Life and afterlife of a chymist

In 1709 things were moving on rapidly within two ancient chartered corporations, the Mines Royal and the Mineral and Battery Works, both of the City of London. For more than two decades, the companies had been little more than dormant, mostly meeting only once a year for re-electing officials.Footnote ²⁰ A secretary of the Mineral and Battery Works took away the seal and records of these companies, and died in about 1705 without returning them. The companies returned to life when some of the records were found and returned in early 1709. During the next two years, fifty-five meetings were held for the Battery Works alone. Numerous resolutions were made, and the companies were thereby amalgamated. Through this deluge of transactions arose a new governor and the self-styled ‘Mineral Master General’: Moses Stringer.

Little is known about Stringer's modest origins and early years. He probably started his career in the Midlands, somewhere close to Loughborough where his father lived. In July 1692, he obtained an episcopal license in Chester to practise medicine.Footnote ²¹ Although he never matriculated, Stringer also spent some time at the University of Oxford in the early 1690s.Footnote ²² By the time he died in 1714, Stringer had much of which to boast. He had engaged in mining, metallurgy, naval medicine, poor relief and colonial settlement. He had demonstrated ‘choicest Secrets and Experiments’ to the young Peter the Great upon his London visit in 1698, and apparently provided his elixirs to the Queen Anne – the high points of his laborious life.Footnote ²³

Thanks to his wide range of activities, Stringer has appeared in studies of the copper industry, of the two chartered companies mentioned above, of the history of Trinidad and Tobago and of Russian history.Footnote ²⁴ In histories of medicine and metallurgy, Stringer has been portrayed amongst ‘quacks’, as an unreliable ‘projector’ with little skill or business acumen.Footnote ²⁵ Viewing him as a quack is perhaps not surprising given that he was an ‘irregular’ practitioner below the ranks of the Royal College of Physicians.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast, some more recent accounts have sought to rehabilitate his reputation. Stringer's medicinal ‘salt of lemon’, for example, has been hailed in the history of naval medicine as one of the earliest uses of citrus fruits for alleviating scurvy.Footnote ²⁷ In an important reappraisal of Stringer's life and writing, John Appleby has treated him as a Paracelsian–Helmontian chymist. Presenting a range of printed and manuscript sources, Appleby has concluded that, ‘far from being an empiric, Stringer was exceptionally knowledgeable and proficient in a wide field of theoretical and practical disciplines: chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, metallurgy and natural philosophy’.Footnote ²⁸ If assessing him from modern disciplinary perspectives has provided fragmented, sometimes negative, assessments of his versatile career, then rescuing him from the charge of quackery and projecting has led to a rather celebratory account.Footnote ²⁹ As in the wider scholarly literature, then, pejorative assessments have subtly shaped scholarly interpretations.

Reappraising the chymist in his own terms would surely be more productive than imposing modern disciplinary angles. Yet viewing him either as a mere quack or as a reliable natural philosopher has made it extremely difficult to understand the most striking moment of his career: his brief rise to prominence in the two mining companies from 1709 until his death in 1714. A shareholder of the two companies since 1693, this chymist of relatively humble origin became in 1709 ‘our absolute Mineral Master General forever’, vested with ‘whole and sole Executive Power of the Said Societys’ in a ‘full and ample Manner’.Footnote ³⁰ Under his leadership the united societies asserted their monopolistic power ‘over fifty Branches of Profits’, not only for the production and processing of gold and silver, but also for the digging and processing of ‘All Minerals, Earths and Metals, Salts and whatsoever is subterraneous’.Footnote ³¹ This included tin, copper, lead and salt, and related manufactured goods like pins, copper vessels, and sheeted lead – all seemingly beyond the original scope of the charters given to the two corporations. As will be seen below, private entrepreneurs concerned with these sectors were now requested to pay arrears of rents allegedly owed to the united societies. The attempt ultimately failed due to evasions, a lack of governmental support, and Stringer's eventual insolvency and his untimely death. In the meanwhile, however, ‘invaders’ and ‘interlopers’ were threatened with legal action and with having their works ‘destroyed’ and tools confiscated.Footnote ³²

This aggressive attempt at reviving a corporate monopoly has been either passed over by historians, or else seen as an indication of Stringer's business enthusiasm, or as ‘an amazing capacity for self-delusion on Stringer's part’ – a product of the fancy that Defoe and others mocked so relentlessly.Footnote ³³ A closer look, however, suggests that Stringer's peculiar rise in the mining corporations was the culmination of his desperate projects to generate profits out of medicine, metals and empire. The remainder of this article thus goes beyond pejorative images and follows Stringer's footsteps to tease out how his various pursuits informed one another, across different spheres of knowledge and geography. Stuart McCook has recently proposed ‘the deceptively simple method of following something, as it moves around the world … and doing a contextually rich analysis of what happens as it moves'.Footnote ³⁴ Adopting this approach, we shall now follow Stringer's engagement with medicine and metallurgy, explore how that brought him into contact with the emerging British Empire, and reveal what happened to his knowledge claims in the process.

Chymist in the making: Stringer's Oxford

By the time Stringer went to Oxford in the 1690s, chymistry and experimental science in Oxford was in visible decline. The chymical philosophy of Paracelsus, further developed by van Helmont (1580–1644), had been introduced to Oxford from the mid-seventeenth century onwards by Peter Stahl (d. 1675) and Boyle (1627–1691). Yet luminaries like Stahl, John Wilkins (1614–1672) and Thomas Willis (1621–1675) had died some time ago; others like Boyle and Robert Hooke (1635–1703) had long since left Oxford.Footnote ³⁵ The Ashmolean Museum had been established in 1683 but did not provide a systematic training in new science partly because the founder, Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), died without fulfilling his promise to endow a chair in chemistry. Robert Plot (1640–1696) did teach chemistry at the Ashmolean, but his civil (not statutory) ‘professorship’ terminated in 1689 and he soon left Oxford. His successor, Edward Hannes (1664–1710), was still a young medical student; he too left the position around 1695, and the position terminated at that point.Footnote ³⁶

