Cressy - Saltpetre State Secruity England (2011)

SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITYANDVEXATION IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND*

Like the Gunpowder Empires of Islamic Asia (the OttomanEmpire based in Constantinople, the Safavid Empire based inIran and the Mughal Empire based in India), the WesternEuropean gunpowder states of the early modern militaryrevolution made ceaseless efforts to secure the raw materialsfor explosive munitions. Their siege trains, fighting ships, fort-resses and musketry consumed vast amounts of powder as theyvied for dominance and projected their force beyond their fron-tiers. From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth the Spanish,Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedes and English built theirstrength on gunpowder. Neither monarchies nor armies couldoperate without this special commodity. Without gunpowderweaponry they could have no national security, and without itsprincipal ingredient saltpetre there could be no firepowermunitions.1 Only with the development of chemical explosives inthe later nineteenth century did dependence on gunpowderdecline.

Familiar in Europe by the thirteenth century, gunpowder wascomposed of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur (known asbrimstone) and carbon (from charcoal). Reliant on milling andmixing, the product was only as good as the material from which it

* I am grateful to Matt Goldish, John Guilmartin, Bert Hall, Christopher Otter andGeoffrey Parker for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

1 Gabor Agoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in theOttoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Weston F. Cook Jr, The Hundred Years War forMorocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World(Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford, 1994); Yar Muhammad Khan, Barud,Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Brill Online, Leiden, 2005), 5http://www.paulyonline.brill.nl (accessed 26 May 2009); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power:Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago, 1982); Arnold Pacey,Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Oxford, 1990), ch. 5;Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,15001800, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996); Clifford J. Rogers (ed.), The MilitaryRevolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe(Boulder, 1995). For criticism of the term gunpowder empires, see Stephen F.Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge,2010), 56.

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was made. The charcoal provided solid substance for combus-tion, the sulphur allowed immediate ignition, while saltpetre pro-vided oxygen for the explosion (strictly speaking, a deflagrationrather than a highly exothermic combustion). The proportionsvaried with use and changed over time, but by the late sixteenthcentury most English cannon powder mixed six parts saltpetre toone part each of brimstone and charcoal. This combination,claimed the seventeenth-century gunner Nathanael Nye, pro-duced the strongest powder that can be made.2

Charcoal and sulphur, the minority ingredients of gunpowder,were easily and cheaply found,3 but saltpetre proved scarce andexpensive. Known to contemporaries as the soul, the founda-tion or the mother of gunpowder, it was either imported fromdistant lands or extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung

2 Nathanael Nye, The Art of Gunnery (London, 1647), 5. For the history of gun-powder and explosives, see E. A. Brayley Hodgetts (ed.), The Rise and Progress of theBritish Explosives Industry (London, 1909); J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire andGunpowder (Cambridge, 1960); Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, v,Chemistry and Chemical Technology, pt 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic(Cambridge, 1986); Brenda J. Buchanan (ed.), Gunpowder: The History of anInternational Technology (Bath, 1996); Glenys Crocker, The Gunpowder Industry, 2ndedn (Princes Risborough, 1999); Brenda J. Buchanan, The Art and Mystery ofMaking Gunpowder: The English Experience in the Seventeenth and EighteenthCenturies, in Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland (eds.), The Heirs of Archimedes:Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);Robert A. Howard, Realities and Perceptions in the Evolution of Black PowderMaking, in Brenda J. Buchanan (ed.), Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: ATechnological History (Aldershot, 2006), 225. For gunpowder recipes, see Niccolo`Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse (Venice, 1546), sig. L; Nye, Art of Gunnery, 49,19; Thomas Henshaw, The History of Making Gun-Powder, in Tho[mas] Sprat, TheHistory of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London,1667), 278; Henry Stubbe, Legends no Histories: or, A Specimen of Some Animadversionsupon the History of the Royal Society (London, 1670), 945, 11416. For accessibleaccounts of burning rates, shock waves, physico-chemical phenomena and combus-tion reactions, see E. Gray, H. Marsh and M. McLaren, A Short History ofGunpowder and the Role of Charcoal in its Manufacture, Jl Materials Science, xvii(1982); Jaime Wisniak, The History of Saltpeter Production with a Bit of Pyrotech-nics and Lavoisier, Chemical Educator, v (2000).

3 Charcoal came from English woodlands, ideally from alder, willow, hazel orbeech. According to William Harrison there was great plenty of sulphur in Eliza-bethan England: William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen(Ithaca, 1968), 289, 362. Advisers to the Muscovy Company in 1580 recommendedthat their merchants carry brimstone, to try the vent of the same, because weabound of it in the realm: Richard Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie ofAmerica, and the Ilands adjacent unto the Same (London, 1582, STC 12624), sig. I4.Sulphur could be extracted from mineral springs, but most was imported cheaply fromvolcanic regions in southern Italy.

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and urine.4 Lacking understanding of the nitrification associatedwith bacterial action on decaying organic matter, governmentadvisers wondered whether saltpetre was a substance to bemined or grown. This was a serious question, hinged on thedifferent technologies, customs and prerogatives pertaining toagriculture and minerals.5 Derived from the adored muck ofdung-coloured earth, saltpetre had mysterious properties,thought the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, that may welldeserve our serious enquiries.6

English governments regarded saltpetre as an inestimabletreasure and sought it for their infinite security.7 It was thecrucial link in the chain of chemistry and power, comparablein strategic importance to modern oil or uranium. Monarchsclaimed the right to extract saltpetre from private property,while landowners complained of the vexation and oppressionthis intrusion entailed.8 Between the 1560s and the 1640s a suc-cession of projectors tendered new or secret processes in-tended to improve supplies of saltpetre while alleviating thepressure on English subjects. Chemists and philosophers mean-while pondered the mysteries of saltpetre and wondered how thisdarling of nature gave rise to the most fatal instrument of deaththat ever mankind was trusted withal.9 In Shakespeares synec-doche, it was villainous saltpetre . . . digged out of the bowelsof the harmless earth that made lethal the vile guns of the

4 John Bate, The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (London, 1634, STC 1577), 55;National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), SP 12/286/42;SP 16/180/3; A. R. Williams, The Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages,Ambix: Jl Soc. Hist. Alchemy and Chemistry, xxii (1975); Stephen Bull, Pearls fromthe Dungheap: English Saltpetre Production, 15901640, Jl Ordnance Soc., ii (1990).

5 On the subterranean treasures belonging to the crown by royal prerogative, seeSir John Pettus, Fodinae regales: or, The History, Laws and Places of the Chief Mines andMineral Works in England, Wales, and the English Pale in Ireland (London, 1670), 5, 21,28. The royal mines were primarily of gold and silver, but Pettus included saltpetreamong minerals and other products . . . beneficial to the kingdom (p. 5).

6 The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, i, 163661, ed. Michael Hunter, AntonioClericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe (London, 2001), 424; Robert Boyle, APhysico-Chymical Essay, Containing an Experiment, with Some Considerations Touchingthe Differing Parts and Redintegration of Salt-Petre (1661), in The Works of the HonourableRobert Boyle, 6 vols. (London, 1772), i, 359.

7 By the King: A Proclamation for the Better Making of Saltpeter within this Kingdome(London, 2 Jan. 1627, STC 8848); PRO, SP 12/275/76.

8 A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom (London, 1641), 15.9 Thomas Henshaw, The History of the Making of Salt-Petre, in Sprat, History of

the Royal-Society of London, 274.

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battlefield.10 Successive regimes praised God for seeding theland with mines of saltpetre, and gave thanks for the greatblessing of God, that this land hath means to furnish itself ofthis provision.11

The quest for saltpetre illuminates interactions between sci-ence and technology, society and war, in the formative era ofthe early modern state. It is an important matter for historicalinvestigation, not only because saltpetre furnished the statewith explosive force, but also because of the social, financialand political complications of its provision. The procurement ofweapons-grade material involved statesmen and speculators, ord-nance officers, international merchants, technical advisers, law-yers, labourers, and owners of nitrous-rich grounds. Theirdealings and conflicts generated the documentation on whichthis study is based. Governors and counsellors specified theirmilitary needs, while contractors and investors sought to supplythem. Their projects for the finding, refinement and furnishing ofsaltpetre created a paper trail through which the social, legal,political and technological history of their enterprise can betraced. Written agreements, accounts, reports, inventories, peti-tions and proclamations reveal the practicalities and complexitiesof saltpetre production. Local opposition to intrusions bythe saltpetremen brought discussion of their vexation and op-pression to the attention of parliaments, councils and courts.References to saltpetre abound in the state papers, private arch-ives, and legal and commercial documents of Tudor and StuartEngland, yet the history of its procurement remains unwritten.

Though documentation is abundant, the somewhat un-savoury business of collecting and processing saltpetre (asGerald Aylmer described it) is overshadowed by more glamorousaccounts of politics and war.12 A few specialists have studied thetechnology of gunpowder, with reference to its constituent in-gredients. Historians of science, particularly chemistry, havetouched on saltpetre, but they rarely pursue the subject unless a

10 William Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I. iii.11 PRO, SP 12/286/42; By the King: A Proclamation for the Maintenance and Encrease

of the Mines of Saltpeter, and the True Making of Gunpowder, and Reforming AbusesConcerning the Same (London, 13 Apr. 1625, STC 8770). See also Harrison,Description of England, ed. Edelen, 362, 364.

