Cressy - Saltpetre State Secruity England (2011)

Like the Gunpowder Empires of Islamic Asia (the Ottoman
Empire based in Constantinople, the Safavid Empire based in

Iran and the Mughal Empire based in India), the Western
European gunpowder states of the early modern military
revolution made ceaseless efforts to secure the raw materials
for explosive munitions. Their siege trains, fighting ships, fortresses and musketry consumed vast amounts of powder as they
vied for dominance and projected their force beyond their frontiers. From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth the Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedes and English built their
strength on gunpowder. Neither monarchies nor armies could
operate without this special commodity. Without gunpowder
weaponry they could have no national security, and without its
principal ingredient saltpetre there could be no firepower
munitions.1 Only with the development of chemical explosives in
the later nineteenth century did dependence on gunpowder
decline.
Familiar in Europe by the thirteenth century, gunpowder was
composed of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur (known as
brimstone) and carbon (from charcoal). Reliant on milling and
mixing, the product was only as good as the material from which it
* I am grateful to Matt Goldish, John Guilmartin, Bert Hall, Christopher Otter and
Geoffrey Parker for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
1
goston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the
Gabor A
Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Weston F. Cook Jr, The Hundred Years War for
Morocco: 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.pauly
online.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 Military
Revolution 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.
Past and Present, no. 212 (August 2011)
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtr006
The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2011
Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ at Lahore University of Management Sciences on September 6, 2013
SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND

VEXATION IN EARLY MODERN
ENGLAND*
74
PAST AND PRESENT
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2
Nathanael Nye, The Art of Gunnery (London, 1647), 5. For the history of gunpowder and explosives, see E. A. Brayley Hodgetts (ed.), The Rise and Progress of the
British Explosives Industry (London, 1909); J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and
Gunpowder (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 an
International Technology (Bath, 1996); Glenys Crocker, The Gunpowder Industry, 2nd
edn (Princes Risborough, 1999); Brenda J. Buchanan, The Art and Mystery of
Making Gunpowder: The English Experience in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, 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 Powder
Making, in Brenda J. Buchanan (ed.), Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A
Technological 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, The
History 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 Animadversions
upon the History of the Royal Society (London, 1670), 945, 11416. For accessible
accounts of burning rates, shock waves, physico-chemical phenomena and combustion reactions, see E. Gray, H. Marsh and M. McLaren, A Short History of
Gunpowder and the Role of Charcoal in its Manufacture, Jl Materials Science, xvii
(1982); Jaime Wisniak, The History of Saltpeter Production with a Bit of Pyrotechnics and Lavoisier, Chemical Educator, v (2000).
3
Charcoal came from English woodlands, ideally from alder, willow, hazel or
beech. According to William Harrison there was great plenty of sulphur in Elizabethan England: William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen
(Ithaca, 1968), 289, 362. Advisers to the Muscovy Company in 1580 recommended
that their merchants carry brimstone, to try the vent of the same, because we
abound of it in the realm: Richard Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of
America, 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 from
volcanic regions in southern Italy.
was made. The charcoal provided solid substance for combustion, the sulphur allowed immediate ignition, while saltpetre provided oxygen for the explosion (strictly speaking, a deflagration
rather than a highly exothermic combustion). The proportions
varied with use and changed over time, but by the late sixteenth
century most English cannon powder mixed six parts saltpetre to
one part each of brimstone and charcoal. This combination,
claimed the seventeenth-century gunner Nathanael Nye, produced 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 and
expensive. Known to contemporaries as the soul, the foundation or the mother of gunpowder, it was either imported from
distant lands or extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung
SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND VEXATION
75
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 from
the Dungheap: English Saltpetre Production, 15901640, Jl Ordnance Soc., ii (1990).
5
On the subterranean treasures belonging to the crown by royal prerogative, see
Sir John Pettus, Fodinae regales: or, The History, Laws and Places of the Chief Mines and
Mineral 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 saltpetre
among minerals and other products . . . beneficial to the kingdom (p. 5).
6
The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, i, 163661, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio
Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe (London, 2001), 424; Robert Boyle, A
Physico-Chymical Essay, Containing an Experiment, with Some Considerations Touching
the Differing Parts and Redintegration of Salt-Petre (1661), in The Works of the Honourable
Robert 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.
and urine.4 Lacking understanding of the nitrification associated

with bacterial action on decaying organic matter, government
advisers wondered whether saltpetre was a substance to be
mined or grown. This was a serious question, hinged on the
different technologies, customs and prerogatives pertaining to
agriculture and minerals.5 Derived from the adored muck of
dung-coloured earth, saltpetre had mysterious properties,
thought the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, that may well
deserve our serious enquiries.6
English governments regarded saltpetre as an inestimable
treasure and sought it for their infinite security.7 It was the
crucial link in the chain of chemistry and power, comparable
in strategic importance to modern oil or uranium. Monarchs
claimed the right to extract saltpetre from private property,
while landowners complained of the vexation and oppression
this intrusion entailed.8 Between the 1560s and the 1640s a succession of projectors tendered new or secret processes intended to improve supplies of saltpetre while alleviating the
pressure on English subjects. Chemists and philosophers meanwhile pondered the mysteries of saltpetre and wondered how this
darling of nature gave rise to the most fatal instrument of death
that ever mankind was trusted withal.9 In Shakespeares synecdoche, it was villainous saltpetre . . . digged out of the bowels
of the harmless earth that made lethal the vile guns of the
76
PAST AND PRESENT
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10
William Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I. iii.

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 Abuses
Concerning 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.
11
battlefield.10 Successive regimes praised God for seeding the

land with mines of saltpetre, and gave thanks for the great
blessing of God, that this land hath means to furnish itself of
this provision.11
The quest for saltpetre illuminates interactions between science and technology, society and war, in the formative era of
the early modern state. It is an important matter for historical
investigation, not only because saltpetre furnished the state
with explosive force, but also because of the social, financial
and political complications of its provision. The procurement of
weapons-grade material involved statesmen and speculators, ordnance officers, international merchants, technical advisers, lawyers, labourers, and owners of nitrous-rich grounds. Their
dealings and conflicts generated the documentation on which
this study is based. Governors and counsellors specified their
military needs, while contractors and investors sought to supply
them. Their projects for the finding, refinement and furnishing of
saltpetre created a paper trail through which the social, legal,
political and technological history of their enterprise can be
traced. Written agreements, accounts, reports, inventories, petitions and proclamations reveal the practicalities and complexities
of saltpetre production. Local opposition to intrusions by
the saltpetremen brought discussion of their vexation and oppression to the attention of parliaments, councils and courts.
References to saltpetre abound in the state papers, private archives, and legal and commercial documents of Tudor and Stuart
England, yet the history of its procurement remains unwritten.
Though documentation is abundant, the somewhat unsavoury business of collecting and processing saltpetre (as
Gerald Aylmer described it) is overshadowed by more glamorous
accounts of politics and war.12 A few specialists have studied the
technology of gunpowder, with reference to its constituent ingredients. Historians of science, particularly chemistry, have
touched on saltpetre, but they rarely pursue the subject unless a
77
13
Kelly DeVries, Sites of Military Science and Technology, in Katharine Park and
Lorraine 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, and
Spain, c.1580c.1640, Legislative Studies Quart., vii (1982), 21011, repr. in Conrad
Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 16031642 (London, 1990), 127.
celebrity scientist, a Boyle or a Lavoisier, became involved.

Military historians, of course, deal with gunpowder, but few
more than nod at saltpetre. Their arguments about the timing,
content and consequences of the military revolution address the
cost and performance of cannonry, siegecraft and gun-equipped
armies, but tend to take the logistics of firepower for granted.
Students of international commerce, particularly the East India
Company, have traced traffic in saltpetre from the mid seventeenth century, but they too pay scant regard to its earlier history
or larger context. It remains true that no comprehensive study of
late medieval and early modern saltpetre production has been
written.13
Conflict between the royal prerogative and the claims of
common law is a central motif of legal and political history, but
scholars have rarely placed saltpetre in that story. It has been
enough to note that the saltpetremen were unpopular, and that
their vexation and oppression were cited amongst the grievances
presented to Charles I in the Grand Remonstrance of 1641.
Conrad Russell once identified himself as the kind of historian
who was not overly concerned about the misdeeds of the saltpetremen of Chipping Sodbury. But a saltpetre scandal at
Chipping Norton briefly claimed his attention, as it came
before the 1628 parliament. Russell elsewhere made the key observation that changes in warfare intensified the crying need of
monarchies for saltpetre, thereby precipitating a straightforward
clash of priorities between the needs of the state and the rights of
the subject, but no one has developed this insight.14
This article explores the social cost of saltpetre exploitation
from the early Tudor era to the age of the English Revolution.
It begins by considering the science of saltpetre and the international transfers of technology that facilitated its extraction. It
frames this by reference to the expanding scale of warfare and the
increasing heft of weapons that required gunpowder. A central
section examines complaints against the roving saltpetremen of
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PAST AND PRESENT
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I
Written discussion of the properties of saltpetre filtered into
England following the publication of Vannoccio Biringuccios
De la pirotechnia in Venice in 1540.16 Generations of authors
plagiarized this text without acknowledging their source. Peter
Whitehornes Elizabethan treatise on warfare included chapters
derived from Biringuccio that explained the nature of saltpetre,
and the manner how to make and refine it, and how to make all
sorts of gunpowder.17 Cyprian Lucars Colloquies Concerning the
Arte of Shooting in Great and Small Peeces of Artillerie (1588) was
also heavily indebted to Biringuccio, with sections on saltpetre
word for word identical to those of Whitehorne.18
15
K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early
Joint-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 the
Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower, Historian, lxxi (2009).
16
Vannoccio Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia (Venice, 1540); The Pirotechnia of
Vannoccio Biringuccio, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New
York, 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 in
1574 (STC 17165) and 1588 (STC 17166).
18
Cyprian Lucar, Three Bookes of Colloquies Concerning the Arte of Shooting in Great
and Small Peeces of Artillerie (London, 1588, STC 23689), 513. Other influences
include Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse; Girolamo Cataneo, Opera nuova di fortificare, offendere et difendere (Brescia, 1564); Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (Basel,
(cont. on p. 79)
Elizabethan and early Stuart England, whose depredations even