However briefly, Stringer seems to have learnt ‘Physick and Chimistry’ from Benjamin Woodroffe, a student of Stahl.Footnote ³⁷ Although no direct evidence of Stringer's education in Oxford has been found, we know enough about the evolution of chymical practices in and outside Oxford that informed the kind of training that would have been available.Footnote ³⁸ By the end of the seventeenth century, the complex world view of earlier Paracelsians had changed dramatically. Earlier fascinations with the rereading of the Creation as a chemical process, or with theories of sympathy and antipathy, were replaced by more mechanistic world views; the dream of the infinite production of gold had lost much of its credibility by the early eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ Through Paracelsian practitioners like Stahl, skills initially developed in alchemy and metallurgy, such as the melting of metals, and the separation and amalgamation of compounds, were introduced to medicine. Such techniques were applied also to metallurgy, to extract medicinal ‘liquors’ or powders out of mineral and organic compounds.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, like those inspired by the heterogeneous Paracelsian–Helmontian tradition such as Johann Moriaen, Johann Rudolf Glauber and Johan Joachim Becher before him, Stringer also pursued the ‘Metallick parts of Chyimstry in Minerall Knowledge and Practices’, while also producing chemical medicines from them.Footnote ⁴¹

As the Oxford mathematician John Wallis (1616–1703) recalled in about the year 1700, a series of informal instructions had been available in Oxford after Boyle invited Stahl there in 1659. These exploited ‘a convenient Laboratory’ built by the university, ‘well furnished with furnaces and utensils for that purpose’. In it ‘6, 8, or more’ students would agree plans with an instructor and ‘go through a whole course of chymistry … with one company after another from time to time’.Footnote ⁴² The Ashmolean built upon this tradition, as described by Edward Chamberlayne. In addition to a fine laboratory, the museum boasted a collection of natural rarities and a ‘Store-room for Chymical preparations’, a cellar where chemical ingredients could be purchased ‘at easie rates’. In the same museum, Plot was said to have offered a one-month ‘Chymical course’ concerning

Note the emphasis placed upon basic, practical, details like place of origin of particular minerals and their virtues. What Stringer attended was probably one of these courses with a stronger emphasis on hands-on practices than on theoretical sophistication. Stringer's instructor, Woodroffe, displayed a similar, practical, orientation. In Woodroffe's proposed curriculum for Worcester College, a chymical lecturer was to give four sessions on principles and twelve on experimental chemistry.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Wallis attested, such instructions were made available until well into the early eighteenth century, even after Plot's tenure terminated.Footnote ⁴⁵ The case at hand thus reveals the career and competence of a humble chymical practitioner who received extracurricular instructions at a low point in Oxford's history as a centre of experimental learning.

Beyond self-fashioning

Thanks probably to his training at Oxford, Stringer was admitted to the Mines Royal and to the Mineral and Battery Works in 1693 as someone ‘being Esteemed Ingenious & p[ro]pence to Chymistry & minerall Studies’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Due to the intermission of regular teaching of chemistry at Oxford in about 1695, Stringer may have even offered ad hoc chymistry lessons in colleges or in apothecary shops that were equipped with furnaces.Footnote ⁴⁷ Three years later, in 1698, he described himself as ‘The famous Mr Stringer the Chymist (who made the Extraordinary Separation of Metals, and the Artificial Gem, before his Imperial Majesty the Czar of Moscovy’. Just a decade later he was referring to himself as ‘Dr Moses Stringer who had been 14 years past Professor of Chymistry in the University of Oxford’.Footnote ⁴⁸ No evidence of the university appointment has been found, yet some evidence does seem to support the impression of relative success. In January 1702, Stringer testified to the Chancery Court that he had spent nearly a thousand pounds on ‘Erecting a Laboratory and a Foundary & in setting up Severall large Furnaces & Refineryes For the working & refineing of Mettals’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This manuscript evidence has persuaded Appleby of Stringer's relative affluence and technical competence.Footnote ⁵⁰ Note, however, that this speaks of Stringer's own estimation. A closer inspection of his material circumstances provides a less sanguine picture, to which we now turn.

Stringer began his career as a chymist on the move. In 1697, we find Stringer based in ‘his Refinerys in the High Peak in Derbyshire’.Footnote ⁵¹ There he was providing cures to the sick and wounded, while melting metals for industrial purposes. Evidence suggests that he did not have a fixed address for another few years. We thus find him providing cures in Buxton, Chester, Leicester and London, among other places.Footnote ⁵² When he performed the experiments for the Russian emperor at Deptford in March 1698, Stringer announced that he ‘now is come to live in York-Build[ing]s in the Strand’; he was still there the following January when he signed the mining proposal addressed to Parliament.Footnote ⁵³ He did not stay there for long. Less than nine months later, in September 1699, we find him in one ‘Mr Smith's a painter in Kerlson Court in Drury Lane’. His mining proposal of earlier in the year had won neither parliamentary support nor a prospect of profitable employment. Thus, from Drury Lane, Stringer wrote to the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland about his potential ‘dispatch’ to Edinburgh so that he would be ‘able of My selfe to doe the service I intend for your Scotch Nation’.Footnote ⁵⁴

This newly discovered manuscript helps us to reassess Stringer's declared investment of a thousand pounds in his ‘laboratory’. As Stringer told Hamilton, one Mr Godde was ‘to raise the £200 … towards ere[cting?] my Iron works’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Stringer may have used his medical service on a quid pro quo basis to advance his mineral pursuits; that is, soliciting investment and other help from business partners who had received his medical services. The renowned mining entrepreneur Talbot Clerk, for example, had been distributing Stringer's elixir and salt of lemon to his kinsmen; Clerk offered to send his ‘ablest fire man and refiner’ to assist Stringer in his proposed Scottish dispatch.Footnote ⁵⁶ What the chymist acquired through medical service was not so much a substantial purse to erect the laboratory singlehandedly as a network of partners and patients willing to support him in return.

The same letter further reveals that Stringer was capable of hiring two or more craftsmen, but lacked sufficient funds to travel up north or to apply for a patent to protect his ‘furnaces and Mills’ and his ‘invention of smellting of Iron and other Mettals with pitt coals’ – an application which cost approximately seventy pounds or more.Footnote ⁵⁷ Stringer also needed clay and bricks ‘to line our first furnace’. In total, Stringer asked thirty pounds' worth of investment from the duke so that ‘we may work this winter … in more particulars than I have yett had opportunity to demonstrate’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the end Stringer did not venture into Edinburgh, but instead moved to Hugh's Court, Blackfriars, in March 1700 at an annual rent of £23 10s. Here he set up his ‘Laboratory and Foundery’, later also called the ‘Mineral-Office-General’.Footnote ⁵⁹ We soon find him demonstrating his capacities. On 15 February 1701, on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession, Stringer struck a deal to receive disused ordnances from the ship chandler John Martin, and to melt and recast them into cannonballs.Footnote ⁶⁰ The agreed payment of fifty pounds in just one month (more than twice his annual rent), with raw materials provided, must have been attractive. Stringer did in fact deliver quantities of shot, as we shall see below. But the enterprise ended in disputes soon after Martin ‘received Some intelligence and informac[i]on touching the plaintiff's [Stringer's] Character and Circumstances that rendered this def[enden]t very uneasy’.Footnote ⁶¹ In order to secure the deal, Stringer went so far as to deposit the property indenture of his house to Martin's partner as a security. Stringer was clearly ‘very desirous’ of employment, as Martin slyly remarked.Footnote ⁶² Despite his self-presentation as an Oxford ‘professor’, Stringer of the 1690s was little better than an itinerant chymist with limited means, restlessly looking for patients and opportunities.

