The above-ground mine of Giovanni Botero

An often underestimated thinker, Giovanni Botero reinvigorated the belief that knowledge is power. He developed an anti-Machiavellian reason of state based around the empirical collection of knowledge and its deployment in administration and industry.Footnote ¹³ Botero defined the reason of state in 1589 as information (notitia) concerning the ways to found, preserve and expand a constant dominion over a people.Footnote ¹⁴ Such an informed political practice showed, Botero contended, that dominion need not rest upon violence nor upon base Machiavellian deceptions. As Michel Senellart put it, Botero contrasted an economic view of the reason of state against an older military one, and the subsequent history of statist thought offered various combinations of these two competing political approaches.Footnote ¹⁵

Botero's reorientation of reason of state entailed a fundamentally different relationship between the state and knowledge of nature. According to Botero, the prince must learn about useful arts as well as a very long list of natural particulars, from the qualities of the soul to minerals, herbs, animals and meteors such as rainbows.Footnote ¹⁶ His best-selling geopolitical surveys of world, the Relazioni (1591–1598), encompassed not only political constitutions, national habits, resources and characteristics, but also the study of nature and its transformation through art. He offered a sample political study of nature and art in his ‘Relations on the Sea’, which included a project on how to freshen saltwater. It was appropriate to dedicate his ‘Relations on the Sea’ to Stanislaw Koscielecki, the governor of Marienburg, Botero said, due to Koscielecki's delight in the ‘notitia of nature’ and his role in the administration of Baltic Prussia, an area known for its Dutch-style engineering.Footnote ¹⁷

Botero's focus on the utility of industry elevated the status of crafts for politics. Subsequent seventeenth-century politicians could not afford to despise the craft knowledge of secrets, since they believed that political advantage rested upon it.Footnote ¹⁸ Art, however, was not only a tool for politics; it also presented a model for politics. There were some arts, said Botero, such as architecture, sculpture, painting and all those which made things out of wood, iron, wool and silk, which displayed a complete control over material. Practitioners were thus able to reach their intended ends, and realize their conceptions, within matter. Other arts, however, such as agriculture, navigation, medicine, politics and, above all, the military arts, lacked such a ‘complete dominion over matter’.Footnote ¹⁹ Botero's reason of state advised princes about how to act as a true head of state; that is, as an artisan displaying complete dominion over matter.

In a chapter ‘On industry’ originally printed in his 1588 On the Greatness of Cities, but also included in his 1589 On the Reason of State, Botero stressed both the utility and the exemplarity of industry through an analysis of mining and manufacture. In an iron mine, humans drew raw material out of the earth, and this matter could then be increased in value through art. Likewise, the state might also learn to act as an artist, and use art to draw forth wealth from its own subject matter, people. Because art surpassed nature, political mining could far outstrip actual mines in its moneymaking potential.

Why an iron mine? The lands of the Duke of Savoy, one of Botero's patrons, did not abound in gold or silver, but they were rich in iron.Footnote ²⁰ The base metal of those hard Alpine rocks did not seem a likely competitor to the glittering silver fleet sailing home to Spain. Although it seemed counterintuitive, Botero suggested that an iron mine could compete with a mine of silver not in the value of its ore, but in the money it could produce if properly linked with diverse sources of revenue. True riches did not come from nature alone, but from the canny ways man perfected nature and increased its value.

‘The reuenew gotten out of the Iron Mynes, is not the greatest’, wrote Botero,

Botero's analysis of seemingly negligible sources of revenue revealed staggeringly unexpected effects. The envied natural resources of the greatest overseas empire, he suggested, did not equal the customs tax on a single European industrial center. The true power of the Spanish Habsburgs lay in exported manufactured goods, not in imported American natural resources. Italy, France and especially Flanders all lacked significant mines, yet through ‘inestimable Art and Cunning … There was not a Country throughout all Europe, neither more rich, nor more inhabited’ than Flanders. That was why Flanders was called ‘the Emperor's Indies’. Savoy, if managed carefully as an industrial center like Flanders, could compete after all with the mountains of silver in the New World.

