Puritans and English Science: A Critique of Webster

Author(s): Lotte Mulligan

Source: Isis, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 456-469
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 Puritans and English Science:
A Critique of Webster
By Lotte Mulligan*

T HERE IS REASON FOR HISTORIANS OF SCIENCE to reconsiderthe

major thesis of Charles Webster's Great Instauration, a thesis now increasingly
accepted as the new orthodoxy, that Puritanism fostered the upsurge of mid-
seventeenth-century science. The Great Instauration, published in 1975 and favorably
reviewed at the time, is an important book.1 It extends the work of Christopher Hill
and others in relating the seventeenth-century scientific revolution to the political,
social, and religious upheavals of the mid-century. Its scope, scholarship, and
methodological variety well suit the first major attempt since Robert Merton to
present the history of seventeenth-century science as part of a contemporary intellec-
tual debate. Webster's book shows how explanations of the natural order and
methods for its control had their parallels in explanations of the social order and
proposals for its reform. He demonstrates that seventeenth-century science was not
principally the pursuit of specialists who isolated their intellectual efforts from the
rest of their lives and argues that it was instead carried out by reformers working with
others fully committed to political, religious, and social revolution. In this way-
through the association of the like-minded-Webster relates the scientific revolution
to the political revolution.
It is, however, questionable whether Puritanism, the alleged link between these
revolutions, is strong enough to bear the explanatory weight with which it has been
credited. Webster's book treats of "puritan science" and its influence on mid-
seventeenth-century science tout court. He wishes to explore the ideological and
political contexts of the work of Puritan scientists-scientists whose work did not
directly culminate in the spectacular breakthrough usually treated as the core of the
scientific revolution-in order to explain how, their worldview conditioned their
attitudes to the natural world in particular and, as a consequence, how their scientific
purposes, practices, and writings reflected their political and theological thought and
influenced the science that followed. It is this concern with a period of Puritan
influence that sets the chronological limits of his work-the years 1626 to 1660, when
the Puritan ideology of reform and the political revolution were conceived and

* Department of History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia 3083.

I should like to thank Glenn Mulligan, Judith Richards, and John Graham for their suggestions on and
criticism of this paper.
ICharles Webster, The Great Instauration (London: Duckworth, 1975). Reviewed (on the whole
favorably) by J. L. Heilbron, Isis, 1977, 68:485-486; Robert G. Frank, Jr., Science, 1977, 195:
383-386; D. M. Loades, Annals of Science, 1977, 34:205-207; R. S. Westfall, American Historical
Review, 1977, 82:353-355; Frances Yates, New York Review of Books, 1976, 23(9):27-29; Quentin
Skinner, Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 1976, pp. 810-812; Bernard Capp, History, 1977, 62:118-119;
Roger French, Nature, 1976, 260: 197.

ISIS, 1980, 71 (No. 258) 456

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISH SCIENCE 457

carried through, and the foundations were established for the institutionalization of
scientific discovery.
In order to make a meaningful distinction between Puritan and other science
Webster must show that the Puritan intelligentsia were people with self-consciously
different attitudes towards the natural world, attitudes that underwrote particular
brands of scientific activity. While I believe that Webster is right in characterizing one
strain of thought relevant to scientific endeavor in the mid-seventeenth century as
utilitarian, pansophic, and inspired by providentialism and millenarianism, and that
this strain led to a particular brand of activity focusing on utilitarian reform pro-
grams in general and educational reform in particular, labeling these traits as Puritan
is neither illuminating nor explanatory. For this congeries of attitudes was shared by
a wide range of English Protestants, to many of whom Webster could apply the term
Puritan only at the expense of his thesis. At issue here is not a word but the
consistency of its usage. Webster's argument depends on elision: a set of traits true of
many is treated as a hallmark of a chosen few. Nor is it easy to agree with the ever-
widening scientific contexts into which his Puritan stream of thought is said to flow.
For what begins as a particular and radical brand of Puritan science has for him an
impact not only on conservative Puritan mechanical philosophy but also on all
English mid-seventeenth-century science.
Because Puritanism is used explanatorily, it is important both to explore how and
of whom Webster uses the term, and to question whether it is possible to trace back
to a utilitarian, pansophist, millenarian strain of thought the development of English
seventeenth-century science in general and argue that the course of science and its
institutionalization before 1660 resulted from the work of the men Webster charac-
terizes as radical Puritans.
Webster attempts to distinguish Puritans from other groups by focusing initially
on a period during which he sees Puritans with common preoccupations and connec-
tions beginning to identify themselves, assemble as a group, and think through a
rationale for scientific activity of a kind cognate with an overall Puritan scheme of
things. He begins his story in 1626-a time which, he argues, "was marked by a major
phase in the consolidation of the opposition party of puritan laymen and clergy....
between 1626 and 1628 personal allegiances were settled and intellectual trends set in
motion which achieved their full expression at the outset of the Puritan Revolution in
1640."2It is crucial for Webster's thesis that a group of people can be identified which
saw itself as special-a spiritual brotherhood that was Puritan, oppositional, and
linked with the 1640 revolution, one whose attitude towards the natural world came
to inform much of the science of the day. In rebuttal it will be argued here:
* That while there were of course Puritans, and Puritans of many different kinds,
there was no self-conscious opposition party in the 1620s and 1630s, and it is doubtful
that there was one even in 1640; and that in the formative period Webster specifies,
the label "Puritan" was rejected by almost everyone as descriptive of themselves;
* That the intellectual properties Webster isolates as peculiarly informing for
Puritan scientists-millenarianism, providentialism, utilitarianism, rational empiri-
cism-were the common property of a wide range of Protestants, including those
Webster does not wish to claim as Puritan;

2Webster, Instauration, pp. xiv-xv.

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458 LOTTE MULLIGAN

* And that the establishment of the Royal Society was not, as Webster argues,
crucially influenced by Puritan science.3

WAS THERE A PURITAN OPPOSITION PARTY?

