The Impact of Milton’s Of Education on the Hartlib Circle’s Understanding of Public and Private

ABSTRACT

Milton’s Of Education was an influential contribution to the Hartlibian philosophy of advancing knowledge in the 1640s. This article proposes that Milton’s blueprint for an aristocratic academy enjoyed an afterlife in the Hartlibian texts of the later 1640s. The afterlife suggests that Milton’s educational treatise demonstrated to the Hartlibians that exclusive forms of education could contribute to the public good of society. The article begins with a discussion of the Hartlibian philosophy of universal learning that the circle drew from Johannes Amos Comenius, before considering how Hartlibian texts of the late-1640s, particularly those written by John Hall, encode an attitude to education that aligns with Of Education and differs from Hartlibian texts published before 1644. The article locates Of Education in a Hartlibian discourse, as a text inspired by Samuel Hartlib, and as having the capacity to make a tangible impact on the developing Hartlibian ideology of the 1640s.

KEYWORDS:

• John Milton
• Samuel Hartlib
• Hartlib Circle
• John Dury
• John Hall
• education

Introduction

Of Education (1644), John Milton’s treatise for aristocratic education, was an influential contribution to the developing Hartlibian ideology of universal learning in the 1640s. Dedicated to Samuel Hartlib (1600-62), Milton’s educational tractate proposes a means of advancing knowledge for public good, but it does so with a particular focus on socio-economically elite individuals.¹ The Hartlib circle, through which the text was disseminated, emerged primarily through the close relationship of Samuel Hartlib, who acted as an intelligencer in England and Europe, and the irenicist and Presbyterian minister, John Dury (1596-1680). In association with the Czech educationalist, Johannes Amos Comenius (1592-1670), Hartlib and Dury led a diverse group of progressive intellectuals, who shared their belief that universal reformation could be achieved through the advancement of all forms of learning.² Drawing inspiration from Francis Bacon’s philosophy of advancing knowledge, particularly the institutionalised form of this philosophy in Salomon’s House in Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the network believed that the dissemination and propagation of knowledge would bring about reform necessary to facilitate eschatological change. The group was so passionately invested in its project that, by the late 1640s and early 1650s, they had achieved palpable parliamentary support, largely through the assistance of Sir Cheney Culpeper (1601-63), an advocate of the Hartlibian cause with influence in government. In the early 1640s, Hartlib became aware of Milton as a promising pamphleteer and encouraged him to commit to paper his thoughts on education. The impact of Milton’s elite educational vision on Hartlibian proposals for educational institutions in the late 1640s remains underexplored. This article will situate Milton within contemporary Hartlibian discourse and show how Hartlibian texts of the later 1640s exhibit a particular focus on elite education.

Timothy Raylor has previously observed how Of Education influenced Hartlibian tracts of the later 1640s. Raylor acknowledges Dury’s and Hartlib’s enduring interest in Milton and his educational ideas during this period. He shows specifically how Dury’s The Reformed School (1650) is an ‘appropriation, at the level of curricular structure, and in sequencing, content, and set-texts’ of Of Education. This article will consider Milton’s wider influence on Hartlibian texts of the late-1640s, such as those of Dury, John Hall and other unpublished letters of the circle. Raylor has also argued that the elite focus of Of Education was partly inspired by the French noble academies of Antoine de Pluvinel (1552-1620). As Raylor posits, Milton’s idealised institution in Of Education ‘was a version of a noble academy – a distinctly English, reformed, and Miltonic version, to be sure; but a version nonetheless.’³ Hartlib himself assisted efforts by individuals, such as Balthazar Gerbier, in establishing noble academies in England, which suggests that an educational treatise encouraging a similar programme would have coincided with Hartlibian ideas at the time. However, as Milton makes plain towards the end of Of Education, signifying his awareness of the French academies, he views his educational model as superior to that of the French academies: ‘Nor shall we then need the Monsieurs of Paris to take our hopefull Youth into their slight and prodigal custodies and send them over back again transform’d into Mimicks, Apes, and Kicshoes’ (414). His criticism of the French model indicates the importance he placed on his educational treatise as outlining a decidedly English institution.

There has been considerable research conducted to explore the conceptual boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the seventeenth century, to which this article contributes.⁴ The Roman conceptions of these terms remain significant in the early-modern period: privatus signified an individual without civic office; publicus, by contrast, related to a group of individuals within a polity – as in the term res publica – and had political associations. Erica Longfellow posits that ‘for seventeenth-century individuals, private and privacy are more simply the negative of public: secrecy or separation from that which is open, available, or pertaining to the community or nation as a whole.’⁵ Milton’s educational vision complicates this ‘negative’ definition as the private academies are intended to realise longer term public gain. Of Education itself is a letter of advice that entered the public sphere through the printing press: Milton uses the word ‘private’ in Of Education to refer to the correspondence that he exchanged with Hartlib, in which the intelligencer solicited Milton to put to paper and, ultimately, publish his ideas on education.⁶ The significant political upheaval of the previous few years coincided with a proliferation of newsbooks and pamphlets that made widely available discussions and ideas that would have otherwise remained in certain circles.

Milton’s vision for academies that prepare sons of gentry to serve in positions of leadership, both as statesmen and military leaders, is also ‘private’ in the sense that it is socio-economically exclusive. Bruun has recently discussed the relationship between the phenomenon and term ‘private’: by ‘phenomenon’, Bruun means ‘withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access’, and she explores how the term privatus appears in various forms in and languages of early-modern European writings.⁷ In Of Education, Milton asserts to Hartlib that ‘I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war’ (377-9). ‘Generous’ here derives from the Latin generosus, meaning ‘of good or noble birth’ (CPW ii. 378, n. 56). Milton also refers to ‘our noble and gentle youth’ (406), mirroring references elsewhere to his ‘noble Education’ and ‘Noblest way of Education’ (376). In Of Education, Milton envisions the graduates of his ‘institution of breeding’ (408) as becoming either ‘stedfast pillars of the State’ (398) or ‘perfect Commanders in the service of their country’ (412). The image towards the end of the text of these students having the opportunity ‘to ride out in companies with prudent and staid guides, to all the quarters of the land’ (413) is a distinctly noble one. However, the end purpose of these exclusive academies – to produce graduates capable of serving their country – served the betterment of society in a manner that challenged the universal ideal of the Hartlibian concept of ‘public good’.