The capacity of a humble chymist

Lofty natural philosophers, like satirists, would assume that there was little substance behind the chymist's grandiose self-presentation. This could not be the case if he were to find patients and seize opportunities in the emerging world of public science. In the absence of his notebooks or recipe books, it is impossible to reconstruct Stringer's chymical practices, as has been done for the alchemist George Starkey.Footnote ⁶³ Yet scattered evidence suggests that Stringer's medical and metallurgical pursuits were accompanied by strenuous effort to demonstrate his knowledge, experience and credibility. Just as Desaguliers and others did, Stringer even sought to stay above the unreliable ‘projects’. Although the chymist did not live up to his own exalted estimation, such effort did enable him to distance himself from common empirics and miners, and to forge a pocket of authority in which he could impress those around him.

The medical side of Stringer's chymical ideas, outlined ably by Appleby's article, would require only brief treatment here. The chymist followed an emerging medical ontology, inspired by Paracelsus and subsequently developed by Thomas Sydenham. The more traditional Galenic medicine was oriented towards customized diagnosis and healing of humoral imbalance in individual patients.Footnote ⁶⁴ By contrast, Sydenham supposed that certain chemical substances caused obstructions inside the body. His goal was to conduct trials to develop medical specifics that could remove such obstructions ‘no matter to whom it was given’, irrespective of individual humoral constitution. Following this line of thinking, Stringer suggested that ‘the Effect will not cease till the Cause be removed’.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘Obstruction causes Pain’, Stringer explained elsewhere; ‘Pain raiseth a Fever, and sometimes begets a Tumor’. His elixir was efficacious, he argued, because it ‘promotes Transpiration by removing the Impediments which hinder Nature in that daily necessary Operation’.Footnote ⁶⁶

This is not to suggest that Stringer was among the ranks of fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. Medical providers like John Colbatch often articulated and defended their medical theories and interpretations in order to enhance the credibility of their practice.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although he started as a medical ‘irregular’, Colbatch went on to become a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians – a move that could consolidate his contested credibility.Footnote ⁶⁸ In contrast, Stringer never seems to have applied for a licentiate. Instead he continued to rely on shorter bills and advertisements, appealing not so much to respectable practitioners as to potential patients.Footnote ⁶⁹ No mention of him has been found in the manuscript Annals of the College. It is unlikely either that Stringer corresponded with savants like Plot, Martin Lister (1639–1712), Edward Lhuyd (1659/60?–1709) or Hans Sloane (1660–1753).Footnote ⁷⁰

Given his peripheral position in the world of medical erudition, it is perhaps not surprising that Stringer relied upon, rather than critically engaged with, Paracelsian tenets. In a handbill advertising his medical specifics for ‘recovering Old-Age’, Stringer recounted how Paracelsus gave his ‘Renovating Quintessence’ and rejuvenated an old hen so ‘very Old that no body would kill it’. In fact, the whole episode had been silently lifted from Boyle's Usefulness of Natural Philosophy (1663).Footnote ⁷¹ This indicates that Stringer either read or learned about Boyle's work in Oxford or elsewhere – an inkling of medical learning. What is absent in Stringer's chymico-medical practice, however, is a sustained scrutiny of received theories based on hands-on trials, something the alchemist George Starkey conducted for establishing his own ‘generalized principles and a universalized method’.Footnote ⁷²

Similar limitations can be observed in the mineral side of chymistry. A good place to start is his 1699 mining proposal that sought parliamentary backing. Stringer suggested that one-quarter of the British Isles remained unimproved, and that much of the land was rich in minerals. He argued that, because overhead charges were overwhelming, the government should not leave the matter to private hands, but instead should launch a national scheme for encouraging new mining projects, to be funded partly by local parishes and by nationwide public subscriptions.Footnote ⁷³

Seeking to attract serious attention from the Commons, Stringer went on to display the information gathered from reading and direct observations. In order to suggest that the British Isles were rich with silver, Stringer drew on John Webster's natural history of metals, Metallographia (1671), particularly a passage about silver ores in the West Riding of Yorkshire.Footnote ⁷⁴ Information culled from his reading was combined with the results of direct observations. Not only did Stringer see ‘the pretious Stones … [of] our Museum at Oxford’ presumably as part of the chymistry course, but he also examined at Apothecaries' Hall some ‘brown Copper Ore’ found in Blackheath, south of Greenwich.Footnote ⁷⁵ True to the pedagogical emphasis placed at Oxford upon identifying local diversity of minerals, the chymist repeatedly noted where different minerals would be had, and what industries they might serve. All this knowledge about mineral affairs across the country, he argued, set him apart from miners ‘ignorant of any thing but what is common in that County’, and, crucially, also from ‘Pretenders, who have reduced the best [mineral] Discovery to the Scandal of a Project’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Just like Desaguliers, Stringer thus distanced himself from unreliable projectors, recommending himself as the potential superintendent of mineral affairs, ‘propense to Mineral Studies, and understand Mines, Soughing, Levelling, and Refining, &c in each County where Mines are found’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Conspicuously absent in Stringer's mineral writings, however, were gustatory analysis, visual depictions, testimonies, and the critical investigation of the scale of mines and the quality of minerals. It was a widespread practice for medical practitioners and naturalists alike to ‘taste’ minerals, vegetables and even bodily fluids in order to examine their composition. Such gustatory practices required discipline and repetition accompanied by record keeping. Stringer's writings show little evidence of such bodily engagements.Footnote ⁷⁸ More critical still was the limited range of literary techniques employed. In the 1699 pamphlet, Stringer declared that ‘England is a most wholesom scituated Island’ blessed with ‘a Fruitful Surface, but a thousand times more Wealthy in Subterraneous Productions’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Patriotic hyperbole was no novelty. Yet, when a contemporary mining company, the Mine Adventurers of England, declared that its Welsh mines were as rich as the silver mines of Potosí in the Spanish Americas, the company published not only details of the mines complete with engravings and the computation of future profitability, but also testimonies of local miners attesting as ‘matters of fact’ both the scale of the veins and the quality of the ores in order to enhance their credibility.Footnote ⁸⁰ By 1699, Stringer was aware of this Welsh enterprise, mentioning its mines when addressing Parliament.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet, having been an itinerant chymist in Staffordshire, and then seeking employment in London, Stringer probably had neither adequate funds nor close ties with wider mining districts to command comparable estimates or testimonies.

