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One such was Samuel Hartlib, a Protestant refugee from central Europe. Hartlib combined aninterest in Baconian science – that is, knowledge based on verifiable experience, and located within a coherent intellectual system which is often regarded as the forerunner of modern natural science – with an interest in the educational ideas of Comenius (Jan Komensky) and John Dury’s interest in the promotion of Protestant unity. Here the key issue was sound knowledge – of nature and of scripture – organized and taught in a coherent way, to produce an educated, properly Christian population. These ideas were presented in Macaria in 1641 and it was at Hartlib’s invitation in 1644 that John Milton wrote Of Education, an outline of an education suitable for a better world, training boys to govern, cultivate and defend their commonwealth.38

A central element of these ideals was the communication of knowledge and experience, and Hartlib was himself a tireless letter writer and, when funds permitted, publisher. Accurate knowledge, and a method to understand its meaning, was also associated with the creation of institutions to validate truth: a college of experience in the utopian tract Macaria (and another college to consider doctrinal matters); the Office of Address in a later and more limited proposal. These hopes had a millenarian aspect too. Hartlib and many of his correspondents believed that in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall, Adam had enjoyed a perfect knowledge of creation. Through an active use of the resources around him, Adam was never hungry, or ill, and was at one with God’s Word. Restoration of this knowledge would help to prepare the way for the return of Christ and the saints. This was an active and practical millenarianism, continuously concerned to make productive use of the environment.39

This desire to read the book of nature in order to come closer to God was akin to the interest in astrology, which promised to read in the heavens signs of God’s intentions: the book of nature provided a means to supplement our knowledge of God’s purposes derived from the often inscrutable book of scriptures. Clearly the conditions of the 1640s made that an enticing prospect. According to one modern authority, ‘Astrology was probably the most ambitious attempt ever made to reduce the baffling diversity of human affairs to some sort of intelligible order’, and the millenarian Baconianism of the Hartlib circle was scarcely less ambitious. Astrology fostered its own college too: the Society of Astrologers.40

In Samuel Hartlib’s case, intellectual creativity was married to attempts at practical mobilization. He had visited England in 1626 and settled there in 1628, pursuing an ambitious programme of educational reform throughout the 1630s. In 1641 and 1642 it looked like his moment had come: convinced that the English were under a special dispensation from God, he was able to secure visits from Comenius and Dury and was clearly building a significant amount of support in Parliament. Although this moment passed – interest in Macaria gave way to a more immediate fear of armed popery – he was tireless in mobilizing support for projects throughout the 1640s and 1650s. A crucial element of many of them was the more effective use of God’s bounty: the chemical manufacture of saltpetre (an essential ingredient of gunpowder, but also a powerful fertilizer); setting the poor to productive work, making idle hands useful to the commonwealth; or promoting Atlantic trade, which would maximize use of natural resources, increase knowledge and strengthen the commonwealth. Other projects included sponsorship of a woollen tank and testing torpedoes in the Thames, an interest in jam-making, bee-keeping and the cultivation of silk worms in Virginia. Behind these projects lay a single vision, of making full use of natural resources and political opportunities to edge the world back to a prelapsarian harmony with nature. Like astrology, this offered to lend meaning to the current confusion, and to provide a guide to