The perfecting of nature undergirded the above-ground mine on several levels. In the New World, nature produced precious metals out of matter, and those metals were mined by man. In the above-ground mine of Flanders, man produced profitable works of art from nature, and the state mined precious metals from those men in the form of taxes and other revenue streams. Thus the process of perfecting nature did not end with the artificer. To the above-ground mine, the artisans and merchants served again, as it were, the role of the natural commodity. The population of miners, forgers, casters and merchants could be further cultivated and refined by the tender attentions of political miners as they artfully achieved a complete dominion over their material.

Botero himself pointed to the centrality of perfective views of nature in his analysis of industry. Referring to a long-standing rivalry between art and nature, he claimed that art surpassed nature due to its perfective ability. ‘Nature bringeth forth her formes in Materia prima: And mans Art and cunning, worketh upon the naturall compound, a thousand kindes of naturall formes. For, nature is to the workeman, the same, that Materia prima is to the natural agent’.Footnote ²² If nature gave birth to the precious metals found in mines, the artisan fashioned these metals into innumerable new objects filling an even richer mine for the state to exploit.

The mine of revenue drawn from industry and trade might not exist in any obvious location, and in that sense it was even more hidden than an actual mine. The gold filling the imperial treasury from the ‘Emperor's Indies’, however, was all too real. Cunning political miners could locate such above-ground mines in order to perfect the mines of nature, turning base iron into gold.

Botero's mine in the political thought of Jakob Bornitz and Francis Bacon

Botero's ingenious conception of an above-ground mine was quickly imitated by other political writers who shared his perfective view of nature. A jurist and imperial councilor at Schweidnitz under Emperors Rudolf and Matthias, Jakob Bornitz repeatedly developed Botero's idea of the above-ground mine. Bornitz introduced the idea of the ‘reason of state’ to German-speaking lands in his On Acquiring Political Prudence of 1602. He equated prudence with the true (i.e. anti-Machiavellian) reason of state collected by a political artisan (artifex politicus) through both history (including natural history) and experience.Footnote ²³

In a 1608 work, On Coins, Bornitz drew on Botero's idea of the above-ground mine. Bornitz described how manufacturing goods served as ‘the oblique way’ to get silver from the New World.Footnote ²⁴ One could travel overseas and dig silver up, or, using the instrument of the reason of state, one could sell domestic manufactures to the Spanish and acquire New World silver in a more artful way. In his chapter ‘On producing an increase of coins in a Republic’, Bornitz developed these views at length. There were two ways of producing an abundance of coins: either direct mining or the importation of coins. The latter was the true mine of princes. This was due to the ever-increasing ability of mankind to perfect nature, so that art often seemed to surpass nature (‘ut saepè ars naturam superare videatur’). The riches accruing to Milan, the Netherlands, Nuremberg and China due to art were proof of this. Rather than directly mining nature for coins, man could increase the value of nature by shaping raw material into infinite new forms to sell abroad to other peoples always eager for novelties.Footnote ²⁵

The very divisions of Bornitz's lengthiest work, On a Sufficiency of Things of 1625, demonstrated the importance he placed on improvement upon nature through industry. The first section dealt with agriculture, hunting and mining (fifty pages), the second with mechanical arts (172 pages), and the third with trade (seventeen pages). The final section devoted only six pages to administration, although Bornitz promised to expand this discussion into a second volume, On Conserving a Republic (alas Bornitz died before its appearance).Footnote ²⁶

Bornitz explained that in using the term ‘mechanical arts’ (in which he included the arts of design, such as painting and architecture) he intended no disrespect. The status of the mechanical arts should be determined by their utility for civil and military life alone. The ways many German princes displayed their control over matter through ivory-turning showed how noble and useful the mechanical arts could be. Bornitz portrayed the status granted to art and manufactures at the Rudolfine court as the fulfillment of a cutting-edge, statist political theory promoting the mastery of nature through art.Footnote ²⁷

Bornitz encapsulated his central ideas concerning the importance, for the political artisan, of innovation, art, empirical discovery and an open mind in a posthumously published emblem book.Footnote ²⁸ The oddness of these emblems drew on the esoteric nature of emblematic culture to suggest the wide horizon of possibility provided by art's perfective ability and the ways that cunning could find roundabout means to reach desired ends. One man walking on the surface of water wearing winged trousers (p. 88), another writing with his toes (p. 90), an alchemical distillatory (p. 94) and a glass workshop (p. 98) all showcased the ability of art and practice to surpass nature. Reason alone could not determine possibility or impossibility. Miners prising jewels from the mine walls (Figure 1) showed that ‘reason denies many things which experience shows to be true’.

