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John DuryJohn Durie or Durye, Johannes Duraeus, Johannes Dureus, Johann Dureus, Jean Duré. (1596 in Edinburgh – 1680 in Kassel) was a Scottish Calvinist minister and an intellectual of the English Civil War period. He made efforts to re-unite the Calvinist and Lutheran wings of Protestantism, hoping to succeed when he moved to Kassel in 1661, but he did not accomplish this. He was also a preacher, pamphleteer, and writer.
From 1628 Dury petitioned Gustavus Adolphus for help in the cause of Protestant unity. He spent much time from 1630 to 1661 wandering through Europe, working for ecclesiastical peace between Calvinists and Lutherans.Turnbull, 1947, pp.132-291. Through an introduction from Hartlib, he also met Comenius, who spent some years in Elbing as well.
Up to 1633, Dury had Anglican support from George Abbot. In that year, Abbot died and was replaced by William Laud, with whom Dury had a much more difficult relationship;Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (1962 edition), pp. 264–9. Christopher Hill A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), p. 83. states "Laud had no use for the efforts of Comenius, Dury and Hartlib to reunite Protestants". Dury was ordained in 1634, and went to Sweden, supported by 38 English Puritans.Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 100. Hill lists among Dury's English supporters Richard Holdsworth (p.100), John Stoughton (p.101), John Pym (p. 107); Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye and Henry Burton (p.308). The networking of Dury and Hartlib in the 1630s brought them close to Oliver Cromwell, through Oliver St John (a relation by marriage, and friend) and the Godmanchester preacher Walter Welles, a neighbour. PDF , p.4; John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), p. 138 – Welles had studied in Leiden.
Dury then travelled widely in northern Europe, and was tutor to Mary, Princess of Orange in the Hague. Concise Dictionary of National Biography He had a long though unproductive meeting with René Descartes in 1635;Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic (1995) p.589; see also Popkin, p. 334.Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (2001) p.204, speaking of 30 years later, describes Dury as anti-Cartesian and a correspondent of Johann Heinrich Heidegger. also in the Netherlands he was an associate of Adam Boreel and Petrus Serrarius, and an influential figure.
In 1641, Dury and Comenius came to England; an invitation had been mooted in a sermon by John Gauden in 1641, at the start of the Long Parliament.Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 104. The backers of the scheme to bring Comenius then included John Pym and Lord Brooke as well as Mandeville.
Dury gave a well-known sermon to the Parliament on 26 November 1645, Israels Call to March out of Babylon into Jerusalem.Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993), p. 111. He was given an official appointment, as tutor to the younger children of Charles I;Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 102. from 1646 these had been in the care of Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland.
After the war in England had ended, he argued both for religious toleration, and for acceptance of the Parliamentarian regime. He incurred the displeasure of the Westminster Assembly, to which he belonged, for his part in the 1648 publication (with Hartlib and John Goodwin) in the translation of part the theological work Satanae Strategemata of Jacob Acontius on toleration.Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 102; Hill, Milton, p. 289. He called on the Ranter Abiezer Coppe to repent,Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (1984), p. 42. and helped in drafting his recantation.Hill, A Nation of Change, p. 201. He provided arguments in pamphlets of March and October 1649 for supporting the Rump Parliament.Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (1993), pp. 257–259. HillChristopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People (1988), p. 314; also Hill, Experience p. 101. places Dury with Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham as propounding the theory that Parliament had legitimacy conferred by God because it held power de facto. Barbara Lewalski calls Dury's arguments 'Hobbesian'. The Life of John Milton (2000) p. 249; Hill, Intellectual Consequences p. 21 endorses the idea that these theorists anticipated Thomas Hobbes. Hill Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (1980), p. 73. considers that the failure of Cromwell's plan to create a unified Protestant church in England of the 1650s put paid to Dury's ecumenical ideas.
In 1652 he translated John Milton's Eikonoklastes into French as Eikonoklastēs, ou, Réponse au livre intitulé Eikon basilikē. In 1655 Milton quoted from letters of Dury in his Pro se defensio contra Alexandrum Morum.Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (2000), p. 324.
