Puritanism and Natural Philosophy revisited: the case of Ralph Austen (c. 1612–1676)

ABSTRACT

Twentieth-century historians of science emphasised the apparent connection between puritanism and experimental natural philosophy in mid-seventeenth-century England, but revisionist scholarship exposed the incorrect religious taxonomies undergirding this thesis. As both a staunch puritan and a well-connected figure in scientific networks, Ralph Austen provides an opportunity to re-examine the thesis. A horticulturalist, cider manufacturer and lay theologian based in Oxford from 1646 until his death in 1676, Austen was a friend and collaborator of Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle. He was also a pious puritan, steeped in Reformed divinity, and friends with premier Interregnum puritans, including John Owen. Austen’s life and career demonstrate that Baconian aims to reform learning could happily go hand-in-hand with, and be inspired by, puritan ideals, though they hampered his reputation in post-Restoration natural-philosophical circles. At the same time, via Austen we learn that puritan theologians responded positively to Baconian ideas, something hitherto underrepresented in the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural philosophy
• puritanism
• Hartlib circle
• John Owen
• Royal Society

To the enthusiastic projectors of seventeenth-century England, cider was one of the keys to national betterment. As John Evelyn saw it, beer may have been pleasurable, but it repaid such pleasures ‘with tormenting Diseases’; by contrast, cider was ‘one of the most delicious and wholesome Beverages in the World.’ Writing the preface to Pomona, a work on fruit trees and cider production appended to his Sylva (1664), Evelyn was effusive in praising the benefits of ‘our Native Liquor’, ‘good Cider’: planting fruit trees for cider production would provide employment for the poor, protection from trade embargoes, fresher air, and a beverage that could comfortably surpass the finest of French wines.¹ But at the time of Pomona’s publication, English cider was a regional phenomenon, restricted mostly to the western counties of Herefordshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire, a problem that Evelyn and his fellow cider enthusiasts sought to solve. In 1676, the west country clergyman and cider aficionado John Beale (bap. 1608, d. 1683) published Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens, and Vineyards Encouraged, a short tract composed of three letters addressed to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society. Noting that ‘[t]he great Example of his Majesty, and of our Nobility, and generally of our chief Gentry’ in planting fruit-trees (and improving husbandry more generally) was said to have reached its limits ‘about Cambridge’, his stated aim in this piece was to encourage the creation of a cider trade in the university town, just as the drink had been brought to Oxford a few decades before.²

Oldenburg joined Beale in this effort. In September 1676, around the time Beale’s Nurseries was published, he wrote to Isaac Newton proposing a scheme for the planting of fruit trees. Newton’s reply detailed the horticultural situation of the town: ‘there are some gentlemen that of late have begun to plant [apple trees], and seem to incline more and more to it’, though Cambridge lacked a ‘professed nurseryman’.³ Newton wrote to Oldenburg a few weeks later, desiring his ‘procuring a recommendation of us to Mr Austin the Oxonian planter’, who seems to have been suggested by Oldenburg. Newton wanted this cider expert to furnish himself and his Cambridge collaborators ‘wth ye best sorts of Cider-fruit-trees’: ‘30 or 40 Graffs’ for their first foray into cider cultivation.⁴ Via Oldenburg, Newton was able to make contact with the Oxford man, but he had died before any serious enterprise was afoot.⁵

The ‘Oxonian planter’ in question was Ralph Austen, the man almost single-handedly responsible for bringing cider production to Oxford, and thus an obvious recommendation for Oldenburg to have made. Austen is not well-known today, but he was an influential figure in the reformist agricultural movements of the mid- to late-seventeenth century.⁶ A horticulturalist who spent more than forty years specialising in arboriculture, Austen’s major work, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, was published by the Oxford stationer Thomas Robinson in 1653, and proved popular enough for expanded editions to appear in 1657 and 1665. He was a central figure in agricultural correspondence networks, particularly in the 1650s, when he formed a close collaboration with Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62), the Prussian intelligencer. Austen became Hartlib’s mouthpiece in Oxford, England’s most prominent university town, where Hartlib and his acolytes hoped to gain the ear of the puritan divines intruded upon the former royalist headquarters. Via Hartlib, Austen also collaborated with Walter Blith (bap. 1605, d. 1652), the author of the influential husbandry manuals The English Improver (1649) and The English Improver Improved (1652);⁷ and Beale, with whom he shared apple tree grafts and debated the merits of different fruit varieties for cider production (at times rather bitterly). In Oxford, Austen formed a close relationship with Robert Sharrock (bap. 1630, d. 1684), the horticulturalist and natural lawyer, and Robert Boyle (1627–91), who helped distribute some of his later writings, and through whom he received the support of Oldenburg. But it was by his writings, particularly the Treatise, that Austen was best known: the gentleman farmer John Worlidge (d. 1693) acknowledged his debt to Austen in his popular Systema Agriculturæ (1669), while Evelyn’s Sylva was almost certainly influenced by him.

These networks are of interest to historians of science, but they represent only one side of Austen’s concerns. Published alongside the first two editions of the Treatise was a parallel work, which Austen regarded as being just as significant: The Spiritual Use, of an Orchard; or Garden of Fruit-Trees. This text contained ‘diverse Similitudes between Naturall and Spirituall Fruit-trees’, with Austen using his horticultural know-how to illustrate, by metaphor, his particular brand of Calvinistic piety. For Austen was very much a puritan, and he was close, both relationally and as a coreligionist, to the divines intruded upon many of Oxford’s colleges: John Owen (1616–83), Thankful Owen (1620–81), and Henry Langley (1610/11–79), to name a few. (He was also connected to the Cromwellian regime through his kinship to Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, who was his mother’s first cousin – a connection he capitalised on in his search for patronage.) This makes Austen an apt figure for exploring the relationship between the experimental natural philosophy of the Restoration era and the politico-religious climate of Cromwellian England. From Robert Merton in the 1930s to Charles Webster in the 1970s, many historians of science claimed that ‘puritanism’ provided the seedbed for the scientific enterprises of the Restoration, until this interpretation was challenged by historians objecting to the imprecise religious taxonomies used to undergird this thesis.⁸ According to critics of the puritan-and-science thesis, experimental natural philosophy was eminently ‘latitudinarian’ in character;⁹ and this revisionist account has been upheld by more recent literature, which continues to present the non-puritan character of the early Royal Society. But one by-product of this debate was to obscure those figures involved in mid-century natural philosophy who were ‘puritan’ in character, according to the more accurate classifications of modern scholarship. This obscurity has hardly been helped by the historiography of puritanism, or scholarship on individual puritan divines, which likewise engage minimally with the history of science, instead examining puritan figures for their politico-religious significance, or their relevance to the history of theology.¹⁰

In Austen, we can begin to fill these historiographical lacunae. The eagerness of his Baconianism was matched only by his adherence to the staunchest of puritan principles, and to him the two chimed neatly. In this sense, something of the weight of Webster’s thesis can be snatched back from revisionist hands. But Austen’s very obscurity, and the more than ambiguous attitudes towards him amongst the scientific establishment – particularly after the Restoration – place limits on any quick revival of the ‘puritanism-and-science’ thesis. Puritanism certainly played a part in the reform of natural philosophy, but it was a far smaller part than that attributed to it by the Weberian historians of the twentieth century. More illuminating is the light Austen sheds on the response of Reformed divines to the developing natural philosophy of mid-century England, a topic that has been underexplored in the literature on English puritanism. The rather extensive extant materials relating to Austen reveal someone at the centre of the puritan establishment, through whom ideas about the reform of learning and natural philosophy were communicated to its kingmakers. In these cases Austen provides us with a picture of puritan responses to the new science – one that the printed sources usually relied upon have not been able to divulge. More than we might expect from divines who were, by and large, of an Aristotelian-scholastic hue, figures like John Owen and Henry Langley approved of and encouraged the reform of natural philosophy. It is clear that puritanism did not cause experimental natural philosophy in any meaningful sense. But these divines, in their quiet approbation of it – so different to the response of many continental Reformed divines¹¹ – played a part in the extraordinary developments in natural philosophy that took place in the Cromwellian years, and on into the Restoration era.

I

Ralph Austen was born in Leek, Staffordshire, in c. 1612.¹² Little is known of his background or upbringing. He seems to have come from a yeoman family, though apparently of some means: Walter Blith pointed his readers to ‘an Oxford Gentleman, called Ra. Austen’,¹³ a descriptor Austen himself would use in later life;¹⁴ and his family home was a property built in the ruins of Dieulacre Abbey, where, later in the century, Robert Plot’s friend Thomas Rudyerd would live.¹⁵ Nothing is known of his schooling, though his writings reveal a good knowledge of Latin and classical poetry, suggesting a fairly thorough grammar school education; he also had a basic knowledge of scholastic philosophy.¹⁶ On his account, he started work in husbandry in around 1633;¹⁷ by 1636, he is recorded as a husbandman in Hunningham, around seventy miles south of his childhood home.¹⁸ At some point, probably at the close of the first civil war, he settled in Oxford. It is unclear what brought him to the university town, but he wasted no time ingratiating himself with the newly-established authorities, being appointed deputy registrar to the parliamentary visitation of the university in 1646, and registrar thereafter.¹⁹ It was during these early years in Oxford that Austen became acquainted with the influential intelligencer Samuel Hartlib. We do not know when their friendship began. The first extant letters they exchanged, dating from early 1652, already suggest a degree of familiarity, so it is unlikely that they mark the beginning of their relationship; but he was not a well-known figure in the Hartlib circle in 1652, when Hartlib wrote to Walter Blith warning him not to tread on the Oxonian’s toes. The Warwickshire-based farmer had been preparing a chapter on fruit trees for the updated edition of his work, The English improver improved (1652), only to desist once ‘Mr. Samuel Hartlib, that publike spirit’ had alerted him that Austen ‘had finished a Work fit for the Presse, of approved experiments in Planting late Fruit, from better Rules than have hitherto yet been published’.²⁰

Austen seems to have started work on the book in question, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, sometime in 1651. Wood reports that at the end of July 1652 Austen ‘was entred a Student into the publick Library, to the end that he might find materials for the composition of a book which he was then meditating’, something that is confirmed by the Bodleian’s record of readers’ admissions.²¹ But this ‘meditating’ was already far enough along in February 1652 for a full manuscript to be sent to Hartlib via Austen’s friend Benjamin Martin, who worked for William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Commons (probably at his property in Burford, nineteen miles west of Oxford).²² We can safely assume, then, that the bulk of the work, published in the early months of 1653, was formed before Austen started his reading project in the Bodleian – especially given that there is no indication in his detailed correspondence with Hartlib that the book underwent any significant revisions. This accords with Austen’s own description of his education in fruit-tree husbandry. In the preface to A Treatise of Fruit-Trees he relates that his experience in the craft by that point spanned ‘the space of Twenty yeares, and more’, with his knowledge being both practical and literary: ‘I have seen,’ he assured his readers, ‘the best Workes, both of Ancient, and Late Writers upon this Subject, and have learned from them what I could, for accomplishment of this Art’.²³

Principal among such writers was Francis Bacon, ‘a Learned Author’ whose influence litters Austen’s corpus, and on whose Natural History Austen produced a commentary in 1658. In Bacon, Austen found a writer whose interest in husbandry chimed with his own: Bacon had defended his treatment of ‘Plants or Vegetables’ in Sylva sylvarum (1627), for instance, by asserting that such matters ‘are of excellent and generall Vse, for Food, Medicine, and a Number of Mechanicall Arts.’²⁴ But as useful as this may have been to husbandry in particular, Austen imbibed the heart of the Baconian project in a thoroughgoing fashion – indeed, several of the core conceptual framings of his work he lifted wholesale, and unapologetically, from Bacon. Perhaps most importantly, he consistently stressed the importance of practical experience and ‘experiments’ over and against a speculative or bookish approach to nature. After assuring his readers of his horticultural expertise, Austen dealt a typically Baconian blow at too scholarly an approach to the subject:

Some who have taught this Art of Planting Fruit-trees, have been in it (I conceive) only Contemplative men, having little, or no Experience in it: so that in many things they have erred, and that grossely, as shall appeare in due place.

Citing Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Austen then argued that such ‘speculative men’ had failed to realise that, important as book-learning is, it is ‘Experience’ that enjoys pride of place as ‘the Perfecter of Arts, and the most sure, and best teacher in any Art’. Speculation has a place, but it must go hand-in-hand with experience in the pursuit of true, practicable knowledge. Indeed, attempting go without one or the other is to do more than just shoot oneself in the foot: since ‘Contemplation and Action are the two Leggs whereon Arts runne stedily and strongly … the one without the other, can but hop, or goe lamely.’²⁵

These principles did not mean that Austen rejected the tenets of the more traditional Aristotelian physics in toto. In at least two places in his corpus, he drew upon Aristotelian maxims to explain his arboricultural theories. Commenting on Bacon’s Natural History, he explained that the efficacy of grafts from good trees came about since ‘every twig, graft, and bud, hath the nature of the whole tree in it, perfectly’, just as ‘the soule in the body, which is tota in toto, & tota in qualibet parte’.²⁶ This doctrine, which Henry More would later dub ‘holenmerism’, was common in scholastic-Aristotelian treatments of the soul.²⁷ Similarly, in the first edition of the Treatise, Austen had defended his theory of the ascension of sap in trees on the basis of the Aristotelian maxim (originally articulated in the Politics) that ‘Natura nil agit frustra, nature does nothing in vaine’: and it would be needless, Austen argued, for nature to cause sap to ascend, only to cause it then to descend again.²⁸ Austen’s Baconianism, then, was less about an outright rejection of Aristotelian ideas than a commitment to the primacy of experience over bookishness, and a utilitarian vision of the advancement of learning.