violated churches. Lawyers, property-owners and politicians
sought to mitigate the procurement demands of the state, with
limited success because public necessity outweighed private convenience; national security always took precedence over individual grievances. This leads to discussion of schemes and projects
designed to make the production of saltpetre more effective for
the crown and less burdensome to the subject. The repeated failure of such schemes ceased to matter only when bulk imports
from India changed the saltpetre equation. East Indian saltpetre
became an international imperial commodity by the later seventeenth century, still vital for military power but without the vexation that troubled the subjects of Elizabeth I, James I and
Charles I.15
79
(n. 18 cont.)
1556), book 12 of which deals briefly with saltpetre. See also William Bourne, The Arte
of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce (London, 1587, STC 3420), 57.
19
Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray, fos. 228; see
also Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages, 12730.
20
Lazarus Erckers Treatise on Ores and Assaying Translated from the German Edition of
1580, trans. Anneliese Grunhaldt Sisco and Cyril Stanley Smith (Chicago, 1951). The
work was reprinted in Frankfurt in 1598, 1629 and 1672. The first English translation
appeared 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 boiling
salt-petre. According to Stubbe, Legends no Histories, 878, Thomas Henshaws
History of the Making of Salt-Petre was heavily plagiarized from Ercker. See also
R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History, 15761612
(London, 1997), 215.
The most excellent saltpetre, Whitehorne explained, is made

of the dung of beasts, converted into earth, in stables or in dunghills of long time not used. Dovecotes or pigeon houses were also
favoured sites because of their concentration of sheltered droppings. Skilled saltpetremen learned to excavate such places and
haul the earth away for processing. To this end they would need
many 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 and
leaching. The process involved percolating water through barrels
filled with suitable nitrous earth, then boiling and refining the
liquor until it was ready to crystallize. Judicious applications of
ash, lime or alum would help to remove such impurities as
common salt. A week or more of work would yield crude saltpetre
that needed further refinement before it could be serviceable for
gunpowder.19 This basic process, that took saltpetremen all over
the country, prevailed in England until the 1660s.
The most comprehensive account of the right and most perfect
way of the whole work of saltpetre was by Lazarus Ercker (1530
94), chief master of the mines of Emperor Rudolf II in Bohemia.
German editions appeared in Prague in 1574 and in Frankfurt in
1580, but there was no English publication before the 1680s.20 In
1589, however, the Jewish metallurgist Joachim Gaunz, arrested
in England for denying the divinity of Christ, offered to explain
the Bohemian process using Ercker as his guide. Observing that
saltpetremen in England work blindly and without knowledge,
with more loss than profit, Gaunz described the properties of
various earths and reviewed the best techniques for boiling and
80
PAST AND PRESENT
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21
Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), Calendar of the Manuscripts 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 very
blasphemous 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, and
Chymistry in England, 16501750 (Leiden and Boston, 2007).
24
Francis Bacon, The Historie of Life and Death: With Observations Naturall and
Experimentall for the Prolonging of Life (London, 1638, STC 1157), 158.
refining. He dedicated his forty-page manuscript to Sir Francis

Walsingham, and its survival among the papers of Lord Burghley
may testify to its military and economic significance.21
Practical men knew what gunpowder did, but nobody understood how it worked. The properties of saltpetre were especially
puzzling. Alchemists, natural philosophers, mining engineers and
military contractors speculated about the nature of saltpetre, and
discussed technologies for its nurture and extraction. Scholars
probed its humoral and elemental properties, and puzzled
over saltpetres ambiguities. It seemed to partake of earth, air,
fire and water, to be hot, cold, wet and dry, and to share attributes
of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. I cannot tell how
to be resolved, to say what thing properly it is, observed Whitehorne, except it seemeth it hath the sovereignty and quality of
every element.22 Followers of Paracelsus perceived a vital generative principle in saltpetre, with both material and mystical connotations, a notable mystery the which, albeit it be taken from
out of the earth, yet it may lift up our eyes to heaven. Its threefold
nature evoked that incomprehensible mystery of . . . the divine
Trinity, marvelled the minister Thomas Timme in his translation
of Joseph Duchesne.23 Francis Bacon observed that the nitre in
gunpowder . . . doth make the crack and report, and identified
saltpetre as the energizing spirit of the earth.24
Though veiled by many noble secrets, this darling of nature
was universally diffused through all the elements, and must
therefore make a chief ingredient in their nutriment, and by consequence of their generation, thought the Royal Society lecturer
Thomas Henshaw. Saltpetre is one of the most odd concretes in
81
25
Henshaw, History of the Making of Salt-Petre, 2745; Stubbe, Legends no
Histories, 45.
26
William Clarke, The Natural History of Nitre: or, A Philosophical Discourse of the
Nature, 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, 1626
1660 (New York, 1976), 37881; Charles Webster, Benjamin Worsley: Engineering
for Universal Reform from the Invisible College to the Navigation Act, in Mark
Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and
Universal 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 theses
quaedam, 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 the
Secrets 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 the
Holy Roman Empire (Chicago and London, 2007); Roos, Salt of the Earth.
the world, declared the Restoration virtuoso Henry Stubbe.25 It

was ubiquitarian but obscure, with hermaphroditical qualities, according to the physician William Clarke.26 Its elusiveness
as well as its utility made saltpetre a puzzle worth pursuing.
Savants in Samuel Hartlibs circle in the mid seventeenth century mused on philosophical saltpetre and philosophical dung
as guides to wisdom and experimentation. The physician Benjamin Worsley conceived of a philosophically driven, sciencebased, altruistic enterprise that would put the poor to work,
achieve saltpetre independence, and advance mans mastery
over nature. His junior associate Robert Boyle shared the belief
that the seminal principle of nitre, latent in the earth, would
make possible a perpetual mine of saltpetre. Alchemical enthusiasts of the Interregnum hoped that the study of saltpetre, the
most catholic of salts, would prove very conducive to the discovery of the nature of several other bodies, and to the improvement of divers parts of natural philosophy.27 None could fathom
the way it was formed, nor could anyone fully explain the vitalizing power that made saltpetre so formidable. Could it be, some
wondered, the sal nitrum or spiritus mundi, the nitrous universal
spirit, that would unlock the secrets of nature?28
Considerable effort addressed the question of whether the
powder makers saltpetre was the same substance as the nitre
known to the Bible and classical antiquity. (The usual references
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PAST AND PRESENT
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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 George
Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the
World (Oxford, 1627, STC 12611), 2612; Edward Jorden, A Discourse of Naturall
Bathes, and Minerall Waters (London, 1632, STC 14792), 48; Joseph M. Levine,
Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New
Haven and London, 1999), 28. Modern scholarship concludes that ancient nitre
was most likely soda (i.e. sodium carbonate), and that the properties of saltpetre were
unknown in Europe before the thirteenth century: Partington, History of Greek Fire and
Gunpowder, 298314.
30
Henshaw, History of the Making of Salt-Petre, 260, 267. Henshaws account
was popularized in [ John Houghton (ed.)], A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry
and Trade, nos. 2247, 13 Nov. 4 Dec. 1696, and repeated in subsequent collections
of 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 owe
this reference to Matt Goldish. For the counter-view that gunpowder was wholly
unknown to the ancient Greeks and Arabians, and only recently Latinized as sal
bombardicum, see William Salmon, Seplasium. The Compleate English Physician: or,
The Druggists Shop Opened (London, 1693), 90.
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 skill
died with them. From Thomas Chaloner in 1584 to William
Clarke in 1670, a succession of scientific and medical writers
probed the properties of the mother of gunpowder. The question fuelled debate between ancients and moderns, and was
never satisfactorily resolved.29
Lecturing to the Royal Society in 1662, Thomas Henshaw
thought it important to determine whether the nitre of the ancients be of the same species with the salt which is commonly
known by the name of saltpetre. Historical, philological, mineralogical and experimental inquiries led him to conclude
that 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 antiAristotelians of the Royal Society for their pique against
antiquity.31 William Clarke was likewise convinced that the
ancients knew saltpetre, but that they remained ignorant of its
pyrotechnical applications.32
83
II
33
For Bosworth battlefield archaeology, see Guardian, 28 Oct. 2009; for the period
more generally, see Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The
English Experience (New Haven and London, 1996), 287, 2923; Mark Charles Fissel,
English Warfare, 15111642 (London, 2001), 44, 52; DeVries, Sites of Military
Science and Technology, 30811; Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance
Europe (Baltimore and London, 1997).
34
Cal. Pat. Rolls, 148594, 395.
35
James Raymond, Henry VIIIs Military Revolution: The Armies of SixteenthCentury 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:
(cont. on p. 84)
Tudor and Stuart regimes, like their enemies and competitors,