12 G. E. Aylmer, The Kings Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 16251642(London, 1961), 2845, 463, quotation at p. 284.





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celebrity scientist, a Boyle or a Lavoisier, became involved.Military historians, of course, deal with gunpowder, but fewmore than nod at saltpetre. Their arguments about the timing,content and consequences of the military revolution address thecost and performance of cannonry, siegecraft and gun-equippedarmies, but tend to take the logistics of firepower for granted.Students of international commerce, particularly the East IndiaCompany, have traced traffic in saltpetre from the mid seven-teenth century, but they too pay scant regard to its earlier historyor larger context. It remains true that no comprehensive study oflate medieval and early modern saltpetre production has beenwritten.13

Conflict between the royal prerogative and the claims ofcommon law is a central motif of legal and political history, butscholars have rarely placed saltpetre in that story. It has beenenough to note that the saltpetremen were unpopular, and thattheir vexation and oppression were cited amongst the grievancespresented to Charles I in the Grand Remonstrance of 1641.Conrad Russell once identified himself as the kind of historianwho was not overly concerned about the misdeeds of the salt-petremen of Chipping Sodbury. But a saltpetre scandal atChipping Norton briefly claimed his attention, as it camebefore the 1628 parliament. Russell elsewhere made the key ob-servation that changes in warfare intensified the crying need ofmonarchies for saltpetre, thereby precipitating a straightforwardclash of priorities between the needs of the state and the rights ofthe subject, but no one has developed this insight.14

This article explores the social cost of saltpetre exploitationfrom the early Tudor era to the age of the English Revolution.It begins by considering the science of saltpetre and the inter-national transfers of technology that facilitated its extraction. Itframes this by reference to the expanding scale of warfare and theincreasing heft of weapons that required gunpowder. A centralsection examines complaints against the roving saltpetremen of

13 Kelly DeVries, Sites of Military Science and Technology, in Katharine Park andLorraine Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, iii, Early Modern Science(Cambridge, 2006), 311.

14 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 16211629 (Oxford, 1979), 2,374; Conrad S. R. Russell, Monarchies, Wars, and Estates in England, France, andSpain, c.1580c.1640, Legislative Studies Quart., vii (1982), 21011, repr. in ConradRussell, Unrevolutionary England, 16031642 (London, 1990), 127.





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Elizabethan and early Stuart England, whose depredations evenviolated churches. Lawyers, property-owners and politicianssought to mitigate the procurement demands of the state, withlimited success because public necessity outweighed private con-venience; national security always took precedence over individ-ual grievances. This leads to discussion of schemes and projectsdesigned to make the production of saltpetre more effective forthe crown and less burdensome to the subject. The repeated fail-ure of such schemes ceased to matter only when bulk importsfrom India changed the saltpetre equation. East Indian saltpetrebecame an international imperial commodity by the later seven-teenth century, still vital for military power but without the vex-ation that troubled the subjects of Elizabeth I, James I andCharles I.15

I

Written discussion of the properties of saltpetre filtered intoEngland following the publication of Vannoccio BiringucciosDe la pirotechnia in Venice in 1540.16 Generations of authorsplagiarized this text without acknowledging their source. PeterWhitehornes Elizabethan treatise on warfare included chaptersderived from Biringuccio that explained the nature of saltpetre,and the manner how to make and refine it, and how to make allsorts of gunpowder.17 Cyprian Lucars Colloquies Concerning theArte of Shooting in Great and Small Peeces of Artillerie (1588) wasalso heavily indebted to Biringuccio, with sections on saltpetreword for word identical to those of Whitehorne.18

15 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an EarlyJoint-Stock Company, 16001640 (New York and London, 1965); K. N. Chaudhuri,The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 16601760 (Cambridge,1978); James W. Frey, The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and theRise of Britain as a Global Superpower, Historian, lxxi (2009).

16 Vannoccio Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia (Venice, 1540); The Pirotechnia ofVannoccio Biringuccio, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (NewYork, 1942).

17 Peter Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray (London,1562), appended to his translation of Niccolo` Machiavellis Arte of Warr, repubd in1574 (STC 17165) and 1588 (STC 17166).

18 Cyprian Lucar, Three Bookes of Colloquies Concerning the Arte of Shooting in Greatand Small Peeces of Artillerie (London, 1588, STC 23689), 513. Other influencesinclude Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse; Girolamo Cataneo, Opera nuova di for-tificare, offendere et difendere (Brescia, 1564); Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (Basel,


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The most excellent saltpetre, Whitehorne explained, is madeof the dung of beasts, converted into earth, in stables or in dung-hills of long time not used. Dovecotes or pigeon houses were alsofavoured sites because of their concentration of sheltered drop-pings. Skilled saltpetremen learned to excavate such places andhaul the earth away for processing. To this end they would needmany cauldrons, furnaces, barrels or tubs, and likewise wood,white lime, and ashes of old oak, as well as wagons for transport,and abundant supplies of fuel for fires, and water for boiling andleaching. The process involved percolating water through barrelsfilled with suitable nitrous earth, then boiling and refining theliquor until it was ready to crystallize. Judicious applications ofash, lime or alum would help to remove such impurities ascommon salt. A week or more of work would yield crude saltpetrethat needed further refinement before it could be serviceable forgunpowder.19 This basic process, that took saltpetremen all overthe country, prevailed in England until the 1660s.

The most comprehensive account of the right and most perfectway of the whole work of saltpetre was by Lazarus Ercker (153094), chief master of the mines of Emperor Rudolf II in Bohemia.German editions appeared in Prague in 1574 and in Frankfurt in1580, but there was no English publication before the 1680s.20 In1589, however, the Jewish metallurgist Joachim Gaunz, arrestedin England for denying the divinity of Christ, offered to explainthe Bohemian process using Ercker as his guide. Observing thatsaltpetremen in England work blindly and without knowledge,with more loss than profit, Gaunz described the properties ofvarious earths and reviewed the best techniques for boiling and

(n. 18 cont.)

1556), book 12 of which deals briefly with saltpetre. See also William Bourne, The Arteof Shooting in Great Ordnaunce (London, 1587, STC 3420), 57.

19 Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray, fos. 228; seealso Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages, 12730.

20 Lazarus Erckers Treatise on Ores and Assaying Translated from the German Edition of1580, trans. Anneliese Grunhaldt Sisco and Cyril Stanley Smith (Chicago, 1951). Thework was reprinted in Frankfurt in 1598, 1629 and 1672. The first English translationappeared in Sir John Pettus, Fleta minor: The Laws of Art and Nature (London, 1683).John Rudolph Glauber, The Works of the Highly Experienced and Famous Chymist(London, 1689), 34559, also reproduced Erckers treatise on the manner of boilingsalt-petre. According to Stubbe, Legends no Histories, 878, Thomas HenshawsHistory of the Making of Salt-Petre was heavily plagiarized from Ercker. See alsoR. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History, 15761612(London, 1997), 215.





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refining. He dedicated his forty-page manuscript to Sir FrancisWalsingham, and its survival among the papers of Lord Burghleymay testify to its military and economic significance.21

Practical men knew what gunpowder did, but nobody under-stood how it worked. The properties of saltpetre were especiallypuzzling. Alchemists, natural philosophers, mining engineers andmilitary contractors speculated about the nature of saltpetre, anddiscussed technologies for its nurture and extraction. Scholarsprobed its humoral and elemental properties, and puzzledover saltpetres ambiguities. It seemed to partake of earth, air,fire and water, to be hot, cold, wet and dry, and to share attributesof the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. I cannot tell howto be resolved, to say what thing properly it is, observed White-horne, except it seemeth it hath the sovereignty and quality ofevery element.22 Followers of Paracelsus perceived a vital gen-erative principle in saltpetre, with both material and mystical con-notations, a notable mystery the which, albeit it be taken fromout of the earth, yet it may lift up our eyes to heaven. Its threefoldnature evoked that incomprehensible mystery of . . . the divineTrinity, marvelled the minister Thomas Timme in his translationof Joseph Duchesne.23 Francis Bacon observed that the nitre ingunpowder . . . doth make the crack and report, and identifiedsaltpetre as the energizing spirit of the earth.24

Though veiled by many noble secrets, this darling of naturewas universally diffused through all the elements, and musttherefore make a chief ingredient in their nutriment, and by con-sequence of their generation, thought the Royal Society lecturerThomas Henshaw. Saltpetre is one of the most odd concretes in

21 Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), Calendar of the Manu-scripts of the Most Honourable the Marquis of Salisbury . . . at Hatfield House, 23 vols.(London, 18831973), xiv, 339; Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC,microfilm 164.70, partially transcribed in Gary C. Grassl, Joachim Gans of Prague:The First Jew in English America, Amer. Jewish Hist., lxxxvi (1998). For Gaunzs veryblasphemous speeches against our saviour, see PRO, SP 12/226/40.

22 Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray, fos. 21v22.23 Iosephus Quersitanus [i.e. Joseph Duchesne], The Practice of Chymicall, and

Hermeticall Physicke, for the Preservation of Health, trans. Thomas Timme (London,1605, STC 7276), sig. Pv; Allen G. Debus, The Paracelsian Aerial Niter, Isis, lv(1964); Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, andChymistry in England, 16501750 (Leiden and Boston, 2007).

24 Francis Bacon, The Historie of Life and Death: With Observations Naturall andExperimentall for the Prolonging of Life (London, 1638, STC 1157), 158.





