will … free the whole Common-wealth of the trouble or injury susteyned in haveing their Houses Cellers yards and other places digged up and spoiled by Salt-Peter-Men’. In all, he promised ‘not to intrench upon the libertie or infringe the just priviledges of any subject whatsoever’.Footnote 29
Although Worsley went on to submit a petition to the Lords, his scheme ultimately did not materialize; it is alleged that Worsley did not have the technical knowledge he claimed to possess.Footnote 30 Importantly, however, avoiding imposition and thereby distancing himself from monopolistic projectors and saltpetremen enhanced the credence of the scheme. The committee of London aldermen reported that the scheme would advance ‘the publique good’ without being ‘preiudiciall (in the least) vnto any, hee being neither desirous to debarr any to import the said Commodity, or to make it after the way that is now vsed’.Footnote 31
Equally revealing is a case of William Petty, who obtained a patent in 1648 for what he called the ‘double-writing’ engine, an invention for producing ‘two resembling copies of the same thing at once’.Footnote 32 He had originally proposed ‘to move the State to lay an additionall taxe upon writing paper’, appointing himself as a tax-collector who would take a fee as a reward for his invention. This ambitious proposal, Petty admitted, was dropped and a more conventional patent procured instead because imposing a new tax seemed to have ‘cross[ed] too much the nature of the times, when men complain enough already of impositions’.Footnote 33
Promoters did not, however, always agree precisely what these ‘impositions’ were. A case in point is the promotion of the ambitious ‘universal trade’ scheme. First developed by a Huguenot, Hugh L'Amy, and later promoted by Le Pruvost, the scheme intended to introduce fishery and agricultural innovations in England in order to fund the state-led plantation of a Calvinist colony in North America.Footnote 34 Hartlib's allies were acutely aware of the need to avert comparison with the early Stuart projector. Culpeper suggested that the scheme might be tried by getting a patent for the inventions, although, he added, doing so would make it look ‘eyther folly or knavery’.Footnote 35 Dury agreed. Patents were understood ‘not to bee beneficiall to the public’; getting one would make the scheme ‘seeme a project indeed and a kind of Monopolie’. It would bring ‘soe much opposition of Envie & jeallousie against’ the promoter that he ‘hardly should be ever able to proceed’. Instead of a patent, Dury thus argued, Le Pruvost would need the state's full support via parliamentary ordinance.Footnote 36
The debate continued among the reformers because Le Pruvost demanded the imposition of fines and confiscation of properties upon offenders so that ‘none practise or cause to be practised’ his ways of husbandry and fishing.Footnote 37 Dury argued parliamentarians could still be persuaded because discouraging free-riders was reasonable, and because the promoter neither drew upon ‘any inventions, which looke like projects’, nor ‘demands any special priviledge as Monopolists or projectors use to doe’ under the early Stuarts.Footnote 38 Note that the feasibility of the scheme was measured against the image of the ‘projector’ and the ‘monopolist’. By contrast, Culpeper claimed that the Frenchman would first have to ‘quitte that resolution of takinge mens estates & disposing of them without theire consente’. This, Culpeper wrote, was ‘an inseparable companion of moste former monopolies’.Footnote 39 Dury and Hartlib later reiterated this point and revised a draft ordinance to drop draconian elements, but the French promoter rejected this, and the scheme reached a deadlock.Footnote 40 The reformers did not agree on what exactly made a proposal look like repressive early Stuart projects, especially whether stiff penalties could be permitted if judiciously administered. Nonetheless, the efforts of Worsley, Petty, Dury, and Culpeper reveal that encroachment upon people's rights and properties was an underlying concern when putting useful knowledge to public use, and that the image of the early Stuart monopolist and projector provided a benchmark for negotiation.