To look at the claim that an identifiable Puritan opposition group was established in
the period before 1640, it is necessary to begin with a critical view of Webster's
characterization of the prerevolutionary years. Webster, like all historians of the
English Revolution, is faced with the problem of explaining what happened in 1642
in terms of its antecedents. To solve the problem requires hindsight, for it has been
impossible to establish that a plan existed before 1640 that, if successful, would have
shaken the political and religious establishment to the roots. G. R. Elton, Robert
Ashton, J. P. Kenyon, Paul Christianson, and the other contributors to the recent
debate in the Journal of Modern History agree that there was no revolutionaryparty
in existence before late 1641, although there was (perhaps) a whole nation of
discontents and a whole Parliament of reformers.4These qualifications are crucial. If
discontent with the religious and political policies of Charles I was so widespread that
Parliament was almost entirely united in opposing them in 1640, it is difficult to speak
of a "revolutionary party" or even of a "reformist party."
Recent historians do not, as Webster does, see the years 1626-1628 as the time
when a distinctly Puritan opposition party was formed, at least in regard to Parlia-
ment. The Parliaments of 1628-1629 presented an entirely united front to Charles's
specific policies, producing the all-but-unanimous Petition of Right. Conrad Russell
and Robert Ashton5 agree that this highly conservative document did not constitute
an articulated policy of aggression by an opposition party.6 Certainly specific policies
of the crown affecting state and church stimulated considerable opposition-to
political policies in 1628 and to ecclesiastical policies in the late 1630s. But because of
the breadth of that opposition it is pointless to call it Puritan, since it included men of
almost all shades of political and religious opinion and thus encompassed almost the
entire political part of the nation as well as a vocal section of "the fourth sort who do
not rule."

3Another institution whose foundation Webster finds relevant for the institutionalization of Puritan
science was Durham College. Here he is unable to demonstrate that the Puritan establishment of the 1650s
intended to set up an institution sponsoring the "new science"; rather its purpose appears to have been
primarily the training of godly ministers. Its statutes stressed the propagation of the Gospel, its educational
emphasis was on languages, and its founding fathers had little more explicit "scientific"purpose than to set
up gardens for experimentation. (Ibid., pp. 237-242.)
4G. R. Elton, "A High Road to Civil War?" in C. H. Carter, ed., From Renaissance to Counter-
Reformation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966); J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1978); Paul Christianson, "The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six
Months of the Long Parliament," Journal of Modern History, 1977, 49:575-599; Mark Kishlansky, "The
Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament," ibid., pp. 617-640; James E. Farrell, "The
Social and Intellectual Basis of London's Role in the English Civil Wars," ibid., pp. 641-660; Robert
Ashton, The English Civil War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholas, 1978).
5 Conrad Russell, "Parliamentary History in Perspective," History, 1976, 55:18-20; Ashton, Civil War,
p. 15.
6Russell argues that on all important issues of conflict in Parliament-such as the impeachment of
Buckingham and the nonparliamentary collection of tonnage and poundage-there was a division within
the Privy Council as well as in both Houses, suggesting that no court party opposed by a Puritan
opposition may be identified. (Russell, "Parliamentary History", p. 18.) This did not mean that there could
not be overwhelming opposition to the crown. Members saw themselves as responsible to their electorates,
which could be in almost unanimous opposition to the court, but on such occasions-as with the Petition
of Right-many of the king's servants and the bulk of both Houses acted together in opposition.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISHSCIENCE 459

Nor can one speak any more accurately of a Puritan religious opposition party in
1628. Nicholas Tyacke argues that opposition to the crown's ecclesiastical policies
was not Puritan until 1640. In 1625 Parliament condemned Bishop Montagu's use of
"Puritan": "By [Montagu's] opinion we may all be Puritans."7 In the period
1626-1628 Tyacke identifies not a "Puritan" party but an anti-Arminian one-
indeed, a group that saw itself as loyalist and not oppositional, regarding the Puritan
as an odd-ball "who will eat his red herring on Christmas day and his roast beef on
Good Friday," according to the Earl of Bedford.8 Opposition to the crown's ecclesias-
tical policies took the form of opposition to the innovations of William Laud,
Archbishop of Canterbury. These innovations manifested themselves only in the
middle and late 1630s, and opposition to them can only with great difficulty be seen
as Puritan: men who regarded themselves as entirely loyal supporters of the Anglican
church saw themselves thrust into an oppositional role by the innovating church
policies of Laud.9 By 1640 opposition to the crown's policies in church and state was
so widespread that it makes no sense to call it Puritan opposition, not only because
opponents rejected the label but because there was more unity between those who
wished for further reform in the church and those who did not than there was
between the latter and the tiny Arminian party.
Even in 1641 contemporaries did not identify Webster's group (or any other group)
as a Puritan opposition party. Henry Parker's Discourse Concerning Puritans (1641)
saw Puritans as a small, insignificant group of people, for the most part below the
social level of the Parliamentarians, not as the kinds of people used by Webster in his
analysis of Puritan ideologists.
Those whom we ordinarilycall Puritanare men of strictlife and preciseopinionswhich
cannot be hated for anythingbut their singularityin zeale and piety, and certainlythe
numbersof such men is too small and their conditiontoo low, and dejected;but they
whichare the Devil'schiefeArtificersin abusingthe word,whentheypleasecan so stretch
and extendthe samethatscarceany civillhonestProtestantwhichis heartyand trueto his
Religioncan avoid aspersionof it, and when they list again they can so shrinkit into a
narrowsense,that it shall seem to be aimedat none but monstrousabominableHereticks
and Miscreants.Then by its latitude it strikes generally,by its contractionit pierces
deeply, by its confusedapplicationit deceivesvisibly....10