This had implications for the depth of analysis one could command. A good point of comparison would be the case of the learned naturalist John Woodward, FRS, FRCP (1665/1668–1728). His extant notebook records extensive observations taken during his visits to mineshafts in Cornwall.Footnote ⁸² In order to ascertain the relative productivity of given mines, he frequently combined his first-hand experience with more than one nugget of information. Thus, when Woodward visited the Forest of Dean, he approximated the quality of local mines by juxtaposing them with those of Cornwall and Mendip (Somerset).Footnote ⁸³ The notebook also suggests that Woodward read a pamphlet on the Welsh mines belonging to the Mine Adventure. When Woodward took notes on this, he assessed the relative richness of the much-promoted ‘Welsh Potosi’ not only against what he knew about current silver yield at Cumbrian lead mines, but also against information derived from mines near Newcastle and Edinburgh and from ‘a Mine of Lead in the Estate of my Lord Wharton, in Swaledale’ in Yorkshire.Footnote ⁸⁴ This multiple juxtaposition enabled him to suggest that the Welsh lead mine boasted veins of ores twice as wide as those of Wharton's in Yorkshire, with its ores containing at best 50 per cent more silver per ton than the Cumbrian counterpart.

With fewer resources at his disposal, Stringer's mineral writing was clearly dwarfed by that of Woodward. To be sure, the information culled from reading and from direct observations was backed up by some trials upon ores from different places; Stringer also reported the amount of lead he could smelt out of the ore from Cumberland.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, unlike Woodward, Stringer did not present any informed comparisons of these trials. Instead, he simply boasted the fact that he ‘had 18 sorts of English Copper Ores, as Blew, Green … Copper-colour’ and ‘Eight or Nine sorts of Lead Ores; as White, Black, Small grain'd, and Pottern, &c’, and had so far ‘discovered’ mines of gold, silver, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, iron, and antimony ‘for Founders and Pewterers’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The chymist thus named these minerals without developing further comparative analysis.

Stringer's mineral expertise rested less on analytic rigour than on hands-on operation, something most revealingly displayed in his 1698 demonstration for Peter the Great. According to the handbill advertising the performance, Stringer delighted the czar by first separating gold, silver and lead, and then, in another trial, by making ‘an Artificial Gem of what colour he pleased to name … out of an Old Broom staff and a piece of Flint’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Hardly noted by previous studies, this artificial gem was most probably a small piece of lead glass, often called ‘flint glass’. While no further detail of Stringer's experiment has been found, this type of glass was typically produced by mixing calcined flint with molten lead in a crucible, both mentioned in the handbill.Footnote ⁸⁸ The procedure was closely associated with alchemy; its end product, lead-glass vessels, had an economic potential since they could compete with highly prized Venetian glass. No wonder that luminaries like Boyle and Newton, and more practical men such as Hooke, Houghton, Plot and Wren, all took interest in its production.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thanks perhaps to his Oxford training, Stringer was able to follow this trend at the crossroads of alchemy, metallurgy and international industrial competition.

But how well did he follow? A superior method discovered at the time was the use of lead oxide (PbO) which enhanced the crystalline brilliance of the glass, an aesthetic appeal vital for competing with the beautiful Venetian glass. As Christine MacLeod suggests, this was the technique developed by glassmakers under George Ravenscroft, who procured a patent in 1674 to protect the method for seven years.Footnote ⁹⁰ By the time John Houghton wrote about the lead glass in 1696, the patent had been expired for more than a decade; there were at least nine manufacturers producing flint glasses using similar methods.Footnote ⁹¹ Stringer was probably not privy to this artisanal technique, however. Had he gained access, he would have presented a gem similar to surviving Ravenscroft lead glasses (with the PbO content of more than 30 per cent), a gem with soft, oily texture, as the presence of lead oxide makes the material softer and more fragile.Footnote ⁹² Such a gem could have stood as a befitting symbol of England's imminent victory over Venetian craftsmanship, impressing the czar with ‘how good they are at improving of arts’, as Houghton put it in 1696.Footnote ⁹³ Such a presentation probably never took place. As the handbill intimated, the ‘Gem … proved so hard that it cut Glass’ – indicating the lower rate of lead oxide in the gem (probably 14 per cent PbO or lower).Footnote ⁹⁴ If accurate, the report of the 1698 experiment suggests that the chymist lacked access to the artisanal knowledge that was at the heart of the English lead glass industry.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yet a lead glass hard enough to scratch a glass surface could be produced by adopting a recipe of the Florentine writer Antonio Neri, whose book was translated into English by Christopher Merret, FRS.Footnote ⁹⁶ Stringer may have been familiar with the metallurgical procedures promoted under the watch of the Royal Society.

Stringer's real competence as the chymist therefore lay in his hands-on experience in trying different recipes, heating crucibles, and delicately mixing and separating molten minerals. Those who visited Stringer in person, however, were presented with what was probably the most tangible evidence of his competence – his furnace. The Chancery case with Martin suggests that the chymist received ten tons of disused ordnance, and produced more than 1,280 pieces of ‘seker’ and ‘minion’ shot, weighing in total over 2.8 tons. In his own estimation, the chymist delivered more than 4.5 tons of this shot within six weeks.Footnote ⁹⁷ Stringer and Martin disputed the quality of the shot produced; but as to the fact that the chymist had enough furnaces for casting tons of iron, there was no dispute. The impression of authority was reinforced by the presence of mineral specimens and the corporate records of the two mining companies recovered in early 1709.Footnote ⁹⁸

It was in the presence of these embodiments of his knowledge that the humble chymist forged an impression of authority. At a meeting of the Mineral and Battery Works in May 1709, now held at his laboratory, Stringer presented ‘a particular of the various Minerall Earths and Mettals (w[hi]ch are 70 different speicies)’, and from them identified ‘fifty Branches of Profits belonging of Right to these Societys’, ranging from the obvious privilege in gold and silver mining, to drawing copper wire and the collection of pearls. What he presented was little more than a list of minerals, semi-precious stones and metallurgical procedures. The company was, however, suitably impressed, and responded with the ‘Urgent perswasions to Dr Stringer to take upon him the Mannagement’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Led by the self-styled doctor, the united companies appointed high-ranking men into their offices, such as Thomas Earl of Pembroke, Henry Bishop of London, and even Isaac Newton himself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Stringer may not have been as learned as Woodward, nor as specialized as the best London glassworkers. Yet his skill as a chymist, backed up by his furnaces, specimens and corporate records, enabled him to create a small pocket of authority wherein he could, at least temporarily, persuade his partners of his credibility as ‘Dr Moses Stringer’, proficient in chymical matters.