In Of Education, Milton was aware of the etymology of ‘aristocracy’ and the Aristotelian idea of virtuous individuals contributing to the public good of a polity.⁸ ‘Aristocracy’ derives from the Greek aristoi, meaning ‘the best’ or, in the context of Politics, ‘most virtuous’. Aristotle stresses that the end of the city-state should be ‘good life’ or ‘living well’ – eu zên – and, therefore, those who contribute most politically to the benefit of society surpass in ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’ those who are either free or wealthy.⁹ There is a socio-economic distinction in the type of ‘noble’ student that Milton envisions in his academies – children of aristocrats and the gentry – but these students were trained to serve their country as statesmen, fulfilling the Aristotelian endpoint of aristocracy. Milton’s ‘vertuous and noble Education’ (376), a carefully constructed curriculum that covers language, history, mathematics, classical learning, and poetry, was designed to produce virtuous graduates capable of contributing to the public good of society. The academies themselves, intended to reform even ‘our dullest and laziest youth’ (376), were vehicles for the creation of a virtuous aristocracy. On 14 April 1646, Dury wrote a letter to Hartlib in which he asserted his support for the ‘waye of Aristocracy, which doth unite most the Body, & is strongest to uphold state Authority’. Dury writes that an ‘Aristocracy which hath its foundation upon a priority & superiority, not derived from the multitude’ is preferable, particularly in that such a political formation ‘is fitter to make poeple [sic] happy’.¹⁰ Dury’s etymological understanding of ‘aristocracy’ in 1646 anticipates his emulation of Milton in The Reformed School in 1650 and suggests his earlier compatibility with the Miltonic educational vision.

This article proposes that Of Education impacted the Hartlibian understanding of ‘private’ and ‘public’ by presenting the idea that exclusive forms of education could contribute to ‘public good’. In A Motion Tending to the Publick Good of This Age (1642), Dury expresses his conception of ‘public’ in relation to educational reform: ‘That a Publique good is nothing else but the universall private good of every one in the life of God; for that which serveth the turne of some only, although they may be many, and even the greater part, is not to be counted truly Publique; but that is properly Publique which is common, and reacheth alike unto all’.¹¹ In concert with Comenius’s belief in learning that benefits every individual, Dury advocates universal learning that serves a public and common good. Dury defines ‘private’ as something that is restricted or exclusive, for the benefit of a select few individuals rather than universally beneficial, which aligns with Bruun’s categorisation; his definition of ‘public’ is synonymous with ‘universal’ or ‘collective’ and does not have the political associations of the Roman publicus. Indeed, Dury’s conception of ‘public’ reaches towards the modern understanding of the word as ‘concerning everyone’.¹² In his irenicist writing against emerging Independency, An Epistolary Discourse (1644), Dury uses ‘private’ to mean something that does not benefit the public, and instead serves an individual or, in the case of Independency, a specific group of individuals.¹³ The exclusivity of Milton’s envisioned academies does not meet Dury’s definition of ‘public’, but, by preparing students for a career serving the state, the academies also do not coordinate with the Roman privatus. As selective institutions that, by producing well-educated graduates, serve the betterment of state and society, the Miltonic academies of Of Education straddle classical and Hartlibian conceptions of public and private. In doing so, Milton’s proposal showed the Hartlibians that ‘public good’ could be achieved through institutions that served a relative few, and that this could support, rather than impede, the realisation of a universal ideal. This article will show that the Hartlibians, including Dury himself, during the period of 1646-50, proposed, envisioned, and established academies that share with Of Education the philosophy that exclusive or private education can contribute to public good.

The article takes ‘public’ to mean communal, related to community and often used by the Hartlibians in the phrase ‘public good’, which means for the benefit of multiple strata of society. The term ‘private’, by contrast, is taken to mean either individual, for the benefit of individuals, or, when used to describe a group, exclusive and restricted to or for the benefit of specific individuals of that organisation. These individuals are often aristocratic, but the term can also accommodate a socio-economically diverse range of individuals, especially in the writings of Dury and Hall in the late-1640s. It will be shown that, as Milton’s Of Education is a vision for a private academy that serves the public good, Hartlibian texts of the later 1640s not only increasingly accommodate private – and indeed aristocratic – educational ideas that resemble Milton’s own, but also that the Hartlibian conceptualisation of private and public spheres becomes one of interrelationship, rather than distinction. The Hartlibians did not just reproduce Miltonic ideas, but by adopting a more inclusive definition of private education, they integrated Milton’s educational model into their evolving ideology.

In Of Education, Milton articulates a vision of an institution, which is uncommon in his wider corpus, and further reflects the Hartlibian associations of the text. John Dury, Hartlib’s intellectual co-partner in many of the network’s projects, believed in the capacity of church institutions to realise long-term ecclesiastical change, especially through ecumenical reform. Dury’s conviction led him to oppose the first Independent proposal by Philip Nye and John Goodwin – An Apologeticall Narration (January, 1644) – in An Epistolary Discourse, where he favoured ecclesiastical unity over the non-separating congregationalism proposed by Nye and Goodwin. Hartlib equally advocated the potential for organisations – specifically the Office of Address and educational academies – to advance knowledge. Milton, by contrast, rarely envisions, or indeed supports, institutions. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) offers a glimpse into how Milton adapted – or clarified – his political philosophy in accordance with contemporary events. Whereas the first edition of The Tenure supports the will of the people of a state to overthrow a tyrant, the second edition adds ‘to doe justice on a lawless King is to a privat man unlawful, to an inferior Magistrate lawfull’.¹⁴ The later editions of The Tenure specify that the individuals capable of overthrowing a tyrant should represent the state. Milton’s faith in the fledgling republic in 1649 is not, however, a proposal for the future of the English commonwealth.¹⁵ Of Education, by contrast, is one of the few texts where Milton produces a blueprint for a specific organisation: Areopagitica (1644) provides a brief vision for London; The Readie and Easie Way (1659) proposes decentralised republican reform; but neither are blueprints for organisational change. It is possible that, as Of Education developed from Milton’s conversations with Hartlib, the tract was styled and structured in a manner more consistent with other Hartlibian tracts that envisioned organisations, such as A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1640). Of Education was produced for, and was intended to influence, the Hartlib circle.

Milton’s impact on Hartlibian ideology is most clearly exhibited by the works of John Hall. Hall was engaged with both the Hartlib circle and the coterie of Thomas Stanley (1625-78) in the 1640s. Stanley served as patron to Hall’s studies at Durham Cathedral school and St John’s College, Cambridge. Stanley’s literary coterie, which met in 1646-7, longed for a return to poetic court culture. Nicholas McDowell explains that the coterie ‘provided a private, cultured audience for each other’s work at a time when dramatic performance was banned and published poetry was under threat of censorship by a philistine Parliament.’¹⁶ In June 1647, Hall left Cambridge to join Stanley at the Inns of Court and was admitted to Gray’s Inn. Around the same time, Hall was in correspondence with Hartlib and promoted Hartlib’s efforts with the Office of Address at Cambridge in 1646-7. Hall’s strong support for Of Education suggests that he was able to reconcile his engagement with the Hartlib and Stanley circles. Hall’s positive reaction to Of Education is significant: it suggests that he found in Milton a form of private intellectualism that was dedicated to public good in Hartlibian terms. Such enthusiasm indicates how the Hartlibians, following the example of Of Education, were able to accept, envision, and propose private forms of education as a means of realising public good.

