IN THOSE DARK days of the Commonwealth, a light: Samuel Hartlib had established a new and extensive library. Sir Kenelm was cheered by this – but then he learned that, in keeping with this new era, it was not to be called a ‘library’ but a ‘public information service’ or ‘Office of Address’.
Hartlib was a Polack working for the Protectorate, and yet Kenelm considered him a worthy correspondent. He had written to Sir Kenelm asking for information about the Cure of Sympathy, the weather in Aleppo, the best means to caulk a ship, and the cultivation of crayfish, all in the name of his attempt at Pansophy: the recovery of our happy, original state of complete knowledge and its expression in the pages of an encyclopaedia. Sir Kenelm applauded this project, believing that the dissemination of knowledge was a duty of man, although the idea that all should have access to a library struck him as novel, bold, foolhardy.
‘Hartlib . . . was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed machines and siege engines . . . His work has been compared to modern internet search engines.’
Wikipedia.org/wiki/samuel_hartlib
Kenelm went from Chelsea to the City by public ferryboat, then walked slowly through the rain, into the new kingdom of the Protectorate. The ghost of Asparagus pulled back to ask if this was strictly necessary. Kenelm was not certain when they had arrived, for at the far end of Threadneedle Street a mortar had gone off in the recent fight, and there were no proper buildings, so far as he could discern, only a long, lowly type of barn, with a sign saying ‘God with Us’ in plain, poorly painted letters, and beneath it, smaller, ‘Pax quaeritur bello’, a Cromwellian casuistry at which Kenelm scoffed. It was the motto of the Protectorate, frequently printed on placards and scrolls. Kenelm believed in the divine power of opposites, which should be put to the service of the Great Work. Not to political ends. This was sophistry, to make untruths true, by their repetition. ‘Peace through war’, indeed.
At the doorway men dressed in the plain starched garb of the Commonwealth were coming and going so that Sir Kenelm recognised this must be the Office of Address.
Inside, the walls were bare apart from one or two crude diagrams (one of a monstrous fruit tree, another a bumblebee as large as a kestrel) and a sign declaring that this building was ‘A Publick Register of Information on Religion, Learning and Ingenuities, and a Centre and Meeting Place of Advices, Proposalls, Treatise and all manner of Intellectual Rarities’. There were few books, as far as Sir Kenelm could see, but plenty of boxes, in which papers were stored. There were plain chairs and tables, at which people in drab uniforms were sitting, some reading their papers, some talking. Not only men, but also women.
By talking to a few of them, he discovered that he must address himself to the Great Intelligencer, whom everyone here spoke of as the Paragon of Wisdom.
‘He holds every detail you might wish to know, from what time the bells at Powles ring to how to catch a cony,’ said one.
‘But ask wisely, for one question costs six pennies,’ said another. Kenelm made a joke about the oracle being cheap at the price, but then he remembered, as he now must needs remember frequently, that he was no longer rich.
The country was degraded by war; some quick jack-a-knaves had profited by switching sides, and they now held power – or the illusion of it. The fleur-de-lis wilted on his escutcheon, the green fields between Chelsea and the City were built over, and silk and lace were replaced by rough calico. Cromwell sat to Sir Peter Lely and bid him paint him ‘warts and all’; the Royal Society rejected alchemy as charlatanism; the innocent heroism of the cavalier was gone, and no one would again say:
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
A queue had formed in front of a hatch and, out of curiosity, Kenelm joined it. He heard his fellow queuers asking for intelligence on the keeping of pigeons and the milling of spelt. He heard them asking how to find love, how to write in JavaScript code, and how to tie a noose. He could not decide what question he was going to ask of the Great Intelligencer when he got to the hatch. It seemed important he did not waste that special Being’s time. He would ask about the cure of wounds, perhaps, or the practice of Divine Gnosis. But when he came to the front of the queue, he recognised the man behind the hatch as none other than Thomas Clack, one-time foreman of his own building work at Charterhouse, now operating in the guise of Great Intelligencer.
Kenelm felt the past open up under him like a great chasm, and wandered out of the building with a sense of wonder.