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the world, declared the Restoration virtuoso Henry Stubbe.25 Itwas ubiquitarian but obscure, with hermaphroditical qual-ities, according to the physician William Clarke.26 Its elusivenessas well as its utility made saltpetre a puzzle worth pursuing.

Savants in Samuel Hartlibs circle in the mid seventeenth cen-tury mused on philosophical saltpetre and philosophical dungas guides to wisdom and experimentation. The physician Ben-jamin Worsley conceived of a philosophically driven, science-based, altruistic enterprise that would put the poor to work,achieve saltpetre independence, and advance mans masteryover nature. His junior associate Robert Boyle shared the beliefthat the seminal principle of nitre, latent in the earth, wouldmake possible a perpetual mine of saltpetre. Alchemical enthu-siasts of the Interregnum hoped that the study of saltpetre, themost catholic of salts, would prove very conducive to the dis-covery of the nature of several other bodies, and to the improve-ment of divers parts of natural philosophy.27 None could fathomthe way it was formed, nor could anyone fully explain the vitaliz-ing power that made saltpetre so formidable. Could it be, somewondered, the sal nitrum or spiritus mundi, the nitrous universalspirit, that would unlock the secrets of nature?28

Considerable effort addressed the question of whether thepowder makers saltpetre was the same substance as the nitreknown to the Bible and classical antiquity. (The usual references

25 Henshaw, History of the Making of Salt-Petre, 2745; Stubbe, Legends noHistories, 45.

26 William Clarke, The Natural History of Nitre: or, A Philosophical Discourse of theNature, Generation, Place, and Artificial Extraction of Nitre, with its Vertues and Uses(London, 1670), 19, 53.

27 Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 16261660 (New York, 1976), 37881; Charles Webster, Benjamin Worsley: Engineeringfor Universal Reform from the Invisible College to the Navigation Act, in MarkGreengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib andUniversal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge, 1994),21517; Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), in Works, i, 566; Boyle,Physico-Chymical Essay, in Works, i, 359. See also Samuel Worsley, De nitro thesesquaedam, in The Hartlib Papers, 2nd edn (University of Sheffield, CD-ROM, 2002),39/1/16A, and Samuel Worsley, Animadversions upon the Fore-Said Observations,ibid., 39/1/11B.

28 Hartlib Papers, 13/223A; 39/1/11B; see also William Eamon, Science and theSecrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton,1994); William R. Newman, From Alchemy to Chymistry , in Park and Daston(eds.), Cambridge History of Science, iii; Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in theHoly Roman Empire (Chicago and London, 2007); Roos, Salt of the Earth.





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are to Proverbs 25:20, Jeremiah 2:22, and the works of Pliny,Strabo and Herodotus.) If the Greeks or Romans had saltpetre,then why not gunpowder, went one line of speculation. Perhaps,some writers suggested, they kept their art secret and the skilldied with them. From Thomas Chaloner in 1584 to WilliamClarke in 1670, a succession of scientific and medical writersprobed the properties of the mother of gunpowder. The ques-tion fuelled debate between ancients and moderns, and wasnever satisfactorily resolved.29

Lecturing to the Royal Society in 1662, Thomas Henshawthought it important to determine whether the nitre of the an-cients be of the same species with the salt which is commonlyknown by the name of saltpetre. Historical, philological, min-eralogical and experimental inquiries led him to concludethat the refined saltpetre now in use was a modern invention,though the ancients may have handled natural efflorescences.30

Nonsense, exploded Henry Stubbe, who rebuked the anti-Aristotelians of the Royal Society for their pique againstantiquity.31 William Clarke was likewise convinced that theancients knew saltpetre, but that they remained ignorant of itspyrotechnical applications.32

29 Thomas Chaloner, A Shorte Discourse of the Most Rare and Excellent Vertue of Nitre(London, 1584, STC 4940); Clarke, Natural History of Nitre. See also GeorgeHakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of theWorld (Oxford, 1627, STC 12611), 2612; Edward Jorden, A Discourse of NaturallBathes, and Minerall Waters (London, 1632, STC 14792), 48; Joseph M. Levine,Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (NewHaven and London, 1999), 28. Modern scholarship concludes that ancient nitrewas most likely soda (i.e. sodium carbonate), and that the properties of saltpetre wereunknown in Europe before the thirteenth century: Partington, History of Greek Fire andGunpowder, 298314.

30 Henshaw, History of the Making of Salt-Petre, 260, 267. Henshaws accountwas popularized in [ John Houghton (ed.)], A Collection for Improvement of Husbandryand Trade, nos. 2247, 13 Nov. 4 Dec. 1696, and repeated in subsequent collectionsof the Royal Societys Transactions.

31 Stubbe, Legends no Histories, 44, 76.32 Clarke, Natural History of Nitre, epistle dedicatory, 15, 19, 2331. R. Abraham

Portaleone, Shilte ha-Gibborim [Shields of the Heroes] (Mantua, 1612; Jerusalem,1970), ch. 41, claimed that ancient Hebrews were familiar with gunpowder I owethis reference to Matt Goldish. For the counter-view that gunpowder was whollyunknown to the ancient Greeks and Arabians, and only recently Latinized as salbombardicum, see William Salmon, Seplasium. The Compleate English Physician: or,The Druggists Shop Opened (London, 1693), 90.





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II

Tudor and Stuart regimes, like their enemies and competitors,depended on gunpowder weapons. Their need for saltpetre grewwith every deployment and shot. The recent recovery of cannonballs and bullet fragments from the battlefield at Bosworth re-minds us that both sides in that conflict had gunpowder weapons.Both Richard III and Henry Tudor learned from the French andthe Burgundians, Europes leaders in military technology, that nomodern state could thrive without handguns and artillery. Thevictorious Henry VII invested in ordnance and brought in foreignspecialists to operate it. His armoury at the Tower grew fromthirty heavy guns in 1489 to almost fifty by 1497, and by theend of the fifteenth century he had two hundred gunners on hispayroll.33 In 1492 the king authorized James Hede to take houses,land, vessels, wood, coals and other fuel, as well as artificers,labourers and workmen, to make saltpetre for the kings ord-nance, though most of the royal gunpowder was imported.34

The second Tudor monarch invested more heavily in gar-risons, fortresses, ships and stores, and the king himself took aninterest in ordnance and ballistics.35 His state-of-the-art DealCastle (1540) was designed to mount two hundred cannons.Conceiving of himself as a warrior monarch, Henry VIII foughtthree wars against France and Scotland from 1512 to 1514, 1522to 1525, and 1542 to 1546. Though English longbows shared thefield with English cannon, it was modern weaponry that carriedthe day. The force that invaded France in 1513 carried 510 tons ofgunpowder, and its siege guns consumed up to thirty-two tons aday. The assault on Boulogne in 1544 featured a siege train of 250guns which bombarded the town with 100,000 rounds of heavyshot. The army that Henry VIII assembled to invade France in1544 was more than 38,000 strong.36 The Tudor royal navy by

33 For Bosworth battlefield archaeology, see Guardian, 28 Oct. 2009; for the periodmore generally, see Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: TheEnglish Experience (New Haven and London, 1996), 287, 2923; Mark Charles Fissel,English Warfare, 15111642 (London, 2001), 44, 52; DeVries, Sites of MilitaryScience and Technology, 30811; Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in RenaissanceEurope (Baltimore and London, 1997).

34 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 148594, 395.35 James Raymond, Henry VIIIs Military Revolution: The Armies of Sixteenth-

Century Britain and Europe (London, 2007), 3, 28; Fissel, English Warfare, 44.36 Fissel, English Warfare, 416; C. G. Cruickshank, Army Royal: Henry VIIIs

Invasion of France, 1513 (Oxford, 1969), 76; Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeths Wars:


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1546 included fifteen great ships and sixteen galleasses, withalmost two hundred heavy guns of nine pounds or greater calibrebetween them. Their itemized ordnance, artillery, munitions[and] habiliments for the war included forty-five lasts ofpowder, weighing more than forty-eight tons.37 (A standardbarrel of gunpowder weighed a hundred pounds, and twenty-foursuch barrels made a last, weighing 1.07 tons or 1,088.62kilograms.)38

To support this demand, the crown sponsored workshops forfining and refining of saltpetre and brimstone out of rock intomeal, and for coal powder and other stuff appertaining to themaking of gunpowder.39 In 1515 Henry VIII authorized theGerman Hans Wolf to go from shire to shire to find a placewhere there is stuff to make saltpetre of. The kings gunnerThomas Lee received a similar commission in 1531 to takewhat wood, carriage or houses he needed to search for saltpetrein the kings lands and elsewhere. Both commissions stipulatedthat the saltpetremen should replenish and make up plain allground they had broken, or otherwise compensate the owners.40

A generation later, facing a confessionally divided Continent,dangerous shifts in European power balances, and deterioratingrelationships with Spain, the Elizabethan state assessed its mili-tary vulnerability. Stout provision of saltpetre would be the keyto infinite security in case a breach of amity should chance be-twixt her majesty and King Philip. Though not quite worth itsweight in bullion, 20,000 of saltpetre would stand the queen inbetter stead than 100,000 in gold and treasure, so Thomas

(n. 36 cont.)