III
A promoter might well avoid breaching others’ rights and liberties, but he could still resemble an unreliable projector profiting himself by airing impractical or fraudulent ‘inventions’ and ‘secrets’. What strategies enabled such men to avoid comparison with the image of the projector as a fool or conman? One way was to renounce rewards for divulging useful knowledge, and to communicate them by publishing pamphlets so that the reader may try to adopt them for themselves. It was something of an opt-out strategy, to reject elements of the secrecy and profiteering associated with ostentatious projectors in favour of financial independence and open communication. It was adopted by some promoters such as Plattes, the author of the 1641 utopian tract Macaria.
His ambition in publishing mining and agricultural tracts in 1639 was no less than making ‘this Countrey the Paradise of the World’.Footnote 41 Yet, probably mindful of projectors’ ostentatious claims, Plattes repeatedly stressed the limitations of his knowledge. ‘[N]o certaine rule can be given for so variable a worke’ as husbandry he argued. Acknowledging that different environmental conditions, such as soil and weather conditions in agriculture, affected the success of crop cultivation schemes, Plattes kept himself from requesting the investment of others as projectors would do. In his words, he chose to ‘part with my money, rather than to suffer another to be oppressed with extreme want and miserie’. He therefore communicated his findings through print for the profit and use of many. Finally, rather than promising quick substantial returns as typical ‘projectors’ would do, Plattes issued numerous cautions against taking his advice for granted and urged ‘every man’ first to ‘trie the truth [of his relations] in a few Perches of Land … then to goe to worke in greater quantities’.Footnote 42 Similar caveats were given repeatedly in his pamphlets.Footnote 43
The farmer and inventor Walter Blith positioned himself against the stereotype even more explicitly. The son of a Warwickshire yeoman recounted in 1652 that ‘a naughty generation of men’ had obtained patents with ‘their pretences of great abilities in Enginereship’ and thereby ‘brought Ingenuity under the scandal of projects and new devices’.Footnote 44 Like Plattes, Blith emphasized the limitations of his knowledge and refrained from seeking investments, instead publishing books about improved cultivation methods. He was acutely aware that this would enhance his credibility. In a way that intriguingly anticipated the Boylean emphasis on ‘disinterestedness’, Blith argued that his cultivation techniques were ‘Experimented at the onely and proper cost of the Author’, and that they ‘are therefore somewhat the more Credible’.Footnote 45 Thus, instead of asking money in return for revealing secrets, Plattes and Blith stressed their financial independence and commitment to open communication, while emphasizing the potential limitation of the knowledge they possessed. These measures set them apart from what Plattes called men ‘of indifferent vertuous dispositions’ pursuing ‘for very want of meanes … actions which were not laudable’ – an allusion to the spurious ‘projects’ that had been thriving under Charles's Personal Rule.Footnote 46
Not everyone could afford to opt out of profit and patronage, however. Worsley, for example, declared to ‘discharge his Conscience and Duty to the publicke’ by submitting his saltpetre scheme to the London aldermen.Footnote 47 Yet he never elaborated where exactly the knack of his new ‘invention’ lay. The promoter of the ‘Universal trade’, Le Pruvost, too, concealed particulars; he did little more than hint that his scheme would somehow unite subjects’ ‘owne advantages’ and ‘the Rules of Righteousnes for a public aime’.Footnote 48 Cressy Dymock, a landless inventor from a Lincolnshire family, also refused to reveal his secrets while at the same time confidently asserting to serve God and the public.Footnote 49 Although rarely noted in the secondary literature, even Plattes tacitly concealed his seed-setting engine. His 1639 agricultural tract made only passing references to the engine upon the pretext that the labour-saving invention ‘might doe more hurt than good’ by taking jobs away from the poor.Footnote 50 In reality, he had been applying for a patent for the engine and a handbill to advertise it.Footnote 51 Having obtained the grant in February 1640, he defied his previous reservations about the invention, and declared in a handbill: ‘Those that love themselves or the common good, are invited and desired to learn the knowledge of this new invention for the expeditious setting of corne, against the time of dearth and scarcitie.’Footnote 52 Neither technical details nor the intention to disclose them gratis were indicated, suggesting that Plattes probably expected some payment in return for imparting his ingenuity. Unlike monopolies and elements of ‘imposition’ such as taxation, confiscation, and fines, elements of concealment and private gain were more readily reconciled with public service.Footnote 53 Accordingly, just like parliamentarian military officers Ann Hughes has studied, many promoters continued to attach ‘their personal ambitions to particular versions of the public interest’.Footnote 54
Here then was a profound challenge to Hartlib and his close allies. Few promoters would have been unaware of the detrimental effects of being compared to early Stuart projectors. Yet relatively few could escape the damaging comparison because there was little clear-cut distinction between profiteering under the veneer of public service and receiving just reward for divulging useful knowledge.Footnote 55 To that extent, then, even after distancing oneself from monopolistic grants, Hartlib and others still had to face the question of how to collaborate with projector-like schemers in the noble pursuit of reformation.