Into naval medicine and colonial expansion

We are thus moving beyond both the chymist's inflated self-fashioning and the contemporary portrait of greedy, unreliable, quacks and projectors with few or no skills. What is beginning to emerge instead is a story of surprising survival and success despite social, financial, technical and intellectual constraints. Stringer's survival strategy was not the obtaining of institutional membership, however. His self-promotion was probably too dubious, his means, erudition and network too limited, for this kind of upward mobility. Nor did the chymist lay claim to impartiality and disinterest. Instead of disowning political and economic interests, Stringer drew on his chymical expertise to pursue opportunities in naval medicine and colonial expansion, two areas that were less well regulated. He was not alone in this. Retracing his serial encounters with imperial expansion, we can begin to unravel how the humble chymist followed the paths well trodden by his better-known contemporaries, and how he nevertheless acquired his peculiar imperial outlook.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Britain's navy was taking on an ever more important role for its imperial strategy. In May 1702, with Austria and the United Provinces, England declared war against France, thus entering the War of Spanish Succession. Hostilities spread to the Caribbean; there, as elsewhere, the health of military personnel turned out to be crucial. One real challenge that plagued all imperial rivals was the protection of sailors against yellow fever and scurvy. In Admiral Hosier's expedition to the West Indies in 1726, for example, more than four thousand men died in a squadron of 4,750; less than one in five survived the two-year voyage due to poor hygiene and malnutrition.Footnote ¹⁰¹ No wonder that naval medicine became an attractive avenue for aspiring medical practitioners.

Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians stressed the importance of tailor-made treatment of individual patients based on their humoral imbalance. As Harold Cook has shown, however, the Board of Admiralty sought something different: quicker, more efficacious cures for specific conditions such as scurvy that could be administered on board with minimum training and supervision.Footnote ¹⁰² During the 1690s, the board deprived the college of its traditional privilege of controlling the provision of military medicines, making it possible for enterprising medical practitioners to offer their specifics and experiments for trials on board.Footnote ¹⁰³ This was how medical practitioners like Colbatch and William Cockburn had their medicine tested by the Navy in the mid-1690s.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Having engaged with the naval contractor Martin in the run-up to the War of Spanish Succession, Stringer followed suit, armed with his chymical cures.

By 1700, Stringer's medicines reportedly saved patients coming back from ‘a Voyage to East-India’, and had also been shipped to Port Royal, Jamaica, and sold there at a higher price because of their reputed capacity for ‘Removing all kinds of Fevers in a little time’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Also helpful were examples of successful cures that he plentifully advertised in newspapers and elsewhere in print. Appleby has speculated that the chymist may have been connected, through a relative's marriage, to Sir John Benbow, the vice admiral who provided a lodging for the czar for whom Stringer performed experiments.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Be that as it may, Stringer was given opportunities in 1701 to test his medicines for the Navy. In July, Post Boy reported ‘Many extraordinary and successful Experiments’ that the chymist performed for the Navy at Portsmouth and Spithead.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Then, in response to a ‘very good character’ that the Admiralty Office had received of Stringer's ‘two chemical medicines’, they were tried upon a fleet of nineteen ships, three thousand strong, headed by Benbow, bound for the West Indies.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For this medical trial, the Admiralty Office ordered thirty pounds' worth of his medicines, elixir febrifugium martis and purging salt of lemons. Stringer encouraged physicians and surgeons serving naval and merchant vessels to follow suit and purchase the medicines.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

No report of the trial, or evidence of further commission, has been found. The experiment with Benbow's squadron probably met with mixed results. Although Stringer kept details secret, it is likely that much of the vitamin content was lost by the distillation of lemon juice. Stringer did not stop there, however. The sojourn into a naval medical experiment was followed by active moves to tap into England's colonial trade and imperial expansion. As in naval medicine, the chymist was following an emerging trend. England's commodity trade grew by nearly 50 per cent in total between the 1660s and the early 1730s, but that of the colonial sector grew by almost 250 per cent. The transatlantic trade was not as tightly controlled as the south Asian trade presided over by the East India Company.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was why so many medical promoters moved in ahead of Stringer. While plantations could provide new markets for proprietary medicines, Caribbean islands and North American soils also offered a wide range of medicinal herbs and minerals. Sir Hans Sloane, a fellow of the College of Physicians, travelled to the West Indies in the 1680s, and this journey laid the groundwork for his two-volume A voyage to the islands (1707), including Barbados and Jamaica.Footnote ¹¹¹ In the mid-1690s, Hugh Chamberlen, another physician of the college, became one of the proprietors of the Tobago scheme led by Captain John Poyntz. When the map-seller John Lloyd dedicated a map of the island to Chamberlen, he highlighted ‘plenty of Rootes, Herbs, Flowers, and Medicinal Drugs’ to be found in the island.Footnote ¹¹² Chamberlen quoted another physician on the virtue of global expansion: ‘if he went beyond Sea for Food, as Wine and Spice, he must do the like for Physick’.Footnote ¹¹³ Just like the plant-gatherers and natural historians studied by Richard Drayton and Londa Schiebinger, medical practitioners of all descriptions were at the forefront of imperial expansion.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Stringer rubbed shoulders with Royal College physicians as well as with merchants. Never content with naval medicine, Stringer began promoting his medicines to colonial merchants, advertising that his medicines ‘sell in the West Indies above 115 per Cent. profit, being well esteem'd of there’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He was also seeking to take part in the expansion of the colonial base itself. In June 1702, just ten months after the Navy-backed experiment had been sanctioned, Stringer and Woodroffe joined Poyntz's Tobago scheme, in which Chamberlen had been involved. The enterprise captured a concern of statesmen. France was laying claim to Tobago as a trading base;Footnote ¹¹⁶ as Nottingham, then the Secretary of State, put it, ‘Nothing can be more for our interest and to the prejudice of France’ than to prevent it ‘from the fruits he expects from the West Indies’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The fruits Stringer and others expected went beyond colonial settlement. As a petition jointly signed by Poyntz, Woodroffe and Stringer reveals, they also expected to hunt for ‘rich Earth-Mines and Lapis Lazuli, as also of Pearls, and Ambergrease’, by which ‘great and vast wealth (to the value of several hundred thousand pounds) may yearly redound to your Majtie and yr Subjects’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In order to promote the scheme, Stringer subsequently negotiated with the Duke of Courland (modern-day Lithuania), who also claimed a right of possession of the island, and with Thomas, Earl of Strafford, then an ambassador to Brandenburg-Prussia, in order to raise subscription from Protestant allies abroad.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Unfortunately for Stringer, the Tobago settlement did not materialize, partly because it met opposition from those London traders having a stake in Barbados. They were, Stringer alleged, intent upon keeping Tobago ‘as a park to Barbadoes to supply them[selves] w[i]th wood water Hoggs Turtle &c w[i]thout paying’, a status quo that the Committee for Trade and Plantation hesitated to change.Footnote ¹²⁰