The mixture of Aristotelian doctrines with Baconian methods was hardly unique. George Hakewill’s influential Apologie of the Power and Providence of God (1^st ed. 1627, 2^nd ed. 1635) made clear its debt to Bacon’s optimism about the augmentation of the sciences from the off, with a thinly-veiled allusion to Bacon’s anti-Aristotelian Masculine Birth of Time, an unfinished treatise that had been circulating since c. 1602.²⁹ Yet Hakewill was no anti-Aristotelian: indeed, he retained belief in the four elements, and in the Apologie ‘his central thesis is a reaffirmation of the changeless Aristotelian heavens’.³⁰ To this we could add the example of William Twisse, zealous acolyte of the Stagirite who nonetheless expressed his approbation of Bacon’s reading of the apocalyptic prophecy of Daniel 12:4 in his preface to the English translation of Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apolcalyptica (1643).³¹ Like Hakewill and Twisse, Austen interpreted Bacon’s intellectual project as bothering itself less with the subtleties of metaphysics and epistemology than with a utilitarian vision of human betterment brought about through the improvement of man’s relation to the natural world. What mattered was not Aristotelianism or anti-Aristotelianism, but the advancement of learning.

The stress on experience bore much fruit for Austen’s work. He was able to produce detailed instructions on nursery management and fruit production that made the Treatise, in Webster’s words, ‘the most systematic and detailed treatment of this subject yet published in England.’³² The contribution of which Austen was most proud, at least in scientific terms, was his claim to have proven the ascension of sap in trees. Robert Sharrock, fellow of New College, writing the preface to Austen’s Observations upon some part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Natvral History in 1658, noted that many would be offended by ‘his refusall to attribute many effects to the descention of Sap’. But this was ‘a vulgar Error’, and, once Austen had at last convinced Sharrock as much, he encouraged the horticulturalist ‘to publish his arguments to the contrary’.³³ He had in fact already done so, in his original Treatise of 1653. Noting that ‘[t]his Opinion of descention of sap in Trees is an old Error, of many yeares standing, and is radicated in the Minds of most men’,³⁴ Austen produced a stream of arguments in its refutation. It would be needless, he asserted, for nature to cause sap to ascend, only to cause it then to descend again, and ‘Natura nil agit frustra, nature does nothing in vaine’. Similarly, he dismissed the popular view that the cold causes the descent of sap, since ‘Cold never causeth sap to stir, but to stand, or move slowly.’ Making an argument from experience, he appealed to the process of leaves becoming ‘contracted, and wrinkled’ once cut loose from trees, which happens because they are not being replenished by the ascension of sap from the roots.³⁵

Other Baconian tenets feature heavily in Austen’s work. A tireless pursuit of practical knowledge was to be a bulwark of Instauratio Magna, Bacon’s utopian vision for the triumph of man over nature. Though proud of his own achievements, the same restlessness pervades Austen’s project. His claim to Hartlib in April 1652, a year before the final sheets rolled off Thomas Robinson’s press, that his work would be ‘capable of additions of new Experiments from yeare to yeare’ might have seemed premature, or somewhat far-fetched,³⁶ but Austen remained true to his word when he published an updated Treatise of Fruit-Trees in 1657.³⁷ Despite the considerable experience he had already acquired by the time he published the first edition, the updated sections in 1657 showed Austen to be a constant learner. In 1653, when providing instructions for the beginning of a nursery, Austen had advised that seed plants could be left on their beds to ‘grow there a yeare longer, and then be transplanted’.³⁸ In the 1657 edition of the Treatise, he removed this sentence, inserting in its place the stipulation that all seed plants be removed from their original beds after ‘but one sommers growth from the seed … though they be never so small’. Having detailed the advantages that could be gained thereby, he added a cautionary note, in autobiographical form: ‘This is very considerable, and therefore observe it: I underwent great inconveniences when I came to Removing, before I found out this observation.’³⁹ Those inconveniences he presumably experienced in the interim between the two publications, and was thus quick to incorporate his solution into the latter. The same goes for a variety of small additions in the second edition of the text, many of them marginalia, such as recommendations for the storing of apricot stones and advice for the protection of seeds against mice,⁴⁰ recommendations of pear types for perry production,⁴¹ the size at which ‘young grafted Trees’ should be removed from a nursery,⁴² the spacing between newly-planted trees,⁴³ and new material on the choice of apples for cider and the best methods for its production.⁴⁴

Nor did 1657 mark his final word on the matter. In 1658 he published Observations upon some part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Natvrall History, a critique of Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum that was, ironically enough, his most stridently Baconian text. The text arrived at a time when Austen was having increasing contact with that other great Hartlibian horticulturalist, the clergyman and virtuoso John Beale. Their correspondence, begun in 1656, centred on the question of which apple varieties were best for making cider. In the 1657 edition of the Treatise Austen had recommended the use of domesticated apples already acclaimed as table fruits: pearmains, pippins, and especially Gennet Moyles.⁴⁵ But Herefordshire, the county of Beale’s birth and upbringing, had become known for its cider made from wild apples, particularly a variety known as the Red-Streak, pioneered by Lord Scudamore. Writing in September 1658, Austen protested against Beale’s approbation of the Red-Streak: ‘Pippins & Peare Mains makes [sic] far better Cider then wilde apples,’ he claimed, since cider made from ‘wilde harsh fruit … is found to bee somewhat harsh & hard’.⁴⁶ But Beale’s response, asserting the rich taste of cider made with Red-Streaks, as well as the speed of their growth and their plentiful yield,⁴⁷ seems to have changed his mind; only a few weeks later, with the publication of Observations, Austen included the ‘Redstreake’ alongside the original selection of apples he had listed to Beale, as amongst the varieties able to produce ciders that could rival French wines.⁴⁸

This urge for constant improvement was driven by an attractive vision: the increasing land yields, prolongation of human life, and marriage of pleasure and profits dreamt of in Bacon’s utopian project. The frontispiece of Austen’s Treatise (Figure 1) made these aims clear at the outset. Produced by the engraver John Goddard (whom Austen reckoned ‘a man … given to misspend his time in drinking, though an excellent workman’⁴⁹), it depicted the hand of ‘Profits’ clasping that of ‘Pleasures’. The ‘profits’ that could be gained through fruit cultivation he would go on to rhapsodise throughout the book: a garden of fruit trees brought increase to estates, health to the body, long life, greater knowledge, a lasting name, and alms for the poor, alongside the pleasures of the senses.⁵⁰ The prolongation of life was particularly singled out by Austen, and defended by recourse to the Book of Proverbs and Bacon’s History of Life and Death.⁵¹

Figure 1. The frontispiece of Austen’s 1653 Treatise of Fruit Trees. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

All these features of Austen’s project marked him out as thoroughly Baconian. And, true to the original genesis of Bacon’s vision, his efforts towards the betterment of husbandry were not the work of an isolated maverick. Just as Bacon’s vision for ‘the enlargement of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ in the New Atlantis required the collective expertise of the Elders of ‘Salomon’s House’,⁵² so Austen and his fellow Interregnum Baconians scurried about their work from a communal footing, built upon a nationwide network of correspondence. We have already seen as much in the aforementioned comments of Blith, who worried that Austen’s ideas would be less widely disseminated without him holding back his own material on fruit trees.⁵³ There was nothing disingenuous about these comments: Blith even offered to arrange the printing of Austen’s work in London, and via Hartlib sent Austen a copy of his Improver Improved (1652).⁵⁴ Blith’s comments on Austen’s forthcoming work acted as something of an ‘advertisement to the reader’, which Hartlib very deliberately built upon later in the year, when he published an anonymous treatise on fruit trees titled A Designe for plentie (1652). This little work was merely an amuse-bouche meant to stir up anticipation for Austen’s weightier tome:

Such as have perused Mr. Blithe’s Improver improved … will meet with a promise made concerning this Treatise of Master Austin’s, which now he is putting to the Presse, as by his own Letter written in November last 1652 he doth informe me: therefore I intend in this Preface and by this Treatise, as by a small taste of so good a matter, both to raise thine appetite and quicken thy desire to see that larger Work, and to stay thy stomack a little till it come forth …⁵⁵

By the time Austen’s book found its way to booksellers, then, demand had been cultivated by this collective effort, something he duly acknowledged in his dedication to Hartlib.⁵⁶ Even Thomas Robinson, the Oxford bookseller, collaborated, offering Hartlib as many copies of the Treatise as he desired, at a rate substantially below the usual stationer’s price – on the proviso that he didn’t tell ‘Mr Royston’, the London bookseller responsible for distributing the work in the capital.⁵⁷

The Treatise was a collective effort, then, typical of Hartlib’s many schemes for improvement. But though Hartlib had been Austen’s foremost mentor and correspondent for a number of years, it was not long after the publication of the second edition of the Treatise that Austen’s intellectual centre of gravity began to shift away from him. In part this seems to have been due to the failure of Hartlib’s patronage. Austen’s repeated attempts to get parliament, or indeed Cromwell, to take notice of his scheme for national fruit tree planting were channelled via Hartlib, who seems to have been singularly inept at making anything come of them. Austen had also entrusted Hartlib’s son with £100, apparently for some business transaction on his behalf.⁵⁸ But Hartlib junior not only failed to use the money as instructed, but ignored Austen’s repeated pleas about the matter.⁵⁹ Austen’s patience snapped in September 1655, nearly a year after he had first sent the money, when he complained to Hartlib senior that all he sought was ‘the common Iustice & equity that is distributed even among the Turks’. This letter goes on to criticise, in considerable detail, Hartlib’s newly-published Legacy of Husbandry (1655), accusing the German of erring in ‘ordinary, & common things’,⁶⁰ giving the impression that Austen was also angry with Hartlib himself.

The diminution of his relationship with Hartlib coincided with a new and more powerful source of patronage, one that must have seemed a precious providence to Austen. Sometime around late-1655 or early-1656, Robert Boyle moved to Oxford, setting up in rooms on the high street near University College.⁶¹ It is unclear how Boyle and Austen first met. Perhaps Hartlib had arranged their acquaintance, but it is equally likely that Robert Sharrock, the natural philosopher based at New College, encouraged the connection. Charles Webster has claimed that Austen was Sharrock’s ‘close friend’, and indeed that the budding botanist collaborated with Austen in the publication of his 1653 Treatise.⁶² While it is not clear whether Sharrock contributed anything to the text of the Treatise, he did note in his prefatory epistle to Austen’s 1658 Observations that he had read it, and Austen’s subsequent works, prior to publication, remarking that ‘THE Author of this piece has alwaies thought fit … to give me leave some time before every impression to make a judgment of what in this nature he has published.’ Textual clues suggest that this process indeed began before Austen’s first work appeared: Sharrock claims that he had ‘alwaies encouraged [Austen] to publish his arguments’ as to the movement of sap in trees, something which he had done with much clamour in the first edition of the Treatise.⁶³ Almost definitely, then, Sharrock was a fairly longstanding acquaintance of Austen. But Sharrock was also close to Boyle, publishing his only scientific text at the latter’s instigation,⁶⁴ and supervising the publication of his works in Oxford while the more eminent scientist was away from the city periodically between 1659 and 1661.⁶⁵

It did not take long for Austen to strike up an enduring collaboration with Boyle. Austen clearly relished the opportunity posed to him by a reform-minded natural philosopher with connections to some of the most powerful landowners and politicians in the nation, noting in the dedicatory epistle to the Observations his gratitude that Boyle had ‘been pleased to honour [him] with [his] acquaintance’.⁶⁶ This deferential language, apt for a yeoman’s son addressing a member of one of the nation’s wealthiest noble families, belied the closeness of their collaboration. Michael Hunter has surmised that ‘Boyle almost certainly encouraged’ the publication of Austen’s work, and indeed that the format of the text, presented as a refinement of Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum, ‘echoes [Boyle’s] Certain Physiological Essays’ of 1661, which Boyle had written in the mid- to late-1650s, and which presumably Austen had seen in manuscript.⁶⁷ Doubtless Boyle did have a serious impact on Austen’s intellectual trajectory, but it is also possible that the influence was reciprocal. Anthony Wood thought as much, when he later recorded not only that Austen’s Treatise ‘was much commended for a good and rational piece by the honorable Mr. Rob. Boyle’, but that Boyle ‘did make us of it in a book or books which he afterwards published’.⁶⁸ It is possible that Wood was thinking of the connection already noted, between Austen’s 1658 work and Boyle’s Certain Physiological Essays, reading off the publishing history a simple assumption of the direction of intellectual influence. But he could also have had in mind Austen’s work on the movement of sap, something which, as we have seen, he advertised widely, and a topic which Boyle incorporated into the discussion of van Helmont’s theory of water as fundamental matter in his Sceptical chymist of 1661.⁶⁹

Despite the significance of Austen’s Observations to his arboricultural project, he made no mention of it in his correspondence with Hartlib. It is possible that letters discussing the work are no longer extant in the Hartlib Papers; but it is striking that Hartlib, who had been so involved in the publication of Austen’s original Treatise – receiving the autograph manuscript,⁷⁰ as well as plenty of printed copies to distribute – should have received copies not at the hand of Austen but of Boyle.⁷¹ By that point, Boyle had become a conduit between the two. Already in March 1658, Hartlib had sent a letter to Austen via Boyle, whom he asked to convey his apologies for the failure of his entreaties to the Lord Protector.⁷² And in November 1659, Hartlib asked Boyle to send him Austen’s response to a paper by Oldenburg (presumably on fruit trees; it is not extant).⁷³ But Hartlib remained a useful contact for Austen, especially when the political turmoil of the Restoration left him estranged from scientific networks, as a puritan deeply implicated in the Cromwellian regime. Sometime in the early summer of 1660, Hartlib had notified Austen of a secret scientific society that was forming.⁷⁴ But Hartlib appears to have been guarded in the information he divulged to his erstwhile confidant. He was eager enough in December 1660, when writing to John Worthington about the nascent Royal Society, with its ‘meeting every week of the prime virtuosi’.⁷⁵ But one of Austen’s final letters to the German, dating from March 1661, makes clear how little his old friend had been informing him of the matter. ‘Concerning the invisible society mentioned,’ Austen observed (perhaps an allusion to Boyle’s ‘Invisible College’ of the 1640s),⁷⁶ ‘I hartily wish they may at last proue visible, for the publique good’. But their continued invisibility, at least to Austen, had left him incredulous, and he expressed doubt ‘that there should be such men upon the Earth; who really intend such things; seeing (for ought I know) it is without President in any age of the world’.⁷⁷ By this point Austen was discouraged, and dejected. Despite a half-hearted plea to Hartlib in May 1661 that they ‘reviue the remembrance of our Ould designe’,⁷⁸ his words in March of that year had already spoken volumes as to waning vitality of his project:

I haue beene at so much expences in sending, & receaving Letters for aboue this 7 yeares, & in giving, & distributing of Books both in the Citty & Country, about this businesse that I am aweary of it, & discouraged; & indeede disabled, reaping no fruit after so much seede sowen …⁷⁹

Even Boyle, whom he counted his ‘very good friend’, was holding off on what he had purportedly promised Austen – presumably the commendation to the powers that be that Austen so desired, and had approached Boyle for in October 1658.⁸⁰ At the Restoration, Austen was finding himself out in the cold: the political project in which he had placed so much hope crumbling before his eyes, and his once-cooperative colleagues reticent to engage with him. The dream of an Edenic England must have seemed far off.