7N. Tyacke, "Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution," in Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins
of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 134.
8Ibid., pp. 134-136.
91n 1633 Bishop Davenant complained: "Why that should be esteemed Puritan doctrine which those
held who have done our Church the greatest service in beating down Puritanism or why men should be
restrained from teaching that doctrine hereafter, which hitherto has been generally and publicly main-
tained (wiser men perhaps may) but I cannot understand." (Quoted in Tyacke, "Puritanism," p. 139.)
Puritanism, then, was applied not only to men who wished to see the pre-Laudian church reformed but
also to those who were perfectly satisfied with the status quo ante.
'OHenry Parker, Discourse Concerning Puritans (London, 1641), pp. 7-9, 53. Compare with William
Bradshaw, English Puritanisme (London, 1605), p. 10: "The most notable men and gentlemen of spirit,
action and religion, in London .. . and all cities and good townes, where is dilligent preaching be Puritans
... because their religion seemeth the most perfect. And (thus) sound Protestants do be Puritans at heart."
This early, wide definition of "Puritan" as all sound Protestants attached the label to all truly religious
people concerned with purity and moral issues; it included Bishops Sanderson and Whitgift, the Earl of
Essex, King James, Prince Charles, and the Earl of Stafford. John Donne said he was a Puritan if Puritan
means one who opposes oaths and profaning of the Sabbath. See Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism
in Prerevolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964), pp. 16, 18. Hill too stresses that after
the advent of Arminianism "Puritanism" became a word to brand its opponents, and that throughout the
1620s and 1630s there was anxiety about the use of the word to encompass all who were genuinely
religious. Roger Coke lamented: "Laud'sfaction stigmatized all others which were not of their faction with

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460 LOTTE MULLIGAN

Parker also noted the political implications of this labeling: "All the Commons in
Parliament and almost all the ancient impartial temporal nobility, and all such as
favour . . the late proceedings of both Houses which is the main body of the realm,
papists, prelates and courtiers excepted ... all these are Puritans.... If all reformers
are Puritans then Parliament is Puritan."11And Sir Benjamin Rudyerd lamented in
1641: "Whosoever would be governed by the King's laws he is a Puritan.... [the
Arminians'] great work, their masterpiece now is to make all those of the religion to
be of the suspected party in the Kingdom."12
So while before the advent of Laud many of the characteristics Webster ascribes to
Puritans were shared by a wide range of Anglicans, after his coming to power anyone
who was not an Arminian risked being called a Puritan-and this included perhaps
the vast bulk of the nation. Irrespective of how the label was used or abused,
contemporaries appeared not to recognize any opposition party for which the label
might have been appropriate.
The period Webster characterizes as "the major phase in the consolidation of the
opposition party of puritan laymen and clergy" did not produce anything as choate as
an opposition party. Further, the events he chooses to demonstrate that the years
1626-1628 mark the origin of his group's identity do not constitute a set of occur-
rences which contemporaries would have recognized as related, nor can they be used
to testify to the existence of a self-conscious attitude of opposition among his
Puritans. These events include John Preston's sponsoring of Samuel Hartlib and the
latter's decision to settle in England, the deaths of Francis Bacon and of Preston, the
publication of the New Atlantis, the millenarian commentaries of Joseph Mede and
Johann Heinrich Alsted, William Harvey's De motu cordis, and the foundation of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Since he was a key figure in the Great Instauration, Hartlib's decision to settle in
England was clearly significant for the history of English science, and his intellectual
cast certainly fits Webster's characterization of Puritan science as utilitarian, panso-
phist, millenarian, and providentialist. Hartlib's association with Preston may have
helped to establish him as a reputable figure within Preston's sphere of influence, but
it is much more difficult to see Preston himself as a member of a Puritan opposition
party, and his case illustrates the difficulties in ascribing to anyone membership in
such a group. Though Preston was a critic of the Jacobean and Caroline church he
nevertheless deviated in no way from the path of reform from within. As chaplain to
the prince and as his mentor before Laud, he cannot be seen as a truly oppositional
figure.13
Webster is very careful not to identify Bacon as a Puritan, though he does insist
that he "had an intellectual ancestry largely in common with the English puritans."14

the name of Puritans," ibid., p. 27. Nor can a hard-and-fast distinction be made between a Puritan
oppositional party and the court itself, at least in the 1620s. Even after the Puritan influence over the court
under James was diminished, John Preston was chaplain to Charles, Prince of Wales, and was present with
Charles at James's death. (William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism [New York: Harper and Brothers,
1957], p. 70). Even in 1643 it was possible to describe as "Puritan"any opponent to the court. The Puritan
faction, wrote the Venetian Ambassador in 1643, consisted of "some bishops, all the gentry and the
commonalty." (Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 27)
"Parker, Discourse, pp. 11, 45.
12Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 26.
'3William Lamont, Godly Rule (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 46; J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in
Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 6.
'4Webster, Instauration, p. 514.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISH SCIENCE 461