Figure 1.

Jakob Bornitz, Emblematum Sacrorum et Civilium miscellaneorum, Heidelberg: Clement, Ammonius, 1659. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, H: P 545a.4° Helmst. (3):2.

In following oblique routes, politicians imitated a secretive nature. Botero suggested using ‘a secret art’ to reach political ends rather than a magnificent show of force, just as nature leads pines and cedars to the greatest heights insensibly.Footnote ²⁹ ‘Oblique courses’ rather than ‘direct methods’ were, according also to Francis Bacon, the most effective means in politics.Footnote ³⁰ Like Bornitz, Bacon also developed Botero's idea of the mine of industry, which allowed the state to acquire wealth in roundabout ways. ‘Worke, and Carriage, is more worth, then the Materiall, and enricheth a State more; As is notably seene in the Low-Countrey-men, who have the best Mines, above ground, in the World’, he said.Footnote ³¹ The ability of the Emperor's Indies to provide more silver from trade and manufacture than Spain gained through its New World mines became a commonplace.Footnote ³²

Bacon's mines: from politics to natural philosophy

In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon extended the idea of an above-ground mine from politics to natural philosophy. Like Botero, he drew upon the perfective ability of art to support the metaphor.Footnote ³³ He said,

While philosophical miners sought causal knowledge or ‘Naturall Science’ deep within the recesses of nature, philosophical smiths further refined nature through art, to produce the effects of nature again in the above-ground mine of what Bacon termed, in an analogy with political prudence, ‘Naturall Prudence’.Footnote ³⁴ The miner collected information, and the smith used that information to achieve, as Botero would say, a dominion over matter.Footnote ³⁵

Bacon's link between operative natural philosophy and political prudence at this juncture owes much to Botero. Botero had already politicized natural knowledge, and matter theory had already shaped his view of political prudence. Both Botero and Bacon explored how the perfective arts allowed man to act as a ‘second Nature’, while political cunning encouraged him to look for knowledge in new places.

Bacon's writings are, of course, rich in metaphor. The hunt for causal knowledge within a mine can be likened to the ‘epistemology of the hunt’ so central to Bacon's view of secrets, according to William Eamon.Footnote ³⁶ In its important links with Botero and the perfective manipulation of metals, however, the mining metaphor brings to the surface certain characteristics of Bacon's view of knowledge particularly well.

One of the benefits of the mine, argued Botero, was the way it integrated many different individuals, increasing the population of cities and thus the opportunities for wealth through taxation and other incidental profit-making. To Botero, the revenues of the single owner of the mine were negligible compared with the diverse professions tangentially supported by the mine. Likewise, Bacon stressed a multiplicity of professions, and the integration of diverse types of people in the project of knowing and perfecting nature. Yet although the mine integrated the work of many within a larger institution, it did not necessarily make the work of each known to others or to the public at large. The mining metaphor demonstrates how Bacon's conception of research could be collaborative without being public through the clever articulation of social structures for knowledge.

Bacon's simultaneously collaborative and secretive view of research is most pronounced in his New Atlantis. The staff of information collectors in Salomon's House gathered material through travel, books and personal experience. Disguised Merchants of light ‘adopting the names of other Nations (for our own we conceal)’ sailed to foreign lands and brought back books, abstracts and experiments. Pirates or ‘Deprepators’ (sic) collected experiments out of books. ‘Mystery-men’ collated the secrets of various arts and professions, while ‘Pioneers or Miners’ tried out their own experiments. All this information was then methodized by ‘Compilers’. The fellows of Salomon's House carefully consulted about which works to publish and which ‘to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state and some not’.Footnote ³⁷