II

But Austen’s greatest discouragement at that time would have been religious. For his arboricultural project was wrapped up in an eschatological hope that was decidedly Calvinistic and puritan – and Austen, like many of his coreligionists who had put such hope in the English republic, must have been shaken by the failure of designs that had been assumed to enjoy providential favour. It is this side of Austen – the zealous, utopian-minded puritan – that is foregrounded in the most in-depth study of him to date, undertaken by Charles Webster in his The Great Instauration (1975). Webster’s thesis, the most sophisticated articulation of an idea that had its roots in the work of R.H. Tawney and Robert K. Merton, was that puritanism played a significant role in the development of early experimental science. Naturally, this rested on taxonomical foundations – Webster and his followers needed to show that their scientists really were ‘puritans’. But religious taxonomies have long proved vexing to historians of seventeenth-century England, as the long debates over the nature of ‘puritanism’ make abundantly clear.⁸¹ Webster, a historian of early medicine and science, was naturally hampered in wading into such territories, and his detractors duly took advantage of the analytical impotence of a definition of puritanism broad enough to include John Wilkins and John Owen – arch-nemeses in Interregnum Oxford – as religious bedfellows.

The same kind of taxonomical reclassification that Barbara Shapiro undertook in her work on John Wilkins could equally be applied to Samuel Hartlib and his circle, as Shapiro herself alluded to.⁸² At one level, Hartlib shared many of the concerns that specialists in religious history have characterised as archetypically puritan. On 1 April 1653, for instance, Austen wrote to Hartlib detailing his concerns about a practice common amongst the people of Oxford. In a few weeks it would be May Day, when the townsfolk would indulge in the ‘sinfull superstitious Custome’ of ‘Making Garlands, of flouers, & puting them vpon two of the company who are carried vpon the shoulders of the rest, vp & downe the streets’. Austen was fervent in condemning this behaviour: ‘Many vaine, & sinfull things are then practised among them to the Dishonour of god’.⁸³ His complaints were typical of the godly, who had long laboured to suppress the maypole and associated practices in the name of moral reformation.⁸⁴ But it is telling that, in an Oxford already under puritan rule, he would turn to his Prussian friend for help against this menace, appealing to Hartlib to petition parliament for another law to suppress the practice. We have no indication of Hartlib’s response to this request, but Austen’s interruption of their usual horticultural discussions implies that he shared many of Austen’s religious and political concerns. A resident of London since 1631, Hartlib had long associated himself with eminent puritan figures, including Thomas Goodwin, the Independent divine with whom he corresponded from the 1630s, and other members of the Westminster Assembly.⁸⁵ And when the irenic Sir Cheney Culpeper found that John Dury, the tireless advocate of Protestant pacification, was not originally invited to serve as one of the Assembly’s divines, it was to Hartlib that he turned, requesting that the intelligencer might have Dury nominated for the role.⁸⁶

But while such connections seem to demonstrate Hartlib’s puritan credentials, his close association with Dury, a man whose ecumenism led to his forging alliances across otherwise acrimonious confessional divisions, suggests otherwise. Though he adopted the side of parliament in the Civil Wars, and cooperated happily with the Cromwellian authorities thereafter, Hartlib had none of the concern for precise confessional distinctives that characterised the leading puritan and Reformed divines of the era, and he was willing to cross sizeable political divides in his efforts towards collective ‘improvement’. For the most part, the circle that coalesced around him reflected this ecumenical outlook, influenced less by the polemical divinity of Thomas Goodwin and more by the pansophist ideals of Jan Amos Comenius. Dury was on good terms with puritan and Laudian divines;⁸⁷ Robert Boyle read and apparently approved of aspects of Socinian writings (though he was later a loyal son of the established church); and Benjamin Worsley seems to have had fairly pronounced Socinian sensibilities, if the contents of his library are anything to go by.⁸⁸ In his efforts to help Austen, Hartlib had no qualms in simultaneously praising the regicide Colonel John Barkstead for his role in providing the manuscript later published as A Designe for plentie (1652), alongside commending to Austen the Earl of Southampton, a powerful Royalist noble, who nonetheless shared their passion for fruit trees.⁸⁹

The ecumenical, utopian, and politically ambiguous stance espoused by Hartlib and Dury may have overlapped with aspects of mainstream puritanism, particularly in the stridency of its millenarianism.⁹⁰ But much of it fails to align with a working definition of ‘puritanism’ in this period. Quite what that definition may be has been the subject of much historiographical debate, and space does not permit an adequate representation of the voluminous literature.⁹¹ For our purposes, it is sufficient to regard English puritanism as one wing of the wider movement that historians of theology, notably Richard Muller, have called ‘Reformed Orthodoxy’ – that is to say, it was, broadly speaking, Calvinistic in doctrine.⁹² Some aspects of puritanism were unique to the English situation, especially in its reaction to the continuing episcopal (to its detractors, quasi-papist) character of the Church. But many of its sociocultural features were a natural corollary of the doctrinal tenets of Calvinism, shared by other movements within the early-modern Reformed tradition. Reformed soteriology, which was robustly predestinarian, emphasised the discernment of the individual’s status as one of God’s ‘elect’, for whom Christ died, and an emphasis on personal holiness, together with a distinction between ‘the godly’ and ‘the world’, flowed from this. This high-stakes process of spiritual discernment was an obsessive feature of the religious lives of the godly in England in particular, and a whole industry of works describing signs of true spiritual regeneration rolled off English presses, part of what Philip Benedict has called ‘the experimental predestinarian tradition’.⁹³ Related to this were certain practices of piety, personal and communal, many of them unique to English Calvinists: strict sabbath observance, sermon-gadding, and the reading of ‘godly’ devotional works, along with household worship and regular fasting.⁹⁴

Many of the puritan divines with whom Hartlib dealt correspond to this definition of the movement. John Owen, for instance, was a lifelong exponent and staunch defender of Reformed soteriology, from his anti-Arminian A Display of Arminianisme (1642), his first published work, through to his The Doctrine of Justification by Faith through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ (1677). Fearing for his status as a Christian, Owen had experienced long years of spiritual depression in his youth, before an afternoon of sermon-gadding led to his finally finding assurance of salvation.⁹⁵ Owen’s emphasis on holiness came out in Of The Mortification of Sinne in Believers (1656) and Of Temptation, The nature and Power of it (1658), while he advocated strict sabbath observance in Exercitations Concerning the Name, Original, Nature, Use and Continuance of a Day of Sacred Rest (1671).

Compared to Owen, Hartlib, a man of more ecumenical persuasion, appears less obviously ‘puritan’. That of course limits the explanatory power he provides for exploring the connections between English puritanism and early science. But Ralph Austen very much was a puritan, in the same vein as the likes of Owen or Thomas Goodwin, both of whom he knew. This has been understated in the literature on Austen, which digs no deeper than associating him with Hartlib and his pansophist religious concerns. But Austen’s works reveal him to have been something of a lay Reformed theologian. In part this underemphasis has resulted from T.F. Henderson’s mistaken claim in the Dictionary of National Biography that the Reformed and anti-Quaker The Strong Man Armed not Cast Out (1676) was not by the Oxford cider man, despite its author being named as one ‘Ra. Austen’.⁹⁶ This seems to have been taken for granted in subsequent historiography, which has ignored this text. In fact, Henderson’s claim that the work ‘contains no reference to gardening’ is false. Austen defends the doctrine that Christ indwells only the elect – an attack on the Quaker doctrine of the ‘light within’ – on the basis of a ‘Similitude between Natural and Mystical Fruit-trees’, something that will sound familiar to readers of his Spiritual use of an Orchard (1653).⁹⁷ This work, animadverting on a Quaker text, The Strong Man Armed Cast Out (1674), was responded to by the author of that work, one James Jackson, who made direct reference to Austen’s occupation (as well as to Jesus’s parable of the tenants) in the title of his reply, The Malice of the Rebellious Husband-men against The True Heir (1676).

Despite the claim that Austen was ‘[John] Wilkins’s friend’,⁹⁸ the social networks his correspondence with Hartlib bear witness to are markedly puritan in character (and indeed, Wilkins is barely mentioned). In December 1653, Austen suggested to Hartlib that he buy some of the common land in Shotover Forest, east of Oxford.⁹⁹ It took him until August 1655 to give the scheme more impetus, by which time he had rounded up support amongst his friends in Oxford, many of whom, he suggested to Hartlib, could work as commissioners to decide the compensation for those who used the common land. ‘[T]hese honest Gentlemen my friends’, as Austen described them, included many influential Oxonian puritans: ‘Dr Iohn Owen: Vice-Chancellor of the Vniuersity of Oxon’; John Nixon, the puritan mayor of Oxford from 1636; Thankful Owen, president of John’s College; and Tobias Garbrand, principal of Gloucester Hall.¹⁰⁰ Austen also listed Elisha Coles, the lay Independent divine who later authored the popular work A Practical Discourse of God’s Sovereignty (1673).¹⁰¹ As a London trader who settled in Oxford in 1650, Coles was in a similar boat to Austen.¹⁰² Both lacked a university education, but nonetheless produced works of popular divinity that proved successful. Austen spoke fondly of Coles, to whom he sometimes deputised his Registrar duties, referring to him as ‘My beloued brother’ in a letter to Hartlib in 1655.¹⁰³

But if Coles was his closest friend, his foremost spiritual counsellor proved to be Henry Langley, the Independent divine intruded as master of Pembroke College in August 1647. In his expanded second edition of The Spiritual Use of an Orchard, published as a standalone volume in 1657, Austen lamented that many ministers shirked their pastoral duties, ‘think[ing] it sufficient to be diligent in their studies … but greatly neglecting this other duty, of enquiring, and looking into the particular state of soules’, something he himself had sadly experienced.¹⁰⁴ But that was not true of Langley, whom he praised as a faithful minister of the gospel. Austen dedicated the first edition of his Spiritual Use of an Orchard (1653) to him, relating how Langley’s use of similitudes from nature, and especially fruit trees, had been an inspiration to him. But more than that, Langley had been the main instigator of Austen’s recovery from a period of severe spiritual depression. In his dedicatory preface, he explained that he presented the work to Langley ‘as a testimony of my thankfulnesse for all your labours in the Lord, and care for mee, from time to time, especially in my great Afflictions, which befell me about six years agoe in this place, when I was even stript naked both of inward, and outward comforts’.¹⁰⁵ These ‘Afflictions’ he would go on to describe in moving terms in the work itself.¹⁰⁶ More broadly, the experience seems to have given Austen clout amongst the godly in Oxford. Stephen Ford, the vicar of Chipping Norton and former chaplain of New College, vouched for Austen’s credentials by describing how ‘he hath beene exercised with many Temptations from his youth up; having passed through the spirit of bondage early in the morning, and by degrees came to close with Christ, and to attaine a comfortable assurance of his interest in him’.¹⁰⁷ The vignette provided by Ford was confirmed in another preface to the same text, written by one ‘J.F.’, described as ‘A Minister of the Gospell’, who wrote approvingly Austen’s godly ‘conversation’.¹⁰⁸

Despite Langley being the puritan divine apparently most amenable to Hartlib’s vision for reform,¹⁰⁹ it was his connection to Owen that Austen was most proud of. He wrote excitedly to Hartlib in July 1653 of the ‘manifold encouragements’ about his Treatise, printing of which had finished in April of that year. Particularly encouraging were the commendations Austen received ‘from some spetiall hands’, principal among them ‘Mr Owen, Vice-Chancellor’, who ‘having beene pleased to take much paines in perusing of it (in order to lycence the Printing)’, had given him ‘great encouragements in it’.¹¹⁰ And, sure enough, Owen not only kept his copy of the work,¹¹¹ but signed a testimonial vouching for Austen and his project, and even promised in February 1654 that he would commend the horticulturalist to the Lord Protector.¹¹² In 1657 the expanded edition of The Spirituall use of an Orchard proudly advertised itself as bearing the imprimatur of ‘JOHAN: OWEN, Vice-Can: Oxon:’, taking advantage of the Independent divine’s growing status in a way that the first edition did not. Although Hartlib’s efforts amongst the Oxford puritans seem to have been focused upon Goodwin – understandable given their long correspondence – it is clear that Owen, possibly due to Austen’s influence, was sympathetic to Hartlib’s designs, meeting the Prussian personally in February 1654 and subscribing to one of Hartlib and Dury’s schemes of improvement in July of that year.¹¹³