This of course widens the roots of Puritan thought to include the English Protestant
tradition in general and lessens considerably the explanatory potential of Puritanism
proper. Webster stresses Bacon's millenarianism-a trait which, it will be argued, was
shared by a great many members of the Church of England of all kinds, and an aspect
of English Protestantism in general. What Webster claims as important is the way
some of Bacon's work was taken up by Puritan scientists, partly because of its
millenarian teleology. The time of publication of New Atlantis, given its utilitarian
utopian strain, was certainly an important date, for it established antecedents for
Puritan works of a similar genre. Why Bacon's and Preston's deaths should be
significant is not demonstrated. At the time of his death Bacon was hardly recognized
as a crucial intellectual lynch-pin for the Puritans.
The publication of Mede's and Alsted's work was also important, but again it must
be stressed that Mede's work at least was not itself Puritan but stood in the general
English millenarian tradition. Nor is it easy to see the relevance of the foundation of
the Massachusetts Bay Company-an event of quite another order. In 1628 its
members would have rejected the label of Puritan opposition to the crown. And while
Harvey's influence on English science in general was great there is no reason to link it
with Puritan science particularly, since De motu was dedicated to Charles I, and its
language, as Hill shows, was originally highly colored by metaphors comparing the
absolute rule of the heart over the body with the power of kings over the body politic:
"The heart is the principle of man's body, and the image of your kingly power." Hill's
argument that Harvey later recanted remains unconvincing, and is in any case
irrelevant before the 1640s.15Webster characterizes Harvey as nondoctrinaire in his
experimental philosophy, humanist and eclectic in his reading, and possessing a
philosophical attitude that would have made him critical of any of the new systems
developed in the seventeenth century. But such an intellectual case-history would fit
any number of scientists who were not Puritan.16 Harvey, like William Gilbert,
belongs to the category of scientists who contributed to the macroscopic scientific
revolution; he should not be invoked as specially relevant to Puritan science.
With the exception of Hartlib, none of the names Webster finds crucial to the
formation of an opposition party which set the social and intellectual context for
Puritan science-John Foxe, Sir Walter Ralegh, Mede, Bacon, and Harvey-can
meaningfully be classified as Puritans. Since millenarianism, providentialism, scien-
tific empiricism, and lack of dogmatism were not the sole property of Puritans but
could belong equally to non-Puritans, holding these tenets will not certainly identify
anyone as a Puritan. Indeed, to argue that open-minded examination of all philo-
sophical systems was a Puritan trait ignores the propensity of Puritans to be dog-
matic and confident of their monopoly on truth, the strong antirational streak in
much of their writing, and, most importantly, the fact that so many seventeenth-
century scientists as well as sixteenth-century humanists saw virtue in following truth
wherever it might be found-the obvious consequence of a wholesale criticism of

15ChristopherHill, "William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy," Past and Present, 1964, 27:54-72. See
also the debate on this subject between Hill and Gweneth Whitteridge, Past and Present, 1965,
30:104-109. Hill argues that by 1651 Harvey had dethroned the heart and established the constitutional-
ism of the blood, but one cannot agree that Harvey, a personal friend and physician to Charles I and
Censor of the College of Physicians, was anything but a loyal royalist. See Charles Webster, ed., The
Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp.
12-15, 160-197 for this debate.
16Webster,Instauration, p. 316. The fact that his experimental and undogmatic attitudes influenced the
Republican College of Physicians hardly makes his inspiration particularly Puritan.

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462 LOTTE MULLIGAN

Aristotelian orthodoxy. Of course these ideas might have provided the amalgam
from which Webster's science emerged. But because they were not exclusive to
Puritans, they cannot per se explain anything particularly Puritan about the kind of
science Hartlib and his friends espoused.
The events on which Webster focuses in the 1620s do not constitute a "set"at all. In
the 1620s and through most of the prewar period there was no "Puritan opposition
party," and so the picture of an intellectual and social movement fully established
before the revolution and able to spring into action as soon as circumstances allowed
it, while appealing, has little verisimilitude. Parker's cautionary strictures about the
politics of word usage are pertinent: "But they who are the Devil's chiefe artificers in
abusing the word [Puritanism] when they please can so stretch and extend the same
that scarce any civil honest Protestant . . . can avoid the aspersion."1 7

PROTESTANT MILLENARIANISM AND PROVIDENTIALISM

Webster stresses the importance of providentialism and millenarianism for shaping

the particular brand of science carried out by Puritans. He recognizes that these ways
of making sense of the natural order were not peculiar to Puritans,18but by empha-
sizing their utility as ideologies for transforming the immediate future, he uses them
to explain the special nature of Puritan interest in science. In order to set these beliefs
in their full context, however, it is important to show how widespread they were
among seventeenth-century writers in general. The millenarian tradition of Foxe,
which depicted English kings and other Protestant countries as leaders against the
power of Rome and the papal Antichrist and identified the millennium with the
defeat of the forces of Antichrist, was shared by all Protestants, conservative and
radical alike. 19 Hill is explicit that such literature came from "the Calvinist wing of
the Church of England, both Puritan and non-Puritan," a view endorsed by Kathe-
rine Firth's latest work.20Hill lists James I and twelve Jacobean and Caroline bishops
who proclaimed the pope as Antichrist,21and even under Laud the bishops carried on
Brightman's tradition of an England under godly leadership, opposing Rome and
Antichrist at the head of a Foxeian reformation.22
Even those who took issue with the orthodox belief that the pope was Antichrist
exercised caution. Laud pleaded at his trial that he was entitled to reject the identifi-
cation as "the Church of England hath not positively resolved it to be so," and a
Laudian argued that the Beast would only be overcome by a "splendid visibility"
greater than Rome itself-episcopacy by Divine Right.24 This suggests that what

17 Parker, Discourse, p. 8.
18Webster,in Webster, ed., The Intellectual Revolution, pp. 12-13.
'9Lamont, Godly Rule, passim. Katherine R. Firth in The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) refutes the view that it was John Foxe who initiated the English
nationalistic interpretation of the fight against Antichrist, arguing that it was the work of Thomas
Brightman and Mede (pp. 106-109).
20Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press,
1971), p. 20; Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 234.
21Hill, Antichrist, pp. 20-27. Napier identified the pope with Antichrist and dedicated his work to
James, and Selden had lengthy discussions with the king of the significance of the ntmber 666; William
Lamont, "Richard Baxter, The Apocalypse and the Mad Major," Past and Present, 1972, 55:75.
22Bishop Carleton called the "Church of Rome . . . the whore of Babylon, the see of Antichrist, the
mother of all abominations." Lamont, Godly Rule, p. 42.
23So "established" were these interpretations of the prophesies of the Bible that the Book of Common
Prayer beseeches God to root out the Antichristian papists and the dedication to the Authorized Version
of the Bible congratulated James for the blow it presented to the "Man of Sin."
24Lamont, Godly Rule, pp. 37, 67.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISH SCIENCE 463