This was where Bacon's mining metaphor diverged from Botero's. Bacon's ultimate end was not the state, but knowledge, and thus he imagined an arena of research free from both the public and the state. Bacon hoped to make the ‘Spyalls and Intelligencers of Nature’ semi-independent of the spies of state, even if he expected both to rely upon the same source of funding.Footnote ³⁸ Despite the vaunted public nature of Baconianism, it was not publicity which differentiated Bacon's plans for intelligencers from the collectors of arcana imperii. Botero, Bornitz and Bacon all envisioned miners collecting valuable nuggets from hidden spaces; only Bacon, however, imagined some of those nuggets remaining hidden in a shadowy corporation separate from both the state and the people.

Broken knowledge in politics and science: bringing together Baconian science and Tacitism

Botero's metaphor of the above-ground mine could be found in the political writings of both Bornitz and Bacon, as well as in Bacon's philosophical writings. This metaphor links both Bacon's philosophical thinking to political models, and his political models to international writers on the reason of state. Both these links contradict some current views. Bacon's political thinking has been differentiated sharply both from contemporary reason of state and from his own natural philosophy. Markku Peltonen, drawing in large part on Bacon's essay ‘On the true greatnesse of kindomes and estates’, distinguished between Bacon's politics (a Machiavellian republicanism intended for a time of war) and his apolitical plans for learning in times of peace, exemplified by his philosophical writings such as An Advancement of Learning.Footnote ³⁹

Peltonen's points about not assuming coherence in Bacon's thought are well taken. However, the flexible reason of state was supposed to adapt to differing circumstances. Botero had drawn an influential distinction between the different arts needed to found, preserve and extend an empire.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Flemish humanist Lipsius also advised that violence was necessary in times of war, but knowledge was needed for peace.Footnote ⁴¹ According to the Palatine ambassador Hippolytus à Colli, peaceful (as opposed to military) prudence required the prince to know something about all the arts practised in his realm, as well as ethics, politics and even natural philosophy (physica) and mathematics.Footnote ⁴²

In his 1623 expansion of the Advancement of Learning, Bacon also distinguished between three political duties belonging to the art of empire (which itself was but one of three different types of political prudence): ‘that a Kingdome or State be conserved’, ‘that it may become happy and flourishing’ and ‘that it may be amplified and the bounds thereof propagated and extended’. He included the essay ‘On the true greatnesse’, retitled ‘A Summary Treatise touching the enlarging of the Bounds of Empire’, as an example of the last.Footnote ⁴³ This was not the same political knowledge Bacon would deploy, however, in order to make a state ‘happy and flourishing’.

Peltonen, while conceding that ‘some themes’ from Botero and Lipsius can be discerned in Bacon's writings, argued that ‘on the whole, his treatises on civic greatness should be understood as a highly critical reaction to these accounts’. For Peltonen, Bacon's references to the ‘principles of estate’ and to ‘true reason of state’ signaled Bacon's rejection of the reason of state of Botero and Lipsius, and his adherence to Machiavelli. However, Botero and Lipsius themselves cast their projects as part of a true reason of state. Rejections of a so-called ‘false’ reason of state associated with Machiavelli were legion across Europe. Such statements did not counter the reason of state, but supported a multifaceted political practice grounded in knowledge more than upon violence.Footnote ⁴⁴

The distinction between Bacon's political and natural philosophical work is a symptom of a much wider historiographical divide. The rise of two allegedly contrasting cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – late humanist Tacitean politics and experimental science – has been analysed in separate historiographies. Since arcana imperii appeared in the form of commentaries upon ancient historians, the collection of political arcana has been seen as a backwards-looking political practice that had little to do with the empirical study of the present or innovative attempts to transform the future.Footnote ⁴⁵