How came Austen by such influential friends? As very much a part of the puritan party in Oxford, he doubtless engaged in religious activities, such as joining a gathered church, where he rubbed shoulders with such figures. More tangibly, though, Austen’s various roles in the Cromwellian regime at Oxford placed him at the centre of puritan circles. As the registrar of the parliamentary visitation, he had an inside view of the Cromwellian attempts to reform the university: indeed, almost the entire register of the visitation, detailing the visitors’ meetings and promulgations, alongside responses to their efforts, from 1647 until 1658, is in Austen’s hand. Given this, and the fact that the register was given to the Bodleian Library by the executors of Austen’s will, it seems likely that it was kept in his possession; the various different hands that feature in the register, alongside Austen’s, thus give us a good idea of the university figures with whom he interacted. In May 1648, the hands of both Francis Cheynell and John Wilkinson appeared, recording, respectively, the parliamentary orders for these two influential presbyterian divines to take up the headships of St John’s and Magdalen Colleges.¹¹⁴ The vituperative congregationalist Edward Bagshaw, meanwhile, contributed his retroactive response to the visitors’ 1648 test of loyalty in his own hand, explaining his allegiance to parliament’s rule.¹¹⁵ As well as putting Austen at the centre of the puritan reform party, his role as registrar made him synonymous with the visitation throughout the university. The visitors’ many pronouncements were made in his name, something that was duly noted in college records. At Lincoln an order to elect one John Taylor to a vacant fellowship, in June 1648, was subscribed by the singular name of ‘Ra: Austen’; so too, the election of the Hartlibian Robert Wood to the place left by the extruded William Owen.¹¹⁶ Payments made to the visitors were also made out in Austen’s name; in 1657, for instance, the bursars of Magdalen College made a payment of £4 to the horticulturalist.¹¹⁷

Austen combined his work for the visitors with a similar role at Christ Church, where he was employed as the Dean and Chapter’s registrar from July 1649 until May 1655.¹¹⁸ Although in June 1653 Austen complained to Hartlib that the College was behind on paying his salary,¹¹⁹ he continued to work there until 1660; by 1659, he appears in the College accounts as a verger (‘virgifer’), in charge of maintaining the chapel, for the undertaking of which he received 15s quarterly.¹²⁰ Again, these roles put Austen at the heart of the puritan reformist party in the university. Christ Church, Oxford’s largest, wealthiest, and most prestigious college, was home to the most influential puritan divines: Edward Reynolds and, after him, Owen, as its Dean; the elder Henry Wilkinson, a canon and Regius Professor of Divinity; Peter French, the brother-in-law of Cromwell; and Henry Langley. Recording the events and decisions of meeting after meeting, Austen would have got to know the likes of Owen and Langley fairly well throughout his long tenure at the College.

Austen’s own beliefs and experiences were very much typical of the godly with whom he mixed. His aforementioned spiritual journey, from fear as to the certainty of his regenerate status to assurance of salvation, followed a pattern familiar to English Calvinists. In moving autobiographical excursions in The Spiritual use of an Orchard, Austen recounted the story of this decline and recovery, explaining how, locked in the midst of despair, it had seemed to him that ‘the Sun was clouded, and the spirit, and sap suspended,’ until

he lost not only the sence of the light of Gods countenance, towards him, & the sight of the graces of his spirit, but questioned all his former Evidences of his interest in Christ, and (especially at some times) even gave all for lost.¹²¹

It was only after a period of ‘Seaventeene, or Eighteene Months, or thereabouts’, that Austen experienced relief, writing of how ‘the sunne of righteousnesse beganne to arise with healing in his wings, and to cast some beames of light into his darke soule, which increased more & more unto the perfect day’.¹²² John Stachniewski has explored the prevalence of such cases of despair and melancholy, usually associated with predestinarian anxiety, amongst the godly.¹²³ As we have seen, John Owen experienced something similar. It was perhaps an unsurprising by-product of a theological system that stressed a rigid doctrine of predestination, as even historical theologians sympathetic to Reformed thought have acknowledged.¹²⁴

Animating this experience was a sense of the need for the individual to confirm their status as one of God’s elect, something that was a constant theme in Austen’s theological work. His spirituality was thus deeply inward-looking and meditative, with a particular focus upon the believer’s ‘communion’ with God, by which assurance of salvation might be bolstered. Already an established motif of puritan mysticism, ‘communion’ with God was usually expressed as a kind of experiential knowledge of God. Often, as Elizabeth Clarke has shown, it was articulated via allegorical readings of the Canticles, taken to represent the mystical marriage of Christ to the church, or to the soul of the believer.¹²⁵ In 1638, for instance, Francis Rous wrote in The heavenly academie of how, married to Christ, Christian believers possess ‘blessings of the highest nature’: ‘remission of sins, peace with God, communion with God, conformitie to God, a spirituall sonship, an inhabitation of the Spirit, an earnest of an eternall inheritance’, and much else besides.¹²⁶ The idea would be developed most fully, and famously, by Owen, first in lectures given in St Mary’s, Oxford, from 1651, and then in his popular Of Communion with God (1657), a work later criticised by William Sherlock as evidence of puritan ‘enthusiasm’.¹²⁷ Austen’s first edition of The Spiritual Use did not treat the topic. But the second edition of 1657, which added a further eighty spiritual aphorisms to the original twenty, did, perhaps a result of his growing association with Owen. In the 26^th ‘Observation’, the fact that the husbandman delights in his fruit trees (and vice versa) was taken to indicate that ‘There is a sweete fellowship, & communion between God, & his People, God delightes in them, and they delight in him.’ Just as in Rous’ work, Austen expressed this through the motif of marriage, rhapsodising the ‘reall, and substantiall pleasures’ available to the believer in Christ, which are nonetheless ‘but tasts, and beginnings of Eternall joyes and satisfactions’. Yet such ‘tasts’ are enough to transport the Christian beyond the visible world: ‘By close Communion with God,’ Austen wrote, ‘we live in another spheare, in another world, then the Common sort of Christians who improve [i.e. make use of] not Communion; it lifts Beleivers as it were in the third heaven, where are unspeakable pleasures, and contentments, and the soule saies, its good being here’.¹²⁸

This spirituality was built upon doctrinal foundations that were stridently Calvinistic. Austen laid down the confessional gauntlet from the off, refusing to shy away from theological polemics: the first ‘Proposition’ of his Spiritual use of an Orchard was a stalwart defence of the doctrine of double predestination, the very issue that had provoked such heated debates in Oxford since the 1630s. Austen affirmed ‘That God from all eternity made choice of what Spirituall Plants he pleased, to plant in his Garden the Church, and refused others.’ This was something that ‘[God’s] word clearely manifests’,¹²⁹ and appeared alongside many other central tenets of Reformed divinity in Austen’s work. He claimed that ‘Unregenerate persons (of themselves) cannot come to Christ, nor bring forth one good fruit’, criticising ‘the Error of those who hold free will’.¹³⁰ But those who were recipients of God’s grace, Austen believed, could not lose their elect status. ‘[T]he sure, and safe condition of every beleever,’ he explained, was that ‘they shall never fall away’, since ‘Saving grace, or the Divine Nature in beleevers, abides in the soule for ever’.¹³¹ Austen also emphasised the believer’s union with Christ, and the identification of the pope as antichrist.¹³² All this was to echo central themes in Reformed Orthodox thought, especially since their codification and defence at the Synod of Dort in 1617.

Such doctrines were hardly uncontroversial, not least because of the growing influence of Arminian theology amongst parliamentarian supporters in the 1650s, spearheaded by the fiery Independent John Goodwin.¹³³ It seems that Hartlib, less keen on doctrinal precision than on the peaceful cooperation of differing religious groups, was wary of Austen publishing such material. We might expect as much from less clearly ‘puritan’ characters. Anthony Wood, for instance, assumed that Austen’s foray into polemical divinity hampered the sale of his horticultural works.¹³⁴ Boyle likewise discouraged any republication of the Spiritual Use when Austen approached him for support in republishing the Treatise in 1665, as he attested to Oldenburg.¹³⁵ But Hartlib had also dissuaded Austen from publishing his spiritual aphorisms. Although Austen initially agreed as to the idea of ‘Printing only the Naturall part of the work first’,¹³⁶ by the time it came to the printing process he had changed his mind, and he appended to the Treatise what he assured Hartlib was ‘only a tast’ of the theological material that he had produced.¹³⁷ It seems likely that Hartlib, who wanted the project to be broad enough as to include the staunchly royalist Earl of Southampton, was wary of alienating potential supporters with divinity that was undoubtedly divisive.

Austen had no such qualms: his work made abundantly stark what he made of the political and religious upheavals of the day. Nowhere is that clearer than in his political theology, and the eschatological scheme wrapped up with it. As the events of the Civil Wars, regicide, and commonwealth developed, puritan preachers and laypeople alike turned to apocalyptic prophecies in scripture to explain the cataclysmic events unfolding around them. This was not a uniquely puritan phenomenon: throughout this period, eschatological fervour featured across the political and religious spectrum, as is evident in John Evelyn’s end time speculations, or John Worthington’s editing of Joseph Mede’s works.¹³⁸ But Austen’s eschatology was most certainly puritan in origin. One influential voice in puritan apocalypticism was that of Owen, who developed a unique eschatological stance in the course of his parliamentary sermons of the late-1640s and early-1650s. In a sermon preached before the Rump on 19 April 1649, Owen advanced a novel interpretation of Hebrews 12:26 (‘Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven’), arguing that the ‘shaking’ of ‘heaven and earth’ should be understood as the providential refashioning of earthly kingdoms that would usher in the kingdom of Christ on earth. As Crawford Gribben has observed, this interpretation ran counter to the prevailing reading of the verse amongst English puritans, as shaped by Franciscus Junius’s notes in the Geneva Bible;¹³⁹ it also differed from the interpretations of other radical Independents.¹⁴⁰ Owen himself acknowledged this in the text of his published sermon. But the consent of ‘Junius, and after him, most of ours’ did not stop him from making the radical claim that ‘The Heavens of the Nations’ are ‘even their Politicall heights and glory, those Forms of Government which they have framed … with the grandeur and lustre of their Dominions’, while the ‘Nations Earth is the multitudes of their people, their strength and power, whereby their Heavens or politicall heights are supported.’¹⁴¹ For Owen, the political turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s was a sure sign that the eschaton was nigh.¹⁴²

Austen’s own eschatological beliefs echo those of Owen, in language that is strikingly redolent of the Cromwellian Independent. Towards the end of his original Spiritual Use of an Orchard, Austen used pruning and digging as analogies for God’s providential governance of political affairs: just as the pruning of fruit trees leads to their eventual fruitfulness, so the commotions afflicting the church ‘will end in the settlement, peace, and glory of it.’ They were all a part of the ‘great work’ of God in the world, a work which he ‘is now about … even in our daies’. Crucially, Austen made this claim with reference to the same interpretation of Hebrews 12:26 as Owen, directly linking the ‘shaking’ spoken therein to political tumult: ‘When were the Heavens, and the Earth, and the Sea, so shaken as they have been of late yeares, who knowes not of the overturnings, and great alterations, that have been among us both in Church and State.’¹⁴³

Austen seems to have taken Owen’s eschatology even further, his thought shaped by Fifth Monarchist literature. In the 1657 edition of The Spiritual Use, he implored his readers to observe ‘the visibile dispensations of providence’ so as to discern ‘what are the Designes of God in this our generation’, citing John Tillinghast’s Generation Work (1653), which encouraged much the same.¹⁴⁴ Tillinghast had been influenced by Owen’s parliamentary sermons, though he took the historicist reading of apocalyptic texts further still, providing precise dates for the fall of the Roman Church (1656) and the onset of the millennium (1701).¹⁴⁵ That he drew upon Tillinghast is indicative of the remarkable durability of Austen’s eschatological hope. By 1657, many puritan figures had stepped back from the eschatological optimism of 1649–50, partly in response to the threat posed by the Fifth Monarchists.¹⁴⁶ But Austen had no such qualms in identifying himself with the group. And indeed, none of the eschatological sections of Austen’s 1653 Spiritual Use were altered upon its republication in 1657. Confident of ‘the certaine downefall of Antichrist’, Austen remained hopeful of a transformation in the church, and especially its ministry, in these last days of the world:

surely the time is at hand (and is not the day dawned already?) when the Gospell Ministry shall be purged, the drosse (carnall Ministers) shall be cast out, and the pure mettle preserved, according as was Prophesied, Mal. 3. 1,2,3.¹⁴⁷

To this eschatology was wedded, somewhat unsurprisingly, a political radicalism. Describing the inevitable triumph of the Christian church, in 1653 Austen expressed his confidence that ‘such as oppose [Christ], and stand out in rebellion against him (though they be Kings and Monarch’s) … he will break such with a rod of Iron, & dash them in peeces like a Potters vessel, Psal:2.9.’¹⁴⁸ Although this was an uncontroversial interpretation of the biblical text, it represented a very specific intervention in the fraught political climate of the 1650s, the memory of the regicide still fresh. There could be no doubting Austen’s politics.