Webster has treated as Puritan emphasis was in fact orthodox belief until that
doctrine was changed by Laud's reactionary innovations, and even then Foxeian
millenarianism was invoked by non-Puritans.
Nor did English millenarianism cease with the Revolution. There is no need to
refer to the explosiveness of the idea for Puritans during the 1640s and 1650s; it is
well documented by Webster and most historians concerned with the profusion of
radicalism in those years. But Royalist Anglicans, too, continued to invoke the
millennium through the dark days of their defeat, one even suggesting that Cromwell
was the Antichrist.25 And later, as the recent works by James and Margaret Jacob
show and as Webster recognizes, there is plenty of evidence that millennial expecta-
tion revived within the established church after 1660.26The Jacobs' argument, that
Anglican science after 1660 was inherited from conservative Puritan science of the
1650s and carried on by trimmers like Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, would explain
the continuity of scientific and religious traditions after the Restoration. So for
example the latitudinarian millennium of the post-1688 world included such
thorough-going apocalypticism as that of John Evelyn: "For this Earth in which
dwell nothing but wickedness ... shall be burned up, purged and made another thing.
Upon this hope the Apostle persuades the Saints to take of that Refreshment when
Christ . . . shall be sent."27Just as Puritan millenarians of the 1640s had hopes of a
heaven on earth in the immediate future, so Evelyn saw 1689 as the crucial year: "The
7th viall poured on Antichrist was the preaching of Luther; and continues to this day;
by all the reformed, figured by the Earthquake . . . and that by the Harvest is figured,
ye Reformation of ye last Century. The Vintage is now come; from anno 1689 or
thereabout and to the last til the full destruction of ye Roman Babylon."28But if
Evelyn was a latitudinarian in religion and politics in the 1680s, he was not a Puritan
conservative earlier, having been a firm upholder of Royalism and Anglicanism in the
1640s and 1650s. In short, pace the Jacobs, millenarianism can be attributed to
Anglicans who had not been Puritans in the 1640s and 1650s. Certainly, Anglican
apocalypticism existed during the Interregnum. Hobbes in 1651 thought that there
would be a literal, political kingdom of God on earth ruled by the Saints,29and of
course Newton's theology, bridging the entire period from the 1650s to the end of the
century, was apocalyptic. In his Observations on the Prophesies he stated his belief
that the prophesies of Daniel and Revelations had partly been fulfilled and that the
present continued to show their working-out.30

25B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 41.
26See Webster, Instauration, p. 32, for the differences between an Anglican and a Puritan millennial
paradise, and Webster, Intellectual Revolution, pp. 10 ff. Margaret Jacob's thesis is that the eschatology of
Foxe was projected into the post-Restoration period by moderate Protestants who believed that the
fulfillment of the Reformation depended on the ascendancy of English Protestantism. Divine Providence
had brought about the defeat of the Puritans and the establishment of the Restoration ihonarchy and the
church. The new generation of saints, having discarded radical Puritanism, were members of the Church of
England, and with them the millennium would arrive. Margaret Jacob, "Millenarianism and Science in the
Late Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1976, 37:336. See also James R. Jacob,
Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), Ch. 4, and James R. Jacob
and Margaret C. Jacob, "The Anglican Origins of Modern Science," Isis, 1980, 71:251-267.
27J. Jacob, "Millenarianism," p. 338.
28Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Hassocks: Harvester Press; Ithaca,
N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 127.
29J. G. A. Pocock, "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in J. H. Elliott
and H. C. Koenigsberger, eds., The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 173-174.
30L. Trengrove, "Newton's Theological Views," Ann. Sci., 1966, 22:278; W. Turnbull, ed., The Corre-
spondence of Isaac Newton, Vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 241-245.

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464 LOTTE MULLIGAN

The belief in divine providence favoring the righteous was not a radical Puritan
monopoly either. When Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote Contemplations on
the Psalms of David in 1647, the time he began the History, he believed the Psalms
were prophetic of a bright future for England: "Methoughts the future was so
evident, that the present ought not but to be submitted to with cheerfulness."'31God
would exalt and punish according to his divine plan; his just judgments would direct
the events of the future.32 The same reflective tenor appears in the History: "The
finger and wrath of God is everywhere discernible"; the miseries of the Great
Rebellion were generated by the "same natural causes and means, which have usually
attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride and excess towards some signal
mortification and castigation from Heaven."33In Clarendon's ruminations God's
providence accounts both for the punishment of the wicked and for the hope of a
brighter future for the virtuous.
Nor is Clarendon alone among loyal Anglican Royalists in such a view of provi-
dence. Richard Braithwaite, supporter of both the established church and the state,
saw the study of history as useful "to note the raising of many obscure persons to
great honour; as likewise the pulling down of many eminent houses and families,
would enforce no lesse admiration in us of God's divine Providence, than of his secret
Justice, who pulleth downe and setteth up, as seemeth best to his secret wisdom."34
The mystery and secrecy of God's plan-its inaccessibility to human reason-was
shared by these writers, as was the confidence that in the long run both the virtuous
and the wicked will receive their just deserts. This thought is echoed by Jeremy
Taylor, chaplain to Charles II. Writing from his haven in Wales in 1647, he saw God's
providence as a personal one, saving him from metaphorical drowning: "Here I cast
anchor . . . but that he who stilleth the raging of the Sea and the noise of his Waves
and the madness of his people, had provided a Plank for me I had been lost to all the
opportunities of content."35In 1660 he naturally took a more sanguine line about the
wider implications of God's providence: "The circles of the Divine Providence turn
themselves upon the affairs of the world.... every new event in the Oeconomy of
God is God's finger to point out to us by what instances he will be served.... God
hath left off to smite us with an iron rod."36And of course autobiographical accounts
of all kinds in the seventeenth century recounted God's providential acts on behalf of

31 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Contemplations and Reflections on the Psalms of David (Oxford,