IV
Perhaps surprisingly, the Bacon-inspired proposals for encouraging ingenuity and the ‘Advancement of Learning’, for which the circle is perhaps best known, reveal a tortuous process of negotiation with projector-like promoters seeking rewards. When the scheme was first proposed in print by Dury in May 1647, the aspiration to open communication was featured prominently. The so-called Office of Address had two branches, ‘One for Bodily, the Other for Spirituall Matters.’Footnote 56 The bodily part was to give jobs to the poor by gathering information concerning demands for, and supplies of, labourers. The branch was named the Office of Address for Accommodation. The spiritual branch was to handle ‘matters of Religion, of Learning, and’, crucially, of ‘all Ingenuities’ as well. It was to become ‘a Center and Meeting-place of Advices, of Proposalls, of Treaties … freely to bee given and received, … by and for all such as may think themselves concerned’ with ‘the most Profitable Undertakings, Discoveries, and Occurences’. Designed to serve as a ‘communion’ of noble minds, this upper branch was named the Office of Communication, and was deemed ‘far beyond that of Accommodations in Usefulnesse’.Footnote 57
This aspiration to free and open communication is the image most commonly associated with the Office of Address.Footnote 58 Yet a more complex picture begins to emerge if we consider how well Hartlib and his close allies managed to put this ideal into practice. An underexplored case of the obscure inventor William Wheeler (? – 1653) is particularly revealing as the circle sought to bring him into collaboration at a time when the idea about the Office of Address was taking shape.Footnote 59
Little is known about Wheeler. He seems to have moved to the Netherlands, in the 1630s, working on a broad range of inventions, but especially on fen drainage and related inventions under the auspice of the English ambassador to The Hague, Sir William Boswell.Footnote 60 Wheeler obtained a patent there for his draining engine in 1639, and an English one in 1642 covering multiple inventions including his water raising engine – an invention useful not only for Dutch lowlands but also for English fens and mines. He had become known to Hartlib and his associates by 1644, and Culpeper was soon asked to arrange a meeting with Wheeler's associate in England.Footnote 61 In October 1645, Culpeper commented on Wheeler's patent for his draining engine, which conferred him ‘the full preiveledge of either sellinge the use of this invention to others or of using it himselfe’.Footnote 62
It seems that Wheeler asked for a rather exorbitant compensation for ‘selling’ his patented inventions. Yet, Culpeper initially expected Wheeler to be a like-minded Christian willing to impart useful knowledge voluntarily and freely. He proposed that Wheeler should surrender his invention to trustees so that the trustees could first invest in building a model of the mill, and subsequently utilize the invention more widely for the public's benefit.Footnote 63 Culpeper acknowledged the need to reward inventors and investors who would initially ‘undergoe that disbursemente & hazarde’, but only by granting them ‘concurrent use’ of the invention for ‘particular under takings of their owne’. Hartlib's editorial intervention suggests that he preferred to permit private use only after public interests were first met;Footnote 64 Worsley reportedly proposed to induce disclosure by paying the inventor.Footnote 65
Culpeper's and others’ responses were therefore not monolithic. Importantly, however, the ‘official’ line presented in the first printed proposal for the Office of 1647 indicated little about the need for rewards. When Culpeper commented on a draft proposal of the Office in 1646, he in fact made no mention of Wheeler, with whom the circle was negotiating at that time. At this point, his concern was simply that no one but Hartlib would have ‘suche a stocke of forreine relation, intelligence & ingenuities’.Footnote 66