Stringer's imperial turn

Facing multiple social, intellectual and material constraints, Stringer therefore accelerated, rather than attenuated, the promotion of the schemes and proposals that had made him look dubious in the first instance. This had far-reaching consequences. As Harold Cook has shown for the case of early modern Dutch commerce and science, ‘both the content and the framework of knowledge could be reshaped in the encounters with strangers’.Footnote ¹²¹ Similar epistemic transformation happened even to the humble chymist. Here, we find something unique about Stringer's career. Following his ‘imperial turn’ will now enable us to make better sense of the chymist's rise in the mining companies in 1709.

At one level, Stringer's imperial turn was simply about the importation of economic plans. One striking example came in 1709, when London was swayed by an influx of German refugees from the Palatine region. Within six weeks from 1 May that year, no less than ten thousand German Palatine refugees arrived, escaping from French persecution – some ill, many with children, all exhausted.Footnote ¹²² A crisis of public health ensued. The SPCK and other charitable bodies sprang into action, setting up tents, distributing foods and drugs, and raising funds for further action. The commissioner of trade and plantation was informed that this sudden rise of population might ‘produce a proportionable Increase of their Trade & Manufacture’ if, ‘instead of sending them to the West Indys’, the government encouraged them to settle within the British Isles.Footnote ¹²³ Stringer stepped in at this point, and proposed to set up ‘Mineral Colonies’. His plan was to send the ‘strong & those th[a]t can Labour’ to a manor of Penrhyn in north-western Wales, ‘to be Imployed in the Silver & Copper Mines there open'd’ by the Mines Royal.Footnote ¹²⁴ Some of the ideas came directly from the Tobago project discussed above. Stringer and fellow promoters had then proposed a ‘Bank and Factory of Creditt’, a bank that would offer securities for transatlantic trades in return for the payment of 3 per cent premium on the value of the goods consigned.Footnote ¹²⁵ Now, facing the need to facilitate foreign refugees to start earning an independent living in Welsh countryside, Stringer proposed that a proportion of the money raised for their relief be set aside to establish the ‘Mineral Bank of Factory and Credit’, so that the refugees might borrow money at a small rate of interest.Footnote ¹²⁶ Economic historians, such as Maxine Berg and Prasannan Parthasarathi, have shown how global trade and imperial expansion shaped consumer behaviour and even technical processes at cotton mills back in Europe.Footnote ¹²⁷ Stringer's imperial encounter likewise informed his economic response to the Palatine refugees.

The impact of colonial engagements went further. By the time the chymist revived the mining companies in 1709, he had come to view his mineral pursuits as a global, imperial, concern. The difference is unmistakable. When Stringer spoke of mines in ‘her majesties dominions’ in his proposal of 1699, he meant mines across the British Isles, ranging from Snowdon in Wales to Staffordshire and Scotland. As a new head of the Battery Works, Stringer gave in 1709 an entirely different, global, picture. The company was endowed with ‘Mines in all the Dominions, Territorys and Confines thereof what soever Uppertaining to the Imperial Crown of Great Brittaine In various and Far Distant Luttitudes & Longitudes'. Stringer further proposed to employ those ‘skilled in the Mines … Bottorny [i.e. botany], Agriculture, and’, he added, ‘Geography’.Footnote ¹²⁸ What had been primarily domestic livery companies came to be envisioned as a company operating across the expanding empire.

Stringer's imperial turn had further conceptual dimensions. Sarah Irving has suggested that the biblical vision of Adam's dominion over land lent itself to the idea that man might take whatever he ‘discovered’ and ‘improved’ as his property, even across the ocean. As David Armitage puts it, ‘External “imperialism” was the offspring of “internal colonialism”’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet, on the other hand, Alix Cooper has shown that the discovery of mines in the Americas spurred matching interests in domestic mines and natural history among European virtuosi and chymists, Paracelsus among them.Footnote ¹³⁰ The case of Stringer suggests that even a humble chymist took part in such epistemic transactions criss-crossing the Atlantic: if his chymical expertise first paved the way for naval medicine and colonial engagements, he then brought the imperial vision of dominion and jurisdiction over the land to bear upon the ancient mining companies.

The change was dramatic. When he published the mining tract in 1699 (prior to his extensive imperial engagements), he reassured the Commons that ‘all those that have Mines, and do work them, shall enjoy them according to the present Right and Custom’. The underlying assumption was clear: those who ‘discovered’ and ‘improved’ the mines should enjoy them undisturbed.Footnote ¹³¹ As he engaged with colonial schemes, however, Stringer came to witness a very different, imperial, set of claims. Consider the Tobago plantation scheme, which was based on Poyntz's ‘Several Secret discoveries’ of mines and gemstones. These riches and the island itself were to ‘be anext to yr Majties Realm of England’. The petition signed by Stringer and others declared that peace with the natives would help ‘enlarge your Majesties Territories and Dominions’, lands that were to be defended against other parties such as France and Courland.Footnote ¹³² The Committee for Trade and Plantation was in fact resolved ‘not to allow’ the Duke of Courland's right of possession, until ‘its in the hands of English subjects so as totally to surrender it to the Crown’.Footnote ¹³³ This was the conception of imperialism that Stringer brought to bear upon his mineral undertaking. When Stringer rose to become the mineral master general, he sought the reinstatement of the Crown's exclusive possession and jurisdiction over mines, minerals and related industries. Just as Stringer upheld the Crown's dominion in the New World against natives and the sovereignty of France, Spain and Courland, he now sought to ‘assert the Right of the Crown to the Mineral Kingdom; and to maintain our Corporations Rights, and Fee Simple to every [mineral] Species thereof under the Crown’, this time to the exclusion of all its subjects who acted without the permission of Stringer's united companies.Footnote ¹³⁴ Stringer thus argued that the united societies were entitled to levy fees, or else ‘to obstruct and hinder all other her Subjects, or others, to Dig or Search for the said Minerals, or to use their Tools, Instruments, Engines for gaining the same, or … the Engines, Hearths, Furnaces, or Methods of Stamping, Roasting, Boiling, Smelting, Melting or Refining’.Footnote ¹³⁵