III

Austen, then, was very much a coreligionist of the puritans seeking to turn Oxford to the Cromwellian cause in the 1650s. But to what extent did he influence them? It has often been assumed that divines like Owen and Langley expressed little interest in the concerns of the Hartlib circle. For the most part, Charles Webster’s narrative was built upon viewing the likes of Wilkins or Boyle as ‘puritans’, rather than a thorough analysis of the response of divines like Owen to Baconian ideals. Meanwhile, historians of theology, religion, and politics – who have looked at the Oxford puritans more thoroughly – have been explicit in distancing them from Hartlibian ideas. Blair Worden, in his work on Interregnum Oxford, has claimed that the reaction to Hartlib’s proposals for educational reform ‘was unwelcoming’ and that ‘his schemes for reform were ignored’ across the academic spectrum.¹⁴⁹ Similarly, Richard Greaves has claimed that John Owen ‘displayed little interest in curricular reform, especially the new science’ – and indeed, there is no mention of Hartlib or Baconian ideas in any of the more specialised literature on the Reformed divine.¹⁵⁰ To be fair to such scholarship, the evidence as to puritan responses to Hartlibian ideas is murky. If we take the case of Owen, the long-serving Vice-Chancellor, the sources indicate disparate conclusions. In July 1654 he delivered an oration at the university’s ‘Act’, or Comitia, a yearly celebration that included festivities and mock disputations, in which he certainly seemed to affirm his support for the new learning, noting with pleasure that the university was ‘making daily progress … in widening the boundaries of the sciences and in promoting literature side by side with piety and religion.’¹⁵¹ Three years later, again speaking at the Comitia, Owen lauded ‘the outstanding mathematicians’ of the university, who,

exceeding the common lot of learned men, have so clearly and eloquently put before the eyes of the learned new, marvellous, astonishing things, extracted from the very entrails of nature unknown to their predecessors, to be admired by their successors, not without glory and fame both to themselves and the University [.]¹⁵²

Although Hartlib was less concerned with geometry than with more obviously practical disciplines, Owen’s reference to experimental method in natural philosophy was clearly Baconian in tone.

That Owen may have been sympathetic to the Baconian designs of the Hartlib circle is further suggested when we consider the evidence of his support for curricular reform. Having already been consulted on proposed revisions to the constitution of Trinity College, Dublin, during his sojourn in Ireland in 1649, in 1657 Owen was asked by Henry Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to send a copy of Oxford’s statutes as a model for the foundation of a proposed second college for the University of Dublin. Owen’s response hardly voiced confidence in Oxford’s statutes, which had been framed under Archbishop Laud and famously mandated a rigid adherence to Aristotle’s corpus. ‘[O]ur statutes,’ he related, ‘as also those of the other university, beinge framed to the Spirit and road of studys in former days, will scarsly upon consideration, be found to be the best expediente for the promotion of the good ends of Godlinesse and solid literature which are in your ayme.’ He encouraged the Lord Lieutenant, instead, to seek out ‘men of Ability, wisdom, and piety’ who would be able to ‘compose a body of orders and statutes suited to the present light’.¹⁵³

At first glance this might seem to be an uncomplicated echo of Hartlibian sentiments. In 1648, for instance, Thomas Gilson, an admirer of Hartlib who was a fellow of Merton College, wrote excitedly to the intelligencer of the opportunity ‘to Reforme statutes & constitutions’ at Oxford, thereby ‘planting ingenuity & advancinge Learninge’.¹⁵⁴ But it is not clear what Owen meant by ‘the present light’, to which the Laudian statutes were not, in his estimation, suited. He had already used identical language in what was clearly a religious sense. His 1649 work Of toleration, appended to the printed edition of his regicide sermon, spoke of the spiritual knowledge granted to believers as ‘their present light and apprehension’.¹⁵⁵ His arch-nemesis John Goodwin, meanwhile, used the phrase in a similar fashion, as referring to believers’ knowledge of God and how he ought to be worshipped, something he made clear in a work defending religious toleration.¹⁵⁶

If that makes the case complicated, so too does a comment from Ralph Josselin, the lifelong diarist and minister of Earls Colne in Essex. Owen had ministered in neighbouring parishes to Josselin during the 1640s, first in Fordham, about five miles to the east of Earls Colne, from July 1643, and then in Coggeshall, a similar distance to the south, from August 1646.¹⁵⁷ Josselin had been close to Owen during his tenure as an Essex pastor, and he duly kept his eye on Owen after the latter moved to Oxford in the 1650s.¹⁵⁸ Word reached him of Owen’s controversial attempts to reform the University, which included reducing the number of oaths that university members had to swear, abolishing the Comitia, removing the Convocation voting rights of MAs, and reforming academic dress. On 8 July 1656, Josselin recorded how he

Heard how Dr owen endeavoured to lay down all the badges of schollers distinction in the universities: Hoods, caps, gowns, degrees, lay by all studdie of philosophy he is become a great scorne, the Lord keepe him from Temptacons …¹⁵⁹

The Owen Josselin got wind of was not a learned Reformed divine who sought to encourage a Hartlibian approach to natural philosophy, but an anti-intellectual iconoclast.

But light is shed on this question by Austen’s work. The second edition of The Spiritual Use (1657) replicated the original twenty aphorisms of the first edition, with no changes in the body of the text. But Austen did make one addition to the marginalia. The sixteenth ‘observation in nature’ led to a discussion of the necessity of sending out ‘University men … into the service of the Church, and Commonwealth’,¹⁶⁰ in which Austen added a word of advice absent from the original text. College heads, he wrote, ought to prepare newly-trained ministers ‘to preach Christ’,

by making Orders, and Rules in the severall societies for that end; and not to walke (in this great respect) by statutes made in darke, corrupt times; Is it likely such should be meete Rules for these Gospell times, these times of light, and Reformation?¹⁶¹

This comment almost certainly referred to the Laudian statutes, which in Austen’s estimation were hopelessly outdated. Of course, the context was a discussion of training for the ministry, and it is certain that he had in his sights the moral deficiency of the statutes, which to many Oxford puritans were insufficiently strict in mandating godly religious practices. But it is striking that Austen, who happily mixed puritan eschatology with Baconian utilitarianism, should take aim at the rigidly Aristotelian statutes, and in language so clearly reminiscent of Owen’s. Clearly, an emphasis on moral reformation could go hand-in-hand with a new approach to nature: and Owen, alongside Austen, had both in mind when criticising the Laudian statutes.

If Owen was speaking in Hartlibian terms of the deficiency of the statutes, this makes sense of Josselin’s comments about his approach to philosophy. To Josselin, educated at Cambridge in the 1630s, long before the mechanical philosophy began to have a foothold in the university, a Baconian emphasis on experiment and practical knowledge of nature would have seemed at odds with the emphases of traditional philosophy; indeed, it would have seemed positively unphilosophical. After all, the planting of fruit trees was (and still is) a rather different endeavour to Aristotelian metaphysics, and Hartlib’s schemes – focused on husbandry, silk-worms, bee hives, and enclosures – were thus often seen as anti-philosophical. Speaking at the funeral of John Langley, high master of St Paul’s, in 1657, Edward Reynolds criticised some Lutherans who, neglecting philosophy, ‘turned to Mechanick imployments’ and ‘Husbandry’.¹⁶² (This was an unfortunately ironic comment, given John Langley’s enthusiasm for Hartlib and Austen’s scheme for fruit tree planting.)¹⁶³ To the likes of Josselin and Reynolds, Owen’s support of Hartlib’s schemes for improvement would have seemed to amount to the neglect of philosophy itself.

But this enthusiasm for Hartlib and his designs was not unique to (Henry) Langley and Owen among the Oxford puritans. As we have seen, Austen’s plans to buy Shotover forest were endorsed by the great and the good of the puritan party in town and university – among them John Owen, the mayor John Nixon, and the divines Thankful Owen and Tobias Garbrand.¹⁶⁴ In the two Owens, Austen could count as his supporters two of the committee members of the second and third parliamentary visitations.¹⁶⁵ As well as seeking support for his scheme to buy Shotover Forest, in February 1654 Austen rallied his influential Oxonian contacts to provide a testimonial to the value of his national fruit tree planting scheme. Among the signees was Peter French, the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell who was a canon at Christ Church. French had been reading Hartlib’s Legacie: or An Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry (first ed., 1651) – apparently with some enthusiasm, for he desired Austen to procure from Hartlib further instructions for cultivating clover grass.¹⁶⁶

The likes of French, Owen, and Langley show that many Oxford puritans were amenable to Hartlib and Austen’s pleas for curricular reform and the advancement of learning. But it is not easy to gauge the impact that this receptiveness had. For one thing, the Cromwellian years were too short-lived, and the power-brokers of university life and politics soon found themselves proscribed from the intellectual mainstream. But even during their years in power, their primary aims belonged not to the world of fruit trees and silkworms but to defending the cause of the Reformed faith. Between the tasks of preaching, ministering in gathered congregations, leading colleges, and writing capacious theological treatises, little time could be set aside for the projects that the Hartlibians spent their days toying with. John Owen claimed (admittedly with a degree of self-aggrandizement) that his voluminous Doctrine of the Saints Perseverance (1654) was composed during ‘Journeyes, and such like avocations from [his] ordinary course of studies, and imployments, with some spare hours’.¹⁶⁷ Henry Langley’s theological labours never even made it into print – unsurprising, perhaps, for someone who fulfilled the twin duties of a canonry at Christ Church and the presidency of Pembroke College with such aplomb. When Ralph Austen acted as a conduit between Hartlib and Goodwin, it was the latter’s busyness that prevented his engagement with the Prussian’s schemes. Twice in 1655 the horticulturalist called on Goodwin, only to find the great Independent to be away from town.¹⁶⁸ When he finally did track him down, Austen was able to extract a promise of a reply to Hartlib, but preparations for the Act sermon soon got in the way.¹⁶⁹

And yet, given this, the degree of engagement with Baconian ideas amongst these divines is remarkable. Owen, between all his duties, found time to read Austen’s Treatise of Fruit-Trees, and made sure to meet Hartlib during a visit to the capital. Langley arranged financial support for Hartlib; many of Oxford’s premier puritans encouraged Austen’s labours, as we have seen. We have to dig beneath the surface of the sources available to discern these things; and indeed, much of the literature on these figures has failed to observe their connection to the Hartlib circle.¹⁷⁰ But the glimpse of puritan engagement with reformist ideas that we gain pays dividends. Puritans like Owen and Langley encouraged Hartlibian involvement in Oxford – and in doing so they left their mark on the history of natural philosophy in this period.

IV

At the Restoration, Austen followed many of his fellow puritans into nonconformity. But, dejected as he was in 1660, his religious radicalism only increased thereafter. Given his relationship to Owen and Langley, it seems likely that he was an Independent during the 1650s. But already in 1657 he had been arguing for the toleration of Baptists (who were Congregationalists in polity, but rejected the practice of paedobaptism) on the basis of the fact that ‘the difference [between the two positions] will prove (when throughly understood) but a circumstantiall difference’.¹⁷¹ And it seems possible that he himself became a Baptist in the final years of his life. His 1676 anti-Quaker work draws almost exclusively on Baptist writings – particularly Thomas Hicks’ Three Dialogues Between a Christian and a Quaker (1675) – rather than on the works of his puritan colleagues from the Cromwellian days.¹⁷² Even more strikingly, Austen himself appears to have flirted with Quakerism, the experience of which prompted his writing The Strong Man Armed Not Cast Out (1676). This text was written against an anti-Independent pamphlet titled The Strong Man Armed Cast Out (1674), by James Jackson, an ex-Independent turned convinced Quaker (clearly Austen’s horticultural talents were not matched by a gift for witty ripostes). Jackson responded to Austen’s invective with a short ad hominem pamphlet attack, titled The Malice of the Rebellious Husband-men Against the True Heir (1676). The acme of Jackson’s assault on Austen’s work came when he accused the Oxonian of hypocrisy: for Austen had – or so Jackson claimed – been a frequent attender of London Quaker meetings. ‘[T]hou went to most meetings of Friends in London’, he accused Austen, ‘and heard several Friends declare’. Indeed, he went on:

after thou hadst heard Alexander Parker [a prominent Public Friend], thou went to him, and discours’d with him, and came and told B. Clarke, Stationer in George Yard Lumbard-street, how sound thou found this Parker, and how well thou liked such and such, and could willingly joyn with them.¹⁷³

Of course, the polemical nature of this exchange casts some doubt upon his account. But the mention of the stationer Benjamin Clark adds credibility to the tale: Jackson is appealing to the testimony of a well-known witness, a publisher whose print output would soon include many Quaker works.¹⁷⁴ It is unlikely that it was completely unsubstantiated.

With all Austen’s religious radicalism, we might expect to find him proscribed from the world of Restoration natural philosophy – which, after all, stressed its distance from Interregnum puritanism, and its allegiance to the Stuart church-state established in 1662.¹⁷⁵ But Austen was not completely ostracised: indeed, he remained an important figure in agricultural circles. When John Worlidge published his Systema Agriculturæ (1669), he included ‘A Catalogue of Such Authors Who have written of Agriculture’, describing Austen’s Treatise as ‘A necessary Work’.¹⁷⁶ Later in the same work, he pointed his readers to Austen’s description of the pleasures and profits to be had by fruit-tree cultivation.¹⁷⁷ And although Evelyn’s Sylva – the first work published under the Royal Society’s imprimatur – did not mention the Oxonian horticulturalist, one of the appendices to Pomona, ‘Aphorisms concerning Cider By M Beale’, acknowledged his opinion about the best apple varieties for cider.¹⁷⁸ Pomona, published under Evelyn’s editorship, was mostly composed by Beale, Austen’s correspondent. The new edition of the work, published in 1670, contained light edits to Beale’s original text, including a new acknowledgement of the opinion of ‘the Industrious Mr. Austin’ as to correct grafting methods (Beale advocated cleft grafting, while Austen swore by tongue grafting).¹⁷⁹ Clearly, Austen’s work remained influential.