Culpeper had been too optimistic. By February 1646, it emerged that a trial of Wheeler's engine would not take place in England. Culpeper accordingly told Hartlib that he ‘did not open’ himself to a call for investment – a reluctance he repeated in October 1647, just five months after the publication of the first printed proposal for the Office of Address.Footnote 67 Wheeler probably remained unwilling to agree to the terms of co-operation. If the overblown narrative in Mr William Wheeler's case (1645) is to be believed, he feared that patrons such as Boswell were plotting to deprive him of God-given secrets. His expertise, Wheeler alleged, ‘drew upon me infinite enmities, and oppositions’, but ‘the mercy of God most admirably fortified me: so that I did conceal my chief skill’.Footnote 68 Meanwhile, in December 1647, Petty performed his ‘double-writing’ engine before witnesses and soon began seeking a patent for it.Footnote 69 He did not reveal the secret to the circle. Having given up the idea of introducing a new tax on writing paper (as we have seen earlier), Petty went on proposing to take fees of 7 s 2d for licensing, asking parliament to pay £1,000 for fully revealing the technology behind the invention.Footnote 70
Culpeper's view began to change. In January next year, Culpeper called for a parliamentary committee for purchasing inventions. He admitted that he had been ‘exceedingly taken with Mr Petit & Mr Wheelers [sic]’ inventions. Yet because ‘they cannot parte with them without some rewarde, & that noe private purse’ or public authorities as they stood would answer their demands, Culpeper suggested that parliament ‘appoint a Committee for the examininge & rewardinge of Ingenuities & purchasinge them for publike use’. The Office of Address was envisaged to serve this committee.Footnote 71
The promotion of useful knowledge began to look more like the trade in marketable goods. Culpeper argued that men like Wheeler had shown just ‘howe many ingenuities ar[e] loste & buried because Selfe cannot be advanced’. The ‘exchange and merchandiz of it is & will be between mechanique disposition’ who would ‘not forgoe their commodities of ingenueity but by way of barter’.Footnote 72 The Office of Address had to be modified accordingly. Commenting on the 1647 proposal, Culpeper argued that ‘the care of rationall ingenuities showlde be annexed to that parte which you call the office of Accommodation’.Footnote 73
These considerations were echoed in the second publication about the Office, A further discoverie of the Office of Publick Addresse for Accommodations (1648). This striking, yet hitherto underused, pamphlet explicitly relegated the status of useful knowledge to the ranks of ‘Outward Things concerning this present life’ to be handled by the lower Office of Accommodation.Footnote 74 Allusions to the possibility of remuneration must have been unmistakable to contemporary readers. The Office was to offer ‘sensible Inducements towards all Enterprises’; those who had such things as ‘a new discovery of a Truth, or an Experiment in Physick, Mathematicks, or Mechanicks … shall be able to receive satisfaction therein so far as it is attainable’.Footnote 75 This was because ‘most men will not intend any Publick Ayme till they can secure their own Interests’.Footnote 76 Spiritual aspirations did not disappear, of course. In Further discoverie, the purchasing of useful secrets was characterized as a ‘momentary’ means for achieving the ‘Work of Communication … towards the Advancement of Pietie, Vertue, and Learning’.Footnote 77 As an editorial intervention of Hartlib (or his secretary) suggests, the reformer wished to see such remuneration as ‘accommodation in this present’, something to be adopted temporarily until individual spiritual reformation fully took root among collaborators.Footnote 78 Yet, the pamphlet does reveal reformers’ grudging effort to ‘accommodate’ those who could not abandon worldly needs for compensation. Subsequent publications on the subject adopted this line.Footnote 79
More broadly speaking, the desire to offer reward and thereby expand the ring of collaborators was probably rooted in the advent of international Calvinism itself. Based on the doctrine of election, hot Calvinists in the Netherlands, for example, saw themselves as the chosen few, or ‘the children of God’. Yet there was also a desire to cast ‘the “evangelical net” to catch as many as possible’ for the propagation of the gospel.Footnote 80 Like a comprehensive church, then, the Office of Address was to open its door widely. No longer just for public-spirited individuals, the proposal came to look more like a means for accommodating unreformed brethren into the pursuit of useful knowledge and reformation.