On 30 April 1709, when Stringer began rising to prominence in the two companies, he in fact argued for discovering such defaulters.Footnote ¹³⁶ The scope of operation now being imperial, the long-term associate Thomas Oswin was appointed a deputy mineral master in Ireland. His appointment was deemed appropriate because he had just come back from Ireland, where, ‘by an Industrious Search he had discovered Several Rich Mines, which were already opened, and many Battery Workes of Several Sorts that were sett up in that Kingdome’. His job was to act as a de facto informer.Footnote ¹³⁷ It was also resolved that the iron and battery work near Boston owned by one John Hubbard, and ‘severall Copper and Silver Mines’ there, ‘may be Encouraged and Regulated under the Protection Powers and Previledges of this Corporation’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Later that year, a newspaper advertisement encouraged other entrepreneurs to comply and pay ‘easy Rents’.Footnote ¹³⁹ There may have been financial pressures at play too. In November 1709, Stringer cajoled one coach driver, Thomas Potter, into paying thirty pounds so that he could serve the united companies. Potter subsequently launched a legal action as Stringer and the companies provided neither a coach nor a ‘Silver Badge w[i]th the Companyes Armes Engraved thereon’. Like the ship chandler, Martin, the driver alleged that ‘their representac[i]ons were alltogether Fictitious’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Perhaps driven partly by the need for steady income, the same stern position was applied to England. Stringer alleged encroachments by prominent mining entrepreneurs such as Thomas Foley, John Trippe, and John Coster. The chymist argued that the society had not ‘taken care so [as] to informe themselves … as to call any of those Persons to an account for their soe doing’. The self-styled former Oxford professor of chymistry made the point to other members, ‘haveing the Counterparts of Mr Foleys leass in his hands’ – a dramatic gesture towards the legal record kept at his Blackfriars laboratory where the meeting took place.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The united companies later estimated that £460,000 worth of assets and arrears had been ‘usurp'd by several Invaders and Interlopers into the Mines, Minerals, and Battery Works, and Lands of their Societies, as also for taking their Wire-works, Mills, and other Parts of their Mineral and Battery Works’.Footnote ¹⁴² Instead of improving mines, the united companies at Stringer's behest would ‘regulate’ them by collecting the arrears from other mining operators across the empire.

The chemist's renewed ambition (which would have brought handsome profits) defied the evolving relationship between the Crown's prerogative and its subjects, especially in England. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, industrial monopolies became something of an anathema, an encroachment upon ‘free-born’ Englishmen.Footnote ¹⁴³ Even the Crown's exclusive rights over ‘mines royal’, those mines containing silver and gold, came under challenge as something infringing upon subjects' rights and liberty. As most natural ores contained some trace of precious metals, the definition of ‘mines royal’ could be stretched to include virtually every mine within the realm. This was precisely what happened in the early years of the Royal Mines Company. The Exchequer ruling of 1568 affirmed this expansive interpretation; under this rubric the Mines Royal became a powerful agency of the Crown, capable of searching private lands for discovering and ascertaining mines royal.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

This was the course of action that Stringer's imperial turn inspired him to revive. Yet the timing could not have been worse. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 accelerated the decline of a wide range of royal corporations such as the College of Physicians and the Royal African Company. They now struggled in the shadow of institutions like the Bank of England that were fiercely defended by parliamentary Whigs.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Acts of Parliament in 1689 and 1693 reversed the Exchequer ruling of 1568 in favour of subjects' rights and properties. The 1693 act affirmed that all proprietors of mines containing ‘Copper Tin Iron or Lead shall and may hold and enjoy the same … notwithstanding that such Mine or Mines or Ore shall be pretended or claimed to be a Royall Mine’ by any other parties.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Stringer sought to restore the ancient privilege in defiance of these acts, fuming that ‘late Act[s] of Parliament made about Mines Royal’ were ‘a Scarecrow only, and of little vallidity’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The chymist declared, ‘All Minerals, Earths and Metals, Salts and whatsoever is subterraneous, is the Prerogative Royal’, hence to be regulated by the united companies. This was evident because, he proclaimed, all mines and minerals had belonged to the Crown since the Norman Conquest.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This defied legal precedent, for even the 1568 Exchequer ruling conceded that base-metal mines belonged firmly to the landowner.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In seeking to resuscitate the old privilege, Stringer thus ended up advancing claims that were legally dubious, and politically anachronistic.

The revival of monopoly was ultimately unsuccessful. The Solicitor General did issue a summons in favour of the company's request to bring Trippe to a court meeting. Yet when the company pressed a charge against him, the Solicitor General prevaricated, answering that he could not judge the matter ‘without he had a view of the Original Patents or an Authentique Coppie thereof’, which he probably knew had never been recovered due to its secretary's earlier defection.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Support for the revival of monopoly meanwhile faded away. Although powerful men such as the Earl of Pembroke and Newton initially accepted their respective elections, few seem to have been sworn in. Newton soon ‘excused’ himself from taking the oath. Pembroke, though a moderate Tory, likewise distanced himself from the concern.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The company was soon embroiled in internal disputes among members; Stringer was on the verge of insolvency, and may have been detained for debts in 1710 and in 1713, both in relation to the legal action of the driver, Potter. The companies' activities dwindled by 1711, with only one meeting held in each of the years 1712 and 1713. The chymist died the following year, leaving his son Hippocrates trapped in Potter's legal action.Footnote ¹⁵²

Projecting, piety and public service

Given Stringer's demise, the range of schemes that he pursued may on the whole appear to have little in common except aggressive opportunism. Was he not a needy chymist, after all, who was all too happy to pursue less well-regulated avenues like naval medicine, only to turn towards the reintroduction of monopoly over the mining industry? A more nuanced picture will emerge if we dwell upon the alchemical connotation of the term ‘projecting’. Like the alchemist's crucible that would transmute base metals into gold, Stringer's wide-ranging schemes promised to turn untapped resources into profit and plenty, thus enriching the public as well as himself. Such promises were also made by his better-known contemporaries. Stringer's case thus reveals that their promises (or pretensions) to serve the public through expertise were in fact remarkably similar.