Part of the reason for this continued influence was that Austen retained powerful sources of patronage. Most significantly, he enjoyed the continued support of Robert Boyle. In early December 1664, Boyle sent Oldenburg a paper by Austen.¹⁸⁰ Upon Oldenburg’s instigation, it was read at the Royal Society on 14 December.¹⁸¹ This paper, which is extant in the archives of the Royal Society, represented a summary of Austen’s key convictions and concerns as to the benefit and necessity of his arboricultural schemes. Titled ‘Certaine Queries humbly propounded to the honourable & Royall Societie’, it included six major proposals:

1. That the Royal Society invest in improving ‘the knowne, & Experimented waies of Profitt, vnto greatter Profitts, rather then to labour in waies vncertaine, & vntry’d’;

2. that salaried officers be appointed to undertake a scheme of fruit tree planting;

3. that the Society promote cider production and consumption, until its popularity has outpaced that of both beer and wine;

4. that fruit trees should be planted on waste lands by the poor, providing relief for them;

5. that the poor should themselves be employed in this work, providing them with a ready income;

6. that the Society should continue to seek ‘Riches, health, & long-life’ for mankind.¹⁸²

By all accounts the paper received a favourable response. The Society’s Georgical Committee (which dealt with agricultural matters) was asked to look into it, and, at the following week’s meeting, Austen’s proposal ‘was ordered to be recommended to such persons of the Society, as were members of the parliament’, in response to his request for political action on the matter.¹⁸³

Doubtless spurred on by the success of his paper, Austen wrote to Boyle in January 1665 about the possibility of producing a third edition of his Treatise, which he proposed to dedicate to the physicist. It is clear that he recognised the impact his religious reputation could have on its reception: promising to keep back the material from The Spirituall Use, Austen suggested that Boyle’s patronage would render the work ‘more profitable to my selfe, and more acceptable to others’ than would otherwise be the case.¹⁸⁴ The epistle dedicatory of the new volume (now in octavo format) duly praised Boyle, and attempted to connect Austen’s concerns to those of the physicist and the Royal Society at large, observing how both Boyle and the Society ‘have been pleased … to take into Consideration the Work of Planting and Preserving all sorts of Trees; not onely of Forrest-trees for Building, Fuel, and other uses, but also of Fruit-trees’.¹⁸⁵ Although Boyle seems to have been somewhat cagey about his patronage of the new edition (his letter to Oldenburg in September, announcing the work’s printing, is rather apologetical in tone: ‘to whose publication I doe not repent’, he remarks of his involvement),¹⁸⁶ he promised to send a copy to Oldenburg, who looked forward to receiving ‘Mr Austins new and reformed Edition’ in due course.¹⁸⁷

In Boyle, Austen enjoyed the patronage of the foremost figure in Restoration natural philosophy. But he was also looked upon favourably by Oldenburg, as this correspondence suggests. Although it was Boyle who sent Austen’s ‘Certaine Queries’ to Oldenburg, it was the latter who made sure they were presented to the Royal Society, hoping as he did so that Boyle would ‘not Judge amisse to have [Austen’s paper] represented and recommended to [the Society], to consider ‹of› the carrying of it on’. Indeed, Oldenburg was convinced that the Society ‘will be very well pleased’ with Austen’s work.¹⁸⁸ More than a decade later, Oldenburg’s support of Austen was undimmed. In 1676 he received three letters on fruit tree husbandry – two from Beale, and one from Beale’s colleague Anthony Lawrence. As we will see, Lawrence’s letter praised Austen in no uncertain terms, as a man who had done great good for the nation: so much good, in fact, that a ‘worthy Friend’ had ‘devised a Monument for him’, which praised him as the one who ‘first prepared the best cider with art and industry at Oxford’.¹⁸⁹ The letter itself is not extant, but Oldenburg kept the drawing of the monument design that Lawrence had sent him, inserting it into a section of his commonplace notes from the 1650s that dealt with cider production – showing, at the very least, that he thought information on Austen worth preserving.¹⁹⁰ He also encouraged these three letters to be printed – and soon enough they were issued as Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens, and Vineyards Encouraged, discussed above (Figures 2 and 3). This tract, which bore the names of Beale and Lawrence, seemed to complain about Oldenburg’s neglect of Austen in the Philosophical Transactions. But not long after its publication, Beale wrote to Boyle disclaiming responsibility for the piece and explaining that it was Oldenburg who encouraged its printing.¹⁹¹ Oldenburg, who also recommended Austen to Newton around this time, was clearly supportive of the Oxford cider man.

Figure 2. The design of the proposed monument to Austen, which seems never to have been produced, as printed in Beale and Lawrence’s Nurseries (1676), 7. Reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford.

Figure 3. The original drawing, sent by Lawrence to Oldenburg, and inserted by the latter into his commonplace notes (RSA, CLP/7i/30, between fols. 102 and 103). Reproduced by kind permission of the President and Fellows of the Royal Society of London.

In his recommendation to Newton, it seems that Oldenburg was particularly influenced by Lawrence’s praise of Austen. Indeed, in Lawrence’s short piece, Austen enjoyed the most outspoken approbation of his career. Anthony Lawrence had been a student at Oxford in the 1660s and 1670s: matriculating at Oriel in 1668, he graduated BA in 1672 and MA in 1674, and he seems also to have been an extra licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1677.¹⁹² But his main employment was in husbandry, working either for Beale or his family, who were influential cider producers in Herefordshire. Beale, writing to Boyle in November 1676, described how Lawrence had helped the cause of fruit tree husbandry by ‘Transporting many thousands of Graffes of Apples & Peares of the best Cyder fruite out of Herefordshire & Worchestersheire into Somersetts Dorsetts Devons, and Cornwall: and by sending Graffes to London & by Rideing up and Downe to Give Instructions, & Incouragements.’¹⁹³ He would go on to describe Lawrence, in a letter to Evelyn in September 1678, as ‘[his] Man’.¹⁹⁴ Lawrence had clearly come across Austen during his time as a student in Oxford, and was perturbed to see his reputation stifled; surely it was ‘meerly by Incogitance,’ he wrote, ‘that that Industrious Author, Mr. Austen, hath not been hitherto mentioned’ in the Philosophical Transactions.¹⁹⁵ The letter to Oldenburg was an attempt to set that right, and included the most effusive praise of Austen. ‘This plain Writer,’ he wrote, ‘who pretends to no glory in Rhetoric, hath by his labours and Experiments done more good for Oxford, and thence for England, than is yet done by many gaudy Gallants, who spend more in a day, than this honest Nursery-man can spare in a year.’ Indeed, Lawrence was certain that Austen would receive the approbation of posterity, his labours being so helpful in the cause of good scholarship:

And possibly the next Age may enroll him among Benefactors, as if he had founded or endowed a Colledge. For by experience it is throughly confirmed, That a seasonable and moderate use of good Cider is the surest remedy and preservative against the Diseases which do frequently afflict the sedentary Life of them that are seriously studious.¹⁹⁶

Lawrence had no doubt that cider was the key to a healthy life, and thus a happy England: and, as far as he was concerned, Austen was the hero of seventeenth-century cider production.

But this very pamphlet reveals the ambiguities of Austen’s involvement with post-Restoration agricultural and natural-philosophical circles. For although the short collection of letters was published in the names of both Beale and Lawrence, the west country clergyman was quick to denounce the work ever having seen the light of day. On 29 November 1676 he wrote to Boyle, seeking to apologise that the letters had been published, and explaining how its printing came about:

Sir Insteed of Returning you those many thankes, which I am Resolved for ever to owe you, I must fall on begging; First that you will pardon a few wild sheets bearing the Tytle of nurseryes, & my name, but (in truth) They are not myne: For they came soe hastily from my over Runing pen, & slipt away, out of my ‹power› soe Suddainly, that they never had one minute of my second Thoughts: Neither had they blasted my name abroad, if Mr Oldenburghs perswasions had not prevailed with mee, more, then my owne Judgment & the sense of my owne Reputation.¹⁹⁷

What caused Beale so to recoil from the printing of the letters? Beale’s own contribution to the pamphlet was hardly controversial: merely an echo of sentiments already expressed in Herefordshire Orchards (1657) and Pomona. So it is likely that Beale’s fears for his reputation stemmed from the pamphlet’s praise of Austen. Immediately after the above-quoted comments, he excoriated Austen, claiming ‘[t]hat Anthony Lawrence can doe more for propogation of Orchards in five yeares, than Mr Austen hath donne in Fifty two yeares as hee numbers them’ – remarkable comments from one who had collaborated so closely with the Oxford horticulturalist. But Beale had long been reticent to be publicly associated with Austen. In private he was capable of praising Austen’s work, being cordial enough in their correspondence, and mentioning him in the same breath as Bacon in one letter to Boyle.¹⁹⁸ But his public acknowledgements of Austen were usually critical, drawing attention to their differences over grafting methods or apple varieties for cider.¹⁹⁹ In the latter case, Beale was particularly unfair, consistently representing Austen as being opposed to the famous Red-Streak variety, even after the Oxonian had acknowledged its value as early as 1658, and had himself cultivated it in Oxford, according to Lawrence.²⁰⁰

There are a variety of explanations for this hostility. Certainly, Austen did not help himself, openly criticising Beale’s work when he found it lacking. In January 1666 he wrote to Beale to give his opinion of Pomona. Although he praised it as an ‘excellent peece’, which he hoped would ‘haue a spetiall influence vpon many’, he lambasted Beale’s use of the classical horticulturalist Palladius, who had claimed that any two different types of tree could be grafted together: this was ‘a thing neuer done, but in [Palladius’] phansy’.²⁰¹ But Beale’s hostility seems most likely to have stemmed from Austen’s rather unfortunate religious and political sensibilities. Beale was not alone in this. For even despite Austen’s continued influence, thanks to the patronage of Boyle and Oldenburg, his work often went unacknowledged. As we have seen, no mention of him was ever made in the Philosophical Transactions. Nor was he ever acknowledged in the publications of John Houghton, the ‘heir’ to the Royal Society’s Georgical Committee whose Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1692–1703) included pieces on the cultivation of cider.²⁰² Boyle never mentioned him in print, despite their collaboration on horticultural matters. And though the Royal Society had horticultural works in its library, none of Austen’s books featured.²⁰³

Most significantly, the paper presented at the Royal Society in December 1664 marked the acme of Austen’s involvement with the learned society. One ‘Mr Austin’, recorded as a member of the Society’s Georgical Committee, has been taken by historians to be the Oxford horticulturalist.²⁰⁴ Almost certainly, this identification is false. Austen’s paper was recommended to the committee, as we have seen; a curious response, if he was himself a member. More concretely, we can identify every member of the Georgical Committee by examining the records of the Society; these reveal that each committee member was already an elected fellow by the time of their appointment to it.²⁰⁵ Thus it is almost certain that the ‘Mr Austin’ was also a fellow: John Austin, the Roman Catholic devotional writer who dabbled in mathematics, and was elected FRS on 20 May 1663.²⁰⁶ Beyond his brief moment in the limelight in December 1664, it seems that Ralph Austen never made significant inroads into the natural-philosophical establishment.

V

Austen, then, never achieved the influence he sought. But he did enjoy continued successes plying his trade in Oxford, even amidst a political climate so hostile to much of what he represented. In his latter years, he seems to have started doing quite well for himself: according to Anthony Lawrence, in the final months of his life Austen expanded his nursery grounds by twenty-seven acres, making good his failed attempt to purchase Shotover forest in the 1650s.²⁰⁷ And his publishing career was revived, too. In 1676 he published A Dialogve (or Familiar Discourse) and Conference betweene a Husbandman and Fruit-Trees; in his Nurseries, Orchards, and Gardens, a work which reincorporated much of the material of his earlier Treatise of Fruit-trees, this time in dialogue format. Scattered references to Aquinas, absent from any of his earlier oeuvre, suggest that his reading projects had continued throughout the Restoration period.²⁰⁸ The same year, of course, he published his anti-Quaker piece. But later that year, Austen died without issue, leaving behind his wife.²⁰⁹ He was one of the last of a generation of commonwealthmen wedded to the heady utopian ideals of that age, his final years lived as something of an anachronism amidst a world alien to that in which he had first found acclaim.

Writing in the 1680s, Anthony Wood produced a brief biographical sketch of Austen for his Athenæ Oxoniensis (1692). He was not an easy man for Wood to pin down. Despite his hostility to the presence of puritan forces in Oxford, Wood could not help but acknowledge that Austen ‘was a very useful man in his generation,’ someone who ‘spent all his time in Oxon to his death, in planting gardens there and near it, in grafting, in oculating, raising Fruit-trees, &c.’ But Austen’s religion had proved too much for some would-be supporters. According to Wood, appetite for Austen’s Treatise was attenuated by the presence of divinity alongside it:

… it is very probable that [A Treatise of Fruit-Trees] might have been printed more than twice had not he, the author, added to, and bound with, it another treatise as big as the former entit. The spiritual use of an Orchard, or garden of Fruit-Trees, &c. Which being all divinity and nothing therein of the practick part of Gardening, many therefore did refuse to buy it.²¹⁰

Wood, of course, was overstating the case – as we have seen, the work was printed more than twice. But he was accurately representing the ambiguities of responses to Austen. Had he stuck to fruit trees and cider, Wood implied, Austen might be better known today.

But it is precisely in this amalgam of puritan divinity and Baconian natural philosophy that Austen’s interest to today’s historian lies. Austen shows that seventeenth-century natural philosophy – and particularly the broad, utilitarian vision of bettering the human condition through the mastery of nature – could very much be the preserve of puritans. As much as he was a lifelong Calvinist, he remained a committed Baconian. It may be that natural philosophy in this period was a particularly ‘latitudinarian’ endeavour, as has been suggested. But at the very least, Austen complicates that picture. And he suggests that there is more gainful research to be done on the relationship between religious concerns and natural philosophy in this period. Undoubtedly, there are other figures to whom we might apply the same kind of precise religious taxonomies that are instructive in studying Austen.