‘State’, deriving from ‘standing’ (stare), implied that the reason of state largely concerned the idea of maintaining the status quo.Footnote ⁴⁶ New ideas would perturb and trouble the state. As Bacon wrote in ‘On Innovation’, ‘It is good also, not to try Experiments in States; Except the Necessity be Urgent, or the utility Evident’.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, if changes were to be made, Bacon recommended that they be radical, ‘For it is a Secret, both in Nature, and State; That it is safer to change Many Things, then one’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Both the content of scientific writing and its form have been distinguished sharply from contemporary Tacitism and the reason of state. Stephen Clucas, for instance, once differentiated between the anti-Ciceronian, humanist use of aphorisms and Francis Bacon's scientific aphorism. The former, he argued, was a closed form privileging ancient knowledge, while Bacon's aphorism pressed forward in an exploration of things rather than words.Footnote ⁴⁹

More recently, Hubert Treiber drew a similar distinction between Richard Cumberland's scientific interest in the real world and the Strasbourg historian Matthias Bernegger's inability to escape his bookish viewpoint. Treiber cited Bernegger's edition of Galileo (1635) where Bernegger discussed the changes in the topical method in his time, and described how Galileo's telescopic observations allowed him to make the ‘places’ argument capable of proof. According to Treiber, Bernegger differentiated himself from Galileo as ‘a disciple of a different kind of proof’. The ‘text-bound’ viewpoint of Matthias Bernegger, ‘a card-carrying Tacitist’, ‘imprisoned’ him ‘in his conventional manner of thought’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Bernegger gave no evidence of distancing himself from Galileo. In fact, in his preface to another translation of Galileo over twenty years earlier, Bernegger developed at length the reasons why mathematics, despite the contempt in which it was held by many, ought to be considered central to the study of politics. It was the practical rather than contemplative parts of mathematics which were important for the politician, whose job it was to collect knowledge useful and necessary for the public good.Footnote ⁵¹

Tacitism was not opposed to the empirical study of nature, art and trade. Nor, despite being conducted in Latin, was the study of Tacitus opposed to the vernacular and to new literary forms. In his defense of the German vernacular, Martin Opitz, Bernegger's student, cited Tacitus and the history of invention to show that the moderns could compete with the ancients.Footnote ⁵² As Morris Croll and Joseph Levine have pointed out, it was not English science which originated the broken, exploratory style of the aphorism and the essay, but the international vogue for Seneca and Tacitus.Footnote ⁵³ Francis Bacon's vernacular aphorisms and essays, like Montaigne's, fit easily within the Tacitean political culture which by the turn of the seventeenth century was well established in England, as elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁴

The political aphorism itself was originally drawn from medicine. Those who offered counsel to the body politic were not only often themselves doctors. They also frequently compared the reason of state to medical knowledge found in aphorisms adapted to particular cases.Footnote ⁵⁵ The rhetoric of politics circa 1600 was that of broken pieces of empirical knowledge, with a preference for res over verba.Footnote ⁵⁶

For instance, rather than offering a beautifully polished image of the ideal polity as in older humanist political oratory, Justus Lipsius descended below the level of the finished text in his influential Politica to compose a flexible patchwork of ‘places’ taken from ancient historians which could be employed in almost any political situation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bernegger's student, the Strasbourg professor Johann Heinrich Boeckler, specified that most of the ‘places’ Lipsius used were intended as information, not as rhetorical ornament.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such informative places were gathered in open-ended ‘questions, observations, digressions, dissertations, and political or historico-political discourses’. This method, ‘if the term method can even be applied’, said Boeckler's student, the Jena professor Johann Andreas Bose, was employed by Tacitean commentators and, among other authors, by Bacon in his Essayes.Footnote ⁵⁹

Another Bernegger student, Christoph Colerus, equally esteemed Bacon among the novel writers on politics, and he was not alone in doing so; Bacon's essay, the Smith of Fortune (Faber fortunae) was particularly popular.Footnote ⁶⁰ To Bacon's Continental readers, the Smith of Fortune appeared as a useful extension to the already extant literature on the arcana imperii. The Dutch Cartesian, Brandenburg counsellor and professor at Frankfurt an der Oder Martin Schoock included an excerpt from Bacon's Smith of Fortune in his 1668 expansion of Clapmar's by-then-classic On Secrets.Footnote ⁶¹

To modern historians, the integration of Bacon's writings into the Continental political rhetoric of the period has sometimes appeared astonishing. David Halsted, noting Christoph Colerus's treatments of Bacon's Smith of Fortune, remarked that ‘Colerus saw in a “project unburdening Western philosophy of its dependence on authority” a source of lessons in political prudence’.Footnote ⁶² To Halsted, this seemed like an inventive misreading rather than evidence that Bacon's Smith of Fortune was not that distinct from other essays on political prudence. To Bacon's early modern Continental readers, however, his writings fit easily with the newly fashionable political genres of secrets, aphorisms and essays.