1757), p. 525. See B. H. B. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, Historiography and Religion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 167. God, not man, ordains what is to come and He acts without the
collaboration of man: "I have long since thought our nation will be either utterly extinguished under this
great judgement or be restored and preserved by such an extraordinary way as we shall not be able to
assume any part of it to our own wits and dexterity; for, methinks, God Almighty exceedingly discounte-
nances all the designs which our natural reason is apt to flatter us with." (Cited in Wormald, Clarendon, p.
167.)
32"Theinevitable judgements pronounced upon prosperous wickedness, pride and oppression and the
protection and exaltation promised to those who suffer unjustly and are not weary in their innocence nor
depart from it upon any temptation: I found cause enough to believe that both one and the other might
possibly fall out and come to pass in this world, as it must unavoidably do in the next ... I must confess the
frequent reading of the Psalms of David gave me great hopes He would do it." (Clarendon, Contempla-
tions, p. 370.)
33EdwardHyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Great Rebellion (first publ. London, 1702-1704;
repr. 6 vols., Oxford, 1888), Vol. I, pp. 36-37. See also Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 19.
34Richard Braithwaite, The English Gentleman (London, 1633), p. 218.
35JeremyTaylor, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), in L. P. Smith, ed., The Golden Grove (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 3.
36Jeremy Taylor, Doctor Dubitandum (1660), in Smith, Golden Grove, p. 34.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISH SCIENCE 465

the autobiographer in everyday life. Not only John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and
Ralph Josslin but also Jeremy Taylor and William Laud thanked God's providence
for saving them on innumerable occasions from sudden death.37
Nor were Puritans always as sanguine about their ability to assume that they could
predict the nature and path of divine providence as Webster's account suggests. Urian
Oakes wrote: "God can stop the Sun in its course, and cause it to withdraw its
shining. He can give check to the Fire, that it shall not burn ... though He hath set an
Order among his Creatures, this shall be the cause of that effect etc. yet He himself is
not tied to that Order; but Interrupts the course of it when He pleases."38Henry
More, whom Webster connects with the Puritan brotherhood (though he was by no
means straightforwardly a Puritan), was similarly uncertain about the direction of
the workings of providence: "It is an outrageous Presumption to expect that He
should not act according to his own Mind and Will but according to the groundless
enlargements and expanses of our own wanton and busy Phansies."39The "increased
confidence in the capacity of the human intellect" and the "spectacular advances
which could be anticipated in all fields of learning"which Webster sees as characteriz-
ing the providentialism of his Puritan scientists was not a hope universally held. One
should attend seriously to Walter Charleton, the eminent and undogmatic scientist
whose suspicion of "the dark lanthorne of reason" led to the incentive to "throw
ourselves upon the implicit conduct of faith."40Although the doctrine of providence
was a comfortable doctrine, providing the hope of a bright future, Puritans were not
as certain of being able to read God's plan as Webster suggests. Nor did providential-
ism cease with the Puritan eclipse after 1660, as the quotation from Jeremy Taylor
illustrates. Benjamin Whichcote continued to believe that "the affairs of mankind are
a choice piece of the administration of providence."'41 Webster elsewhere points to the
wide range of millenarianism existing at different times and the different ways of
planning for the future that the doctrine inspired in its various adherents.42But since
these beliefs were widely shared by non-Puritans at the very time when, it is claimed,
they crucially affected Puritan scientists, they have little explanatory potential for
Puritan science in particular.

PURITAN INFLUENCE ON THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

It now remains to examine Webster's claims for the influence of his brand of Puritan
science on mid-seventeenth-century English science in general. It is clear that he is not
simply concerned to trace the history of the millenarian-inspired pansophic strain of
science exemplified by Puritans like Hartlib and Haak, but that he wishes to show the
crucial role these men played in shaping and institutionalizing the English scientific
revolution. He distorts the situation, however, in claiming that the optimism of the
scientific movement comes from Puritan millenarianism, for many who were not
touched by it were hopeful about future discoveries and increased control over

37John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (London, 1666), passim; Richard Baxter, Autobiography (London:
Dent, 1974; orig. publ. as Reliquiae Baxteriae, London, 1696), pp. 11, 13, and passim; Jeremy Taylor,
Prophesying, passim; Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josslin (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), pp. 179-180; William Laud, The Diary of William Laud (London, 1694), in Works
(London, 1886), Vol. III, p. 227 and passim.
38Urian Oakes, The Soveraign Efficacy of Divine Providence, cited in Baker, Wars of Truth, p. 15.
39Baker, Wars of Truth, p. 17.
40P. M. Rattansi, "Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution," Ambix, 1963, 11:26.
41McGee, Godly Man, p. 32.
42Webster, Intellectual Revolution, pp. 10 ff.

