God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [273]
Hartlib had close personal connections with Oliver St John and John Pym and was, we can presume, sympathetic to the more radical wing of the parliamentary cause, committed to the use of Parliament’s power to transform, not merely defend. Cheney Culpeper, one of his regular correspondents, certainly was.45 But Hartlib maintained correspondence with people of widely differing religious and political opinions: at the heart of his correspondence was a willingness to suspend differences about issues which were beyond human certainty in order to further human knowledge. Searching for a means to more secure knowledge in the future seems to have entailed for Hartlib and his associates a willingness to live with uncertainties in the present. It allowed for toleration of differences in spiritual matters, and for co-operation with those of differing opinions and temperament.
Hartlib’s circle were important to the promotion of knowledge of the natural world and saw this as closely connected to the political crisis in England. Others also took advantage of the practical opportunities to pursue intellectual enquiry. Richard Wiseman, for example, gleaned much important surgical knowledge from his wartime experience and it is possible that the supply of corpses allowed for increased anatomical observation in wartime Oxford. It has often been claimed that there was a connection between Puritanism and science, and the Hartlib circle have been central to that discussion; in any case, it is clear that there was a connection between these wartime conditions and science. It was in part a matter of free intellectual expression, and the more or less inviting possibilities of the changed print market. But it was also a matter of practicalities – the great Thomas Hobbes, for example, was drawn into a debate about the mechanics of the sword stroke, something of immediate interest but long-term significance to the science of mechanics.46
Hartlib’s circle are well-known because of the riches that survive in his papers, but there were clearly many such networks in this period. One with which his interests eventually intersected was a group of London merchants, with interests in New World trade and associated with the Independent congregations in London. Bound together by their hostility to the great merchants of the monopolistic Chartered Companies, men like Maurice Thomson, William Barkley and Owen Rowe can be seen at the cutting edge of the radicalization of the parliamentary cause throughout the 1640s. Their time was to come in 1651, when their in fluence can be seen at work in the transformation of state regulation of overseas trade.47
Another set of transatlantic ties was also crucial – that between the exiled godly and those who had stayed at home. Hugh Peter returned to put fire into the belly of God’s soldiers, and Roger Williams came back in search of a charter for his godly community, pausing to reignite the divisions among the London godly over the correct form of church government. The diversity of these networks, and their intersecting, overlapping and sometimes conflicting visions, contributed to the confusion of post-war politics. In the next three years Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton would unite as ‘Levellers’, championing popular sovereignty as the basis of political order. Thomas Hobbes, already on a rather singular route, may have started work on his classic Leviathan in 1646, refiguring the classical heritage accessible to early modern gentlemen (Hobbes was a tutor in an aristocratic household) to argue for a new political world.48 Milton, in Areopagitica (1644), had already made a case for freedom of speech as the best means to arrive at truth; an argument of second nature to Western liberals in the twenty-first century. Such intellectual creativity, and the fluidity of political alliances, prompted