That relationship, of course, worked both ways: and there has been even less research done on the impact of the natural philosophy of the Royal Society and its forebears on the puritan divines with whom Austen associated. The apparent silence of figures like John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, or Henry Langley on natural-philosophical matters must not be taken at face value: as we have seen, they most certainly engaged with Hartlibian ideas. Indeed, the gulf between their published work and private intellectual engagement suggests that there is more work to be done on this issue – work that digs beneath the surface to reconstruct a picture of intellectual engagement that goes beyond the written text, and which disentangles the complex web of intellectual, religious and political allegiances and concerns that governed literary interventions in the natural-philosophical and theological discourses of this period.

That is not an easy task. Political considerations, personal animosities, and the ever-present spectre of religion constantly shaped how theologians and natural philosophers alike disseminated, debated and discussed ideas. As Austen indicates, this was far from a simple process. In a sense, natural philosophy was a non-confessional enterprise, allowing for a figure as politically haphazard as Austen (at least in the world of the 1660s) to have a foot in the door of a learned society explicitly setting out to show its commitment to the Stuart establishment. But the kind of puritan radicalism represented by Austen could also be problematic. Hence the puzzle of Austen’s involvement with the Royal Society and various of its fellows: championed by some, cautiously promoted by others, lambasted by a few. As a result, Austen achieved relative success, while never quite enjoying the reputation he deserved, as one who had done so much for England’s trade in fruit and cider.

Declaration of Interest

Nothing to declare.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael Edwards, Samuel Tunnicliffe, and an anonymous reviewer, who provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of Gurnee Hart and the estate of Christopher Hogwood, who between them endowed the scholarship that made this research possible.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jesus College, University of Cambridge Gurnee Hart and Hogwood PhD Scholarship.

Notes

1 Evelyn, ed., Pomona, 1^st ed., 1–4.

² Beale, Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens, and Vineyards Encouraged, 1.

³ Newton to Oldenburg, 2 September 1676, in Turnbull, ed., Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 2^nd vol., 93.

⁴ Newton to Oldenburg, 14 November 1676, in ibid., 181.

⁵ Newton to Oldenburg, 28 November 1676, in ibid., 185; Oldenburg to Newton, 2 January 1677, in ibid., 187.

⁶ Only four historians have treated Austen in any detail; see Webster, Great Instauration, 470–80; Turner, ‘Ralph Austen, an Oxford Horticulturist of the Seventeenth Century’, 39–45; idem, ‘Austen, Ralph (c. 1612–1676)’, in ODNB; Bennett and Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple, 49–51.

⁷ For biographical details see Thirsk, ‘Blith, Walter (bap. 1605, d. 1654)’, in ODNB. Note, however, that Thirsk misdates Blith’s death, which Hartlib reported to Austen on 21 October 1652, as is clear from Austen’s reply. See Austen to Hartlib, 1 November 1652, in The Hartlib Papers (hereafter HP), 41/1/12A–13B.

⁸ Richard L. Greaves, ‘Puritanism and Science: The Anatomy of a Controversy’, 345–68; Shapiro, John Wilkins, 224–50; idem, ‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, 286–316; Jacob and Jacob, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science’, 251–67; Mulligan, ‘Puritans and English Science: A Critique of Webster’, 456–69.

⁹ See, e.g., Shapiro, ‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’; Burnham ‘The Latitudinarian Background to the Royal Society, 1647-1667’.

¹⁰ Worden, ‘Politics, Piety, and Learning: Cromwellian Oxford’, 91–193; Gribben, John Owen, 66–67; Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter, and the Formation of Nonconformity, 108–16; Toon, God’s Statesman, 73–76; Lawrence, ‘Transmission and Transformation’. In his biographical entry, for instance, Lawrence makes no mention of Hartlib’s hopes that Goodwin might be a conduit for his plans for curricular reform at Oxford; see Lawrence, ‘Goodwin, Thomas (1600–1680)’, in ODNB. An exception to this historiographical trend is found in Sytsma’s work; see, inter alia, Sytsma, ‘Puritan Critics of New Philosophy, ca. 1660-1680’, 116–50.

¹¹ There were, notoriously, few moderate responses to Descartes’s philosophy among Dutch Reformed divines; see Israel, Dutch Republic, 889–99.

¹² Turner, ‘Ralph Austen, an Oxford Horticulturist of the Seventeenth Century’; Turner, ‘Austen, Ralph (c. 1612–1676)’. There is no extant evidence concerning Austen or any of his relations in the local parish church of St Edward the Confessor, where he was almost certainly baptised, and which was remodelled significantly in the 1670s.

¹³ Blith, English Improver Improved, 269 (due to a pagination error this is printed as 259).

¹⁴ Turner, ‘Ralph Austen, an Oxford Horticulturist of the Seventeenth Century’, 39.

¹⁵ Herefordshire Archives and Record Centre, B47/S16; Plot, Natural History of Stafford-Shire, 384.

¹⁶ See Austen, Observations, 14, where he compares the nature of a tree to the nature of a soul, which is fully in every part of the body, ‘tota in toto, & tota in qualibet parte’, a common scholastic doctrine which the philosopher Henry More dubbed ‘holenmerism’.

¹⁷ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., preface ‘To the Reader’.

¹⁸ The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, DR 18/10/63/8-9.

¹⁹ à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2^nd vol., 780. The record of the parliamentary visitation that we have belonged to Austen and was donated to the Bodleian in 1687, probably by his executors; see Bodleian MS e Mus. 77.

²⁰ Blith, English Improver Improved, 268–69 (pagination error reads 258–59).

²¹ à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2^nd vol., 780; Bodleian Library Records e. 533, fol. 161^r.

²² Austen to Benjamin Martin, 26 February 1652, HP 41/1/2A–3B. Hartlib recorded in the margins of this letter that Martin was ‘One of Mr Speakers Gentlemen’.

²³ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., preface ‘To the Reader’.

²⁴ Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 109.

²⁵ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., preface ‘To the Reader’.

²⁶ Austen, Observations, 14.

²⁷ Reid, Metaphysics, 142–47.

²⁸ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., 91; cf. Aristotle, The Politics, 1256b.

²⁹ Hakewill, Apologie, sigs. b2^v–b2^r; Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 33.

³⁰ Poole, ‘The Evolution of George Hakewill’s Apologie’, 2.

³¹ Webster, Great Instauration, 21–22. For Twisse’s Aristotelianism, see Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian’, 647–52.

³² Webster, Great Instauration, 478.

³³ Sharrock, ‘Good Reader’, in Austen, Observations.

³⁴ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., 91.

³⁵ Ibid., 92–93.

³⁶ Austen To Hartlib, 23 April 1652, HP 41/1/6A.

³⁷ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 2^nd ed.

³⁸ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., 45.

³⁹ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 2^nd ed., 44.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 42.

⁴¹ Ibid., 55.

⁴² Ibid., 63.

⁴³ Ibid., 66.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 76–78.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 76–77.

⁴⁶ Austen to Beale, 7 September 1658, HP 52/169A–B.

⁴⁷ Beale to Austen, 16 September 1658, HP 52/171B–172B.

⁴⁸ Austen, Observations, 39–40.

⁴⁹ Austen to Hartlib, 6 May 1653, HP 41/1/26A.

⁵⁰ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., 40.

⁵¹ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., 24, 26–27. Bacon’s Historia Vitae et Mortis was first published in Latin in 1623; as his references make clear, however, Austen had read William Rawley’s English translation, which was published as Francis Bacon, The Historie of Life and Death. With Observations Naturall and Experimentall for the Prolonging of Life. Written by the Right Honouralbe Francis Lord Verulam, Viscount S. Alban., trans. William Rawley (London: Printed by I. Okes, for Humphrey Mosley, 1638).

⁵² Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 123–24.

⁵³ Blith, English Improver Improved, 268–69.

⁵⁴ Austen to Hartlib, 26 July 1652, HP 41/1/10A-11B.

⁵⁵ Hartlib, ed., A Designe for Plentie, sig. A2^v.

⁵⁶ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 1^st ed., sig. ¶^r.

⁵⁷ Austen to Hartlib, 14 June 1653, HP 41/1/34A–35B. Austen records the sale price of the book as being 18d; Royston and other stationers could purchase it from Robinson for 15d, but Hartlib could get copies at 12d a piece.

⁵⁸ Austen first mentions the money in a letter to Hartlib of 26 October 1654, HP 41/1/74A.

⁵⁹ Austen enquired as to the whereabouts of the money on 26 December 1654 (HP 41/1/76A–77B), 5 January 1655 (41/1/78A–79B), and 29 April 1655 (41/1/82A–83B).

⁶⁰ Austen to Hartlib, 7 September 1655, HP 41/1/98A–99B.

⁶¹ Hunter, Robert Boyle, 92.

⁶² Webster, ‘Water as the Ultimate Principle of Nature’, 104n31.

⁶³ Sharrock, preface to ‘Good Reader’, in Austen, Observations.

⁶⁴ Sharrock, The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables, sigs. A2^r–A2^v .

⁶⁵ Hunter, Robert Boyle, 139.

⁶⁶ Austen, Observations, sig. A2^v.

⁶⁷ Hunter, 122, 135.

⁶⁸ à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2^nd vol., 780.

⁶⁹ Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, 355.

⁷⁰ See Austen to Hartlib, 23 April 1652, in HP 41/1/6A–7B, where Austen asks for the manuscript that he has sent to Hartlib to be returned to him ‘for I haue not any Coppie in the same forme’.

⁷¹ Hartlib to Boyle, 13 May 1658, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, eds., Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1^st vol., 270–72.

⁷² Hartlib to Boyle, 25 March 1658, in ibid, 1:202.

⁷³ Hartlib to Boyle, 1 November 1659, in ibid., 1:381.

⁷⁴ Austen’s reply spoke of ‘that secret society rich, & wealthy, as you stiled them’; Austen to Hartlib, 5 June 1660, in HP 41/1/133B.

⁷⁵ Hartlib to Worthington, 17 December 1660, in Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, 1^st vol., 245–52.

⁷⁶ On this see Webster, Great Instauration, 57–67.

⁷⁷ Austen to Hartlib, 11 March 1661, in HP 41/1/137A.

⁷⁸ Austen to Hartlib, 3 May 1661, in HP 41/1/139A.

⁷⁹ Austen to Hartlib, 11 March 1661, in HP 41/1/137A.

⁸⁰ Ibid. Austen related his plan to capitalise on Boyle’s patronage in a letter to Hartlib of 7 October 1658 (HP 45/2/5A–5B).

⁸¹ In 1980 Patrick Collinson, the great scholar of Elizabethan and early Stuart religion, remarked that the discussion about what constituted ‘puritanism’ resembled ‘a debate conducted among a group of blindfolded scholars in a darkened room about the shape and other attributes of the elephant sharing the room with them.’ See Collinson, ‘A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan’, 484. For the claim that the capital ‘P’ is ‘problematic’, see Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 15n1.

⁸² Shapiro, John Wilkins, passim; idem, ‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, 292.

⁸³ Austen to Hartlib, 1 April 1653, in HP 41/1/20A.

⁸⁴ On this see Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 200–226.

⁸⁵ Lawrence, ‘Goodwin, Thomas (1600–1680)’; Van Dixhoorn and Wright, eds., Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1^st vol., 14.

⁸⁶ Van Dixhoorn and Wright, eds., Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1^st vol., 14; see also HP 13/307A–308B.

⁸⁷ Milton, ‘“The Unchanged Peacemaker”? John Dury and the Politics of Irenicism’, 95–117.

⁸⁸ Hunter, Robert Boyle, 83–84; Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 213–14; Webster, ‘Worsley, Benjamin (1617/18–1677)’, in ODNB; for the catalogue of Worsley’s library upon its auction, see Dunmore and Chiswell, eds., Catalogus Librorum.

⁸⁹ Hartlib, A Designe for Plentie, sig. A2^v; Austen to Hartlib, 14 June 1653, in HP 41/1/34A-35B. After Hartlib brought Barkstead to Austen’s attention, Austen suggested the regicide as a potential source of patronage in December 1654; see Austen to Hartlib, 26 December 1654, in HP 41/1/76A-77B.

⁹⁰ Popkin, ‘Hartlib, Dury and the Jews’, 118–36; Oster, ‘Millenarianism and the New Science: The Case of Robert Boyle’, 137–48.

⁹¹ An overview of the historiography is provided in Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, 346–71; see also Coffey, ‘The Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”’, 67–71.

⁹² In emphasising the Calvinistic nature of English puritanism I am following the explicit claims of Dewey Wallace and David Hall, and the more implicit assumptions of Michael Winship. See Wallace, ‘Puritan Polemical Divinity and Doctrinal Controversy’, 206–22; Hall, The Puritans, 14–28; Winship, ‘Were There Any Puritans in New England?’, 118–38, esp. 124; idem, Hot Protestants, 1–6. On the early-modern Reformed tradition more generally, see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 2^nd ed., which remains the quintessential study.

⁹³ Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 384.

⁹⁴ Here I am following Andrew Cambers’ definition of puritanism as rooted in shared practices of piety; see Cambers, Godly Reading, 13–14. for the practice of sermon-gadding, see Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 190–207.

⁹⁵ Gribben, John Owen, 36–43.

⁹⁶ Stephen, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, 2^nd vol., 260–61.

⁹⁷ Austen, The Strong Man Armed Not Cast Out, 53.

⁹⁸ Mandelbrote, ‘John Wilkins and the Gardens of Wadham College’, 212. Mandelbrote’s claim is built on Sharrock’s reference to ‘Mr Austen of Wadham Coll. a skillfull florist’, in Sharrock, The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables, 19, but there are no records of Austen having been employed by the College.