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466 LOTTE MULLIGAN

nature. Bacon himself was an obvious source of such confidence, and Webster agrees
that millenarianism played only a minor role in his writings as a whole.
More overtly, Bacon's confidence in the future of scientific knowledge was based
on the efficacy of his scientific method set out in Novum Organum, a work in which
millenarianism plays little part. Confidence in the ever-widening horizons of science
owed much to geographical discoveries, the influence of Paracelsus, the scientific
method developed in the school of Padua, the eclectic humanism and Neoplatonism
inherited from Pico, Ficino, and the whole range of Renaissance classical scholar-
ship, and, of course, to Bacon.
Webster, however, wishes to stress the formative influence and dynamism of
pansophic millenarian Puritanism in his account of the development of mid-
seventeenth-century English science in general. His treatment of the origins of the
Royal Society illustrates how he attempts to show this influence at work: ". . . it is
important to establish the degree to which the Royal Society was influenced by the
puritan experiments in intellectual organization already described."143 Webster con-
centrates on those early Fellows who were scientifically active in the Society and
argues that most of them had been interested in scientific meetings in London and
Oxford in the 1640s and 1650s. By appealing to the origins of scientific meetings-
during the Interregnum and not at the Restoration-he attempts to connect the
Society's inception and inspiration to Puritan sources. He isolates a group of twelve
Fellows whose activities are often mentioned in Birch'srecord of the Society's weekly
meetings and asks of them: "To what extent did the active group exist in a coherent
form before 1660 and extend back into the previous decade to interlock with the
organizations generated under Puritan auspices?" This procedure excludes Robert
Hooke, mentioned more frequently than any other Fellow in Birch, because as
curator of experiments "he was [not] able to exert much influence until his reputation
was more established," and it excludes thirteen others because their attendance "was
not very considerable," although they were continually involved with the Society.44
The resulting list of men connected with the earlier scientific meetings is thus
somewhat contrived.
More important, Webster makes the dubious claim that people who met during the
Interregnum did so under Puritan auspices. True, the 1645 London group meeting at
Gresham College was predominantly Puritan and Parliamentarian, and it was
initiated by Theodore Haak, a paradigmatic pansophic millenarian. But the fact that
politics and religion were eschewed at the discussions suggests that the dominant
Puritan mode of the time was less relevant and less unifying for the members than
Webster's characterization of the group implies. Indeed, the decision to exclude mat-
ters of theology from scientific discussion suggests that religion was regarded as a dis-
traction from rather than as central for the day-to-day work of science. And to claim
that the group which met at Oxford in the 1650s was "itself an offshoot of the London
group and followed the same pattern of organization"45 seems unjustified. The
Oxford scientists differed from the London group: the bulk of them were committed
Royalists,46 their orientation was primarily medical (seven of them were practicing
doctors), and their experiments were highly technical, in no way realizing the

43Webster, Instauration, p. 88.

44Ibid., pp. 91, 93.
45Ibid., p. 95.
46Six were Royalists, three were Parliamentarians, and six were too young to be labeled by a criterion
based on 1642 allegiances. See Lotte Mulligan, "Civil War Politics, Religion and the Royal Society," Past
and Present, 1973, 59:92-116.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISH SCIENCE 467

pansophic intentions of Haak. These features make it odd to describe the group
merely as an offshoot of the London meetings.
To establish a causal link between the later scientific meetings and the original
London ones is important to Webster because it would enable him to stress the
crucial influence of the Puritan pansophist stream in the origins of the Royal Society.
He specifically rejects characterizing those meetings in the 1640s and 1650s in terms of
Puritan-Parliamentarian and Anglican-Royalist affiliations, but he finds no difficulty
in establishing one stream of allegiance-that of the pansophic millenarian Puritan
element of Hartlib, Haak, and others. "Hence the specifically puritan ideal of
intellectual organization is relevant both to our understanding of the initiation of the
1645 meetings and to the process of institutionalization between 1660 and 1663." This
he asserts despite agreeing that those called together in 1660 to organize the Royal
Society were "from its outset and by intention, of extremely mixed religious and
political constitution." He then argues that "committed puritans and parliamentar-
ians . . . were the dominant element in the scientific community" and concludes that
Puritanism (a label applicable only to a small minority of early Fellows) was a crucial
formative influence on the origin and style of organization of the Society. He effects
this by relating it (through an oddly restricted method of selection) to the member-
ship of the 1645 group, and particularly to the membership of one man, Haak: "It
has already been demonstrated that the involvement of Haak (and to a lesser extent
Wallis) with the Comenian pansophic enterprise was relevant to the genesis of the
1645 group. Accordingly puritan idealism played a part at this crucial first stage."47
Although Haak was important in this group, it is not clear why the involvement of
one man with a singular and little-shared brand of Puritan interest in science should
be given such prominence in the causal chain of Puritan influence over the subse-
quent scientific meetings that culminated in the setting up of the Royal Society in
1660.
Webster goes on to argue that not only the initiative for the 1645 meetings but also
the "process of institutionalization which occurred between 1660 and 1663" was due
to this influence.48But the institutionalization of the Society was just as likely to have
reflected the visions of Abraham Cowley and John Evelyn-both Royalists and non-
Puritans, and both with schemes for scientific institutions with utilitarian scientific
aims. It is surely important when considering the dynamics of small groups to see
influence as a dialectical process. If a case can be made for one man influencing the
minds of others attending the same gatherings, a similar one can be made for other
men's impact. And in determining what intellectual forces were at work at the
foundation of the Royal Society, it is necessary to take into account how the early
Fellows saw their own enterprise. The letters of the Society's registrar,William Croon,
who attempted to enroll established scientists, reflect one important view. In 1661 he
wrote to Henry Power the mathematician: "This will be a very honourable society
favoured by his Majesty and those who have the greatest fame in learning among us.
. . . This company does not take upon itself to assert any one hypothesis . . . for they
believe that to make any hypothesis . . . must bee after the trial of so many
experiments as cannot be made but in a long tract of time."49This conception of the
potential membership and style of intellectual activity of the Royal Society-a
society of established scientists with sophisticated experimental methods-does not

47Webster, Instauration, pp. 93, 94, 491, 97.

48Ibid., P. 99.
49London, British Library, Sloane MSS 1362, fol. 26, July 20, 1661.

