Samuel Hartlib - Life

Life

Hartlib was born in Elbing, Royal Prussia. His mother was the daughter of a rich English merchant at Danzig. His father is said to have been a refugee merchant from Poland. He studied at the Gymnasium in Brieg (Brzeg), and at the Albertina. At Herborn Academy he studied under Johannes Heinrich Alsted and Johannes Bisterfeld. He was briefly at the University of Cambridge, supported by John Preston.

Hartlib met the Scottish preacher John Dury in 1628; the same year Hartlib relocated to England, in the face of the prospect of being caught in a war zone, as Imperial armies moved into the western parts of Poland, and the chance of intervention by Sweden grew. He first unsuccessfully established a school in line with his theories of education, in Chichester, and then lived in Duke's Place, London. An early patron was John Williams, the bishop of Lincoln and hostile to William Laud. Another supporter was John Pym; Pym would use Hartlib later, as a go-between with Dutch Calvinists in London, in an effort to dig up evidence against Laud. It is Hugh Trevor-Roper's thesis, in his essay Three Foreigners (meaning Hartlib, Dury and the absent Comenius), that Hartlib and the others were the “philosophers” of the “country party” or anti-court grouping of the 1630s and early 1640s, who united in their support for these outside voices, if agreeing on little else.

During the Civil War, Hartlib occupied himself with the peaceful study of agriculture, publishing various works by himself, and printing at his own expense several treatises by others on the subject. He planned a school for the sons of gentlemen, to be conducted on new principles, and this probably was the occasion of his friend John Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to him in 1644, and of William Petty's Two Letters on the same subject, in 1647 and 1648. Another associate of his in that period was Walter Blith, a noted writer on husbandry.

For his various labours, Hartlib received a pension of £100 from Oliver Cromwell, afterwards increased to £300, as he had spent all his fortune on his experiments. But Hartlib died in poverty. His association with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth resulted in him being sidelined after Charles II's Restoration. He lost his pension, which had already fallen into arrears. Some of his correspondents went as far as to ask for their letters from his archive, fearing that they could be compromised.