Comenius and Bacon: The Hartlibian Context

In 1644, Milton’s vision for private, aristocratic academies appears incongruous with the prevailing Hartlibian philosophy of universal educational reform at the time, which had developed in collaboration with Comenius. In Of Education, Milton explicitly asserts his lack of interest in the Comenian view of pansophic reform that Hartlib had supported since the late 1630s: ‘to search what many modern Janua’s and Didactics more then ever I shall read, have projected my inclination leads me not’ (364-6). Milton here alludes to Comenius’s Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631) and Didactica Magna (1657).¹⁷ It has been argued that Milton’s opposition to Comenian pansophy did not prevent him from supporting Hartlibian ideas, despite the close collaboration between Hartlib, Dury and Comenius.¹⁸ While Milton’s educational vision does not share in the concept of universal learning that Comenius advocated, it does, as a contribution to the Hartlibian discourse, represent a desire to advance knowledge for public good. In his seventh prolusion, Milton shows an interest in and admiration for Francis Bacon (CPW i. 288-306), but there has been some critical debate about the extent to which Of Education exhibits Baconian ideas.¹⁹ While Of Education is not explicitly Baconian – not least through the lack of scientific learning – the philosophy of knowledge-making serving godly ends would have been familiar to the Hartlibians. Milton also maintained an interest in encyclopaedic knowledge, a humanist tradition that did not share Comenius’s commitment to universal learning. Milton’s private educationalism does contradict the Comenian pansophy that the Hartlibians advocated in the early 1640s, but Of Education remained a significant and influential contribution to the Hartlibian discourse that impacted the circle.

The motivation for propagating knowledge and learning in Of Education shares with Bacon the belief that the advancement of knowledge would bring about greater unity with God: ‘The end then of learning’, Milton asserts early in the tract, ‘is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection’ (366-7). The verb ‘regain’ suggests attaining a lost knowledge of God, the condition of prelapsarian Eden that Milton, like Bacon, wanted mankind to experience again. The means through which Milton proposes the return of such knowledge is through his educational blueprint: ‘I call therefore a complete and generous Education that which fits a man justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war’ (377-9). The causal relationship between Milton’s educational programme and its eschatological endpoint is illuminated by Milton’s belief that knowledge of God can only be acquired from a foundation in humanist learning: ‘But because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature […]’ (367-9). The ‘sensible things’, Milton explains, are Latin and Greek languages (369-75), the formative education of which, as his curriculum suggests, progresses to more abstract concepts. Milton’s model for education enables students to access – or ‘regain’ – a knowledge of God through development from ‘sensible’ to intellectual learning. In A Motion, Dury, positing that ‘a man is first naturall, and then spirituall’ (101), proposed that a ‘Systeme of things obvious to the sences of children, is to be insinuated unto their imaginations’ first, after which students can learn the ‘principles of Religion’ (104). Milton and Dury shared a belief that curricular progression from the visible to invisible, or tangible to abstract, facilitates a knowledge and understanding of God. Milton had argued in Of Reformation (1641) ‘that to govern well is to train up a Nation in true wisdom and virtue’, that which enables ‘likenes to God, which in one word we call godliness’ (CPW. i. 571). Good governance requires godliness, but such godliness can only be achieved, according to Of Education, by a foundation in humanist learning.

Hartlib and his associates were committed to pansophic reform in the early 1640s. In a letter that Dury wrote to Culpeper on 13^th January 1642, which was published in A Motion, he expresses the intricate relationship between the originators of the Hartlibian enterprise: ‘I meane Master Comenius, Mr Hartlib, and my selfe: For though our taskes be different, yet we are all three in a knot sharers of one anothers labours, and can hardly bee without one anothers helpe and assistance.’²⁰ This was followed by a ‘Foederis fraterni’ or ‘fraternal pact’, signed by Dury, Comenius and Hartlib on 13^th March 1642.²¹ Hartlib published Comenius’s tracts, Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia and Pansophiae prodomus, in 1637 and 1639 respectively, the latter of which he republished in translation in 1642 – the year after he had invited Comenius to London – under the title The Reformation of Schooles.²² As Dagmar Čapková explains, Comenius was inspired by the ideal of ‘panharmonia’, ‘a Neoplatonic conception of the whole, of the world as an organism in which interrelationships played an important role and mankind is conceived as a microcosm within a macrocosm.’ Pansophia represented the perfect relationship between man and the world, through which man could attain unity with God, as the ‘truth revealed in Scripture’.²³ In A Reformation of Schooles, Comenius promotes universal education, where learning is not exclusive to the wealthy, aristocratic classes: ‘whereby bookes are growne so common in all Languages and Nations, that even common countrey people, and women themselves are familiarly acquainted with them; whereas formerly the learned and those that were rich, could hardly at any price obtaine them.’ Comenius advocates reform to serve a universal and common good. As A Motion indicates, the Hartlibians increasingly accommodated pansophic values in the early 1640s. Pansophic good, moreover, served a chiliastic purpose, which further aligns Comenius to Bacon: ‘We have also an expresse promise concerning the latter times, that Many shall runne to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased, Dan. 12. 4.’²⁴ Mark Greengrass has observed that this is the same quote used by Bacon on the frontispiece of his Instauratio magna.²⁵ While Comenius played a significant role in directing the Hartlibian project towards a belief in universal reform, Bacon remained an influential precedent in the formulation of Comenius’s pansophic philosophy.²⁶ Comenius, drawing from the Baconian design, facilitated the Hartlibian focus on pansophic reform, which was inherently universal and dedicated to common good.

It is within this context that, just a year later, in 1643, Hartlib makes a note, in his Ephemerides, of a promising, emergent pamphleteer. ‘Mr Milton in Aldersgate Street’, Hartlib notes, ‘hase written many good books a great traveller and full of projects and inventions.’²⁷ It is possible that Hartlib had learned of Milton from correspondence within his network, or he may even have met Milton at this stage. Milton’s ‘projects and inventions’ that Hartlib approves of are presumably theoretical and institutional, anticipating the proposal in Of Education, and possibly indicating an early exchange between the intellectuals. In November 1643, Hartlib notes that Milton, when he was ‘living off a modest private income’, contributed three shillings to the war engine of Edmond Felton.²⁸ Milton’s earnings, prior to his public employment in 1649, were largely sourced from the private tuition of young students. Having taught his young nephews, John and Edward Philips, since his return from Italy, Milton took in more pupils to his house in Aldersgate in April 1643. In the autumn of 1645, Milton moved into a larger house in Barbican in order to accommodate more students, ‘having application made to him by several Gentlemen of his acquaintance for the Education of their Sons’. Edward Philips would later recall ‘probably he might have some prospect of putting in Practice his Academical Institution, according to the Model laid down in his Sheet of Education.’ It was also here that Philips stresses that Milton had no intention to ‘set up for a Publick School to teach all the young Fry of a Parish, but only was willing to impart his Learning and Knowledge to Relations, and the Sons of some Gentlemen that were his intimate Friends.’²⁹

When Hartlib came into contact with Milton, then, the pamphleteer was already practising a distinctly private form of education, designed for children of the gentry. The wider scope of Of Education, where Milton envisages ‘our noble and gentle youth’ (406) being educated together, suggests that he anticipated an educational project dedicated to public good as requiring children of both the gentry and aristocracy. For Milton, those most capable of contributing to public good were in these classes. Hartlib himself had attempted to establish a private academy in Chelsea College in 1630-1 with William Petty. Hartlib’s prior experience with Petty may well have made him receptive to Milton’s proposal. However, Of Education must be viewed in the context following Hartlib’s ‘fraternal pact’ with Comenius and Dury, committing the Hartlibian cause to public good. As Milton’s educational treatise was dedicated to Hartlib, it was not just a private educational institution established solely for private ends. Milton’s educational vision was intended to serve the public good.