The political benefits of mining were well understood by rulers across early modern Europe. In the late sixteenth century, Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and Elector Augustus of Saxony took great interest in raising revenues and reinvigorating trades by developing local mines; the alchemist Becher promoted his career by yoking the grammars of productive art and industry together with that of statecraft.Footnote ¹⁵³ England saw corresponding developments. Under Charles I, Thomas Bushell, the self-appointed disciple of Francis Bacon, won royal patronage over Welsh lead mines by promoting them as the key for unlocking productive nature and enhancing royal glory against parliamentarians.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Gabriel Plattes, who sided with Parliament, likewise highlighted multiple public benefits of ‘digging, melting, and refining’ metals. Sir Humphrey Mackworth made his parliamentary career by promoting his Company of Mine-Adventurers as the joint pursuit of profit, piety and public service.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Stringer's mining scheme drew squarely on this tradition.

In his 1699 pamphlet on mining, for example, Stringer promised to raise a ‘great quantity of Tin, Lead, Copper, Iron, Alom, Vitriol, Salt, Marble, Pitch, &c’. These minerals, he said, would give jobs to hundreds if not thousands of the poor. He also highlighted far-reaching consequences of the mining industry and its produce: ‘if none of these, and the other Staple Commodities [i.e. minerals], be Permitted to be sold abroad, till they are some way Manufactured; as, the Lead into Sheets … Trade must needs flourish, and Money Circulate freely amongst all sorts of People’. If wisely backed with protective policies, then, the scheme would ‘not only enrich me [Stringer]’ and bring dividends to ‘the able Person[s] Adventuring’ with him, but would also prove ‘very beneficial to both King and Nation’ by giving jobs to many, from ‘Smiths, Carpenters, Coopers, Ropers, Refiners’ to mechanics and those selling food and other necessities to them near the mines.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Promises of profit and plenty were never confined to the smelting and refining of ores; they pervaded the emerging worlds of public science, of the financial revolution, and of Defoe's ‘projecting age’. Savery promoted his draining engine as ‘a business so conducive to the Increasing the Mining Trade’, something that could ‘Inrich themselves [i.e. investors] and the Nation, and Increase the King’s Revenue’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ When Humphry Walcot (like Desaguliers a protégé of the Duke of Chandos) sought public subscribers to invest in a desalination engine small enough for ships, he promoted it not only as a wise investment, but also as capable of saving lives, promoting naval supremacy, stimulating long-distance trade, and thus even increasing customs revenue.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The humbler Blackfriars chymist applied the same pomp across the mineral, medical and imperial spheres. ‘Trade’, Stringer declared, was ‘the Life of this Kingdom’. There was a major obstacle: the relief of the idle and indigent poor, which was ‘the far greatest Tax the Nation pays’. Many of his schemes proposed to employ the poor to advance the trade, thereby turning the problem into a solution.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The Tobago plantation project was promoted this way. The proprietors would mine and gather precious substances such as lapis lazuli, pearls and ambergris. If ‘transporting themselves thither’ to Britain, ‘the poorer sort of any of y[ou]r Majties Subjects’ might be given relief and comfortable living; and their labour would help raise ‘several hundred thousand pounds’ for the Crown.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Stringer's medical provision did not quite create jobs, but it was presented as enabling sailors, merchants and labourers to perform their duties. His medicines were said to have ‘saved and served Thousand[s] … to the Honour of England’; thus testimonies about his ‘Surprising [medical] Performances’ were printed ‘for Publick Service’ in 1703.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Stringer even compared his cures to the universal medicine. Given that some provincial medical irregulars tended to be ‘more businesslike in their rhetoric’, Stringer was more akin to the ostentatious quacks that Roy Porter has studied, albeit without a nationwide fame.Footnote ¹⁶² Stringer was adamant that such a fame was long overdue; he asserted that ‘Mankind ought to be, Grateful to their Physitian, who like the Glorious Angels of God, bring Health, Ease and Life’.Footnote ¹⁶³

The invocation of God was another important theme that Stringer shared with others. As Lissa Roberts has suggested, public science lectures promoted by men like Desaguliers often mixed ‘business with pleasure, the work of the hand with that of the mind, and consideration of the here and now with the hereafter’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ More broadly, creating jobs for the poor, be they in mines or in workhouses, was considered a public act of Christian charity, conducive also to the augmentation of national wealth.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Likewise, Stringer suggested that employing the poor through the mining scheme was ‘an Act of Christian Charity … truly worthy the Imitation of all good Men’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ For ‘God sake’, Stringer offered to cure twice a week all those ‘Poor People’ sent out of hospitals or ‘hospital ships’, or ‘left off by their Physicians as Incurable’ – a practice possibly adopted from the medical irregular William Salmon (1644–1713) who also lived in Blackfriars.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In the Tobago plantation scheme, Stringer proposed ‘to Devote Several thousand Acres of Land in Tobago as alsoe the 20th part of Such other purchases, and acquisitions, as they shall make, to such Pious uses whereby the Gospel may be propagated among the Indians’ in Tobago and elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Upon becoming the mineral master general, Stringer promised out of ‘his own will meer Motion, pious Zeal and Charity’ to give 2 per cent of the clear profit ‘towards the Building and Reparing the houses of God’, and another 3 per cent ‘towards the Erecting of Hospitales and Schooles for a Liberal Education of poore Infants and Orphans, and the farnishing of fit Liberarys[,] Mathematicall and Phylosophical Instruments &c.’Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Even the corporate monopoly was promoted as a radical solution to parish poor relief across the nation. In his 1713 tract, building further upon his earlier proposal for Palatine relief, Stringer tapped into the supposed ‘dominion’ over mines and minerals ‘for planting of colonies upon the waste lands’ across the nation. Justices of the Peace were urged to consult local churchwardens and overseers of the poor to identify ‘Overstock'd Parishes’, and to raise funding for sending burdensome families to the nearest mining districts. The united companies were to be ‘Impowered … [to] build houses for the support’ of the incoming families, and to lease each family several acres of land, with ‘necessary Houshold Goods’, ‘also a milch Cow’ and other animals.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Such measures would, he declared, ‘set the Works vigorously on foot, and make a speedy Advantage of the Mines, Mineral and Battery Works, which will make Trade flourish, and employ several Thousands of Hands’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Political and economic historians have shown that the financial revolution went alongside the revived reformation of manners. Charitable missions like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts adopted public subscriptions and corporate structures to further their ends; many business enterprises, from Mackworth's mining company to trading companies such as the Royal African Company, stressed the charitable dimensions of their business.Footnote ¹⁷² Despite the difference in institutional membership and the breadth of learning and networks, the chymist's medical and metallurgical activities were closely entwined with this broader pattern of projecting which drew on the mobilization of useful knowledge at the intersection between profit motives, charitable impulses and the pursuit of national interests.