War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 15441604 (Basingstoke and New York,2003), 18. For the impact of artillery at Flodden in 1513, see Ranald Nicholson,Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), 604. For the gradual changefrom bows to guns, see Steven Gunn, Archery Practice in Early Tudor England,Past and Present, no. 209 (Nov. 2010), 747.

37 The Anthony Roll of Henry VIIIs Navy, ed. C. S. Knighton and D. M. Loades(Navy Records Soc., ii, Aldershot, 2000), 41106; N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard ofthe Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 6601649 (London, 1997), 485.

38 Bourne, Arte of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce, 72; Ronald Edward Zupko, ADictionary of English Weights and Measures from Anglo-Saxon Times to the NineteenthCentury (Madison and London, 1968), 91.

39 PRO, STAC 2/15, fo. 29. See also PRO, SP 1/7, fos. 16872, for accounts ofexpenditure on gunpowder and its ingredients in 1514.

40 PRO, SP 1/10, fo. 154; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign ofHenry VIII, v, 152.





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Gresham advised Secretary Cecil in March 1563.41 The bulk ofEnglands saltpetre came from parts beyond the seas, mostlyGermany and the Low Countries, which made it subject toembargoes, interceptions and capricious foreign pricing.42

Elizabethan merchants looked as far as Russia and North Africafor alternative supplies, and in the 1570s offered cannon balls inexchange for saltpetre from Morocco.43

As war with Spain approached, the Elizabethan treasury spentheavily on warships to build (in Geoffrey Parkers words) themost powerful battle fleet afloat anywhere in the world. Thethirty-four royal ships that fought the Armada in 1588 carried678 heavy guns, more than triple the cannonry of Henry VIIIsnavy. These were supplemented by close to 150 armed merchant-men. By 1595 the queen commanded thirty-eight fighting ships,with even more firepower. A survey in 1603 listed 1,170 pieces ofnaval ordnance, including 625 heavy guns rated demi-culverin orabove.44

The naval demand for gunpowder was insatiable. Full cannonconsumed as much as forty-six pounds of gunpowder a shot; cul-verins and demi-culverins, the backbone of naval ordnance, usedeighteen and eleven pounds of powder each time they were fired.On the Cadiz expedition in 1596 the queens ships stowed anaverage of two and a half lasts (sixty barrels) of gunpowder, andthe thirty-eight-gun Ark Royal set out with four lasts (ninety-sixbarrels, weighing roughly four and a quarter tons). At the heightof the Spanish war the Elizabethan state consumed ninety-fivelasts of gunpowder a year, requiring eighty or more tons of

41 Cal. State Papers, Foreign, 15623, 2289, 239; John William Burgon, The Life andTimes of Sir Thomas Gresham, 2 vols. (London, 1839), i, 294; Hammer, ElizabethsWars, 56.

42 PRO, SP12/223, fo. 77; SP 12/228, fo. 101; SP 12/253, fo. 149; Cal. State Papers,Foreign, 155960, 18, 544; Cal. State Papers, Foreign, 15612, 319; HMC, Calendar ofthe Manuscripts of the . . . Marquis of Salisbury, ii, 394.

43 PRO, SP 15/24, fo. 141; see also E. W. Bovill, Queen Elizabeths Gunpowder,Mariners Mirror, xxxiii (1947); Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages,Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 2nd edn (15981600), 12 vols.(Glasgow, 19035), iii, 369; vi, 6, 2901.

44 Geoffrey Parker, The Dreadnought Revolution of Tudor England, MarinersMirror, lxxxii (1996), 273, 287; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 4867. Cf. Hammer,Elizabeths Wars, 149, where Elizabeths thirty-four ships sport 883 cannon. For the1603 survey, see British Library, London (hereafter BL), Royal MS 17 A XXXI, fos.25v26.





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saltpetre. Land forces, coastal defences and celebratory firingadded to the account.45

In 1603 a naval salute of 355 pieces to celebrate the accession ofJames I rocked ships in the Thames by the Tower.46 But as a kingwho made and maintained peace, James needed less gunpowder,and therefore less saltpetre, than his predecessor. The new regimehad no use for half the gunpowder furnished by the royal mills,and began to dispose of the surplus on the international market.Some of it may have found its way to the Catesby plotters of 1605.In some years in the early seventeenth century as many as fiftylasts of English gunpowder were available for export.47 After1618, however, as hostilities resumed in Europe, a renewedsense of urgency gripped Jacobean military planners.48 Thecrown paid closer attention to munitions in the 1620s as theEuropean security situation worsened, and began a scramblefor saltpetre at home and abroad. In May 1624 the governmentordered that a great quantity of gunpowder should with all speedbe made, and the saltpetremen should double their deliveries asthe pressing occasions of these time do require.49

War raged in Europe throughout Charles Is reign and period-ically threatened to involve the Stuart dominions. In 1625 theCouncil issued urgent orders for the better maintaining of thebreed and increase of saltpetre, and the true making of gunpow-der, and bustled to equip expeditions to Cadiz and the Ile deRe.50 The Ordnance Office struggled to furnish 240 lasts of gun-powder a year, but when hostilities ended with France and Spainthe Council planned to reduce John Evelyns contract to theformer single rate of 120 lasts per annum. Even at this level the

45 Bourne, Arte of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce, 723; Richard Winship Stewart, TheEnglish Ordnance Office, 15851625 (Woodbridge, 1996), 923.

46 BL, Royal MS 17 A XXXI, fo. 31rv.47 Cal. State Papers, Venetian, 16037, 35, 274, 313; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,

Addenda, 15801625, 114; BL, Cotton MS Ortho EVII, fo. 78.48 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 161923, 189; Acts of the Privy Council, 161921, 177.49 Acts of the Privy Council, 16235, 215. See also PRO, SP 14/158/78; SP 16/361/9

( John Evelyns review of Ordnance contracts, 162135); Stewart, English OrdnanceOffice, 8892.

50 By the King: A Proclamation for the Maintenance and Encrease of the Mines ofSaltpeter, 13 Apr. 1625; Acts of the Privy Council, 16256, 14, 18; Cal. State Papers,Domestic, 16256, 4, 9. See also Richard W. Stewart, Arms and Expeditions: TheOrdnance Office and the Assaults on Cadiz (1625) and the Isle of Rhe (1627), inMark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 15981650 (Manchesterand New York, 1991), 118, 125; Andrew Thrush, The Ordnance Office and theNavy, 162540, Mariners Mirror, lxxvii (1991).





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Caroline state used more gunpowder than any of the Tudors. Thetrained bands alone needed ninety-four lasts a year for mustersand training.51

Though England remained aloof from European conflict inthe 1630s, the threat of military involvement had not abated.Invasion by Catholic powers was not unthinkable. There wereforeign foes to be countered, Dunkirk raiders, Barbary corsairs,and ragtag pirates to be pursued. The crown needed supplies forits forts and forces, the garrisons at Portsmouth, Hull andBerwick, and for the re-formed militia. Above all, Charlesneeded powder for the rebuilt royal navy. With thirty-four shipsthe navy of the ship money era was no larger than in the days ofthe Armada, but its tonnage and firepower nearly doubled. KingCharless ships by 1640 carried almost 1,200 heavy guns. Thoughnot called to hostile action, celebratory shots and salutes ate upsupplies so much that the practice had to be curtailed. By esti-mates of February 1638, before the start of the Scottish war,Charles I needed 292 lasts of gunpowder a year, more thanthree times the requirements of the wartime Elizabethanregime.52

The Bishops Wars of 163940 and the decade of civil war thatfollowed put extraordinary pressure on military procurement.The Wars of the Three Kingdoms militarized the British economyand put tens of thousands of men in arms. A military forecast onthe eve of the Civil War estimated that a field armyof ten thousandmen would need seven and a half tons of gunpowder for its foot,and ten tons more for its artillery. Actual campaigns showed theseestimates to be inadequate. Civil War armies ranged up to thirtythousand strong, and at Marston Moor in 1644 there were morethan 46,000 men on the battlefield. The demand for gunpowder

51 PRO, SP 16/180/3 and 10. The saltpetre assignment in 1629 was 5,234 hun-dredweight or 218 lasts, enough to furnish almost 325 lasts of gunpowder; but the totaldelivered in the year ending April 1629, a year of maximum effort, was only 3,462hundredweight, which indicates that production was one-third below target: Cal. StatePapers, Domestic, Addenda, 162549, 340; PRO, SP 16/530/45.

52 PRO, SP 16/292, fo. 38rv; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 242; J. R. Powell,The Navy in the English Civil War (London, 1962), 79; Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships,Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge,1991), 7, 143, 152; Thrush, Ordnance Office and the Navy, 33954; By the King: AProclamation against the Unnecessary Waste of Gunpowder (London, 13 Apr. 1628, STC8882). James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the MilitaryRevolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Stroud, 1999), 328, shows naval expend-iture rising from 174,596 a year in 16259 to 209,395 a year in 16359.