Milton’s commitment to humanist encyclopaedic learning marks an important distinction between his and Comenius’s educational philosophies. It has been argued that Milton’s opposition to Comenian pansophy did not prevent him from supporting Hartlibian ideas, despite the close collaboration between Hartlib, Dury and Comenius.³⁰ The Comenian pansophic ideal was at once unrealistic for Milton, focused too greatly on universal learning – that is, a universal education undistinguished by class – and favoured science over classical learning. As McDowell has shown, Milton’s education at Cambridge and the subsequent five years that he spent at home enhancing his knowledge through an extensive period of reading, illustrate his commitment to the humanist concept of general or encyclopaedic learning.³¹ By describing his curriculum as ‘compleate’ (378), Milton suggests that his system of education is whole and total, which implies that it is encyclopaedic in scope. While Milton and Comenius both advocated encyclopaedic learning, Comenius’s commitment to pansophy, whereby each individual would receive a universal education, differed from Milton’s belief, as demonstrated by Of Education, that educational reform of a social elite, based on his model, was necessary to safeguard the advancement of society to eschatological ends.

In Hartlib, Milton, at an early stage in his writing career, found an intellectual committed to the advancement of learning and who, while courting Comenius’s ideas of universal and scientific learning, remained interested in and encouraging of Milton’s ideas of private education. Milton explains to Hartlib that, while he considers the ‘reforming of Education’ to be ‘one of the greatest and noblest designes, that can be thought on’, he would not have put pen to paper ‘but by your earnest entreaties, and serious conjurements’ (CPW ii. 362-3). Milton affirms that his praise for Hartlib is not the product of their ‘private friendship’, ‘but that I see those aims, those actions which have won you with me the esteem of a person sent hither by some good providence from a farre country to be the occasion and the incitement of great good to this Iland’ (363). Milton does not identify a contradiction between the private, aristocratic academy that he proposes and the Hartlibian efforts to reform England that he praises. To return to Milton’s asserted purpose of learning, of ‘regaining to know God aright’ (367), he specifically refers to ‘the learned correspondence which you hold in forreigne parts, and the extraordinary pains and diligence which you have us’d in this matter both heer, and beyond the Seas’ (363). The value Milton places on both international intelligencing and the dissemination of knowledge suggests a Baconian precedent. Rather than tolerating Comenianism, Milton actively praises the neo-Baconian project that Hartlib co-ordinated. In 1644, Milton’s proposal for a private educational institution that could benefit the public good contradicted the Comenian pansophic philosophy, as shared by Dury in A Motion, that universal education was necessary to achieve public good. Of Education, as the following section of this article will show, marks a point after which Hartlibian educational proposals increasingly accommodated private educational institutions, away from the Comenian pansophic ideal.

Afterlife: Dury, Hartlib, and Hall

Milton not only effectively contributed to already-existing ideas of social reform in Hartlibian discourse, but his ideas also had a tangible afterlife in later Hartlibian works. Raylor concludes that ‘Milton’s tract played a significant part in shaping the Hartlibians’ understanding of the institutional and curricular structure of a reformed institution of aristocratic education.’³² Raylor specifically demonstrates how Dury’s Reformed School is partly modelled on Of Education. Other Hartlibian texts and non-published letters of the later 1640s advocate private forms of education and intellectual advancement. Rather than appropriating Miltonic ideas, as Dury exemplifies in Reformed School, these texts accommodate exclusive forms of education to serve public ends. There is a contrast between the Comenian dedication to universal learning in A Motion and the attention given to selective education in post-Of Education Hartlibian tracts by Dury, such as Considerations Tending to the Happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation (1647), and Hartlib’s Parliaments Reformation (1646). John Hall, as an outspoken supporter of Of Education, is a valuable example of how Miltonic educational ideas infiltrated Hartlibian writings of the period. McDowell posits that Hall, in his equal engagement with both the Stanley coterie and the Hartlib Circle, straddles proponents of private and public intellectual cultures in England respectively.³³ The Stanley circle was exclusive: Hall’s letters to Hartlib frequently encouraging him to contact Stanley suggest that Hartlib either did not succeed in this endeavour or did not try to do so.³⁴ Hall’s strong support for Of Education, therefore, suggests that he found in Milton a bridge between private and public intellectual spheres. Hall’s interest in Of Education exhibits how Milton’s treatise continued to play a role in the developing Hartlibian ideology and enabled Hall to formulate his own perspective on private education.

There is an increased occurrence of correspondence relating to selective, private education in the Hartlib Papers during early 1646. The two-year hiatus between 1644-46, where no Hartlibian educational tracts are published and where there are no extant letters regarding education in the Hartlib Papers, can partly be explained by the first civil war that was in its final stages between April and June 1646. It was for this reason that Dury expressed his reservations of Of Education, that it ‘hath many requisits which I doubt will hardly bee obtained in a tyme of Peace’. Dury himself also had to look after his sister, Jean Dury (fl. 1638-48), who between June 1644 and May 1645 troubled her brother as she became romantically involved with Henry Appelius, an associate from Hartlib’s network.³⁵ Accordingly, it is in April 1646 that Dury references his ‘next taske’, which is ‘the subject of education in the Academie’. He includes an ‘Idea of education’ in a letter to Hartlib dated 4 May 1646, in which he references that he has ‘something more particular of the heads to bee elaborated concerning the education of Nobles’. The ‘second part of the Idea of Education’ is included in a letter to Hartlib on 12 May.³⁶ Given that Dury goes on to write the manuscript pages for Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) in August 1646, which is published alongside Reformed School, it is possible that the letter is an early draft of his Reformed School.