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468 LOTTE MULLIGAN

fit Webster's characterization, yet it must be taken into account in any interpretation
of the Society's initial view of itself.
The existence and pervasiveness of the intellectual strain which Webster anato-
mizes in his book is beyond dispute. But he stretches his original aim of exploring
a peculiar Puritan brand of science in order to demonstrate that the macrocosmic
phenomenon of mid-seventeenth-century English science was crucially influenced by
people who subscribed to the Puritan pansophic millenarian view of science, and he
manages this by emphasizing the role of those who fit the criteria, while excluding as
uninfluential those who do not.
Experimental science and its institutions did not, of course, spring forth fully
grown from the Restoration. But to argue that because they had been gestating in the
1640s and 1650s, they were therefore crucially shaped by what was distinctively
Puritan in the ethos of those years, ignores the existence of the many who contributed
directly to the breakthrough in crucial areas of science and whose intellectual,
political, and religious allegiances were quite other than those characterized in
Webster's analysis as Puritan science-and who indeed played no part in or even
rejected the predominant religious and political values of the day. These would
include mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers like Sir Christopher Wren,
John Flamsteed, Robert Hooke, William Brouncker, Sir Robert Moray, William
Neile, Richard Towneley, Henry Power, Seth Ward, and of course Newton, and
physiologists like Harvey, George Ent, Henry Glisson, Charles Scarburgh, Ralph
Bathurst, Walter Charleton, and Thomas Willis. Without doubt "the founders of the
Royal Society had been conspicuously exposed to puritan and parliamentarian
influences."50It is how they responded to such exposure (as the Jacobs have argued)
that is to the point. Indeed, Webster concedes the extreme heterogeneity of the
intellectual traditions of the early Fellows.51 Just how these influences worked or
what they were is problematic: the problem of "influence"has always bedeviled the
history of ideas. Webster tends to ascribe to Puritan influence any work produced
which shared some of the characteristics of Puritan science, whether the authors were
part of that tradition or not. There is no evidence to show whether the paradigmati-
cally Anglican figures Evelyn, Cowley, and John Aubrey and the Roman Catholic Sir
Kenelm Digby, all of whom shared some of the views of Hartlib and Haak, were
influenced by them or whether they arrived at their conclusions independently. As for
the direction of influence, Webster's "Puritan scientists" travel a one-way street.
Certainly it is true that there was cross-fertilization between seventeenth-century
theology and the explanations men gave of the natural world. But the emphasis
should be on a general English providential view of the natural order rather than on
the peculiar millenarian, pansophist element of the radical Puritans. The theological
rationalizations for attempting to control nature and viewing the universe as a
mechanical construction were explicitly shared by abstract scientists, of whom the
majority were certainly Anglicans.52Thomas Sprat's justification of science based on

50Webster, Instauration, p. 492.

51Ibid., p. 495.
52Ibid., p. 489. Webster surprisingly concedes that a doctrine shared by Anglicans and Puritans alike
may have influenced scientific endeavor. But, having made the concession, he continues to anatomize the
distinctions between what he sees as the typically Puritan emphasis on utilitarian and educational reform
(ignoring Evelyn, Cowley and Beale) and the Anglican contributions to physiology, astronomy, and
physics, and he reverts to claiming for Puritans generally the connection between "reformed Christian faith
. . . and the "new philosophy." Ibid., p. 497.

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 PURITANS AND ENGLISHSCIENCE 469

Anglican doctrine 53was shared by a wide variety of post-1660 scientists. In that sense
it would be more accurate to see the connections between the thought of those
Webster labeled "conservative puritans" like John Wilkins, John Wallis, Jonathan
Goddard, and More and that of Anglicans like Moray, Neile, Ward, and Scarburgh
than to try to attach these more rigorous experimental scientists to the heady
enthusiasms of Hartlib, Haak, and Sir Cheney Culpeper.54Nor should the latters'
brand of scientific interest be seen to arise from a specifically Puritan worldview, for
as this paper has argued, very similar interests in utilitarian and organizational
science were held by non-Puritans like John Beale, Cowley, Evelyn, and Sir Thomas
Browne. As this paper has also tried to show, this is hardly surprising, since the
intellectual stimuli Webster ascribes to the growth of Puritan science were not
restricted to Puritans but were shared by a wide section of Protestants.
CONCLUSION
The crux of the difference between the thesis of this paper and Webster's may be
summarized as follows. There is little disagreement about his identification of individ-
ual Puritans. But Webster's intensional use of the word Puritan to cover many of the
intellectual properties of Protestants in general buries the distinctions that are needed
if Puritans (extensionally) are to be isolated from the pack. Thus he characterizes as
Puritan such traits as asceticism, dedication to the vocational life, a godly motive for
exploring the works of nature, emphasis on the Bible, the search for general improve-
ment, the virtues of manual labor, a critical attitude to inherited wisdom, emancipa-
tion from scholasticism, and a desire to share useful scientific information. These
traits are not the trademarks of Puritans-they were propagated by Bacon and were
shared by many of his readers, Puritan and non-Puritan alike.55 To see Puritan
ideology as antischolastic, undogmatic, open-minded, eclectic, and syncretic56 is
absorbing into that tradition attitudes shared by humanists, abstract scientists,
Baconians, and indeed all "moderns"of the seventeenth century in general. Not only
does this characterization of Puritan ideology apply to a far wider intellectual
community, removing from it much explanatory potential. It also ignores such well-
documented characteristics of seventeenth-century Puritans as intellectual narrow-
ness, lack of receptivity to new ideas, and insistence that there is only one truth and
all divergence from it is heresy. To conclude with a very different paradigm of the
Puritan from Webster's-one which represents the dogmatism, the closed mind, and
the firm desire to repress all who did not share in his own conviction of the truth-we
may cite Thomas Edwards, author of Gangraena, read by thousands in the 1640s.57
That hunter of heretics and "tradducer of all honest men" thundered out:
0, the cryingup of the devil'sdoctrineof libertyof conscience,the perversionsof God's
only truth,the damnabledoctrineof universaltoleration,that right reasonis the ruleof
faith and be the judge of what we are to believe.... 0 that our magistrateswouldshut
up the mouths of those foul revilersof all truth and godliness.58

53Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (1667; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul / St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1959).
54Webster, Instauration, p. 499.
"5Evelyn, Braithwaite, Beale, Ward, Charleton, Sprat, etc. all shared some or all of these attitudes with
their Puritan counterparts.
56Webster, Instauration, p. 513.
57William Walwyn, An Antidote against Master Edwards his Old and New Poyson. London, British
Library, Thomason Tracts, El 184 (U) p. 19.
58Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), Vol. I, pp. 17, 19, 145.

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