God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [272]
In 1644, the year of Marston Moor and the first signs of serious fracture in the alliance with the Covenanters, Hartlib had published two pamphlets enjoining correspondency among the Protestant churches. In August 1646, with a parliamentary victory looming, he published The Parliaments Reformation, a characteristic attempt to take advantage of a moment to push forward his larger agenda. His interest in saltpetre had reflected the difficulty of acquiring this crucial ingredient of gunpowder, and had concentrated on artificial manufacture rather than digging up pigeon lofts for the material in the nitrogen-rich droppings. It was a practical project, helping to meet a practical need while at the same time removing a common grievance. It would also push forward chemical knowledge and employ the poor. This latter concern was at the forefront of his concerns in the 1646 pamphlet – an injunction to use Parliament’s power to force men to be good:
because the major part of the people do never move to any good work willingly before they are commanded; and the command must be upon a penalty too, else they will do little; now consider, who can impose a command on the subject for the carrying on of a good work, and to lay a punishment upon the neglecters of the command, but a parliament’s power.
The pamphlet laid out practical proposals to house the poor, and employ them working on hemp and flax. He anticipated concerns about the effects on trade and the interests of clothiers, and made detailed suggestions about funding (including, for example, the use of fines on sins such as drinking, swearing, Sabbath-breaking and adultery to help meet the costs of the scheme). Overall, it was a plan for ‘such a godly and politic government; that the godly and laborious poor may be countenanced and cherished, and the idle, and wicked poor be suppressed’. Full reformation would come through the education and employment of the children of the poor – orphans, those with careless parents, or those with godly but indigent parents. These, he thought, were ‘the greatest part of the children in the kingdom, and most of them are like to become wicked members to the Commonwealth without this government’.42
This was clearly at an angle to the main political business of 1646, but it was a creative response to a widely remarked problem – poverty – and a new possibility – that Parliament might use its political muscle to promote reformation in the fullest sense. Behind it lay a distinctive vision of how to establish social, economic and political truths. With his eyes on this larger game, Hartlib was non-committal on the details of practical settlement in church and state:
I conclude with my prayers to God for the prosperity of this work; and that God will unite King and Parliament, to carry on this holy, godly and charitable work, that the poor children unborn may praise God, for the Parliament’s preservation, and the Kingdom’s reformation, for which we owe to God praise, and prayers, and all spiritual service.
In June, Hartlib had been granted £100 by a parliamentary committee dominated by Independents, but in August advertised this project as a concern for the new Presbyterian church.43
Hartlib enjoyed such minor but significant patronage from successive parliamentary regimes, and associates of his occupied important places in, for example, the drafting of the navigation laws (which governed the English and then British empire for a hundred years) and the survey of Ireland following the English conquest during the 1650s.44 He was at the centre of a network of correspondents and fellow travellers, and promoted their shared vision in print. In those respects his efforts were like those of many other pamphleteers, mobilizing and galvanizing opinion, taking advantage of the press and political opportunities, to promote a