In Dury’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper, the original letters for which date to August 1646, he envisions a private individual, the librarian, as a vehicle for transitioning the exclusive resource of the Bodleian Library into something that could benefit the public. The Bodleian, Dury explains, ‘is no more then a dead Bodie as now it is constituted, in comparison of what it might bee, if it were animated with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and ordered as it might bee for publick service’ (17). Besides the librarian himself, Dury proposes a tactful means of utilising the resources of wealthier book-owners, whose personal book collections may contain books unavailable publicly:

As for such as are at home eminent in anie kinde; becaus they may com by Native right to have use of the Librarie-Treasure, they are to bee Traded withal in another waie, viz. that the things which are gained from abroad, which as yet are not made common, and put to publick use should bee promised and imparted to them for the increas of their private stock of knowledg, to the end that what they have peculiar, may also bee given in for a requital, so that the particularities of gifts at home and abroad, are to meet as in a Center in the hand of the Librarie-keeper […].

The library-keeper serves as a means of soliciting mutually beneficial book trades with private book owners. In order to achieve universal knowledge, Dury envisions a mercantile arrangement with private individuals, which will ensure that their collections can be of benefit to a wider audience. Dury’s Librarie-Keeper fulfils the philosophy he articulated in A Motion, of public good being collective private good.³⁷ However, as such individuals must be directly solicited, or in the case of the library-keeper, paid for their services, Librarie-Keeper demonstrates Dury’s increasingly pragmatic approach to intellectual reform, and of the need for different interests to be accommodated and employed for public good to be realised. The importance of the private individual contributing to the public good in Librarie-Keeper is an early manifestation of this philosophy in Hartlibian texts post-Of Education.

Dury’s awareness of the necessity for private individuals – especially those more educated than common people – to assist in the advancement of knowledge is further evidenced in 1647 by Considerations. Addressed to the ‘High and Honourable Court of Parliament’ and using inclusive language, Dury demonstrates how well-educated and publicly-minded individuals must assist in establishing the Office of Address, amongst other educational proposals, rather than relying on common people: ‘Now what these Duties are, and How they may be performed, We suppose will be a part of our duty to seek out, to discover and propose, that such of Us as are capable of thoughts raised above ours selves, and can discerne a Concernment more Publike then what the Vulgar doth apprehend’ (11). Dury distinguishes himself and his readers from common people by their capacity to be private individuals that serve the public good. In Happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation, Dury demarcates four types of school by class status and the designated vocations of students upon graduation: ‘The First for the Vulgar, whose life is to be Mechanicall. The Second for the Gentry and Nobles, who are to beare Charges in the Commonwealth. The Third for Scholars, who are to teach others Humane Arts and Sciences. And the Fourth for the sons of the Prophets, who are Seminary of the Ministery.’³⁸ In a notable departure from the philosophy of universal private good in A Motion, Dury in Considerations and Englands Reformation identifies nobility and gentry – specifically those who have been educated separately from common people and those designated for different vocations – as exclusively capable of contributing to the public good of society.

Other attempts to establish academies in England further illustrate the increased focus on private institutions in the Hartlib circle. Dury’s support for aristocracy in April 1646 anticipates Hartlib’s assistance of Colonel John Humphrey’s proposal for a noble academy of music in England, which dates to around 1647.³⁹ In an early edition of the proposal, Hartlib seems to have changed the order of Humphrey’s curriculum to place oratory and poetry later, before the martial training of fencing, riding, and ‘Exercise of armes’, a structure which resembles that of Of Education and Reformed School.⁴⁰ Of the three extant drafts of this proposal (47/8/5A-6B, 7A-8B, 9A-9B), it is the final draft (9A-9B) that includes Hartlib’s own annotations: the original curricular order is amended by numbers in Hartlib’s hand. Hartlib agrees with the original that calligraphy should be first, followed by stenography, ‘The Historie of the most Principal Things’, French, and then History, but he disagrees that oratory and poetry should immediately follow. Instead, he places ‘Experimentall Philosophye’ and Mathematics before. As Milton did in Of Education, Hartlib places poetry last in the curriculum. Milton wrote ‘To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being lesse suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate’. Milton places poetry at the zenith of his programme of study, ‘precedent’ in its intrinsic value to the students. For Hartlib to position poetry so prominently, rather than promoting scientific learning, marks a notable parallel to the curricular structure of Milton’s model.

However, Hartlib also integrated Comenian educational philosophy into the emerging private academies with which he was associated. William Spenser, who showed an awareness of Humphrey’s academy in a letter to Hartlib on 19 June 1650, also attempted to establish a ‘Country Academy’ in late-1650. Spenser explains to Hartlib on 21 October 1650 that his musical academy is modelled on Humphrey’s own: ‘I am setting up a little kind of Country Academy, and shall therein make an Essay what benefit such a worke will produce, and intend to mixe some musick with more serious studdies for diversion, and would intreate you to present my service to Colonel Humphreys when you see him’. On 9 December, Spenser thanks Hartlib for sending him Comenius’s Janua, which Spenser had already implemented: ‘the affects of itt I have allready made proofe of in my Little Academy (as you pleased to stile itt,) but the noble men doe take exceeding great pleasure in the facility of itt, and before winter be past I hope & doe (god willing) resolve to perfect itt for them, and them in itt’.⁴¹ Spenser’s musical academy represents how Hartlibian educational philosophy in the later-1640s synthesises the Comenian ideal of educational advancement with private academies. From 1646, then, the Hartlibians were showing an increasing acceptance of and engagement with the importance of aristocratic education and how more private, exclusive institutions could benefit the public good.

In the same early part of 1646, Milton is referenced in – and deleted from – educational proposals in Hartlib’s hand. The first, dated to February 1646 and written in a mixture of English, Latin and German, was originally entitled ‘Mr Miltons Academie’, but was changed to ‘Mr Lawrence Academie’, which may refer to Richard Lawrence (d. 1684), who founded a school for twenty boys at Lambeth in 1661.⁴² While there are clear Hartlibian elements in the proposal, including ‘An Office of Learned Addresse’ and ‘House of Sensuals’, it also contains more Miltonic elements, such as a ‘Schoole and Councel of Warre’, alongside ‘exercise of shooting out of a long Bow’s’ and ‘Also with Crosse-bow’s’. While such physical exercise does not exactly resemble the martial training of Of Education, the amended title suggests that Hartlib was thinking about Milton when drafting these ideas. In another undated page of notes, entitled ‘Gymnasticae’, Hartlib lists the ‘Art of moulding et Turning. Art of distilling. Art of Fortification’, and questions ‘How a childs spirit may bee enobled by certain Exercises?’. Hartlib’s use of ‘enobled’ here implies that the exercise enhances the status of the aristocratic student, as well as elevates the learning of the individual. In a more extended list of recreational exercises for young boys, Hartlib includes cross-bow shooting, both in German – ‘Nach dem ziel schießen mit armbrust’ – and Latin – ‘sagittare’.⁴³ He also twice references ‘equitare’ or horse-riding, which was a major part of the Miltonic education. Elsewhere, Hartlib discusses riding as an essential quality, especially for nobility: ‘For of al outward qualities, to ride faire is most cumelie for himself most necessarie for his Contri, et the greater he is in the blood, the greater is his praise, the more he doth exceede al other therin.’⁴⁴ Hartlib identifies these qualities, characteristic of nobility, as directly benefitting England and that the greater the noble blood of the student, the more beneficial these qualities will be when they serve their country.