The tension between parliamentarians and royalists remained high, and the state-backed system of testing and purchasing inventions never materialized. Hartlib probably understood this to be God's redirection. As Culpeper once praised, he had a ‘resolution to persiste in your office of address’ and ‘ever to labor with those materials which God affoords & to leave the successee to him’.Footnote 81 ‘Men must adjust to God's will, not prescribe to it’ by their own devices, as Blair Worden has put it.Footnote 82 Hartlib thus started the Office of Address as an unofficial institution drawing on the money parliament had granted him.Footnote 83 Unfortunately, however, imitators soon began to set up their own offices of address, and Hartlib argued for suppressing them – an action to be approved by parliament for the public good. This must have made him look like former monopolists encroaching upon other people's rights and liberties.Footnote 84 Neither introspective nor the state-led reform proved forthcoming in the end. Hartlib and his close allies had to keep negotiating informally. The problem of distrust remained, and the would-be reformers took a strikingly wide range of actions under the slogan of reformation. It is to this that the final section turns.
V
In the absence of a state-backed office of address, Culpeper grew increasingly unsympathetic to projector-like promoters unwilling to share knowledge without monetary rewards. In April 1648, for example, he warned Hartlib against meddling with the Cambridge-educated Robert Child should he turn out to be ‘not … of a communicative disposition’.Footnote 85 In July, in reference to Wheeler, Culpeper declared that he would not ‘deceive my selfe, in valewinge what lyes buried in another mans bosome’; in November, he further lamented that Petty and the German alchemist inventor Johann Glauber were likely ‘to turne a Wheeler’. He now resolved ‘not to trowble my thowghts any farther’ with them, because their ‘ingenuity consistes in other mens purses and theire owne interestes’.Footnote 86 Culpeper learned in March the next year that Wheeler had run away from the United Provinces ‘without sending or writing after, to any of his Creditors’.Footnote 87 He declared in response:
till every particular person be wrowght on by Gods Spirite, to knowe, & to acknolwedge, that the talentes he hath received … are not given, but entrusted onely … not to our owne onely, but to others good[,] till this (I say) be woorckte into the Spirites of men, the divell will hinder the worlde, of a greate parte of the happiness, … of that abundance which more communication of ingenuities wowld produce, & of what innocence, which abundance of all thinges wowld bringe into the worlde[.]Footnote 88
For Culpeper, Wheeler's sins now represented a profound obstacle to the arrival of the Second Coming. Speaking unfavourably of ‘Mr Pettys zeal for experiments’, Henry More also declared that ‘great projectes’ were nothing but the wasteful ‘building of Babell against a second expected deluge’ unless accompanied by ‘sincerity, and untainted morality’.Footnote 89 Where prospective collaborators appeared covetous or unscrupulous, the need for spiritual renewal could be invoked to reject them as unreformed brethren who were wasting God-given talents.
Paradoxically, however, the Calvinist doctrine that underlay the pursuit of reformation simultaneously enjoined to give the benefit of doubt. For example, by alluding to Ecclesiastes 11:6, Dury advised Culpeper not to be too sceptical about Le Pruvost's scheme: ‘wee are bid sow our seed in the morning, and not [to] withhold our hand in the Evening, because wee know not whither shall prosper whether this or that, or both’. It was important ‘to resign ourselves up to God by depending upon his providence for a blessing, and not trusting to[o] much to our owne prudencie to doe thinges’.Footnote 90 Receiving the letter Culpeper agreed and confessed his ‘hopes … to inlarge my thowghts’ and depend on God's providence and guidance.Footnote 91 The success of certain enterprises was to be entrusted to divine, rather than human, judgement.