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was insatiable, and commanders on all sides complained of short-age of munitions.53

The end of civil war in England by no means lessened thestates need for gunpowder. Campaigns in Scotland and Irelandrequired aggressive displays of firepower, and Cromwells army,54,000 strong in 1654, added further to the pressure. Dutch warsand imperial ambitions stimulated the growth of a navy which wasincreasingly hungry for munitions. From a thirty-five-ship navy in1642 with 1,199 heavy guns, the Commonwealths fleet grew to139 vessels with 4,214 guns in 1659. The naval demand for gun-powder expanded fourfold between 1640 and 1660.54

Gunpowder consumption increased with each conflict, andlater Stuart governments understood that the strength of wardepended on saltpetre for the defence and safety of this realm.55

The Restoration Ordnance Office no longer counted lasts, butmeasured supplies in pounds, quarters, hundredweights andtons, as was appropriate in an age of political arithmetic.Whereas Charles II needed 500 tons of powder a year to fightthe Dutch, his Hanoverian successors needed 647 tons a year inthe Seven Years War (175663) and over 1,600 tons a year in theWar of American Independence (177583).56 By this time, how-ever, they relied on East Indian saltpetre and no longer dug instables and backyards.

III

From the mid-Tudor period to the Interregnum English gov-ernments supervised a procurement system for saltpetre that

53 Peter Edwards, Gunpowder and the English Civil War, Jl Arms and ArmourSoc., xv (1995); Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British CivilWars, 163852 (Stroud, 2000); The Royalist Ordnance Papers, 16421646, ed. Ian Roy,2 vols. (Oxfordshire Record Soc., xliii, xlix, Oxford, 196475); Buchanan, Art andMystery of Making Gunpowder , 2425.

54 James Scott Wheeler, Logistics and Supply in Cromwells Conquest of Ireland,in Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain; Powell, Navy in the English Civil War,79; Arthur W. Tedder, The Navy of the Restoration from the Death of Cromwell to theTreaty of Breda: Its Work, Growth and Influence (Cambridge, 1916), 1214, based onBodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MS 73; Wheeler, Making of a World Power, 456.

55 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 168990, 195; By the King and Queen: A Proclamationto Prohibit the Exportation of Salt Petre (London, 25 July 1689).

56 H. C. Tomlinson, Guns and Government: The Ordnance Office under the LaterStuarts (London, 1979), 112; Frey, Indian Saltpeter Trade, 5212; Jenny West,Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1991),163, 212, 2247.





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supplemented foreign imports. The Privy Council and the Lordsof the Admiralty appointed Commissioners for Gunpowder andSaltpetre, who directed the Ordnance Office. Under themthe saltpetremen, a dozen or so men of business, accepted com-missions to deliver contracted amounts of material from desig-nated groups of counties. They in turn employed deputies andagents, and hundreds of workmen who did the actual digging andboiling who were the immediate cause of local vexation.Property owners called them knaves, varlets or underminingtwo-legged moles, and protested against their exactions anddepredations. The saltpetremen were notoriously corrupt, andwere known for compounding with gentlemen whose groundsand buildings they spared.57

The extraction of saltpetre could not be done without diggingand damage, nor could its processing proceed without cartageand fuel. Clashes and collisions arose whenever governmentoperatives intruded on private ground, or requisitioned equip-ment for which countrymen had other uses. Exactions wereinevitable, and some subjects were sure to be greatly abused.Elizabethan councillors sought to keep the vexation and dis-commodity to a minimum, and the queen herself was said to bereluctant to have her subjects houses digged because of theannoyance it entailed.58 While striving to secure material formunitions, Elizabeths government managed to present itself asthe guardian of popular liberties. If subjects suffered wonderfulvexation or were miserably plagued in their houses, in their car-riage, in their wood and timber, as they claimed, councillorspromised that the courts would provide remedy.59 When thewhole country complained of overcharges in 1589, and againin 1600 of contentions and controversies . . . corruptions andabuses the government offered words of assuagement but did not

57 For the administration of this system, see Stewart, English Ordnance Office;Tomlinson, Guns and Government. For characterizations of the saltpetremen, seeThe Lord Cookes Charge Given at Norwiche Assizes the 4 of August 1606 againstthe Abuses and Corruptions of Officers, amongst whom Saltpeter Menn: BL, HarleyMS 6070, fo. 413v; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, A Faire Quarrell(London, 1617, STC 17911), Act I, Scene i; Letters of Mr. Boyle to SeveralPersons, in Boyle, Works, vi, 40.

58 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 15603, 98; PRO, SP 12/91/44; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,154780, 511; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, 156679, 495; PRO, SP 15/24,fo. 141; BL, Lansdowne MS 31, fo. 188; Lansdowne MS 57, fo. 144.

59 BL, Lansdowne MS 24, fo. 139.





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interrupt the work.60 A proclamation of January 1590 acknow-ledged the forcements and exactions on peoples carriages,houses, grounds and woods, to the great grievance and disturb-ance of her majestys loving subjects, but military exigenciesrequired the project to go forward, under legal and administrativescrutiny.61 Attorney-General (later Sir) Edward Coke com-plained to Lord Burghley in August 1597 about the grief anddiscontentment occasioned by the saltpetremen, and sought tolimit their worst abuses.62

Tudor governments assumed to themselves the responsibilityas well as the right to collect saltpetre in the national interest. Onlywhen this right was challenged did they need to cloak it in theory.When monopolies were attacked in 1601, Privy Councillors de-fended the saltpetre system as altogether without [i.e. outside]the compass of monopolies, and congruent with common lawand equity. It rested, they said, on the twin poles of necessity andprerogative:

The benefit of making saltpetre and gunpowder within this land is soinfinite that it stretcheth not only to the security of the goods, lands,and lives of all her majestys subjects, but also to the preservation of herhighnesss royal person, her crown and dignity, and the maintenance oftrue religion.

Royal rights in this regard were beyond question because the solemaking of saltpetre and gunpowder within her majestys domin-ions pertaineth to the crown by her highnesss prerogative royal.Anyone who shall seditiously or contemptuously call in questionthe power or validity of her majestys prerogative royal in thisregard risked severe punishment according to their desert.63

Constitutional questioning of the saltpetre enterprise contin-ued in James Is reign. When landowners refused to allow pro-spectors to enter their grounds in 1603, claiming that theirElizabethan warrants had expired, the patentees for saltpetreand gunpowder reminded the king that their grant was no mon-opoly, but a matter by royal prerogative inseparably belonging to

60 BL, Lansdowne MS 61, fo. 188; Acts of the Privy Council, 15991600, 818.61 By the Queene: A Proclamation for the Calling in and Frustrating All Commissions for

the Making of Salt-Peter (London, 13 Jan. 1590, STC 8190; repr. 1595, STC 8189.7).62 BL, Lansdowne MS 84, fos. 1456.63 PRO, SP 12/286/42; another version in BL, Cotton MS Ortho EVII, fos. 949,

105rv. The royal privilege of digging saltpetre for the defence of the realm was con-firmed in Darcy v. Allen, Kings Bench, Easter 1602, in Sir Francis Moore, Cases Collectand Report (London, 1688), 67.





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the imperial crown.64 Senior justices agreed in 1606 that thedigging and taking of saltpetre to make gunpowder was amongthe kings prerogative rights, performed for the defence of thewhole realm, in which every subject hath benefit. It was under-stood as a purveyance, a necessary provisioning for the crown, butit was not to be done without limitations. To avoid wronging thekings subjects, Sir Edward Coke argued, crown saltpetremenwere obliged to leave the land they worked in so good plight asthey found it. They could dig in outhouses or barns, stables,dove-houses, [or] mills, but not in private dwellings, for thehabitation of subjects [must] be preserved and maintained. InCokes view, though not necessarily that of the crown, the houseof every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for hisdefence against injury and violence as for his repose. Thereshould be no disturbance of an Englishmans corn or hay, nodislodging of horses or cattle. Saltpetre work should be conductedonly at convenient times, between sunrise and sunset, and thesaltpetremen should erect no furnaces or kettles without the land-owners consent. Requisitioning of carts should be limited to ninemiles, with payment of compensation of 4d. a mile laden andempty.65 Each of these provisions was controversial and subjectto violation.

Resistance and resentment accumulated in Charles Is reign, asdemand for saltpetre accelerated. King Charles in 1625 pro-claimed his heavy displeasure at contemners of his majestysroyal commandment concerning saltpetre, and threatened StarChamber against anyone who challenged his prerogative in thatregard.66 Another proclamation in January 1627 invoked theprerogative royal to support the saltpetremen, and esteemedanyone who was remiss or negligent in the due observance of

64 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 160310, 6; PRO, SP 14/1/64.65 Sir Edward Coke, The Twelfth Part of the Reports (London, 1656), 1215; Sir

Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1644),162; Sir Edward Coke Quinta pars relationum Edwardi Coke . . . The Fift [sic] Part of theReports (London, 1612, STC 5507), fos. 912, citing Semaynes Case. See also HenryRolle, Les Reports de Henry Rolle (London, 1675), 182, citing a finding in 1606 pertouts justices, lofficiers del Roy ne poient enfreinder le inner mese dun subject pursaltpeeter etsi soit pur le bien publique, mes outer mese ils potent.

66 Acts of the Privy Council, 16256, 14, 18; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16256, 4, 9;By the King: A Proclamation for the Maintenance and Encrease of the Mines of Saltpeter, 13Apr. 1625.