Hall came into contact with and began writing for Hartlib within this context. It was in 1646 that, in his essay ‘Of Fables’, Hall expressed his support for Bacon and More’s utopias: ‘what rare Common-wealths have beene molded, by Sir Thomas Moore, Campanella, &c. What a stupendious Fabrick of a Colledge for Nature, hath great Saint Albanes reard’.⁴⁵ Between November 1646 and April 1647, Hartlib harnessed Hall’s interest in utopianism by requesting him to translate utopian texts by Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) and Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654).⁴⁶ In his translation of Andreae’s Christianae Societatis Imago (1620), entitled A Modell of Christian Society (1647), Hall laments that there are too few intellectuals of his age ‘as have wholly espoused themselves to great and publick endeavours’.⁴⁷ It was during this time, in March 1647, that Hall was writing his own ‘Idea of a Commonwealth & Colledge in a Romance’, called ‘Leucenia’, which he never finished and was ultimately lost.⁴⁸ On 2 January, moreover, Hall, having acknowledged his own ‘back-wardness to the Publick service’, suggests that ‘A sole office’ should be established for ‘the gatherings of Experiments’, such as that which ‘great Verulam feigns in his new Altantis’. Hall believed that a Hartlibian institution, anticipating the Office of Address, would be preferable to the ‘Invisible College’ advocated by Robert Boyle (1627-91): ‘me thinkes better for a Colledge then Correspondence’.⁴⁹ Hall identified a Hartlibian institution serving the public good as superior to a network of letters. David Norbrook acknowledges that this ‘emphasis on public life placed him in disagreement with Stanley’.⁵⁰ Raymond also discusses the ambiguity of Hall’s ‘quasi-Royalist allegiances’ and his involvement with the Parliamentarian cause, such as his editorship of Mercurius Britanicus in 1648.⁵¹ While Stanley was Hall’s patron, and was the dedicatee of Hall’s 1646 Poems, following the end of court culture and the royalist defeat in the first civil war, Hall came to believe in the potential of the state-funded and public-serving institutions proposed by the Hartlib circle.

The ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, theorised by the Stanley circle, which Hall outlines to Hartlib in his correspondence in April 1647, illustrates and complicates the distinction between the Stanley and Hartlib circles, and Hall’s involvement within them.⁵² Between March and April 1647, Hall explains in his letters to Hartlib that, having visited a sick Stanley, ‘some Gentlemen ar gatrhing [sic] an Academy for Ingenuitys of humane learning & one of them came with me to crave your advise & assistance.’ Two weeks later, on 13 April, Hall sends to Hartlib both a description of the Academy for Ingenuitys in his own hand and, due to the illegibility caused by writing pain, includes a more formal copy in scribal hand, entitled ‘A Short Model of Society’. Hall explains to Hartlib in the following letter that he ‘was ever of the opinion that it was far too slight, to advance any way the Publique being rather a private Conglobation of some for (in a manner) private.’⁵³ Hall’s criticism not only highlights his reservations about private intellectual institutions, but it also reiterates his belief in the Hartlibian project. Although McDowell suggests that we do not know Hartlib’s reaction to the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, in a letter likely dated to 26 April 1647, Hall expresses to Hartlib ‘I am extreamly sorry I so freely Communicated my Thoughts to yow of our utopian Academy’, assuring Hartlib that he ‘made […] show of a great deal of Negative applause of it (I mean I objected nothing) because I knew the other Agents wedded to there own opinions’, and accepting Hartlib’s ‘most Judicious Censure’.⁵⁴ Given Hall’s criticism of the Academy on 20 April, it seems likely that this is what he is referring to in the letter dated ‘26^th’.⁵⁵ Hall’s apologetic tone in the letter suggests that Hartlib may have disapproved of Hall’s criticism of the Academy. If so, then, while Stanley did not want to become involved in the Academy, Hartlib saw potential in the private institution. Milton had shown in Of Education how exclusive educationalism could theoretically contribute to public good, which may have facilitated Hartlib’s interest in the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’.

Hall’s reaction to the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’ is interesting given that it shares the private and aristocratic nature of Milton’s educational proposal. The Academy is managed by a President and Orator, under which are a ‘Secretarie library-keeper & Master of the Ceremonies’. Each of its sixty members – or ‘Essentials’ – would be ‘at least a Gentleman of blood & coat-armour’. They are elected through a character reference, ‘for the Enquiry affter his parts & manners’, and are required to pay a subsidy of ‘noe lesse then 4lb a yeare’ to the Academy, alongside a book donation to the library. Hall explains that Essentials would participate in weekly debates: they are tasked ‘publiquely to discourse before the President, these discourses to bee carefully reserved & registred, for the Peculiar use of the Society’. By only benefitting the Academy, these discussions illustrate the privatised, self-fulfilling nature of the intellectual community. The recording of discourses, moreover, corresponds with the annual task of Essentials to provide ‘a Paper of Verses and some choice discourse as allso those that were Poetically inclined’, which are ‘gathered up, the choisest cull’d & printed under the name off the Academy’. In contrast to the Office of Address, knowledge and literature are internally moderated rather than internationally and nationally disseminated. By 1651, William Rand (1617-63), a physician who Hartlib identifies alongside Milton as a potential commissioner for the ‘Councel for schooling’, explains that he ‘would define Ingenuity to be an uprightnes & gallantry of mind, makeing a man owne truth & justice though to the prejudice of his owne interest’.⁵⁶ Hall himself seems most concerned with the exclusive nature of the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, which bears resemblance to Milton’s aristocratic educational vision. Indeed, Hall even refers to a desire for the Academy ‘to enlarg to Horsmanship, Fencing, etc’.⁵⁷ Hall’s support for Milton’s educational vision, in contrast to his criticism of the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, seems to be because Milton’s treatise is dedicated to public good. While the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’ is private and exclusive like Milton’s educational vision, it lacks the public focus of the latter.