More than religion was at work as well. Hartlib had been interested in the patent system from the 1630s, and later helped various inventors and technologists home and abroad to obtain patents for specific inventions (i.e. not monopolistic patents).Footnote 92 In order to help his wife to earn a living, Dury solicited from Worsley recipes for cordials and ciders; Worsley replied with ‘the most lucriferous secrett’ that was to be ‘kept privatt’.Footnote 93 Culpeper was probably interested in using others’ inventions in his estate or elsewhere.Footnote 94 Though aspiring to holiness, these reformers were therefore never altogether removed from monetary concerns that they occasionally censured. After all, Hartlib and his close allies could not promote useful knowledge without drawing on a wider ring of collaborators. Too readily dismissing them as base and unreformed would thus have been untenable, and also presumptuous, for those aspiring to become weak instruments of God's providence.
The aspiration to follow divine will, bound up with more pragmatic concerns, helps us understand the otherwise puzzling fluctuation of reformers’ attitudes towards collaborators.Footnote 95 Culpeper, who had once accused Glauber and Petty of their mercenary attitudes, for example, came to ‘wonderfully approve’ Glauber while arranging to pay for Petty's agricultural inventions, only to become dismissive of them again later. Even then, Culpeper wished that somehow Hartlib might ‘give a change to these my thowghts’ on them.Footnote 96 It is therefore hardly surprising that Hartlib and his allies went on extending support to otherwise dubious inventors such as Dymock. Although details of his experiments in arable cultivation were kept secret, Boyle, Culpeper, and others invested in them the total of £50 in May 1649.Footnote 97 In March the following year, Hartlib and one Alexander Tracye of London paid Dymock a ‘competent sum of money’ so that under their direction Dymock would build the mills that he claimed approached a perpetual motion engine.Footnote 98 Some of Dymock's letters and manuscripts were subsequently printed in order to call for more investment.Footnote 99 Support was not unconditional. It seems that by 1654, a year after his three-year contract with Hartlib and Tracye on the perpetual motion engines had expired, Dymock had come to fall out of favour. In February that year, Hartlib wrote to Boyle: ‘Mr. Dymock … is forsaken, in a manner, by all.’ ‘Honest Mr. Dymock is blamed almost by every body’, Hartlib added three months later. Even he admitted that ‘I cannot any longer assist either his person, family, or inventions.’Footnote 100
Aspiration to reformation, however, did not allow the reformer completely to ignore dubious promoters like Dymock. As Howard Hotson has shown, Hartlib, Comenius, and his teacher Johann Heinrich Alsted aspired to regain the extent of knowledge that mankind had lost after the Fall. As Alsted put it, ‘man approaches God as closely as possible when he knows Him and His works and when he forms and conforms all his works and deeds to goodness and virtue’.Footnote 101 This was not a purely intellectual concern. For, argued Hartlib, ‘it is nothing but the Narrownes of our Spirits that makes us miserable’; mankind would indeed obtain ‘infinite Meanes of Reliefe and Comfort’ if ‘that which God hath given them’ was put to use ‘to serve the Glory of his Goodness’.Footnote 102 Despite his frustration, Hartlib in fact never completely dismissed Dymock, urging Boyle that Dymock's ‘publick and private usefulness’ be reappraised and some of his schemes be further ‘supported, than hither it hath been’.Footnote 103 Even after a correspondent concluded that Wheeler was no less than a charlatan,Footnote 104 Hartlib kept noting in his work diary Ephemerides Wheeler's numerous inventions until the inventor's death in 1652.Footnote 105 Hartlib took a similar approach to Glauber, stressing the need to ‘note whatever was true and good in all his writings’ even if the inventor was by some ‘count[ed] no better than a mountebank, one that continues to cheat all sorts of people by his specious artifices’.Footnote 106 ‘[Y]our rule is goode’, acknowledged Culpeper, ‘to passe by the woorste of every man soe as the infirmities hinder not the use of what good is [in] him.’Footnote 107 Even where collaboration proved untenable, therefore, the impulse towards collecting God-ordained knowledge prompted Hartlib to gather information even from the excluded.