depended on gunpowder weapons. Their need for saltpetre grew
with every deployment and shot. The recent recovery of cannon
balls and bullet fragments from the battlefield at Bosworth reminds us that both sides in that conflict had gunpowder weapons.
Both Richard III and Henry Tudor learned from the French and
the Burgundians, Europes leaders in military technology, that no
modern state could thrive without handguns and artillery. The
victorious Henry VII invested in ordnance and brought in foreign
specialists to operate it. His armoury at the Tower grew from
thirty heavy guns in 1489 to almost fifty by 1497, and by the
end of the fifteenth century he had two hundred gunners on his
payroll.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 ordnance, though most of the royal gunpowder was imported.34
The second Tudor monarch invested more heavily in garrisons, fortresses, ships and stores, and the king himself took an
interest in ordnance and ballistics.35 His state-of-the-art Deal
Castle (1540) was designed to mount two hundred cannons.
Conceiving of himself as a warrior monarch, Henry VIII fought
three wars against France and Scotland from 1512 to 1514, 1522
to 1525, and 1542 to 1546. Though English longbows shared the
field with English cannon, it was modern weaponry that carried
the day. The force that invaded France in 1513 carried 510 tons of
gunpowder, and its siege guns consumed up to thirty-two tons a
day. The assault on Boulogne in 1544 featured a siege train of 250
guns which bombarded the town with 100,000 rounds of heavy
shot. The army that Henry VIII assembled to invade France in
1544 was more than 38,000 strong.36 The Tudor royal navy by
84
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
(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 change
from 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 of
the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 6601649 (London, 1997), 485.
38
Bourne, Arte of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce, 72; Ronald Edward Zupko, A
Dictionary of English Weights and Measures from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Nineteenth
Century (Madison and London, 1968), 91.
39
PRO, STAC 2/15, fo. 29. See also PRO, SP 1/7, fos. 16872, for accounts of
expenditure on gunpowder and its ingredients in 1514.
40
PRO, SP 1/10, fo. 154; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of
Henry VIII, v, 152.
1546 included fifteen great ships and sixteen galleasses, with

almost two hundred heavy guns of nine pounds or greater calibre
between them. Their itemized ordnance, artillery, munitions
[and] habiliments for the war included forty-five lasts of
powder, weighing more than forty-eight tons.37 (A standard
barrel of gunpowder weighed a hundred pounds, and twenty-four
such barrels made a last, weighing 1.07 tons or 1,088.62
kilograms.)38
To support this demand, the crown sponsored workshops for
fining and refining of saltpetre and brimstone out of rock into
meal, and for coal powder and other stuff appertaining to the
making of gunpowder.39 In 1515 Henry VIII authorized the
German Hans Wolf to go from shire to shire to find a place
where there is stuff to make saltpetre of. The kings gunner
Thomas Lee received a similar commission in 1531 to take
what wood, carriage or houses he needed to search for saltpetre
in the kings lands and elsewhere. Both commissions stipulated
that the saltpetremen should replenish and make up plain all
ground they had broken, or otherwise compensate the owners.40
A generation later, facing a confessionally divided Continent,
dangerous shifts in European power balances, and deteriorating
relationships with Spain, the Elizabethan state assessed its military vulnerability. Stout provision of saltpetre would be the key
to infinite security in case a breach of amity should chance betwixt her majesty and King Philip. Though not quite worth its
weight in bullion, 20,000 of saltpetre would stand the queen in
better stead than 100,000 in gold and treasure, so Thomas
85
41
Cal. State Papers, Foreign, 15623, 2289, 239; John William Burgon, The Life and
Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 2 vols. (London, 1839), i, 294; Hammer, Elizabeths
Wars, 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 of
the 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, Mariners
Mirror, lxxxii (1996), 273, 287; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 4867. Cf. Hammer,
Elizabeths Wars, 149, where Elizabeths thirty-four ships sport 883 cannon. For the
1603 survey, see British Library, London (hereafter BL), Royal MS 17 A XXXI, fos.
25v26.
Gresham advised Secretary Cecil in March 1563.41 The bulk of

Englands saltpetre came from parts beyond the seas, mostly
Germany and the Low Countries, which made it subject to
embargoes, interceptions and capricious foreign pricing.42
Elizabethan merchants looked as far as Russia and North Africa
for alternative supplies, and in the 1570s offered cannon balls in
exchange for saltpetre from Morocco.43
As war with Spain approached, the Elizabethan treasury spent
heavily on warships to build (in Geoffrey Parkers words) the
most powerful battle fleet afloat anywhere in the world. The
thirty-four royal ships that fought the Armada in 1588 carried
678 heavy guns, more than triple the cannonry of Henry VIIIs
navy. These were supplemented by close to 150 armed merchantmen. By 1595 the queen commanded thirty-eight fighting ships,
with even more firepower. A survey in 1603 listed 1,170 pieces of
naval ordnance, including 625 heavy guns rated demi-culverin or
above.44
The naval demand for gunpowder was insatiable. Full cannon
consumed as much as forty-six pounds of gunpowder a shot; culverins and demi-culverins, the backbone of naval ordnance, used
eighteen and eleven pounds of powder each time they were fired.
On the Cadiz expedition in 1596 the queens ships stowed an
average of two and a half lasts (sixty barrels) of gunpowder, and
the thirty-eight-gun Ark Royal set out with four lasts (ninety-six
barrels, weighing roughly four and a quarter tons). At the height
of the Spanish war the Elizabethan state consumed ninety-five
lasts of gunpowder a year, requiring eighty or more tons of
86
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
45
Bourne, Arte of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce, 723; Richard Winship Stewart, The
English 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 Ordnance
Office, 8892.
50
By the King: A Proclamation for the Maintenance and Encrease of the Mines of
Saltpeter, 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: The
Ordnance Office and the Assaults on Cadiz (1625) and the Isle of Rhe (1627), in
Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 15981650 (Manchester
and New York, 1991), 118, 125; Andrew Thrush, The Ordnance Office and the
Navy, 162540, Mariners Mirror, lxxvii (1991).
saltpetre. Land forces, coastal defences and celebratory firing

added to the account.45
In 1603 a naval salute of 355 pieces to celebrate the accession of
James I rocked ships in the Thames by the Tower.46 But as a king
who made and maintained peace, James needed less gunpowder,
and therefore less saltpetre, than his predecessor. The new regime
had 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 fifty
lasts of English gunpowder were available for export.47 After
1618, however, as hostilities resumed in Europe, a renewed
sense of urgency gripped Jacobean military planners.48 The
crown paid closer attention to munitions in the 1620s as the
European security situation worsened, and began a scramble
for saltpetre at home and abroad. In May 1624 the government
ordered that a great quantity of gunpowder should with all speed
be made, and the saltpetremen should double their deliveries as
the pressing occasions of these time do require.49
War raged in Europe throughout Charles Is reign and periodically threatened to involve the Stuart dominions. In 1625 the
Council issued urgent orders for the better maintaining of the
breed and increase of saltpetre, and the true making of gunpowder, and bustled to equip expeditions to Cadiz and the Ile de
Re.50 The Ordnance Office struggled to furnish 240 lasts of gunpowder a year, but when hostilities ended with France and Spain
the Council planned to reduce John Evelyns contract to the
former single rate of 120 lasts per annum. Even at this level the
87
51
PRO, SP 16/180/3 and 10. The saltpetre assignment in 1629 was 5,234 hundredweight or 218 lasts, enough to furnish almost 325 lasts of gunpowder; but the total
delivered in the year ending April 1629, a year of maximum effort, was only 3,462
hundredweight, which indicates that production was one-third below target: Cal. State
Papers, 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: A
Proclamation against the Unnecessary Waste of Gunpowder (London, 13 Apr. 1628, STC
8882). James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military
Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Stroud, 1999), 328, shows naval expenditure rising from 174,596 a year in 16259 to 209,395 a year in 16359.
Caroline state used more gunpowder than any of the Tudors. The
trained bands alone needed ninety-four lasts a year for musters
and training.51
Though England remained aloof from European conflict in
the 1630s, the threat of military involvement had not abated.
Invasion by Catholic powers was not unthinkable. There were
foreign foes to be countered, Dunkirk raiders, Barbary corsairs,
and ragtag pirates to be pursued. The crown needed supplies for
its forts and forces, the garrisons at Portsmouth, Hull and
Berwick, and for the re-formed militia. Above all, Charles
needed powder for the rebuilt royal navy. With thirty-four ships
the navy of the ship money era was no larger than in the days of
the Armada, but its tonnage and firepower nearly doubled. King
Charless ships by 1640 carried almost 1,200 heavy guns. Though
not called to hostile action, celebratory shots and salutes ate up
supplies so much that the practice had to be curtailed. By estimates of February 1638, before the start of the Scottish war,
Charles I needed 292 lasts of gunpowder a year, more than
three times the requirements of the wartime Elizabethan
regime.52
The Bishops Wars of 163940 and the decade of civil war that
followed put extraordinary pressure on military procurement.
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms militarized the British economy
and put tens of thousands of men in arms. A military forecast on
the eve of the Civil War estimated that a field army of ten thousand
men would need seven and a half tons of gunpowder for its foot,
and ten tons more for its artillery. Actual campaigns showed these
estimates to be inadequate. Civil War armies ranged up to thirty
thousand strong, and at Marston Moor in 1644 there were more
than 46,000 men on the battlefield. The demand for gunpowder
88
PAST AND PRESENT
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III
From the mid-Tudor period to the Interregnum English governments supervised a procurement system for saltpetre that
53
Peter Edwards, Gunpowder and the English Civil War, Jl Arms and Armour
Soc., xv (1995); Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil
Wars, 163852 (Stroud, 2000); The Royalist Ordnance Papers, 16421646, ed. Ian Roy,
2 vols. (Oxfordshire Record Soc., xliii, xlix, Oxford, 196475); Buchanan, Art and
Mystery 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 the
Treaty of Breda: Its Work, Growth and Influence (Cambridge, 1916), 1214, based on
Bodleian 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 Proclamation
to Prohibit the Exportation of Salt Petre (London, 25 July 1689).
56
H. C. Tomlinson, Guns and Government: The Ordnance Office under the Later
Stuarts (London, 1979), 112; Frey, Indian Saltpeter Trade, 5212; Jenny West,
Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1991),
163, 212, 2247.
was insatiable, and commanders on all sides complained of shortage of munitions.53