History, the mother of prudence: Bernegger's above-ground mine

Those seeking political prudence found it in the empirical study of art, nature and empire. Empiricism, however, came in two forms: travel and history. Neither was intended to function on its own. Experience, or ‘notitia of human things, through sight and touch’, was the father of Prudence, and Memory, or the ‘notitia of examples, through hearing or reading’, was its mother.Footnote ⁶³ Reason of state included both the Tacitean commentary and the personal collection of particulars through learned travel (the ars apodemica).

The political study of Tacitus was never divorced from knowledge of and action within the real world. Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine and William Sherman have shown how pragmatic readers of ancient and modern history sought practical knowledge for political ends.Footnote ⁶⁴ Kevin Sharpe has studied how one early Stuart reader, Sir William Drake, read as a ‘gatherer’ actively searching for secrets to collect out of writers such as Tacitus, Guicciardini, Botero, Machiavelli, Bornitz and Bacon.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the second half of the seventeenth century, humanistically trained historians and librarians had to integrate an increasingly technical body of natural and technological knowledge into their practices of information collection, and they cut their teeth on the reading of Tacitus.Footnote ⁶⁶ Bernegger and his student Boeckler, and Boeckler's student Bose, were renowned as information collectors and bibliographers. Boeckler, for instance, advised Hermann Conring and the politician Johann Christian von Boyneburg on how to form an archive; it was also in travel that one collected the secret relazioni of foreign ambassadors which formed the riches (opes) of any government archive, he said.Footnote ⁶⁷The German Princely State (1656), the work of another student of Bernegger, the politician Veit Ludwig van Seckendorff, was widely read as a guide for how to use such information collections in concrete political practice.Footnote ⁶⁸

If Bacon fit with Tacitism, Tacitism also furnished information-collecting tools to individuals conceived of today as Baconians. The London-based Prussian intelligencer Samuel Hartlib especially admired Bernegger's information-collection techniques. Although ostensibly a commentary upon a single ancient author, Bernegger's Miscellaneous Questions upon Tacitus was in fact more like an encyclopedia, he said. Hartlib debated the merits of Bernegger's ‘invention’ of the miscellaneous question with his correspondent, the Brandenburg political agent Joachim Hübner.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hübner was himself experimenting with using the miscellaneous question in his study of Tacitus.Footnote ⁷⁰ They both admired the indices composed by Bernegger and Freinsheim for their 1638 editions of Tacitus, and Hübner praised Bernegger's way of composing notes on difficult places in the text.Footnote ⁷¹

Although deeply learned, Bernegger's Tacitism was still geared towards the real world. In politics, one had to think about realia and forget the ‘verbalia of the scholastics’, Hübner told Hartlib. Any child could select sententiae and phrases out of authors, but really getting behind arcana Politica and, as it were, making Tacitus speak (‘Tacitum loquentem’) was another matter, in which Bernegger truly excelled. Hübner himself had collected over five hundred political, moral and military aphorisms out of the first three books of Tacitus alone.Footnote ⁷² ‘After the sacred scriptures, there is no book, I believe, which can better inform one about prudence for human life’ than Bernegger's edition of Tacitus, he said.Footnote ⁷³

Bernegger's Miscellaneous Questions appeared in 1640, edited by Bernegger's son-in-law and student Johann Freinsheim. A scene of miners on the title page (Figure 2) exemplified how ingenious work could excavate hidden treasures when supplied with the right instruments. It was Tacitism that supplied the textual technology with which a generation of politicians dug for valuable information.

Figure 2.

Matthias Bernegger, Quaestiones Miscellaneae, Strassburg, 1640. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, M: QuN 581 (1).