If different facets of the reforming ideal prevented the Hartlib circle from pursuing a coherent method of collaboration and exclusion, the persistent distrust of the projector led collaborators to adopt diverging promotional strategies. In September 1649, when Dymock was busy promoting his schemes for agriculture and perpetual motion, he complained of ‘the exceeding antipathy that almost all men have in them against engenuitye which causes them to reject all new inventions … under the name & notion of projects’.Footnote 108 This explains why Dymock carefully played to the sensibilities of his prospective patrons. Unlike Wheeler who did not build mills in England, Dymock set up a ‘model’ of his engine in Lambeth to prove his technical competence. Although he could drop pious language and highlight forthcoming profits when occasions suited,Footnote 109 Dymock's letters to Hartlib constantly emphasized his desire to serve ‘ever Gratious God’ and ‘the universall good of Mankind’ by perfecting God-ordained inventions.Footnote 110 Alluding to the very passage from Ecclesiastes that Dury mentioned, Dymock even assured Hartlib that ‘of this seed you will reap abundant Harvest in due time’ – a superb metaphor for promoting engines to be used in agriculture.Footnote 111 Even though he did not abandon proprietary attitudes as Plattes and Blith did, in this way Dymock managed to solicit a degree of support from Hartlib and his associates.
Others in the circle stopped promoting schemes to private backers. Worsley provides the most striking example. In 1649, while staying in the United Provinces, he declared ‘the vanity of proposing’ new schemes: ‘vnlesse I may have a place or settled imployment in England, I shall have no heart at all to come over, for I am much convinced of the vanity of proposing any invention to the world of any kind.’Footnote 112 This was a clear change from 1646. He had then hoped that schemes like his own, ‘propounded even but by strangers’ like him, would be capable of winning ‘favour and acceptance’ of parliament and elsewhere.Footnote 113 His interest in saltpetre remained, and Worsley continued to propose ways to achieve the better ‘Imploiment of the poor’, the ‘bringing in of Bullion’ from abroad, or ‘the augmenting of the Revenue to the State’ for the ‘Commonwealth's service’.Footnote 114 But his activities were increasingly channelled into the government, for example, the commission for the parliamentary settlement in Virginia, and the Council of Trade set up in 1650.Footnote 115 Petty pursued a similar path. During 1648, he was busy publicizing the double-writing engine and dabbling in agricultural inventions including a corn-setting engine, perhaps in an attempt to improve the engine patented by Plattes. Yet after a brief foray into the University of Oxford, he started serving as a government official in Cromwellian Ireland for the famous Down Survey.Footnote 116 If Plattes and Blith adopted open communication of experimental results in response to prevailing distrust of the projector, Worsley and Petty opted to pursue careers in government to exploit their talents in what must have appeared a more favourable environment. If anything, the unresolved problem of distrust and the ambivalence of reforming ideals fragmented the circle's pursuit of useful knowledge.
VI
This article has not offered an exhaustive survey of the Hartlib circle's promotion of useful knowledge, but examined why it seems so untidy and inconsistent. Distrust was at the root of the problem, a distrust created by criticism of earlier projectors and monopolists which reached a climax in the 1640s. ‘Projectors’ had acquired such a bad reputation as being contrary to the public interest that the circle's strategy was constantly affected by the need to avoid such criticisms. We have found that the problem of distrust divided the circle over two fundamental questions. First, there was a delicate question of political economy: how to promote useful knowledge and economic improvement without depriving others of their properties and rights to trade. As the case-studies of Worsley and Petty have shown, there was an emerging agreement that one should avoid behaving like early Stuart projectors, imposing authority purportedly for the public good. Yet, equally importantly, Dury and Culpeper disagreed as to whether Le Pruvost might be permitted to use the state authority to impose stiff penalties to deter free riders. The second point raised by the distrust of the projector was the question of money and credibility. There was a deep-seated fear that the promotion of useful knowledge may be undermined by elements of profit. Plattes and Blith distanced themselves from monetary rewards and the search for investors in order to lend credibility to themselves and the knowledge they claimed to possess. Yet because many promoters did not adopt such an opt-out strategy, the Office of Address had eventually to allow for the remuneration of men like Wheeler.