The end of civil war in England by no means lessened the
states need for gunpowder. Campaigns in Scotland and Ireland
required aggressive displays of firepower, and Cromwells army,
54,000 strong in 1654, added further to the pressure. Dutch wars
and imperial ambitions stimulated the growth of a navy which was
increasingly hungry for munitions. From a thirty-five-ship navy in
1642 with 1,199 heavy guns, the Commonwealths fleet grew to
139 vessels with 4,214 guns in 1659. The naval demand for gunpowder expanded fourfold between 1640 and 1660.54
Gunpowder consumption increased with each conflict, and
later Stuart governments understood that the strength of war
depended on saltpetre for the defence and safety of this realm.55
The Restoration Ordnance Office no longer counted lasts, but
measured supplies in pounds, quarters, hundredweights and
tons, as was appropriate in an age of political arithmetic.
Whereas Charles II needed 500 tons of powder a year to fight
the Dutch, his Hanoverian successors needed 647 tons a year in
the Seven Years War (175663) and over 1,600 tons a year in the
War of American Independence (177583).56 By this time, however, they relied on East Indian saltpetre and no longer dug in
stables and backyards.
89
57
For the administration of this system, see Stewart, English Ordnance Office;
Tomlinson, Guns and Government. For characterizations of the saltpetremen, see
The Lord Cookes Charge Given at Norwiche Assizes the 4 of August 1606 against
the Abuses and Corruptions of Officers, amongst whom Saltpeter Menn: BL, Harley
MS 6070, fo. 413v; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, A Faire Quarrell
(London, 1617, STC 17911), Act I, Scene i; Letters of Mr. Boyle to Several
Persons, 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.
supplemented foreign imports. The Privy Council and the Lords

of the Admiralty appointed Commissioners for Gunpowder and
Saltpetre, who directed the Ordnance Office. Under them
the saltpetremen, a dozen or so men of business, accepted commissions to deliver contracted amounts of material from designated groups of counties. They in turn employed deputies and
agents, and hundreds of workmen who did the actual digging and
boiling who were the immediate cause of local vexation.
Property owners called them knaves, varlets or undermining
two-legged moles, and protested against their exactions and
depredations. The saltpetremen were notoriously corrupt, and
were known for compounding with gentlemen whose grounds
and buildings they spared.57
The extraction of saltpetre could not be done without digging
and damage, nor could its processing proceed without cartage
and fuel. Clashes and collisions arose whenever government
operatives intruded on private ground, or requisitioned equipment for which countrymen had other uses. Exactions were
inevitable, and some subjects were sure to be greatly abused.
Elizabethan councillors sought to keep the vexation and discommodity to a minimum, and the queen herself was said to be
reluctant to have her subjects houses digged because of the
annoyance it entailed.58 While striving to secure material for
munitions, Elizabeths government managed to present itself as
the guardian of popular liberties. If subjects suffered wonderful
vexation or were miserably plagued in their houses, in their carriage, in their wood and timber, as they claimed, councillors
promised that the courts would provide remedy.59 When the
whole country complained of overcharges in 1589, and again
in 1600 of contentions and controversies . . . corruptions and
abuses the government offered words of assuagement but did not
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PAST AND PRESENT
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The benefit of making saltpetre and gunpowder within this land is so

infinite 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 her
highnesss royal person, her crown and dignity, and the maintenance of
true religion.
Royal rights in this regard were beyond question because the sole
making of saltpetre and gunpowder within her majestys dominions pertaineth to the crown by her highnesss prerogative royal.
Anyone who shall seditiously or contemptuously call in question
the power or validity of her majestys prerogative royal in this
regard risked severe punishment according to their desert.63
Constitutional questioning of the saltpetre enterprise continued in James Is reign. When landowners refused to allow prospectors to enter their grounds in 1603, claiming that their
Elizabethan warrants had expired, the patentees for saltpetre
and gunpowder reminded the king that their grant was no monopoly, but a matter by royal prerogative inseparably belonging to
60
BL, Lansdowne MS 61, fo. 188; Acts of the Privy Council, 15991600, 818.
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,
rv
105 . The royal privilege of digging saltpetre for the defence of the realm was confirmed in Darcy v. Allen, Kings Bench, Easter 1602, in Sir Francis Moore, Cases Collect
and Report (London, 1688), 67.
61
interrupt the work.60 A proclamation of January 1590 acknowledged the forcements and exactions on peoples carriages,
houses, grounds and woods, to the great grievance and disturbance of her majestys loving subjects, but military exigencies
required the project to go forward, under legal and administrative
scrutiny.61 Attorney-General (later Sir) Edward Coke complained to Lord Burghley in August 1597 about the grief and
discontentment occasioned by the saltpetremen, and sought to
limit their worst abuses.62
Tudor governments assumed to themselves the responsibility
as well as the right to collect saltpetre in the national interest. Only
when this right was challenged did they need to cloak it in theory.
When monopolies were attacked in 1601, Privy Councillors defended the saltpetre system as altogether without [i.e. outside]
the compass of monopolies, and congruent with common law
and equity. It rested, they said, on the twin poles of necessity and
prerogative:
91
64
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 160310, 6; PRO, SP 14/1/64.

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 the
Reports (London, 1612, STC 5507), fos. 912, citing Semaynes Case. See also Henry
Rolle, Les Reports de Henry Rolle (London, 1675), 182, citing a finding in 1606 per
touts justices, lofficiers del Roy ne poient enfreinder le inner mese dun subject pur
saltpeeter 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, 13
Apr. 1625.
65
the imperial crown.64 Senior justices agreed in 1606 that the

digging and taking of saltpetre to make gunpowder was among
the kings prerogative rights, performed for the defence of the
whole realm, in which every subject hath benefit. It was understood as a purveyance, a necessary provisioning for the crown, but
it was not to be done without limitations. To avoid wronging the
kings subjects, Sir Edward Coke argued, crown saltpetremen
were obliged to leave the land they worked in so good plight as
they found it. They could dig in outhouses or barns, stables,
dove-houses, [or] mills, but not in private dwellings, for the
habitation of subjects [must] be preserved and maintained. In
Cokes view, though not necessarily that of the crown, the house
of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his
defence against injury and violence as for his repose. There
should be no disturbance of an Englishmans corn or hay, no
dislodging of horses or cattle. Saltpetre work should be conducted
only at convenient times, between sunrise and sunset, and the
saltpetremen should erect no furnaces or kettles without the landowners consent. Requisitioning of carts should be limited to nine
miles, with payment of compensation of 4d. a mile laden and
empty.65 Each of these provisions was controversial and subject
to violation.
Resistance and resentment accumulated in Charles Is reign, as
demand for saltpetre accelerated. King Charles in 1625 proclaimed his heavy displeasure at contemners of his majestys
royal commandment concerning saltpetre, and threatened Star
Chamber against anyone who challenged his prerogative in that
regard.66 Another proclamation in January 1627 invoked the
prerogative royal to support the saltpetremen, and esteemed
anyone who was remiss or negligent in the due observance of
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PAST AND PRESENT
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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. Johnson
et 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
this work to be contemptuous and ill-affected both to our person

and state.67 At issue was not the royal right to material for
munitions, which nobody disputed, but rather the social cost of
obtaining it. Common-law judges resolved again in 1625 that
saltpetre operatives cannot dig the floor of any mansion houses
which serve for the habitation of man, and Sir Edward Coke
reiterated this in parliament in 1628. The royal right to saltpetre
was only as a purveyance, and allowed no entitlement to enter
private houses. They cannot dig any house or wall, for it is for the
commonwealth to have houses of habitation. They may dig in
floors, in stables, cellars and vaults or mud walls, so as they be
repaired again, but not in dovecotes or barns.68
Charles Is patentees never accepted these limitations, and the
king was inclined to support them. Saltpetremen repeatedly appealed to the crown against refractory persons who thwarted
their enterprise or barred them access.69 Wrapping themselves
in royal authority, they reported acts of ill-affectedness to his
majestys service that cost them great loss and charges.70 The
Oxfordshire saltpetreman Nicholas Stephens in 1628 invoked the
great necessity and danger of the kingdom, and claimed that his
commission empowered him to dig in houses against consent,
and to carry without setting down how far.71 Gloucestershire
saltpetremen made threats and demands in the name of the
king, and called people who resisted them rogues, rebels and
traitors.72 The Wiltshire saltpetreman Thomas Hilliard claimed
that anyone who opposed him opposed the king.73 King Charles
himself made his position clear in a proclamation of March 1635
that labelled as refractory and delinquent those disobedient
subjects who flouted our royal commandment, in a matter of so
high consequence for the public service and safety of our state and
93
74
By the King: A Proclamation for Preservation of Grounds for Making of Saltpeter, and
to Restore Such Grounds as Are Now Destroyed, and to Command Assistance to Be Given to
his 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 Privy
Council, July 1628 Apr. 1629, 33940; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 96.
kingdom.74 Although, as Kevin Sharpe notes, Charles was willing 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 dig
in the kings hunting lodge were repeatedly blocked by the housekeeper and Lord Chamberlain.75
Complaints arose wherever saltpetremen worked, but were
more likely to carry weight when coming from an aristocrat.
Robert Leigh, a saltpetreman in Flintshire, made the wrong
enemy in 1627 when he intruded on the property of the powerful
Lord Strange. He broke locks to enter his lordships stables, tore
up the planking on the floor, and dug so deep that he endangered
the foundations. He followed this feat by digging in Hawarden
Castle, despite being expressly forbidden to enter. Living riotously, on pretence of being the kings servants, Leigh and his
men terrorized the town. At night, in their pots, they cried out,
the town is ours . . . to the great grief and amazement of the
poor inhabitants, whose lodgings they took without paying
rent. Returning to the same ground within three years of its last
digging, they left everything in a ruinous manner. Lord Strange
leaned on the earl of Totnes and master of the ordnance, who
wrote to Secretary Coke to seek punishment for these abuses
and insolences. The Council summoned Leigh to answer
charges, and eventually he acknowledged his miscarriage and
abuses and withdrew from the saltpetre service.76
In April 1628 the earl of Danby brought the case of the
Oxfordshire saltpetreman Nicholas Stephens to the attention of
the duke of Buckingham, who was joint holder of the saltpetre
patent. Having grievously oppressed the people of these parts,
Stephens had been cited at the Quarter Sessions for his manifold
abuses, but claimed protection through the dukes commission.
Danby was willing to suspend proceedings against the saltpetremen, he said, if Buckingham would take care to reform their lewd
94
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
77
PRO, SP 16/101/46.
PRO, SP 16/165/38; Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Johnson et al., iv, 347.
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 in
Wales in 1624, see his diary in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William
Laud, 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 John
Craig. The natural philosopher Henry Stubbe later explained that unpaved floors of
churches or seats that are loosely boarded could be rich in saltpetre because those
places allowed long putrefication where the earth be animated and impregnated by
the air: see his Legends no Histories, 51, 85. In 1635 (under the influence of Archbishop
Laud), 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 of
the saltpetre commission.
78
79
courses.77 Stephens made more enemies by taking seven loads of