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this work to be contemptuous and ill-affected both to our personand state.67 At issue was not the royal right to material formunitions, which nobody disputed, but rather the social cost ofobtaining it. Common-law judges resolved again in 1625 thatsaltpetre operatives cannot dig the floor of any mansion houseswhich serve for the habitation of man, and Sir Edward Cokereiterated this in parliament in 1628. The royal right to saltpetrewas only as a purveyance, and allowed no entitlement to enterprivate houses. They cannot dig any house or wall, for it is for thecommonwealth to have houses of habitation. They may dig infloors, in stables, cellars and vaults or mud walls, so as they berepaired again, but not in dovecotes or barns.68

Charles Is patentees never accepted these limitations, and theking was inclined to support them. Saltpetremen repeatedly ap-pealed to the crown against refractory persons who thwartedtheir enterprise or barred them access.69 Wrapping themselvesin royal authority, they reported acts of ill-affectedness to hismajestys service that cost them great loss and charges.70 TheOxfordshire saltpetreman Nicholas Stephens in 1628 invoked thegreat necessity and danger of the kingdom, and claimed that hiscommission empowered him to dig in houses against consent,and to carry without setting down how far.71 Gloucestershiresaltpetremen made threats and demands in the name of theking, and called people who resisted them rogues, rebels andtraitors.72 The Wiltshire saltpetreman Thomas Hilliard claimedthat anyone who opposed him opposed the king.73 King Charleshimself made his position clear in a proclamation of March 1635that labelled as refractory and delinquent those disobedientsubjects who flouted our royal commandment, in a matter of sohigh consequence for the public service and safety of our state and

67 By the King: A Proclamation for the Better Making of Saltpeter within this Kingdome,2 Jan. 1627; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16278, 303.

68 BL, Sloane MS 1039, fo. 93rv; Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Robert C. Johnsonet al., 6 vols. (New Haven, 197783), ii, 2, 47; iv, 348, 350.

69 Acts of the Privy Council, July 1628 Apr. 1629, 235; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,162931, 219, 238.

70 PRO, SP 16/320/40. See also Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1635, 511, 568, 596;Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16356, 410, 449; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16367, 217,294; PRO, SP 16/292, fo. 52v; SP 16/354/4.

71 PRO, SP 16/169/46 and 47.72 PRO, SP 16/165/38; Gloucestershire Archives, Gloucester, D7115/1, 38.73 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 162931, 318; PRO, SP 16/171/79.





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kingdom.74 Although, as Kevin Sharpe notes, Charles was will-ing for the saltpetre men to dig up his own house at Woodstock(the Council observed in May 1636 that the king likes it well),the repeated applications by saltpetreman Richard Bagnall to digin the kings hunting lodge were repeatedly blocked by the house-keeper and Lord Chamberlain.75

Complaints arose wherever saltpetremen worked, but weremore likely to carry weight when coming from an aristocrat.Robert Leigh, a saltpetreman in Flintshire, made the wrongenemy in 1627 when he intruded on the property of the powerfulLord Strange. He broke locks to enter his lordships stables, toreup the planking on the floor, and dug so deep that he endangeredthe foundations. He followed this feat by digging in HawardenCastle, despite being expressly forbidden to enter. Living rio-tously, on pretence of being the kings servants, Leigh and hismen terrorized the town. At night, in their pots, they cried out,the town is ours . . . to the great grief and amazement of thepoor inhabitants, whose lodgings they took without payingrent. Returning to the same ground within three years of its lastdigging, they left everything in a ruinous manner. Lord Strangeleaned on the earl of Totnes and master of the ordnance, whowrote to Secretary Coke to seek punishment for these abusesand insolences. The Council summoned Leigh to answercharges, and eventually he acknowledged his miscarriage andabuses and withdrew from the saltpetre service.76

In April 1628 the earl of Danby brought the case of theOxfordshire saltpetreman Nicholas Stephens to the attention ofthe duke of Buckingham, who was joint holder of the saltpetrepatent. Having grievously oppressed the people of these parts,Stephens had been cited at the Quarter Sessions for his manifoldabuses, but claimed protection through the dukes commission.Danby was willing to suspend proceedings against the saltpetre-men, he said, if Buckingham would take care to reform their lewd

74 By the King: A Proclamation for Preservation of Grounds for Making of Saltpeter, andto Restore Such Grounds as Are Now Destroyed, and to Command Assistance to Be Given tohis Maiesties Saltpeter-Makers (London, 14 Mar. 1635, STC 9033).

75 Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992),195; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16356, 448; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16367, 238,372, 431, 458; PRO, SP 16/376/146.

76 PRO, SP 16/70/12; Acts of the Privy Council, Jan.Aug. 1627, 408; Acts of the PrivyCouncil, July 1628 Apr. 1629, 33940; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 96.





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courses.77 Stephens made more enemies by taking seven loads ofcoal from Sir Anthony Hungerfords house at Black Burton,saying he must have them, and opened the gate and carriedthem away, and neither tendered nor left the kings price. Heforced carts to carry materials for as many as thirty miles, paidfor half loads instead of full ones, and reimbursed but twopence amile. Stephens even had a tariff for bribes or compounding,taking 1030 shillings in lieu of forced carriage.78

Stephenss most shocking outrage was at Chipping Norton,where he dug twenty loads of saltpetre from the soil in theparish church. Pulling up seats to get to the earth, his men leftthe ground unlevelled so as the parishioners are not able to per-form their duties of divine service. When they had finished therewas no place to sit or kneel in the church, and parishionerscould not conveniently bury their dead. When the parish clerkobjected that Gods house was no fit place for digging, the work-men answered with obscene jests, that the earth in churches isbest for their turns, for the women piss in their seats, which causesexcellent saltpetre. The disturbance continued outside, whereStephens pulled down part of the churchyard wall to set up hisboilers, and his tubs stood in the churchyard so as they couldscarce come into the church. Puritans and ceremonialists couldband together against these transgressions, though the Oxfordshireincident was by no means unique. Stephens had dug in otherchurches at Coventry, Warwick and Oxford, believing them notexcepted in his saltpetre commission.79 The fact that somechurches had pissing places and others suffered from incontinentsermon sitters increased their suitability for the saltpetre service.80

77 PRO, SP 16/101/46.78 PRO, SP 16/165/38; Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Johnson et al., iv, 347.79 Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Johnson et al., ii, 41, 387; iii, 623, 629; iv, 347, 350,

353, 355; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 162931, 206, 386; PRO, SP 16/162/40; SP 16/169/46; SP 16/169/47. For William Lauds reaction to similar sacrilegious abuse inWales in 1624, see his diary in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, WilliamLaud, iii, ed. J. Bliss (Oxford, 1853), 155.

80 For example, Oxfordshire Record Office, Oxford, PAR 207/4/F1/1, fos. 116,182, for the pissing place at St Martins, Oxford I owe this reference to JohnCraig. The natural philosopher Henry Stubbe later explained that unpaved floors ofchurches or seats that are loosely boarded could be rich in saltpetre because thoseplaces allowed long putrefication where the earth be animated and impregnated bythe air: see his Legends no Histories, 51, 85. In 1635 (under the influence of ArchbishopLaud), A Proclamation for Preservation of Grounds for Making of Saltpeter declared,we will not have any sacred ground be stirred, digged, or opened by authority ofthe saltpetre commission.





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Aggressive in his defence, Stephens flourished his royal war-rant, and threatened challengers with Star Chamber. His refusalto answer charges in parliament prompted Sir John Eliot and SirRobert Phelips to speak out against the boldness of the saltpetre-men and their contempt for the House of Commons. A commis-sion to break up churches and lay illegal charges upon the countrysuits well with the unlimited power of some mens commands,which is most unjust, protested Eliot. Debate on the Petition ofRight in 1628 was sharpened by these concerns, which resurfacedin the Grand Remonstrance.81

Grievances arose throughout the 1630s, even with no parlia-ment in which to air them. A four-page report in 1630 com-plained that the saltpetremen had dug in all places withoutdistinction, as in parlours, bed-chambers, threshing floors, malt-ing houses and shops; yea, Gods own house they have not for-borne, but have digged in churches, hallowed chapels andchurchyards, tearing mens bones and ashes out of their gravesto make gunpowder of. They worked without regard to time orseason, upsetting dovecotes, undermining foundations, andseldom or never fill up or repair the places they have digged in,but leave the houses and rooms full of great heaps of earth, rub-bish, dirt, and mire. In placing their tubs by bedsides of the oldand impotent, sick and diseased, of women with their childrensucking at their breasts, and even of women in childbed and ofsick persons lying on the deathbeds, they operated beyond thebounds of common decency, and caused more scandal by theirprofane and impious proceedings, in ringing of bells and dis-orderly drinking in the church.82

Especially notorious was Thomas Hilliard, whose territoryincluded much of the south-west. In Wiltshire Hilliards mendug where they pleased, in any mans house, in any room, andat any time. They spoiled malthouses, interfered with agricul-ture, and paid too little for transport. Among many oppressions,Hilliard allegedly warned opponents he would strike such aneverlasting despair into the heart of the country, as they willnever attempt to complain again.83

81 Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Johnson et al., iv, 348, 350.82 PRO, SP 16/165/38; Gloucestershire Archives, D7115/1, 38.83 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, 162549, 464; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,

162931, 188; PRO, SP 16/161/1; SP 16/163/40; SP 16/171/79; GloucestershireArchives, D7115/1, 36. Hilliards saltpetre warrant embraced Dorset, Somerset,


(cont. on p. 96)




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Thomas Hilliard had survived attacks in parliament in 1628,but his troubles intensified when rival saltpetremen envied hiscommissions. If it was wrong for him to take bribes to spare peo-ples carts and grounds, and scandalous that he allowed his wife toride around in a cart in the nature of a carriage that was hired forthe public service, it was unforgivable that he should attempt todefraud the king. Already suspected of secret deals in London, tohis own private profit and benefit, Hilliard was reported to haveshipped saltpetre by night to black-market powder makers inBristol. Embezzling his majestys saltpetre was a much moreserious charge than trampling on the rights of the subject, and itled to proceedings in Star Chamber.84 Hilliards corruption didbetray the whole realm to danger, said the court, and forced theking to buy saltpetre at a dear rate from foreign parts. After thejudges recommended that he stand in the pillory, be fined5,000, and face a lifetime ban from office, it was reported in1634 that Hilliard the saltpetreman had fled.85

Hundreds more abuses could be cited from a cascade of com-plaints. At Norwich in 1635 the mayor blamed saltpetremen forexcavating the foundations of the town hall, so as the whole fabricand structure of the house is in great danger to fall. Their diggingextended to the jail where dangerous prisoners were housed, andto the rooms where distracted mad persons are usually put.86

Petitioners elsewhere in Norfolk complained of the great abuses,oppressions and extortions of the saltpetremen whose dis-orderly, shameless and riotous behaviour included breakingup houses and barns in most unseasonable times, receiving ofmoneys under hand, [and] forcing of carriages to remoteplaces, only to weary the country thereby to gain bribes.87

Throughout England they insisted on their power, licence,

(n. 83 cont.)

Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, and he also had commissions for Cheshire, Lancashire,Cumberland and Westmorland: PRO, PC2/39, 258.

84 Acts of the Privy Council, May 1629 May 1630, 318; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,16313, 76, 152, 365, 371; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16334, 299, 451; PRO, SP 16/193/83; SP 16/260/21; SP 16/169/46.

85 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16334, 451; PRO, SP 16/260/20 and 21; BL, Add.MS 11764, fos. 6v8; BL, Harley MS 4022, fo. 2v.

86 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1635, 605; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16356, 150,152; PRO, SP 16/303/56; SP 16/305/2; SP 16/305/64; SP 16/311/27.

87 PRO, SP 16/535/108. See also the general complaint of the county against thepractices of the saltpetremen in 1637, in State Papers Relating to Musters, Beacons,Shipmoney, etc. in Norfolk, ed. Walter Rye (Norwich, 1907), 2323.





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liberty and authority to break open and work for saltpetre inanyones houses, lands, grounds and possessions.88 Ratherthan advancing the kings service, claimed Sir Robert Phelips in1636, the saltpetremen pursued their own ends, put the countryto an immense charge, and endeavour[ed] to make his majestyssubjects their slaves.89

Competing lines of patronage and authority clashed inWiltshire in 1637 when the saltpetreman Thomas Thornhillmade the mistake of tangling with Dr Christopher Wren, therector of Knoyle Magna (now East Knoyle). When Thornhillsmen dug out the floor of Wrens pigeon house, without his per-mission, they did so much damage that the north wall fell in andthe birds forsook the house. The rector lost three breeds,whereof the least never yield fewer than 30 or 40 dozen, so hesaid, and he now faced a suit for dilapidations. The pigeon housewas a stone structure twenty feet high with walls three feet thick,but the saltpetremen reduced it to a ruin. Thornhill, for his part,claimed that the wall was already cracked, and that it fell down onthe great windy night that blew down so many houses, barns andtrees in all parts of the kingdom, by no means due to his digging.As a servant of the crown, engaged in work of national import-ance, he sought relief from the Council against the rectors unjustmolestation.90

Wren, however, commanded unusual political resources: hewas dean of Windsor and registrar of the Order of the Garter,and his brother Matthew was the bishop of Norwich. Bypassingthe Council he addressed himself directly to King Charles on theoccasion of the Feast of St George. As an officer of the Garter,Wren claimed royal protection, and the king took his registrarsside against his saltpetreman. A committee under Lord TreasurerJuxon concluded in January 1638 that the pigeon house fell downin consequence of Thornhills digging, not by casualty of windand weather, and the rector could sue for reparations. The future

88 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1637, 129, 2223; PRO, SP 16/361/110 and 11; SP16/320/40 and 41; SP 16/320/30; SP 17/D/19 (saltpetre commission, 30 Nov. 1637).

89 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16367, 53, 449; PRO, SP 16/328/31.90 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1637, 61, 187, 259; PRO, SP 16/355/55; SP 16/361/8;

SP 16/362/101. On the economic benefits and seigneurial privileges of pigeon-keeping, see John McCann, Dovecotes and Pigeons in English Law, Trans. AncientMonuments Soc., xliv (2000). It was widely though perhaps falsely believed that pigeondung produced the best nitre of all others: Quersitanus [Duchesne], Practice ofChymicall, and Hermeticall Physicke, sig. P2.





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architect Christopher Wren junior, who was five years old at thetime of the pigeon-house incident, may have learned somethingabout politics, and about the solidity of buildings.91

Commoners who lacked the advantages of the political elitewere reduced to private grumbling, but some used more inventivemeans to thwart the intruders. In Surrey in 1633 the servants ofGeorge Mynnes of Croydon set chains across the highway anddenied the saltpetremen access to his pigeon house. Armed withpitchforks and bills, they laughed when the saltpetremen soughtwater from Mynnes well, and said that they knew no service thatthe king had there; but if the king came that way he should havethe key.92 Angry citizens at Norwich not only barred the salt-petremen from access to water but also used reproachfulspeeches and threatened to throw one of the workers in awell.93 Opponents of the saltpetremen in Dorset obstructed thecarriage of liquids to the boiling house at Sherborne.94 In Essexthey refused to rent barns or warehouses to the saltpetremanHugh Grove, and diverted all the ash he needed to the soapworks.95 Almost everywhere, said the Berkshire saltpetremanRichard Bagnall, was unwillingness among most of his majestyssubjects to do anything for the advance of this service.96

Saltpetremen reported a mutiny against them in Hertford-shire in May 1638, whereby his majestys said officers were indanger of being killed.97 Midnight raiders in Lincolnshire over-threw saltpetre tubs and spoiled their mixtures, while local magis-trates turned blind eyes to the offenders. In Kent in December1639 malignants with cudgels beat up the saltpetre operativesand locked them in the stocks, saying the king employed morerogues in his works than any man.98 Property-owners found

91 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1637, 353, 531; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378,37, 1445; PRO, SP 16/371/67; SP 16/378/21.

92 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16313, 5578, 573; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,16334, 85, 98, 108, 120; PRO, SP 16/233/23; SP 16/240/21; SP 16/241/713.

93 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1635, 605; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16356, 150,152; PRO, SP 16/303/56; SP 16/305/2; SP 16/305/64; SP 16/311/27.

94 J. P. Ferris, The Saltpetremen in Dorset, 1635, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. andArchaeol. Soc., lxxxv (1963), 1601; PRO, SP 16/318/40.

95 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16334, 282, 4023, 436.96 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1635, 33, 449; SP 16/300/49; SP 16/300/63; SP 16/

301/61.97 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 453.98 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 163940, 176, 473. For more complaints, see Cal.

State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 159, 174, 180, 190, 344, 372, 375, 513, 589; Cal. State


(cont. on p. 99)




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ingenious ways of foiling the saltpetre enterprise. Their gateswere locked, their carts unavailable, their tenants obstreperous.Wagons developed problems with their axles, horses went lame,and barrels suffered mysterious accidents. No fuel could be foundfor boiling, no ashes for straining or refining, and the only avail-able charcoal was mixed with dirt.

Complaints arose from all points of the ideological spec-trum, from champions of parliament like Eliot and Phelips toarch-royalists like Sir John Lucas and Christopher Wren.Lucas, the recently knighted former sheriff of Essex, took um-brage in 1639 against the incivility of the saltpetremen whoviolated the privileges of his house. Lionel Cranfield, earl ofMiddlesex, similarly railed against lewd people who usedsaucy and unbecoming language when under pretence of apatent for digging for saltpetre they broke into his house likethieves and dug in some unfloored rooms.99 Despite beingdivided on other matters, landowners agreed that the crownsquest for saltpetre was vexatious, especially when it touchedtheir own estates. Rank and status did not exempt English aris-tocrats from the attentions of saltpetre prospectors, as it did theircontemporaries in France.100

Charles Is saltpetre enterprise became further stressed whenshortages of money threatened to bring it to a halt. The crown fellbehind in payments to the saltpetremen, who were accused inturn of defaulting on their workers wages. Commanders com-plained of the want of gunpowder, at the very time when warwith Scotland placed new pressures on military procurement.Gunpowder makers blamed the saltpetremen for failing to delivertheir quotas.101 Powder mills threatened to grind to a halt in July1640, just as the Scottish war reached its crisis. The crown owedthe powder maker Samuel Cordewell 4,000, and he was unable

(n. 98 cont.)

Papers, Domestic, 1639, 2623; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1640, 912, 348; PRO, SP16/361/110; SP 16/445/79.

99 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1639, 157; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 163940, 594;Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1640, 62; PRO, SP 16/420/146; SP 16/449/25; SP 16/450/36 and 45; SP 16/451/25.

100 John U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 15401640(Philadelphia, 1940), 65.

101 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1638, 118, 448, 472; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,1639, 12; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 163940, 102, 424; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,16401, 313.