⁹⁹ Austen to Hartlib, 12 December 1653, in HP 41/1/58A–59B.

¹⁰⁰ Austen to Hartlib, 20 August 16555, in HP 41/1/94A–95B.

¹⁰¹ This work went through five editions in the seventeenth century: in 1673, 1676, 1678, 1685, and 1699.

¹⁰² Greaves, ‘Coles, Elisha (b. in or before 1608, d. 1688)’. Thomas Goodwin, writing a preface to the third edition of Coles’ work in 1678, recorded that he had ‘known the Author long (full Twenty Eight years)’; see Goodwin, ‘To the Christian Reader’, in Coles, A Practical Discourse of God’s Sovereignty, 3^rd ed., sig. a^r.

¹⁰³ Austen to Hartlib, 29 April 1655, in HP 41/1/82A–83B.

¹⁰⁴ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 182.

¹⁰⁵ Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., sig. *2^v.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 13.

¹⁰⁷ Ford, preface ‘To the Reader’, in Austen, Spirituall, 2^nd ed.; on Ford, see Wright, ‘Ford, Stephen (d. 1695/6), in ODNB.

¹⁰⁸ ‘J.F.’, ‘To my deare Friend and Brother in the Lord Mr. R. Austine’, in Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., sigs. ††^r–††^v.

¹⁰⁹ Langley to Hartlib, 30 June 1651, in HP 15/3/5A–6B.

¹¹⁰ Austen to Hartlib, 8 July 1653, in HP 41/1/38A–39B.

¹¹¹ Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana, 27.

¹¹² Austen to Hartlib, 10 February 1654, in HP 41/1/66A–67B.

¹¹³ See Austen to Hartlib, 20 February 1654, in HP 41/1/68A–69B, where Austen relates that ‘Mr Vice Chancellor is now in London’ and asks Hartlib if he would ‘mention the businesse to him’, suggesting that a meeting between Hartlib and Owen had already been arranged. The list of subscribers to Hartlib’s scheme, recorded partly in Dury’s hand and partly by a scribe, is in HP 4/3/21A.

¹¹⁴ Bodleian Library, MS. e Mus. 77, p. 100.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 70–71.

¹¹⁶ Lincoln College, LC/R/2 fols. 89^r, 91^r.

¹¹⁷ Magdalen College Archives, LCE/30, 1657, fol. 3^v.

¹¹⁸ The Christ Church Dean and Chapter Book appears in Austen’s hand between these dates; see Christ Church Archives, D&C/i/b.3, pp. 2–68.

¹¹⁹ See Austen to Hartlib, 14 June 1653, in HP 41/1/34A–35B, where he complains to Hartlib that ‘I professe I thinke I haue not receiud 40^s: by my offise at Christ Church this Twelue month’.

¹²⁰ CCA, Disbursements Book, 1659–60, xii.b.102, pp. 29, 57, 85, 113.

¹²¹ Austen, ‘The Spiritual Use, of an Orchard, 1st Ed.’, 13. Austen described these events in the third person, but it is clear that the narrative refers to himself.

¹²² Austen, 12, 14. Austen is alluding to Malachi 4:2 and Proverbs 4:18.

¹²³ Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 27–61.

¹²⁴ See, e.g., Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life, 100, where Ferguson acknowledges that ‘the pulpit was the creator of anxious hearts’ (italics original).

¹²⁵ Clarke, Politics, Religions, and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England, passim.

¹²⁶ Rous, The Heavenly Academie, 26–27. Rous went on to treat the subject more extensively in The Misticall Marriage.

¹²⁷ Gribben, John Owen, 131–32; Owen, Of Communion with; Sherlock, Discourse Concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 13, 117, 140, 363, 388.

¹²⁸ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 56–59. In the final quotation, Austen is alluding to St Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:9, and possibly also to St Peter’s words in the account of the Transfiguration (see, e.g., Matt. 17:4).

¹²⁹ Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., 1.

¹³⁰ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 166.

¹³¹ Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., 27, 31; cf. idem, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 44.

¹³² Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., 29; Austen, idem, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 188.

¹³³ On this, see Coffey, John Goodwin, 199–232; Ollerton, ‘The Crisis of Calvinism and Rise of Arminianism’.

¹³⁴ à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2^nd vol., 780.

¹³⁵ Boyle to Oldenburg, c. 16 September 1665, in in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, eds., Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2^nd vol., 530–31.

¹³⁶ Austen to Hartlib, 23 April 1652, in HP 41/1/6A–7B.

¹³⁷ Austen to Hartlib, 25 April 1653, in HP 41/1/24A–25B.

¹³⁸ See Johnston, Revelation Restored, esp. ch. 7; Mulligan, ‘Puritans and English Science’, 463.

¹³⁹ Gribben, John Owen, 105. For an account of the more traditional interpretation, see Gribben, The Puritan Millennium, 67–79.

¹⁴⁰ Nathaniel Homes, for instance, understood Hebrews 12:26 in a more overtly ecclesiological way: ‘We therefore by new Heavens, and a new earth, understand a new forme of worship’. See Homes, The New World, 7.

¹⁴¹ Owen, Ὁυρανων Ὁυρανια, 7, 9.

¹⁴² Ibid., 12.

¹⁴³ Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., 36–37.

¹⁴⁴ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 185. Austen cites Tillinghast, Generation Work, 45–46.

¹⁴⁵ Greaves, ‘Tillinghast, John (bap. 1604, d. 1655)’, in ODNB.

¹⁴⁶ See, e.g., Goodwin, A Sermon of the Fifth Monarchy, where Goodwin places the onset of the fifth monarchy at some undetermined future date.

¹⁴⁷ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 75, 79.

¹⁴⁸ Austen, Spirituall Use, 1^st ed., 37.

¹⁴⁹ Worden, ‘Politics, Piety, and Learning’, 156.

¹⁵⁰ Greaves, ‘Owen, John (1616–1683)’, in ODNB. Gribben, for instance, makes no mention of Owen’s relationship to Hartlib; see Gribben, John Owen.

¹⁵¹ Owen, Oxford Orations of John Owen, ed. Toon, 15; Owen, ‘Orationes V. Clarissimi & Doctissimi Viri, Joannis Owen, S.T.P.’, in A Complete Collection of the Sermons of the Reverend and Learned John Owen, 7. The above quotation in Owen’s Latin reads as follows: ‘…sed progressus, Deo hominibusque testibus, in dilatandis scientiarum pomœriis, in promovenda, una cum pietate & religione, re literaria quotidie ponere.’

¹⁵² Owen, Oxford Orations of John Owen, 35; Owen, ‘Orationes V. Clarissimi & Doctissimi Viri, Joannis Owen, S.T.P.’, 17. The original Latin reads: ‘Quid egregios mathematicos, quibus, cum neque a priscis feliciter inventa accurate docere, neque aliorum inventis addere, satis fuerit, ipsi etiam communem virorum doctorum sortem prætergressi, nova, mira, stupenda, ex intimis naturæ rerum penetralibus eruta, ignota priscis, admiranda posteris, non sine tum ipsorum, tum academiæ laude & fama…’

¹⁵³ Owen to Cromwell, 9 September 1657, British Museum Lansdowne MS. 833. f. 179; printed in Toon, ed., The Correspondence of John Owen, 100–101. For an account of the proposed college in Dublin, see Webster, Great Instauration, 225–30.

¹⁵⁴ Gilson to Samuel Hartlib, 8 October 1648, in HP 10/1/1A.

¹⁵⁵ Owen, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons, in Parliament Assembled, 92.

¹⁵⁶ Goodwin, M. S. to A. S. with a Plea for Libertie of Conscience, 100.

¹⁵⁷ Gribben, John Owen, 55, 70.

¹⁵⁸ For instance, Josselin recorded the tragic death of two of Owen’s sons in March 1656, and his preaching to parliament in September of that year. See Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Macfarlane, 363, 381.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., 374.

¹⁶⁰ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 33.

¹⁶¹ Ibid., 36.

¹⁶² Reynolds, A Sermon Touching the Use of Humane Learning, 23.

¹⁶³ See Austen to Hartlib, 6 December 1653, HP 41/1/56A–57B; 12 December 1653, HP 41/1/58A–59B; 6 February 1654, HP 41/1/63A–63B.

¹⁶⁴ Austen to Hartlib, 20 August 1655, HP 41/1/94A–95B.

¹⁶⁵ Worden, ‘Politics, Piety, and Learning’, 125–31.

¹⁶⁶ Austen to Hartlib, 10 February 1654, HP 41/1/66A–67B.

¹⁶⁷ Owen, The Doctrine of the Saints Perseverance, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’.

¹⁶⁸ Austen to Hartlib, 8 May 1655, HP 41/1/84A–85B; 12 June 1655, HP 41/1/88A–89B.

¹⁶⁹ Austen to Hartlib, 19 June 1655, HP 41/1/90A–91B; 5 July 1655, HP 41/1/92A–93B.

¹⁷⁰ Gribben, for instance, fails to mention Owen’s connection to Hartlib in his otherwise very detailed biography; see Gribben, John Owen, passim.

¹⁷¹ Austen, Spirituall Use, 2^nd ed., 195.

¹⁷² Austen, Strong Man Armed Not Cast Out, 41, 101, 115. On Hicks, see Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 18, 20, 24–25.

¹⁷³ Jackson, Malice of the Rebellious Husband-Men Against The True Heir, 5.

¹⁷⁴ Clarke would go on to be the publisher, for instance, of the Quaker schoolmaster Christopher Taylor’s Compendium trium linguarum Latinae, Graecae, & Hebraicae (1679), George Fox’s pamphlet An epistle concerning the government of Christ and his peace (1681), and, most famously, William Penn’s A brief account of the province of Pennsilvania (1681). I have not been able to locate any works published under Clarke’s name before 1679, however.

¹⁷⁵ Sprat, History of the Royal-Society of London, 369–74. The pagination here is faulty; I refer to the six pages from sig. Aaa^r inclusive.

¹⁷⁶ Worlidge, Systema Agriculturæ, sig. E^v.

¹⁷⁷ Ibid., 95.

¹⁷⁸ Evelyn, ed., Pomona, 1^st ed., passim.

¹⁷⁹ Compare Evelyn, ed., Pomona, 1^st ed., 9; with Evelyn, ed., Pomona, 2^nd ed., 11. On the different opinions of Austen and Beale – ‘the two prima donnas of arboriculture’ – on grafting, see Webster, Great Instauration, 480.

¹⁸⁰ It is clear that the paper had already arrived by the time of the Society’s meeting of 7 December 1664, since on 10 December Oldenburg wrote to Boyle explaining that they had not had time to look at it in that meeting, but would do so the following week. Oldenburg to Boyle, 10 December 1664, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 2^nd vol., 434.

¹⁸¹ Birch, History of the Royal Society, 1^st vol., 504.

¹⁸² Royal Society Archives (hereafter RSA), RB/1/37/23, fols. 134^r–135^r.

¹⁸³ Birch, History of the Royal Society, 1^st vol., 504, 509.

¹⁸⁴ Austen to Boyle, 14 January 1665, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 2^nd vol., 450–51.

¹⁸⁵ Austen, Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 3^rd ed., sig. A3^v.

¹⁸⁶ Boyle to Oldenburg, c. 16 September 1665 in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 2^nd vol., 530–31.

¹⁸⁷ Oldenburg to Boyle, 18 September 1665, in ibid., 532–33.

¹⁸⁸ Oldenburg to Boyle, 10 December 1664, in ibid., 2:434–35.

¹⁸⁹ Beale and Lawrence, Nurseries, 6–7.

¹⁹⁰ RSA, CLP/7i/30, between fols. 102 and 103.

¹⁹¹ Beale to Boyle, 29 November 1676, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 4^th vol., 431–34.

¹⁹² Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses, 3^rd vol., 887.

¹⁹³ Beale to Boyle, 29 November 1676, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 4^th vol., 431–34, at 431.

¹⁹⁴ Stubbs, ‘John Beale, Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: Part II’, 335n41.

¹⁹⁵ Beale and Lawrence, Nurseries, 5.

¹⁹⁶ Ibid., 6, 8.

¹⁹⁷ Beale to Boyle, 29 November 1676, in in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 4^th vol., 431.

¹⁹⁸ Beale to Boyle, 25 April 1664, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 2^nd vol., 269–71.

¹⁹⁹ Evelyn, ed., Pomona, 1^st ed., 26.

²⁰⁰ Austen, Observations, 39–40; Beale and Lawrence, Nurseries, 7.

²⁰¹ Austen to Beale, 28 January 1666, in RSA RB/3/1/9, fol. 18^v.

²⁰² Hunter, Science and Society, 97.

²⁰³ Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d, 4^th vol., 5–6.

²⁰⁴ Stubbs, ‘John Beale, Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: Part II’, 328; Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Boyle Correspondence, 2^nd vol., 313n.

²⁰⁵ Compare Birch, History of the Royal Society, 1^st vol., 407; with The Record of the Royal Society of London, 3^rd ed., 309–13.

²⁰⁶ On Austin, see Hunter, The Royal Society and Its Fellows, 164–65; Blom and Blom, ‘Austin, John [Pseud. William Birchley] (1613–1669)’, in ODNB.

²⁰⁷ Beale and Lawrence, Nurseries, 8.

²⁰⁸ Austen, A Dialogve (or Familiar Discourse) and Conference, titlepage, sig. A2^v.

²⁰⁹ Oldenburg reported to Newton in early 1677 ‘that Mr Austen is dead, wthout leaving any child’; see Oldenburg to Newton, 2 January 1677, Turnbull, ed., Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 2^nd vol., 187.

²¹⁰ à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2^nd vol., 780.