coal from Sir Anthony Hungerfords house at Black Burton,
saying he must have them, and opened the gate and carried
them away, and neither tendered nor left the kings price. He
forced carts to carry materials for as many as thirty miles, paid
for half loads instead of full ones, and reimbursed but twopence a
mile. 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 the
parish church. Pulling up seats to get to the earth, his men left
the ground unlevelled so as the parishioners are not able to perform their duties of divine service. When they had finished there
was no place to sit or kneel in the church, and parishioners
could not conveniently bury their dead. When the parish clerk
objected that Gods house was no fit place for digging, the workmen answered with obscene jests, that the earth in churches is
best for their turns, for the women piss in their seats, which causes
excellent saltpetre. The disturbance continued outside, where
Stephens pulled down part of the churchyard wall to set up his
boilers, and his tubs stood in the churchyard so as they could
scarce come into the church. Puritans and ceremonialists could
band together against these transgressions, though the Oxfordshire
incident was by no means unique. Stephens had dug in other
churches at Coventry, Warwick and Oxford, believing them not
excepted in his saltpetre commission.79 The fact that some
churches had pissing places and others suffered from incontinent
sermon sitters increased their suitability for the saltpetre service.80
95
81
Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Johnson et al., iv, 348, 350.

PRO, SP 16/165/38; Gloucestershire Archives, D7115/1, 38.
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; Gloucestershire
Archives, D7115/1, 36. Hilliards saltpetre warrant embraced Dorset, Somerset,
82
83
(cont. on p. 96)
Aggressive in his defence, Stephens flourished his royal warrant, and threatened challengers with Star Chamber. His refusal
to answer charges in parliament prompted Sir John Eliot and Sir
Robert Phelips to speak out against the boldness of the saltpetremen and their contempt for the House of Commons. A commission to break up churches and lay illegal charges upon the country
suits well with the unlimited power of some mens commands,
which is most unjust, protested Eliot. Debate on the Petition of
Right in 1628 was sharpened by these concerns, which resurfaced
in the Grand Remonstrance.81
Grievances arose throughout the 1630s, even with no parliament in which to air them. A four-page report in 1630 complained that the saltpetremen had dug in all places without
distinction, as in parlours, bed-chambers, threshing floors, malting houses and shops; yea, Gods own house they have not forborne, but have digged in churches, hallowed chapels and
churchyards, tearing mens bones and ashes out of their graves
to make gunpowder of. They worked without regard to time or
season, upsetting dovecotes, undermining foundations, and
seldom or never fill up or repair the places they have digged in,
but leave the houses and rooms full of great heaps of earth, rubbish, dirt, and mire. In placing their tubs by bedsides of the old
and impotent, sick and diseased, of women with their children
sucking at their breasts, and even of women in childbed and of
sick persons lying on the deathbeds, they operated beyond the
bounds of common decency, and caused more scandal by their
profane and impious proceedings, in ringing of bells and disorderly drinking in the church.82
Especially notorious was Thomas Hilliard, whose territory
included much of the south-west. In Wiltshire Hilliards men
dug where they pleased, in any mans house, in any room, and
at any time. They spoiled malthouses, interfered with agriculture, and paid too little for transport. Among many oppressions,
Hilliard allegedly warned opponents he would strike such an
everlasting despair into the heart of the country, as they will
never attempt to complain again.83
96
PAST AND PRESENT
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(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 the
practices of the saltpetremen in 1637, in State Papers Relating to Musters, Beacons,
Shipmoney, etc. in Norfolk, ed. Walter Rye (Norwich, 1907), 2323.
Thomas Hilliard had survived attacks in parliament in 1628,

but his troubles intensified when rival saltpetremen envied his
commissions. If it was wrong for him to take bribes to spare peoples carts and grounds, and scandalous that he allowed his wife to
ride around in a cart in the nature of a carriage that was hired for
the public service, it was unforgivable that he should attempt to
defraud the king. Already suspected of secret deals in London, to
his own private profit and benefit, Hilliard was reported to have
shipped saltpetre by night to black-market powder makers in
Bristol. Embezzling his majestys saltpetre was a much more
serious charge than trampling on the rights of the subject, and it
led to proceedings in Star Chamber.84 Hilliards corruption did
betray the whole realm to danger, said the court, and forced the
king to buy saltpetre at a dear rate from foreign parts. After the
judges recommended that he stand in the pillory, be fined
5,000, and face a lifetime ban from office, it was reported in
1634 that Hilliard the saltpetreman had fled.85
Hundreds more abuses could be cited from a cascade of complaints. At Norwich in 1635 the mayor blamed saltpetremen for
excavating the foundations of the town hall, so as the whole fabric
and structure of the house is in great danger to fall. Their digging
extended to the jail where dangerous prisoners were housed, and
to 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 disorderly, shameless and riotous behaviour included breaking
up houses and barns in most unseasonable times, receiving of
moneys under hand, [and] forcing of carriages to remote
places, only to weary the country thereby to gain bribes.87
Throughout England they insisted on their power, licence,
97
88
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1637, 129, 2223; PRO, SP 16/361/110 and 11; SP
16/320/40 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 pigeonkeeping, see John McCann, Dovecotes and Pigeons in English Law, Trans. Ancient
Monuments Soc., xliv (2000). It was widely though perhaps falsely believed that pigeon
dung produced the best nitre of all others: Quersitanus [Duchesne], Practice of
Chymicall, and Hermeticall Physicke, sig. P2.
liberty and authority to break open and work for saltpetre in

anyones houses, lands, grounds and possessions.88 Rather
than advancing the kings service, claimed Sir Robert Phelips in
1636, the saltpetremen pursued their own ends, put the country
to an immense charge, and endeavour[ed] to make his majestys
subjects their slaves.89
Competing lines of patronage and authority clashed in
Wiltshire in 1637 when the saltpetreman Thomas Thornhill
made the mistake of tangling with Dr Christopher Wren, the
rector of Knoyle Magna (now East Knoyle). When Thornhills
men dug out the floor of Wrens pigeon house, without his permission, they did so much damage that the north wall fell in and
the birds forsook the house. The rector lost three breeds,
whereof the least never yield fewer than 30 or 40 dozen, so he
said, and he now faced a suit for dilapidations. The pigeon house
was 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 on
the great windy night that blew down so many houses, barns and
trees in all parts of the kingdom, by no means due to his digging.
As a servant of the crown, engaged in work of national importance, he sought relief from the Council against the rectors unjust
molestation.90
Wren, however, commanded unusual political resources: he
was dean of Windsor and registrar of the Order of the Garter,
and his brother Matthew was the bishop of Norwich. Bypassing
the Council he addressed himself directly to King Charles on the
occasion of the Feast of St George. As an officer of the Garter,
Wren claimed royal protection, and the king took his registrars
side against his saltpetreman. A committee under Lord Treasurer
Juxon concluded in January 1638 that the pigeon house fell down
in consequence of Thornhills digging, not by casualty of wind
and weather, and the rector could sue for reparations. The future
98
PAST AND PRESENT
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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. and
Archaeol. 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)
architect Christopher Wren junior, who was five years old at the
time of the pigeon-house incident, may have learned something
about politics, and about the solidity of buildings.91
Commoners who lacked the advantages of the political elite
were reduced to private grumbling, but some used more inventive
means to thwart the intruders. In Surrey in 1633 the servants of
George Mynnes of Croydon set chains across the highway and
denied the saltpetremen access to his pigeon house. Armed with
pitchforks and bills, they laughed when the saltpetremen sought
water from Mynnes well, and said that they knew no service that
the king had there; but if the king came that way he should have
the key.92 Angry citizens at Norwich not only barred the saltpetremen from access to water but also used reproachful
speeches and threatened to throw one of the workers in a
well.93 Opponents of the saltpetremen in Dorset obstructed the
carriage of liquids to the boiling house at Sherborne.94 In Essex
they refused to rent barns or warehouses to the saltpetreman
Hugh Grove, and diverted all the ash he needed to the soap
works.95 Almost everywhere, said the Berkshire saltpetreman
Richard Bagnall, was unwillingness among most of his majestys
subjects to do anything for the advance of this service.96
Saltpetremen reported a mutiny against them in Hertfordshire in May 1638, whereby his majestys said officers were in
danger of being killed.97 Midnight raiders in Lincolnshire overthrew saltpetre tubs and spoiled their mixtures, while local magistrates turned blind eyes to the offenders. In Kent in December
1639 malignants with cudgels beat up the saltpetre operatives
and locked them in the stocks, saying the king employed more
rogues in his works than any man.98 Property-owners found
99
(n. 98 cont.)
Papers, Domestic, 1639, 2623; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1640, 912, 348; PRO, SP
16/361/110; 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.
ingenious ways of foiling the saltpetre enterprise. Their gates