The loosely shared concept of reformation proved an inadequate guide for action. When discussing the Office of Address proposals, the reformers initially had different views as to what forms of reward should be offered to the inventor, and only reluctantly ‘accommodated’ what they called men of ‘mechanic’ dispositions. In the absence of an official Office of Address, men like Culpeper and More disparaged men like Petty and Wheeler for mercenary attitudes and for lacking inward reformation. Yet avid reformers like Dury weres quick to point out that they ought not fully trust their own judgement lest God's will might manifest through seemingly dubious collaborators. Even if financial support proved untenable (as in the cases of Dymock and Wheeler), Hartlib felt obliged to gather information from them in order to restore the knowledge lost after the Fall. These varying positions were probably not mutually exclusive. Religiously affected reformers such as Hartlib, Culpeper, and Dury seem to have embraced these reforming impulses, each taking diverging actions drawing differently upon their loosely shared ideals. The circle's untidy pursuit of useful knowledge emerged, in short, as differing responses to, and interpretations of, a shared frame of reference: the distrust of the projector and the pursuit of reformation.
The findings of this article enable us to do more than develop a conceptual framework for synthesizing studies of the Hartlib circle. First, the analysis of binary discourse that has hitherto focused on post-Reformation politics and religion could be fruitfully extended to incorporate economic and technological themes. Historians of early Stuart and Civil War England could, for example, explore how the pro-reform and anti-projector rhetoric influenced the debate about parliamentary taxation in the same way in which reformation and anti-popery did the debate about church settlement.
The article simultaneously contributes to the history of science and technology. Studies of the rise of experimental philosophy have tended to suggest that philosophical objections derived from Aristotelianism and Scholasticism presented chief obstacles to the use of experiments.Footnote 117 When it came to the application of useful knowledge, however, another important constraint emerged from a more political context, the collapse of Charles's Personal Rule and the ensuing denunciation of the early Stuart projector through various media. Given the degree to which Hartlibeans were alive to the danger of distrust, we should do well to integrate the analysis of political culture more fully into studies of knowledge making.
More fundamentally, by surveying how shared stigma consciousness gave rise to conflicting strategies for negotiating credibility and collaboration, the article highlights distrust as a useful category for exploring early modern knowledge-making practices. Under the influence of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, the analysis of trust in the history of science and technology has dwelt greatly on the question of ‘whom to trust’. This has led to a series of case-studies investigating practitioners’ identity and self-presentation that enabled them to be deemed credible.Footnote 118 An emerging consensus is that even those who ‘lacked the [formal] learning and demeanour of a natural philosopher’ could attract a degree of attention and even support.Footnote 119 The findings of this article not only support this specific consensus, but urge us to ponder how far the negotiation of trust and credibility might have been driven not so much by a set of well-defined personal attributes as by a shared stigma consciousness prompting a multitude of coping strategies. Did the distrust of the projector shape Hartlibean reform in other spheres, such as medicine and taxation? Was Boyle's insistence upon ‘disinterestedness’ an implicit response to the accusation of nefarious ‘projecting’, something similar to Plattes's and Blith's strategy to highlight their financial independence as a source of credibility? Were Fellows’ activities not affected by ‘longstanding wariness of projectors’, as Larry Stewart suggested?Footnote 120 Can bodies such as the Royal Society (established in 1660) and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (founded in 1754) be studied as institutional solutions to distrust?
This article thus opens new avenues for research. By explicitly engaging with studies of post-Reformation culture, by exploring the ways in which opposing concepts such as the projector and the pursuit of reformation shaped reforming initiatives, we can begin to bring together the burgeoning case-studies of practitioners of science and technology in general and the Hartlib circle in particular towards more fruitful synthesis.