Travel, the father of prudence

Besides reading history, the aspiring seventeenth-century political artisan was expected to practise the art of methodical travel codified by the Swiss Theodor Zwinger in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ Jakob Bornitz set methodical travel as a centrepiece of his political ‘art’ (1602). In addition to the query lists of Zwinger, he suggested that the ‘political artisan’ might survey naturalia, medica and mechanica.Footnote ⁷⁵ Matthias Bernegger drew heavily on Bornitz for his Discourse on Travel of 1619.

In countering the suggestion that books about foreign lands might replace travel, Bernegger cited Bornitz to show that a ‘journey is considered to surpass history in experiences [experimentis] and certainty. Those things depending on a historical source should be confirmed by one's own senses in travel’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet the advancement of knowledge gained through empirical travel was still supported by the study of Tacitus. Answering his question on Tacitus, ‘Why Germany is much more fertile and cultured now than in the past’, Bernegger credited the art of travel, ‘which was not as common among the ancients’, with ‘having much advanced the culture of Germany’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Boeckler, in another Tacitean dissertation, wove in a strenuous argument for the modern study of mathematics, art and inventions as a preparation for travel. How else would the traveller be able to converse with the likes of Galileo, Kircher, Mersenne and Gassendi? How could anyone hope to truly understand the secret workings of the Republic without an inner knowledge of manufactures? Just as one cannot see the little bodies from which everything is composed without a microscope, so too one cannot understand the complicated fabric and hidden links of society, which lie secreted from plain view, without first preparing the mind through the knowledge of art. For Boeckler, the reason of state depended upon a body of secrets of nature and art collected beneath the surfaces of things.Footnote ⁷⁸

Artistic, natural and political intelligence in England

Thomas Palmer was one of several Englishmen, including Bacon, who sought to bring the Continental practice of the ars apodemica to an English reading public in the early seventeenth century. To Palmer, the knowledge of ‘draughts of nature, kept secret from the vulgar sort’, was a premier ‘point of knowledge’ to be aimed for in travel.Footnote ⁷⁹ Melanie Ord has also pointed to the attitudes shared between the ambassador Henry Wotton and Bacon in collecting knowledge through travel.

Ord suggested that Wotton anticipated the ‘approbation of those English ambassadors abroad’ voiced by Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society. Such ambassadors collected, according to Sprat, ‘Relations, and Secrets of Nature, as well as of State’. Ord proposed that Wotton's use of aphorisms may have been related to Bacon's preference for the ‘unsystematic and incomplete nature of aphoristic writing … diametrically opposed to a humanist wish for an early-instituted and strictly maintained educational programme’.Footnote ⁸⁰

The attitudes of both Bacon and Wotton do not oppose the political culture of their time in anticipation of future science. Rather, they both relate to the reason-of-state-influenced late humanism. Reading Bacon's Novum Organum, Wotton saw its author as the most ‘inward a secretary’ of Nature's ‘cabinet’.Footnote ⁸¹ For Wotton, such natural intelligence was part and parcel of political practice. As Wotton described to Prince Henry, ‘having a long love of philosophy, and from the contemplative part being slid into the practical’, he desired to ‘entertain your Highness now and then with some experiments, especially such as do not end in wonder, but reach to public use’. He began ‘this kind of intelligence’ with a ‘secret’ ‘not long since imparted to this State [Venice] … namely, a way how to save gunpowder from all mischance of fire in their magazines’.Footnote ⁸²

In the seventeenth century, Henry Wotton was seen as an ideal collector of secrets from both ancient history and travel. The State of Christendom, a collection of arcana imperii gathered from both ‘Modern observations’ and ‘many ancient passages’, was printed and attributed to Henry Wotton in 1657. This work, including an analysis of the works of Antonio Perez (also known as Rafael Peregrino, the double agent and friend to the Bacon brothers), has more recently been attributed to Anthony Bacon.Footnote ⁸³ Yet Wotton, like Bacon, was also a pragmatic reader for the Earl of Essex, for whom he also read and analysed Perez's scandalous collection of political secrets, the Relations.Footnote ⁸⁴ The interests of Bacon and Wotton in the study of nature does not prove that they flew high above the heads of either bookish humanists or dirty spies, but that political and natural intelligence mixed, thus eliding ‘the functions of information gatherer and spy’.Footnote ⁸⁵