were 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 found
for boiling, no ashes for straining or refining, and the only available charcoal was mixed with dirt.
Complaints arose from all points of the ideological spectrum, from champions of parliament like Eliot and Phelips to
arch-royalists like Sir John Lucas and Christopher Wren.
Lucas, the recently knighted former sheriff of Essex, took umbrage in 1639 against the incivility of the saltpetremen who
violated the privileges of his house. Lionel Cranfield, earl of
Middlesex, similarly railed against lewd people who used
saucy and unbecoming language when under pretence of a
patent for digging for saltpetre they broke into his house like
thieves and dug in some unfloored rooms.99 Despite being
divided on other matters, landowners agreed that the crowns
quest for saltpetre was vexatious, especially when it touched
their own estates. Rank and status did not exempt English aristocrats from the attentions of saltpetre prospectors, as it did their
contemporaries in France.100
Charles Is saltpetre enterprise became further stressed when
shortages of money threatened to bring it to a halt. The crown fell
behind in payments to the saltpetremen, who were accused in
turn of defaulting on their workers wages. Commanders complained of the want of gunpowder, at the very time when war
with Scotland placed new pressures on military procurement.
Gunpowder makers blamed the saltpetremen for failing to deliver
their quotas.101 Powder mills threatened to grind to a halt in July
1640, just as the Scottish war reached its crisis. The crown owed
the powder maker Samuel Cordewell 4,000, and he was unable
100
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
102
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1640, 439, 507, 523, 562.

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.
103
to pay his suppliers. The domestic saltpetremen went unpaid, and

the merchant importers had 1,150 owing. Gunpowder reserves
at the Tower and Portsmouth stood at 271 lasts at the end of
February 1640, but fell to 196 lasts by the end of June.102 By
the time of the Battle of Newburn in August, when Scottish
cannon rained destruction on an ill-prepared English army, the
kings inestimable treasure was almost exhausted.
In the following year the saltpetre monopoly unravelled, along
with much more of the royal prerogative. Bulstrode Whitelocke
argued in May 1641 that the making of saltpetre can be no prerogative of the kings, since gunpowder was a relatively recent
invention. Other members of parliament claimed that making
and marketing it was any Englishmans right.103 Parliament
passed An act for the free bringing in of gunpowder and saltpetre
from foreign parts and for the free making of gunpowder in this
realm, domestic saltpetre deliveries shrank to barely eight lasts a
month, and the few saltpetremen who still offered supplies to the
government desired notice might be taken they did not deliver it
. . . as peter made by virtue of any commission or authority derived
from his majesty, but as a commodity sold to him by way of merchandize.104 The national saltpetre programme had few political
friends in 1641 and many enemies to denounce its depredations.
Yet the nation still depended on gunpowder for its security, and
demand for munitions would rocket when the nation succumbed
to civil war. Amidst familiar arguments about safety and
danger, and with safeguards to prevent the reviving of those
oppressions and vexations exercised upon the people, parliament
in 1643 empowered its own state agents to search and dig for
saltpetre in all pigeon-houses, stables, and all other outhouses,
yards, and places likely to afford that earth, though private dwellings were specifically exempted.105
101
IV
106
For the furnishing of saltpetre in continental Europe, see Walter Panciera,
Saltpetre Production in the Republic of Venice from the Sixteenth to the
Eighteenth Century, Icon: Jl Internat. Committee for the History of Technology, iii
hslund, The Saltpetre Boilers of the Swedish Crown, in Buchanan
(1977); Bengt A
(ed.), Gunpowder: The History of an International Technology; Nef, Industry and
Government in France and England, 5868, 978; Surirey de Saint-Remy, The
Manufacture of Gunpowder in France (1702). Part 1: Saltpetre, Sulphur and
Charcoal, 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 his
Work, Archaeologia, xci (1945); Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the Middle
Ages, 1256.
108
PRO, SP 12/16/29; Williams, Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages,
12830.
The only alternative to domestic foraging for saltpetre or reliance

on foreign imports was a centralized, industrialized, sciencebased saltpetre programme. Lazarus Ercker had described such
an operation in Bohemia, and much of the saltpetre imported
through Amsterdam originated in northern European nitre
beds. Enterprising projectors repeatedly promoted such works
in England, and some of them actually delivered a product. But
governments were sceptical and investors fickle, and nothing
replaced the roving prospecting of the hated saltpetremen.106
As early as 1545 the German engineer Stefan von Haschenperg
offered Henry VIII a way of making saltpetre, otherwise called
black vitriol, in one place without going about the realm searching
for it. But any experiments under von Haschenpergs guidance
were small-scale and tentative, and left no record.107 Another
German engineer, Gerard Hoenrich, sought patronage from
Elizabeth I. In March 1561 Hoenrich offered to reveal the true
and perfect art of making saltpetre to grow in cellars, barns, or in
lime or stone quarries, and he sketched out a system of nitre beds,
vats, chambers, brickwork and furnaces. The special ingredients
included urine from drinkers of wine or beer, dung from stabled
horses fed on oats, and lime from oyster shells. Sea coal, he suggested, would serve as well as charcoal for fuel, and might even be
cheaper.108 With Secretary Cecils backing, Hoenrich entered
into the first agreement to make industrial saltpetre for the
English crown. His transfer of German technology would earn
him 300. But two months later Hoenrich complained that he
102
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
109
PRO, SP 12/16/30; BL, Lansdowne MS 5, fo. 98; Cal. Pat. Rolls, 15603, 98,
104.
110
PRO, SP 12 106/53.
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.
111
had not been paid properly, and the project was taken over by
local entrepreneurs. The mercer Philip Cockeram and the haberdasher John Barnes secured a licence to supply saltpetre to the
crown, provided the new invention proved to be of such utility
and profit as is pretended.109 Instead of developing this invention, however, the government relied on its prerogative right to
take saltpetre from private properties.
In 1575 the London gentleman John Bovyat obtained an exclusive patent to manufacture saltpetre and gunpowder from
stone mineral. Having travelled abroad, at great cost and risk,
to find out the secret and hidden mystery of this mode of extraction, Bovyat secured a privilege for twenty-one years. The grant
entitled him to prospect on any subjects land within the queens
dominions, and promised him the assistance of all mayors, justices, constables, bailiffs and other local officers. However, it left
intact the rights of other projectors that have heretofore usually
made their saltpetre and gunpowder of mud walls or earth, by
more conventional methods.110 After twenty years of trying, this
project was still stalled in 1596 when Bovyat asked Lord
Burghley, whether he shall go forward with the same, or whether
so 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, but
the deal collapsed when the Fleming Cornelius Stephinson presented more plausible and better-backed plans. Supported by
Sir Thomas Randolph, the royal postmaster, who praised
Stephinsons mastery of a near-secret art, the project called for
works on 400 acres of the New Forest to deliver twenty tons of
saltpetre a year, good perfect and well-refined. Cornelius (as
most of the records refer to him) actually set up his furnace and
tubs, but problems with equipment, labour and funding proved as
burdensome as objections from holders of traditional forest
rights. Several times he apologized for deficiencies and begged
for more time, and in 1580, amidst fears of a Spanish descent on
103
112
Acts of the Privy Council, 15778, 140, 142, 15961, 1701; BL, Lansdowne MS
24, 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. The
remains 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.
Ireland, news reached Burghley that Cornelius is now boiling of

his earth but it had not yet come to perfection.112
Yet another scheme to transform the saltpetre industry came
from Christopher Coult and associates in the Armada year of
1588. Coult informed Burghley that his years of foreign travel had
taught him many things worthy the learning, including a perfect
way to find out saltpetre and the making of powder, both good
and profitable to serve any prince. Understanding that in this
time of trouble there hath been some want of powder, he offered
to set up a centralized scheme with a national rotation of saltpetre
kettles, fifteen to a region, that would deliver 5,000 hundredweight of saltpetre a year, enough for 310 lasts of gunpowder. It
was preposterously ambitious, alien to Elizabethan instincts, and
once more came to nothing.113
Projectors continued to come forward, among them John
Wrenham, one of the queens saltpetre patentees, who claimed
in 1602 to have an invention for making saltpetre without digging
up any house. The plan involved some sort of spreading ground
and the preparation of earths fit for the generation of saltpetre
that might grow to perfection. Wrenham offered to set this up at
his 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 claimed
knowledge of a new way to rear saltpetre out of earth and grounds
which in appearance and judgement of men of that faculty have in
them no saltpetre or substance of that nature. Half alchemists,
half mountebanks, they claimed competence to deal with the
reparation and restoration of abandoned and derelict saltpetre
mines, and asked for a monopoly so long as they would not
have to reveal their secrets.115 The Council advanced schemes
that may best stand with the furtherance of his majestys service
and the ease of the country, and entertained another proposal in
104
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
116
Acts of the Privy Council, 161921, 177, 188; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16235,
25.
117
House of Lords Record Office, HL /PO/JO/10/1/31, 22 Apr. 1626.