Hall’s ardent support for Of Education illustrates how Milton’s tract continued to navigate the evolving Hartlibian distinction between public and private intellectual spheres in 1646-7. Whereas Hall describes ‘A Short Model’ as ‘too slight’, Cheney Culpeper (1601-63) in November 1645 suggested that Milton’s treatise had ‘some good sprincklings’ but was lacking in not ‘descendinge enowght into particulars’.⁵⁸ Hall was more enthused by Milton’s proposal. Having indicated to Hartlib that Milton had been in contact with him a few days previously, on 21 December 1646, Hall expresses his desire to maintain regular correspondence with Milton: ‘I am much ambitious of the acquaintance of Mr Milton (who is said here to be the Author of that excellent discourse of Education you were pleased to impart) I beseech you be a means to bringing us a Correspondency if you can.’ Hall’s keen desire to establish communications with Milton, which he reiterates on 8 January 1647, suggests just how much Of Education must have impressed him. However, in late March 1647, around the same time as Hall visited Stanley and first heard about the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, Hall makes reference to Milton’s lack of support for the ‘Enclosed Originall’ – a reference perhaps to a proposal given to Milton by Hartlib or Hall himself – after which there is no extant evidence of further communications between Milton and Hall. Hall associates Milton’s aloof response with Stanley’s lack of communications with Hartlib: ‘I am sorry Mr Milton dos abundare suo sensu I wish I cold not Complain the like of my dear Stanley (To whom expect a letter as yow desire next Week) But I hope I shall win or him when I come to Remain at London as I shall shortly.’⁵⁹ These two proponents of exclusive intellectual reform are equally resistant to what was presumably a proposal for universal learning. The difference is that Hall remains optimistic that he could sway his patron, whereas Milton, three years after the publication of Of Education, is presumably now a lost cause. Hall’s enduring interest in the idea of private education reform, in spite of Milton having distanced himself from the circle by 1647, anticipates his own vision for how private learning could contribute to public good.

Hall’s proposal for educational reform, An Humble Motion to The Parliament Of England Concerning The Advancement of Learning (1649), illustrates how he processed his mutual involvement with Hartlib and Stanley and their respective groups. Raymond suggests that Hall’s Advancement of Learning was written ‘in the spirit of Milton and Hartlib.’⁶⁰ Hall does, however, make an original contribution to the Miltonic and Hartlibian ideas that he had encountered: he establishes a distinction between the term ‘private’ and the aristocratic heritage with which it is associated in contemporary discourse. Hall acknowledges that, while some commonwealths have ‘withered under the decay of Learning’, never

have they been so fortunate under any governours as those who comming from a noble education, and a right observation and deduction of things (which may well make a man learned, though he never had seen a book) were neither subject to these wilde evagations, nor savage rudenesses which unturored Natures, through the want of a better discipline, were apt to fall into.⁶¹

The parenthesis interjects a meritocratic perspective that Hall proceeds to develop: ‘many private men born amidst the dregs of the people, & not capable of any such high hopes, have by this means far overtopped men of antiquity and ancient discent’. Hall refers to Augustus, ‘who though his Cradle was not private, yet in his first accesse to business, was not onely left in a private capacity, but surrounded by an inimical faction’ (8). Hall divorces the word ‘private’ from an exclusively aristocratic definition, placing greater emphasis on the potential of a uniquely talented individual, regardless of their heritage. He also maintains his support for universal learning: ‘What means were used to keep it in a few hands in a corner (like a great exile, thrust away by contrary power) till some better times, must now be used to disperse it through the face of the earth, and make it tread as far as mankind’ (18). In January, Hall had referred to ‘private men’ working in an institution resembling Salomon’s House.⁶² In Advancement of Learning, he returns to this utopianism by discussing the value of scientific and empirical experiments in Baconian terms, as they will force ‘Nature […] into an open veracity and pure nakednesse’ (44). Hall articulates his own definition of ‘private’ as a form of elite individual, which may or may not be aristocratic, who serves the public good: graduates of Milton’s academy as well as members of the Hartlib network fit into this categorisation. Hall’s Advancement of Learning epitomises how the Hartlibians developed an increasingly tolerant view of private intellectualism following the first civil war. While Milton distanced himself from the circle during this period, his ideas enjoyed an afterlife in Hartlibian tracts of the late-1640s.

Conclusion

Milton’s contribution to the Hartlib circle left a lasting impact on the group that indicates the significance of Of Education as a Hartlibian text. Milton’s vision of elite, aristocratic academies, nationally instituted and serving the Hartlibian and Baconian end goal, channelled Hartlibian interest away from exclusively universal Comenianism and towards a more tolerant view of exclusive and private learning. Milton’s private academy represents a selective institution that serves the public good in Hartlibian language. It straddles the boundary between private and public in such a way as to align with the purpose of the Hartlibian enterprise – to contribute to public good in a manner that helps to usher in eschatological change – while diverging from the universalist, Comenian means through which the circle intended to realise it in the early 1640s. The impact of Of Education as a text dedicated to the Hartlibian cause is discernible in Hartlibian texts of the later 1640s: where Dury accommodates an aristocratic educational establishment into both Considerations and Reformed School, Hall articulates his own view of the private sphere as representing elite individuals, who, determined meritocratically or by birth, serve a public good. Hall is particularly valuable in demonstrating how the Hartlibians did not just appropriate Miltonic ideas, but adapted them into their own educational visions or practical applications. In 1644, the Hartlib circle facilitated the development of Milton’s ideas on education and knowledge propagation; Milton was no less influential in providing the Hartlibians with a precedent for aristocratic education that served the public good of society.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Nicholas McDowell for his various comments on this article and continued support of my research. I would also like to thank Niall Allsopp, Joad Raymond and Ayesha Mukerjee for their valuable suggestions in the various iterations of this piece of work.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant competing interests to declare.

Notes

¹ See Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, and Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 181; on Milton’s view of the people and his increasingly elitist attitude, see Hammond, Milton and the People. Hammond only alludes to Of Education briefly on p. 15, note 2.

² For a discussion of Hartlib’s programme, see Greengrass, ‘Samuel Hartlib’, 304-22; see also Lewalski, ‘Milton and the Hartlib Circle’, 202-19; on the neo-Baconian and millenarian ideas of the circle, see Webster, The Great Instauration, 19-44; see, generally, Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius; for a discussion of the context of the developing Hartlibian ideology, see below pp. 10-17.

³ Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 399, 404-6.

⁴ Jürgen Habermas has made an influential argument for the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century in The Structural Transformation, where a group of private individuals comprise a public sphere that is separate from the public sphere of state matters. Lake and Pincus have argued more recently that the economic relationship between the state and the bourgeois public sphere emerged in the post-revolutionary period, partly because of the cost of the civil wars. See Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, 281-6, see also 279-81 for the ‘transitional moment’ of the revolutionary period.

⁵ Erica Longfellow, ‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, 315.

⁶ Milton, Of Education, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume II, 363. Further references will be made to this edition parenthetically in the running text. Hartlib’s desire for private intellectual discussions becoming public through publication anticipates a tradition in seventeenth-century science for private experimentation to be publicised through writings, such as that of Robert Boyle. See Ivana Bičak, ‘Chops and Chamber Pots’, 267-70.

⁷ Mette Birkedal Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, 12-16.

⁸ For a discussion of the ‘aristocracy of virtue’ in relation to The Readie and Easie Way (1659), see Austin Woolrych, CPW vii. 215-17.

⁹ See Aristotle, Politics, p. 106

¹⁰ See Dury to Hartlib, 14 April 1646, HP 3/3/11B.

¹¹ Dury, A Motion, 99. Further references will be made parenthetically in the running text.

¹² See Amy Russell, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25-8.

¹³ An Epistolary Discourse, 5, 17.

¹⁴ Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 185.