English networks of pragmatic readers and political agents were fully informed of contemporary Continental reason of state. For example, Elizabeth's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, sent Robert Ashley of the Middle Temple abroad, as Ashley later wrote, to ‘acquire political prudence’ (‘prudentiam politicam comparandam’).Footnote ⁸⁶ Ashley gathered a very extensive collection of Continental literature, including Bornitz's On Acquiring Political Prudence of 1602, his On Coins of 1608, and an impressive array of alchemical literature, which remains today in the Middle Temple library.Footnote ⁸⁷

The increasing prominence of agents with artistic qualifications or expertise in the decades following Ashley was one effect of art's new utility and exemplarity for politics. In Bacon's time, these agents included Philipp Hainhofer, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean de Montfort, Cesare Scaglia, Pieter Spierink, Endymion Porter, Theodore Mayerne and Balthazar Gerbier.Footnote ⁸⁸ Such agents often drew on their travels and international networks in the collection of political, artistic and natural secrets.

For instance, the Huguenot physician Theodore Mayerne had composed a manuscript account of his grand tour in 1599, and published a youthful travel guide to France, Germany, Italy and Spain.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Trevor-Roper has pointed out, Mayerne's later famous collection of artistic methods (Sloane Ms. 2052) was of a piece with his lifelong habit of collecting chemical and industrial knowledge. Within it he referred back to artistic practices he had observed in his youthful travels.Footnote ⁹⁰

Such agents cast artistic, natural and political knowledge as ‘secrets’ useful for politics. Late in his life, the international agent and artist Balthazar Gerbier reflected upon the political nature of methodical travel. The ‘main end of Travell’ ought to be the ‘Interest’ of one's ‘Native Country’. Through both one's own ‘improvement’ and ‘in the opening the Secrets of State’, one ought to ‘returne (well fraughted) with necessaries as may serve to Posterity’.Footnote ⁹¹

Gerbier himself, he argued, was qualified to act as an agent due to his ‘seuerall languages, good hand in writing, skill in sçiences, as Mathematicks, Architecture, drawing, painting, contryuing of scenes, Masques, shows and entertainments for greate Princes, besides many secrets which I had gathered from diuers rare persons’.Footnote ⁹² Such secrets, for Gerbier, included political, military, chemical, natural-philosophical, artistic and industrial knowledge. In a 1654 manuscript collection, Gerbier cast ‘Drawing, Geometry, Military Architecture, Perspective, Cosmography, Geography, Miniature Painting, Architecture, and experimental natural philosophy’ all as ‘secrets useful to Princes and Peoples’.Footnote ⁹³

Gerbier's network of ‘rare persons’ included fellow artists such as Rubens and Van Dyck, also members of Mayerne's extensive network of Huguenot and Flemish artisanal informants. Both Gerbier's collection of secrets and Mayerne's massive manuscript archives could be compared to the similar archives of their contemporary intelligencer, Samuel Hartlib. According to Trevor-Roper, the difference between Hartlib and Mayerne was one ‘of personality, not of policy’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Gerbier and Hartlib did in fact collaborate.Footnote ⁹⁵ Despite differing political and religious sympathies, Mayerne, Gebier and Hartlib shared the practice of political, natural and artisanal intelligence.

Like Mayerne and Gerbier, Hartlib intermingled the search for secrets of art, nature and politics in travel. He recommended that one travel furnished with ‘addresses and directions How to observe or get the Traditional Histories and other mysteries of State and Policy, The Excellent Artificers, Experiments, Projectors, etc’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The plans he worked out with John Dury for an ‘agent’ and ‘intelligencer’ to negotiate a union between the Christian churches also always included on the side the aim of collecting ‘all rare and profitable M.S., secrets, and inventions, of all sorts, both in Sciences, and Artifices’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The combination of the collector of secrets of science, art and politics (in this case church politics) was not unique to the religiously motivated intelligencers such as Hartlib. By the Interregnum, it was a model well established by previous political agents and Tacitist historians alike.Footnote ⁹⁸