Thomas Russell, To the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie, the Lords Spirituall and
Temporall, and the Commons in this Present Parliament (London, 1626, STC 21460.7).
118
1623 to make saltpetre in a new manner within England and

Ireland.116 Any scheme for saltpetre without saltpetremen
would receive hopeful attention, and secrecy was one of its selling
points.
Charles I had barely taken his throne before petitioners came
forward with saltpetre projects. A quartet of Essex gentlemen (Sir
William Luckin, Sir Gamaliel Capell, Francis Quarles the poet,
and William Lyde) proposed to make five hundred tons yearly
from a centralized industrial process. Dependent on the collection of refuse waters, slops and sweepings from silversmiths,
refiners, dyers, innkeepers, vintners, butchers, barbers, victuallers, alehouse keepers, tippling houses, slaughter houses, and
tobacco shops nationwide, this new way of engendering saltpetre was designed to avoid hazardous dependence upon foreign
princes or states, and promised simultaneously to prevent great
charge, trouble and vexation of the subject. A bill in support of
the plan had two readings in parliament in April 1626, but then
was set aside.117
Offering yet another new way and means, not heretofore
known, Thomas Russell, esquire, proposed to centralize saltpetre production in London. A printed broadsheet in 1626 set
out the plan, which he had previously presented to King James.
Currently, Russell noted, Englands saltpetre came either from
Barbary, France, Poland, Hamburg and other places in
Germany, or was gathered domestically, to the prejudice and
inconvenience of the kings subjects. The new scheme would
put London beggars to work to collect the citys urine, to be
spread on specially prepared grounds or nitre beds. Then, after
the earth is ripened and impregnated, the nation would have a
constant supply of high-quality saltpetre ready to make into gunpowder. All that was needed was 20,000 to get the facility up and
running.118
Russells scheme would have made him rich, and would have
made England safe, if only he could have secured funding. It
would have transformed a contentious and haphazard process
into an orderly and predictable system, and would have delivered
105
119
Francis Bacon, Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (London, 1730), iii, 867. For the chemistry of urine, see John Emsley, The Shocking History of Phosphorus: A Biography of the
Devils Element (London, 2000), 18.
120
By the King: A Proclamation for the Better Making of Saltpeter within this Kingdome,
2 Jan. 1627; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16278, 303.
121
122
By the King: A Proclamation for the Maintaining and Increase of the Mines of
Saltpeter, and the True Making and Working of Saltpeter and Gunpowder, and Reforming
of All Abuses Concerning the Same (London, 23 July 1627, STC 8863).
five hundred tons of saltpetre yearly, with synergistic benefits to

the nation. It depended on the nutritive power of human urine,
which Francis Bacon demonstrated was ideal for quickening seed
steeps, and which is known to be rich in organic chemicals.119
Perhaps to the projectors surprise, the government decided to
back him, to secure that inestimable treasure of saltpetre without digging any of our subjects houses, or outhouses of any kind,
or charging them at all with carriages. A royal proclamation in
January 1627 authorized the collection and storage of urine, not
only in London, where Russell and his partner Sir John Brooke
had made a trial, but in all . . . cities, towns and villages within this
our realm of England. The urine was to be kept in convenient
vessels or receptacles fit for that service, along with all the stale of
beasts which they can save and gather together, to be collected
daily in summer and every other day in winter. The proclamation invoked the kings prerogative royal, and was followed by
letters asking towns and cities to contribute to the cost.120 There
was to be a command economy of excrement and urine, centrally mobilized for the kingdoms security.
Instead of multiplying the supply of saltpetre as promised, however, the proclamation supporting Russells scheme brought conventional production to a halt. Property owners decided they
were now excused, and refused to co-operate with the saltpetremen. The saltpetremen themselves feared loss of employment
under the new dispensation, and in their distraction refused to
renew their contracts with the government. An alarmed earl of
Totnes, master of the ordnance, warned Secretary Coke that
without intervention the works must fall, which will be a great
detriment to the kings service.121 The result was another proclamation in July 1627 to safeguard the digging for saltpetre in the
old and approved way.122
Undeterred, the ever hopeful Thomas Russell proposed a variant scheme in December 1627 that would make 1000 tons of
106
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
123
Acts of the Privy Council, Sept. 1627 June 1628, 1923; PRO, SP 16/180/4.
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 162931, 382, 483, 554; PRO, SP 16/175/58.
125
BL, Add. MS 4458, fo. 48, n.d.
126
127
Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, ed. Jansson, ii, 306, 308,
309; [Thomas Brugis], The Discovery of a Projector (London, 1641).
124
saltpetre without any charge to his majesty . . . or grievance to the

subject, but much for their ease in time to come. Instead of saving
their urine for collection, every household was now to lay a load
of earth in some corner of a barn, stable, outhouse or hovel, and
cast the urine that is made in that house upon this earth for three
months together, and then let it rest three months longer, it will be
ripe for saltpetre. Estimating ten thousand villages or parishes in
England, besides cities and towns, with an average of forty houses
and four persons per house, Russell calculated this 400,000 load
of earth will make 100,000 tons of liquor, which will make 1000
tons of powder. Even better, the crown could make a profit of
30 a ton by selling any surplus on the open market. In a revised
version, Russell proposed enlisting the ministers, vicars or curates in every parish to supervise the dispensing of the urine, and
to keep a register of the names of all such as shall be refractory.123 But once again, an ambitious and ingenious scheme
foundered on its own impracticabilities.
Other projectors chanced their luck, dreaming of saltpetre
riches. Among them were David Ramsey, who claimed to know
a new way to multiply saltpetre;124 a projector named Barton,
who offered secrets of a new way, not yet known or practiced;125 and the fen drainer Sir Philberto Vernatti and his partner John Battalion, who in 1634 claimed knowledge of the secret
way of making excellent saltpetre.126 None of these schemes
came to fruition, despite the governments pressing need for
munitions. Meanwhile, the local saltpetremen went about
their work, which stored up resentment against them and their
masters.
Political winds blew strongly in the 1640s against monopolisers and projectors and the royal prerogatives that nourished
them,127 but ambition never rested. In 1646 a group of philosophical projectors revived the notion of centralized saltpetre
works, this time in the interest of universal improvement.
Benjamin Worsley, an associate of Samuel Hartlib, set forth a
new way of producing saltpetre that would secure gunpowder
107
V
Expensive and unreliable importation from Europe, vexatious
digging in private grounds, and ambitious schemes of projectors,
all became unnecessary by the later seventeenth century when
India supplied Englands saltpetre needs. Not quite a deus ex
machina, the new East Indian commerce procured an unexpected
external solution to the countrys security problem. This trade
alone furnisheth us with saltpetre, a commodity so necessary that
in the late kings time the nation suffered greatly by the want if it,
observed Sir Josiah Child of the East India traffic in 1681.129
From quiet beginnings under James I, the East India Company
revolutionized the English saltpetre enterprise, transformed the
gunpowder industry and helped make England a great power.
From their first shipment in 1624 for the service of the state,
the Company imported increasing amounts of saltpetre from
128
Webster, Great Instauration, 61, 374, 37881; Webster, Benjamin Worsley;