¹⁵ For a discussion of the different editions of The Tenure, see McDowell and Keeble, The Complete Works of John Milton, volume vi, 15-20, 42.

¹⁶ McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 20-1.

¹⁷ Although not published until 1657, references to Didactica Magna had been made in other tracts written by Comenius and published by Hartlib before 1644; see CPW ii. 364-5, note 9.

¹⁸ Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 395-7, 404; see Sirluck, CPW, ii. 184-96; Raylor initially offers a revision of Sirluck’s argument in ‘A New Light on Milton and Hartlib’, 22-3; see also Webster, Samuel Hartlib, p. 42.

¹⁹ Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 403; Festa, The End of Learning, 15-16.

²⁰ Dury, A Motion, 107.

²¹ HP, 7/109/1A-2B; see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 53.

²² See Greengrass, ‘Commonwealth of Learning’, 307.

²³ Čapková, ‘Comenius and His Ideals’, 76, 79.

²⁴ Comenius, The Reformation of Schooles, 3, 28-9; for other references to Bacon, see 31, 43, 47.

²⁵ See Bacon, OFB xi. IN1, facing xxxii: ‘Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia’.

²⁶ On Bacon’s influence on Comenius, see Houston, ‘Utopia and Education in the Seventeenth Century’, 174-6.

²⁷ Hartlib, Ephemerides (1643), HP 30/4/89A.

²⁸ Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 402; Hartlib, ‘List of Subscribers to Felton’s Cause’, HP 8/40/8A; on Felton, see Raylor, ‘Edmond Felton and his Engine’, 398-413; see also Raylor, ‘New Light’, 19-20.

²⁹ Festa, End of Learning, 25; Philips, ‘The Life of John Milton’ (1694), in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, 66-8; see also McDowell, ‘Refining the Sublime’, 239-60; and Poole, Making of Paradise Lost, 50-64; for a comparison between Of Education and Milton’s own private tuition, see 297-300; see also Campbell, ed., John Milton: Complete English Poems, 570-1.

³⁰ Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 395-7, 404; see Sirluck, CPW ii. 184-96; Raylor initially offers a revision of Sirluck’s argument in ‘A New Light on Milton and Hartlib’, 22-3; see also Webster, Samuel Hartlib, p. 42.

³¹ McDowell, Poet of Revolution, 66-78.

³² Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 404.

³³ McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 63-5.

³⁴ See Hall to Hartlib, 11 January 1647, HP 60/14/13B; 11 March [1647], HP 60/14/8A.

³⁵ On Appelius, see Webster, Instauration, 277, 387-90; Dury references these difficulties with his sister as a reason why he did not reply to Henry Robinson’s letter, which he received in November 1644, until 24 April 1646; see Some Few Considerations Propounded, As so many Scruples by Mr Henry Robinson in a Letter to Mr. John Dury upon his Epistolary Discourse: With Mr. Durey’s Answer thereunto (July 1646).

³⁶ Dury to Hartlib, 24 April 1646, HP 3/3/13A-B; 28 April 1646, HP 3/3/14A-B; 4 May 1646, HP 3/3/17A-B; 12 May 1646, 3/3/18A-B.

³⁷ For a discussion of this idea in A Motion, see p. 6 above; see also Dury, A Motion, 99.

³⁸ Dury, Happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation (1647), 123; further references will be made parenthetically in the running text to this edition.

³⁹ See Raylor, ‘Education of the Aristocracy’, 397.

⁴⁰ HP, 47/8/9A-B; other versions at 47/8/5A-6B, 7A-8B; see also Hartlib’s involvement with Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663) and his The Interpreter of the Academie for Forrain Languages, and All Noble Sciences, and Exercises (1653), at HP 10/2/27/1A-8B; see generally 10/2/1-47.

⁴¹ HP 46/7/5A, 47/7/3A-4B, 46/7/9A-10B.

⁴² John William Adamson, Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 202.

⁴³ These translate as ‘to shoot at the target with a cross-bow’ and ‘to shoot arrows’.

⁴⁴ Hartlib, ‘Notes on Colleges’, February 1646, HP 47/9/34A-35B; ‘Gymnasticae’, HP 22/14/1A, 3A; ‘Didactica Gymnasticae Infantalis’, HP 22/14/5A-7A; ‘Gymnastica Athletica Baconiana’, HP 22/12/3A.

⁴⁵ Hall, ‘Of Fables’, 196; for an overview of Hall’s twenty-seven letters to Hartlib, see Turnbull, ‘John Hall’s Letters to Samuel Hartlib’, 221-33; on Milton and Hall in the 1650s, see Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 283-5; for a recent comparison of Milton and Hall in terms of the Irish Rebellion, see Cunningham, ‘Milton, John Hall, and Thomas Waring’s Brief Narration’, 69-85.

⁴⁶ McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 55-6.

⁴⁷ Hall, A Modell of Christian Society, sig. A3-4.

⁴⁸ See Hall to Hartlib, late March 1647, 60/14/39B; see also John Davies, ‘An Account of the Author of this Translation, and his Words’, in John Hall, trans., Hierocles upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras (1657), sig. b2.

⁴⁹ Hall to Hartlib, 2 January [1647], HP 9/10/1A-2B.

⁵⁰ Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 169.

⁵¹ Raymond, ‘John Hall’s “A Method of History”’, 268-9.

⁵² For a discussion of the ‘Academy of Ingenuitys’, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 61-2; Turnbull, ‘John Hall’s Letters’, 230.

⁵³ ‘Conglobation’ here means ‘gathering’; the modern spelling is ‘conglobulation’.

⁵⁴ McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 62; Hall to Hartlib, 29 March 1647, HP 9/10/5A-6B; 13 April 1647, HP 60/14/30A-31B; Hall, ‘A Short Model of Society’, 13 April 1647, HP 26/20/1A-2B; Hall to Hartlib, 20 April 1647, HP 60/14/32A; Hall to Hartlib, 26 [April? 1647], HP 60/14/35A.

⁵⁵ Turnbull suggests this conclusion in ‘John Hall’s Letters’, 230.

⁵⁶ HP 47/13/4A; Rand to Hartlib, 1 September 1651, HP 62/27/1A.

⁵⁷ John Hall, ‘A Short Model of Society’, 13 April 1647, HP 26/20/1A-2B.

⁵⁸ Dury to Hartlib, 21 July 1644, HP 3/2/43B; Culpeper to Hartlib, 12 November 1645, HP 13/122A.

⁵⁹ Hall to Hartlib, March 1647, HP 60/14/39B; dos abundare suo sensu is from Romans 15:4, which translates in the Authorised King James Version as ‘fully persuaded in his own mind’.

⁶⁰ Joad Raymond, ‘Hall, John’, in ODNB.

⁶¹ Hall, An Humble Motion to the PARLIAMENT of England, 8. Further references will be made parenthetically in the running text. ‘Evagations’ here means ‘wandering of the mind’.

⁶² Hall to Hartlib, 2 January [1647], HP 9/10/2A.