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to pay his suppliers. The domestic saltpetremen went unpaid, andthe merchant importers had 1,150 owing. Gunpowder reservesat the Tower and Portsmouth stood at 271 lasts at the end ofFebruary 1640, but fell to 196 lasts by the end of June.102 Bythe time of the Battle of Newburn in August, when Scottishcannon rained destruction on an ill-prepared English army, thekings inestimable treasure was almost exhausted.

In the following year the saltpetre monopoly unravelled, alongwith much more of the royal prerogative. Bulstrode Whitelockeargued in May 1641 that the making of saltpetre can be no pre-rogative of the kings, since gunpowder was a relatively recentinvention. Other members of parliament claimed that makingand marketing it was any Englishmans right.103 Parliamentpassed An act for the free bringing in of gunpowder and saltpetrefrom foreign parts and for the free making of gunpowder in thisrealm, domestic saltpetre deliveries shrank to barely eight lasts amonth, and the few saltpetremen who still offered supplies to thegovernment desired notice might be taken they did not deliver it. . . as peter made by virtue of any commission or authority derivedfrom his majesty, but as a commodity sold to him by way of mer-chandize.104 The national saltpetre programme had few politicalfriends in 1641 and many enemies to denounce its depredations.Yet the nation still depended on gunpowder for its security, anddemand for munitions would rocket when the nation succumbedto civil war. Amidst familiar arguments about safety anddanger, and with safeguards to prevent the reviving of thoseoppressions and vexations exercised upon the people, parliamentin 1643 empowered its own state agents to search and dig forsaltpetre in all pigeon-houses, stables, and all other outhouses,yards, and places likely to afford that earth, though private dwell-ings were specifically exempted.105

102 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1640, 439, 507, 523, 562.103 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16401, 521; Proceedings in the Opening Session of the

Long Parliament, ed. Maija Jansson, 7 vols. (Rochester, NY, 20007), ii, 309, 637; iv,302.

104 Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, ed. Jansson, vi, 17;Statutes of the Realm, 16 Car. I, c. 21; House of Lords Record Office, London, HL/PO/JO/10/1/68; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16413, 66, 103, 152, 280.

105 Bodleian Lib., Tanner MS 63, fo. 3. For civil war procurement, see Edwards,Gunpowder and the English Civil War, 10931; Edwards, Dealing in Death, 11017.





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IV

The only alternative to domestic foraging for saltpetre or relianceon foreign imports was a centralized, industrialized, science-based saltpetre programme. Lazarus Ercker had described suchan operation in Bohemia, and much of the saltpetre importedthrough Amsterdam originated in northern European nitrebeds. Enterprising projectors repeatedly promoted such worksin England, and some of them actually delivered a product. Butgovernments were sceptical and investors fickle, and nothingreplaced the roving prospecting of the hated saltpetremen.106

As early as 1545 the German engineer Stefan von Haschenpergoffered Henry VIII a way of making saltpetre, otherwise calledblack vitriol, in one place without going about the realm searchingfor it. But any experiments under von Haschenpergs guidancewere small-scale and tentative, and left no record.107 AnotherGerman engineer, Gerard Hoenrich, sought patronage fromElizabeth I. In March 1561 Hoenrich offered to reveal the trueand perfect art of making saltpetre to grow in cellars, barns, or inlime or stone quarries, and he sketched out a system of nitre beds,vats, chambers, brickwork and furnaces. The special ingredientsincluded urine from drinkers of wine or beer, dung from stabledhorses fed on oats, and lime from oyster shells. Sea coal, he sug-gested, would serve as well as charcoal for fuel, and might even becheaper.108 With Secretary Cecils backing, Hoenrich enteredinto the first agreement to make industrial saltpetre for theEnglish crown. His transfer of German technology would earnhim 300. But two months later Hoenrich complained that he

106 For the furnishing of saltpetre in continental Europe, see Walter Panciera,Saltpetre Production in the Republic of Venice from the Sixteenth to theEighteenth Century, Icon: Jl Internat. Committee for the History of Technology, iii(1977); Bengt Ahslund, The Saltpetre Boilers of the Swedish Crown, in Buchanan(ed.), Gunpowder: The History of an International Technology; Nef, Industry andGovernment in France and England, 5868, 978; Surirey de Saint-Remy, TheManufacture of Gunpowder in France (1702). Part 1: Saltpetre, Sulphur andCharcoal, ed. and trans. D. H. Roberts, Jl Ordnance Soc., v (1993), 47; Robert P.Multhauf, The French Crash Program for Saltpeter Production, 177694,Technology and Culture, xii (1971).

107 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, xx, pt 2, p. 16;B. H. St. J. ONeil, Stefan von Haschenperg, an Engineer to King Henry VIII, and hisWork, Archaeologia, xci (1945); Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the MiddleAges, 1256.

108 PRO, SP 12/16/29; Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages,12830.





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had not been paid properly, and the project was taken over bylocal entrepreneurs. The mercer Philip Cockeram and the hab-erdasher John Barnes secured a licence to supply saltpetre to thecrown, provided the new invention proved to be of such utilityand profit as is pretended.109 Instead of developing this inven-tion, however, the government relied on its prerogative right totake saltpetre from private properties.

In 1575 the London gentleman John Bovyat obtained an ex-clusive patent to manufacture saltpetre and gunpowder fromstone mineral. Having travelled abroad, at great cost and risk,to find out the secret and hidden mystery of this mode of extrac-tion, Bovyat secured a privilege for twenty-one years. The grantentitled him to prospect on any subjects land within the queensdominions, and promised him the assistance of all mayors, just-ices, constables, bailiffs and other local officers. However, it leftintact the rights of other projectors that have heretofore usuallymade their saltpetre and gunpowder of mud walls or earth, bymore conventional methods.110 After twenty years of trying, thisproject was still stalled in 1596 when Bovyat asked LordBurghley, whether he shall go forward with the same, or whetherso great a treasure shall be smothered and lost.111

Another German expert, Leonard Engelbreght of Aachen,offered in 1577 to make industrial saltpetre in England, butthe deal collapsed when the Fleming Cornelius Stephinson pre-sented more plausible and better-backed plans. Supported bySir Thomas Randolph, the royal postmaster, who praisedStephinsons mastery of a near-secret art, the project called forworks on 400 acres of the New Forest to deliver twenty tons ofsaltpetre a year, good perfect and well-refined. Cornelius (asmost of the records refer to him) actually set up his furnace andtubs, but problems with equipment, labour and funding proved asburdensome as objections from holders of traditional forestrights. Several times he apologized for deficiencies and beggedfor more time, and in 1580, amidst fears of a Spanish descent on

109 PRO, SP 12/16/30; BL, Lansdowne MS 5, fo. 98; Cal. Pat. Rolls, 15603, 98,104.

110 PRO, SP 12 106/53.111 HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the . . . Marquis of Salisbury, xiii, 597. For

earlier efforts, see Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 154780, 53, 68; Cal. State Papers,Domestic, 158190, 4; PRO, SP 12/106/1; SP 12/147/42; SP 15/24/68; BL,Lansdowne MS 80, fo. 93.





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Ireland, news reached Burghley that Cornelius is now boiling ofhis earth but it had not yet come to perfection.112

Yet another scheme to transform the saltpetre industry camefrom Christopher Coult and associates in the Armada year of1588. Coult informed Burghley that his years of foreign travel hadtaught him many things worthy the learning, including a perfectway to find out saltpetre and the making of powder, both goodand profitable to serve any prince. Understanding that in thistime of trouble there hath been some want of powder, he offeredto set up a centralized scheme with a national rotation of saltpetrekettles, fifteen to a region, that would deliver 5,000 hundred-weight of saltpetre a year, enough for 310 lasts of gunpowder. Itwas preposterously ambitious, alien to Elizabethan instincts, andonce more came to nothing.113

Projectors continued to come forward, among them JohnWrenham, one of the queens saltpetre patentees, who claimedin 1602 to have an invention for making saltpetre without diggingup any house. The plan involved some sort of spreading groundand the preparation of earths fit for the generation of saltpetrethat might grow to perfection. Wrenham offered to set this up athis own charge, if he may have the benefit thereof for forty years,but like similar schemes, it was all air and ambition.114

Early in Jamess reign Simon Read and Robert Jackson claimedknowledge of a new way to rear saltpetre out of earth and groundswhich in appearance and judgement of men of that faculty have inthem no saltpetre or substance of that nature. Half alchemists,half mountebanks, they claimed competence to deal with thereparation and restoration of abandoned and derelict saltpetremines, and asked for a monopoly so long as they would nothave to reveal their secrets.115 The Council advanced schemesthat may best stand with the furtherance of his majestys serviceand the ease of the country, and entertained another proposal in

112 Acts of the Privy Council, 15778, 140, 142, 15961, 1701; BL, Lansdowne MS24, fos. 137, 139; Lansdowne MS 25, fo. 138; Lansdowne MS 28, fos. 13, 23, 141,145, 147, 149, 152; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 154780, 658; PRO, SP 12/139/1. Theremains of this Elizabethan facility are described in E. C. Wrey, Saltpetre House,Ashurst Wood, Colbury, Papers and Proc. Hampshire Field Club and Archaeol. Soc.,xviii (1954), 3356.

113 PRO, SP 15/30, fo. 213; BL, Lansdowne MS 58, fo. 150.114 HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the . . . Marquis of Salisbury, xiv, 136; xii,

542.115 Ibid., xiv, 136.

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Cressy - Saltpetre State Secruity England (2011)

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