Thomas Leng, Benjamin Worsley (16181677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in
Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2008), 1825; Hartlib Papers, 15/2/5A and B;
39/1/16A; 53/26/2A, 6A and 7A; 71/11/12A.
129
Sir Josiah Child, ATreatise Wherein Is Demonstrated, I. That the East-India Trade Is
the Most National of All Foreign Trades . . . (London, 1681), 6.
for parliament while simultaneously addressing social and economic problems. He invited the state to set up workhouses for the
poor, with separate lodgings for men and women, where all their
easing of excrement and urine could be collected and processed.
The scavengers of every city would bring more material to enrich
the earth and accelerate its nitrification. Each collective of 150
poor people would generate matter for ten ton of peter in a year,
which would more than pay for their keeping. The initial cost of
establishing this Mystery or Corporation of Saltpetremakers
could be met by confiscation of the lands of papists and delinquents. Worsleys scheme had elements in common with Thomas
Russells plans of the 1620s, though it was not primarily for profit.
Underlying the projected arrangement of privies and collecting
tanks, furnaces and factories, was confidence in mans ability to
translate corruption into policy and to unlock the secrets of
nature. An added benefit, common to all such schemes, was its
promise not to entrench upon the liberty or infringe the just
privilege of any subject whatsoever.128
108
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
130
Cal. State Papers, Colonial, East Indies, 16224, 202, 240, 476.
Acts of the Privy Council, July 1628 Apr. 1629, 395; Cal. State Papers, Domestic,
1635, 45, 246; Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 18990.
132
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1644, 94, 129; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16445,
51, 25. See also Bal Krishna, Commercial Relations between India and England (1601 to
1757) (London, 1924), 66, 68, for the Courten or Courteen company.
133
Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 164950, 74, 246, 306, 317, 548; A Calendar of the
Court Minutes etc. of the East India Company, iii, 16441649, ed. Ethel Bruce Sainsbury
and William Foster (Oxford, 1912), 343, 355, 378, 382, 385; Cal. State Papers,
Domestic, 1651, 396.
134
The English Factories in India, 16461650, ed. William Foster (Oxford, 1914),
99, 332, 337; The English Factories in India, 16511654, ed. William Foster (Oxford,
1915), 45, 119, 196; The English Factories in India, 16551660, ed. William Foster
(Oxford, 1921), 206, 308; Tomlinson, Guns and Government, 11213; Brenda J.
Buchanan, Saltpetre: A Commodity of Empire, in Buchanan (ed.), Gunpowder,
Explosives and the State.
135
Buchanan, Saltpetre, 7881; Frey, Indian Saltpeter Trade, 5224. Cal.
Treasury Books, 16607, 360, 648; Cal. Treasury Books, 166972, 153, 294;
131
(cont. on p. 109)
Bengal.130 By the mid 1630s they were shipping up to two hundred tons a year, mostly in ballast, disposing of it to the king, to the
Continent and to their own gunpowder mills.131 Interlopers also
made profits from the arms trade. In 1644 William Courten sold
parliament enough saltpetre to make six hundred barrels of gunpowder, and six months later he engaged to supply 12,000
worth of saltpetre at 4. 10s. a barrel.132 Company saltpetre
reached England intermittently in the 1640s, but soon after the
Regicide the Council agreed to import as much saltpetre as may
be needful for the service of the Commonwealth, and contracted
to buy all that the East India Company could provide. The state
established itself as a regular purchaser, and the Company took
steps to expand its supply. In September 1651, for example, the
Ordnance Office took delivery of 228 tons of Indian saltpetre,
more than the annual output of Charles Is saltpetremen.133
The Company agency in Bengal made saltpetre a prime object
of trade, consuming 50 per cent of available capital. Supply,
demand, and profit all remained high despite Dutch competition,
and open war with the Dutch made Indian saltpetre an even more
valuable commodity in London.134
Collected, leached and boiled from organic soils by a special
caste of nuniyas, East Indian saltpetre made fortunes for
Restoration-era investors. The Ordnance Office paid out
10,800 in 1662, 37,198 in 1665 and 40,000 in 1669 for
East Indian shipments. By 1676 they had more than 3,500 tons
in store.135 Huge cargoes came from workings near Patna, inland
109
VI
The saltpetremen faded in memory to a quaint and unsavoury
nuisance, and historians seem mostly to have washed their hands
of them. But they were notorious in early modern England for
their venality, rapacity and oppressive abuse. In the reign of
Charles I, in particular, they caused vexation to landlords and
tenants, gentlemen and clerics, and to owners and operators of
wagons and carts. Resentment against them may have surpassed
the grievances of billeting and ship money, and was surely more
widespread. Governments tolerated all but the worst excesses of
the saltpetremen because they produced an essential strategic
commodity. Until alternative means were found to procure saltpetre, either by industrial processing or large-scale imports, the
makers of gunpowder would depend upon their foraging and
digging.
(n. 135 cont.)
Tomlinson, Guns and Government, 135. For an early European account of Indian
saltpetre manufacture, see The Voyages & Travels of J. Albert de Mandelslo, in
Adam Olearius, The Voyages & Travels of the Ambassadors Sent by Frederick Duke of
Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia, trans. John Davies
(London, 1662), separate pagination, 84.
136
PRO, WO 55/1759; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Jan. 1686 May 1687, 342; The
English Factories in India, 16651667, ed. William Foster (Oxford, 1925), 139, 257;
The English Factories in India, 16681669, ed. William Foster (Oxford, 1927), 169. For
estimates under Charles I, see Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 16378, 242.
137
Figures recalculated from Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia and the English East
India Company, 5312, and compared with Krishna, Commercial Relations between
India and England, 201, 3078; Frey, Indian Saltpeter Trade, 509, 5301. See also
West, Gunpowder, Government and War, 172, 221.
from the Bay of Bengal, and more came from the Coromandel
coast, Malabar and Bombay. Whereas Charles I in the 1630s set
targets of 240 lasts of saltpetre a year (288 tons), and was
hard-pressed to achieve those figures, his son, by contrast, imported 589 tons of saltpetre in 1664, 659 tons in 1665 and 1,037
tons in 1669. Average annual imports in the 1670s topped 632
tons, and over 733 tons a year in the 1680s.136 Even these impressive figures paled beside later imports, which averaged 840
tons a year in the 1730s and 1,399 tons a year in the 1740s. After
the Battle of Plassey in 1757 Great Britain controlled some 70 per
cent of the worlds saltpetre, enough to furnish a global military
empire.137
110
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 212
138
PRO, SUPP 5/762, 6, 68, 72.

Buchanan, Saltpetre, 79, citing John Stephenson, Treatise on the Manufacture of
Saltpetre (Calcutta, 1835), 8896; Hansard, 3rd ser., clxxvi, col. 1834 (21 July 1864),
speech by Robert Crawford; J. W. Leather and Jatindra Nath Mukerji, The Indian
Saltpetre Industry (Calcutta, 1911), 1.
140
An Account of the Quantities of Saltpetre Imported into, and Exported from, the
United Kingdom in the Years 18601863 Inclusive, and 1864 to the Present Time,
Distinguishing the Countries from which the Saltpetre Was Imported, 24 June 1864,
Parliamentary Papers, 1864 (450), lvii, 605; Arthur Pine Van Gelder and Hugo
Schlatter, History of the Explosives Industry in America (New York, 1927), 117.
141
PRO, CAB 21/120.
139
The demand for saltpetre persisted well beyond the early

modern era. As British naval and military power expanded, so
did demand for gunpowder. A military analysis in 1828 calculated that any new war would consume two hundred thousand
barrels of powder (almost nine thousand tons). Manufacturing
capacity would have to be expanded, along with imports of saltpetre.138 Almost inevitably, the estimate was insufficient. The
production of saltpetre in Indias Bengal region rose from
14,000 tons a year in the 1830s to 25,000 tons in the 1850s.
Most of this came through London, and almost a quarter was
re-exported.139 The Crimean War quickened gunpowder production, and the American Civil War stimulated sales. In the
early 1860s England imported 18,640 tons of saltpetre a year,
and re-exported 4,255, including two thousand tons in
November 1861 to the du Pont company of Delaware.140 The
Victorian saltpetre footprint was heavier than ever, perhaps fifty
times that of the age of Charles I. A reduced demand continued
into the twentieth century, for, as a war cabinet adviser observed
in 1917, not a single round of cordite can be fired without the use
of black powder.141 The government mills at Chilworth
(Surrey), Faversham (Kent) and Waltham Abbey (Essex) continued to mix saltpetre with charcoal and sulphur beyond the
First World War, and today can be visited as gunpowder heritage
sites.
The saltpetre trail leads to unexpected connections between
the social, legal, political, economic, scientific and military histories of early modern England. It intersects the scholarship of
many sub-specialties and illuminates such matters as the calculus of cannonry and the economy of human waste. Just as saltpetre, for chemical savants, broke boundaries and challenged
categories, so for historians it assumes a multivious character,
111
Ohio State University
David Cressy
connecting the military revolution, the scientific revolution

and the revolutions of the Stuart realms. More than just a
simple substance or commodity, like salt or sugar, saltpetre implicated the royal prerogative, and affected agrarian relations,
cosmopolitan commerce and imperial expansion. It furnished
firepower and made the nation safe.
At the heart of the matter lay the vitalizing power of urine and
excrement, and the miracle of nitrous-rich soil, whether in India
or in Essex. Equally important was the ingenuity of making that
soil yield the mother of gunpowder, the formidable potassium
nitrate. Of crucial concern was the harnessing of organic material
in the interests of national security, without too high a social or
political cost. Successive regimes responded variously to the
ramifications of saltpetre dependence by diversifying international supply, importing foreign expertise, intensifying domestic
exploitation or encouraging entrepreneurs. Englands saltpetre
enterprise tested royal authority against individual rights and
hastened the formation of a centralized power. Its practitioners
explored the limits of private, public, domestic and even ecclesiastical space. Generations of saltpetremen dug and boiled, and
projectors offered schemes of more hope than promise, until East
Indian importers finally relieved householders of that intrusive
imposition. Seen from multiple perspectives, through the eyes of
Privy Councillors and common lawyers, artillerymen and military planners, natural philosophers and grubbing projectors,
kings and subjects, the saltpetre economy could prove mysterious
and miraculous, villainous and vexatious, profitable and indispensable, a foundational experience of the early modern state.

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Like the Gunpowder Empires of Islamic Asia (the Ottoman

Empire based in Constantinople, the Safavid Empire based in

The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2011

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SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND

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and urine.4 Lacking understanding of the nitrification associated

PAST AND PRESENT

William Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I. iii.

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battlefield.10 Successive regimes praised God for seeding the

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celebrity scientist, a Boyle or a Lavoisier, became involved.

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Elizabethan and early Stuart England, whose depredations even

SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND VEXATION

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The most excellent saltpetre, Whitehorne explained, is made

PAST AND PRESENT

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refining. He dedicated his forty-page manuscript to Sir Francis

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the world, declared the Restoration virtuoso Henry Stubbe.25 It

PAST AND PRESENT

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are to Proverbs 25:20, Jeremiah 2:22, and the works of Pliny,

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Tudor and Stuart regimes, like their enemies and competitors,

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1546 included fifteen great ships and sixteen galleasses, with

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Gresham advised Secretary Cecil in March 1563.41 The bulk of

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saltpetre. Land forces, coastal defences and celebratory firing

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PAST AND PRESENT

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was insatiable, and commanders on all sides complained of shortage of munitions.53

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supplemented foreign imports. The Privy Council and the Lords

PAST AND PRESENT

The benefit of making saltpetre and gunpowder within this land is so

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SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND VEXATION

Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 160310, 6; PRO, SP 14/1/64.

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the imperial crown.64 Senior justices agreed in 1606 that the

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this work to be contemptuous and ill-affected both to our person

SALTPETRE, STATE SECURITY AND VEXATION