In 1654 he was sent as a diplomat by Oliver Cromwell to Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.Trevor-Roper, Three Foreigners, p.283., letter 19 To Evangelical Churches, given as March 1654, with signatories. In 1652/3 he had travelled with Bulstrode Whitelocke to Sweden.Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 103.
He also worked with Whitelocke as a deputy librarian, from 1649, of the collection going back to Jane Lumley. His book of 1650 on librarianship, sometimes said to be the first such work, came out of his experience in this post.Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 215.
In 1649 Dury addressed a further inquiry to Manasseh on the subject of the Ten Tribes, which resulted in the publication of The Hope of Israel. In 1650 appeared Thomas Thorowgood's Jewes in America; Dury read it in manuscript, and contributed to later editions. He included information on the Karaite Judaism, in whom he had a particular interest, from Rittangel.Mordecai L. Wilensky, Thomas Barlow's and John Dury's Attitude Towards the Readmission of the Jews to England, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser., Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jan. 1960), pp. 256–268.
Dury is considered to have been one of those around Cromwell influencing the decision to allow Jews to enter England officially (they were expelled by Edward I).Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 102-3. He was the cautious author of a pamphlet of 1656, A Case of Conscience: Whether It Be Lawful to Admit Jews into a Christian Commonwealth, in it he laid down certain conditions that Jews must fulfil in order to be admitted (no blasphemy or proselytism etc).Scult, Mel (1978). Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, Up to the Mid Nineteenth Century. Brill Archive. pps.26-27. To a question put to him by Hartlib, as to the general lawfulness of their admission, Dury replied in the affirmative; but from the point of view of expediency, he considered that circumstances as to a particular time and place might render their admission unwise.
Dury’s irenicism and philosemitism can be understood as interrelated aspects of an expansionist Protestant cause focussed on Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, and the Atlantic world. In this understanding, the Portuguese Jews (and American Indians) appear as victims of Spanish Catholicism in desperate need of Protestant help.Fradkin, Jeremy, (April 2017). Protestant Unity and Anti-Catholicism: The Irenicism and Philo-Semitism of John Dury in Context . Journal of British Studies, 56(2), pps. 273-294. doi:10.1017/jbr.2017.2
Richard Popkin and Jefferey Jue have argued that Dury was a millenarian. His millenarian views are said to have pointed to 1655 as apocalyptic.Parfitt, p.80. Against that view it has been argued that Dury warned readers about attempts to predict the onset of the Millennium. In his preface to the millenarian tract Clavis Apocalyptica Dury seems to come out against the idea of a political millenarianism and to defend a more "moral" interpretation of millenarianism.Gibson, The Apocalyptic Thought of John Dury: A Reassessment, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Volume 60, No. 3, July 2009 pp.1–15; see the more careful interpretation of Léchot, Un christianisme sans partialité (2011), p., p. 447-454.
Their daughter Dora Katherina Dury (1654–77) was Henry Oldenburg's second wife. Dorothy also had two sons by her first husband. Hill, Milton, p. 215.
Jews and Hebraists
Dury met Manasseh ben Israel in 1644, and heard from him an account of Antonio de Montesinos's alleged discovery of the Ten Tribes in America. Dury wrote in favour of a Hartlib Circle project, for a College of Jewish Studies.Young, p.43. The first college for Jewish studies (1984), Richard Henry Popkin. Parliament was lobbied for funds. The proposed faculty were Johann Stephanus Rittangel, Christian Ravius and Menasseh ben Israel.
Irenicism and millenarianism
Dury's long ecumenical efforts have earned him a name as an irenicist.S. Mandelbrote, John Dury and the practice of Irenicism, in Religious change in Europe 1650–1914: Essays for John McManners, ed. N. Aston, 41–58. (Oxford, 1997); A. Milton, The Unchanged Peacemaker? John Dury and the politics of Irenicism in England, 1628–1643 in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: studies in intellectual communication, ed. M. Greengrass, M. Leslie, and T. Raylor, 95–117. (Cambridge 1994). This territory he shared, to an extent, with his contemporary Hugo Grotius. Dury made contact with Grotius through his follower Samson Johnson (1603–1661). That relationship soured, since Dury had a hand in Johnson's dismissal as chaplain to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, suspected of Socinianism.Hugh Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992) pp.71–2. According to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Position in the Hartlib Circle
Pansophism and alchemy
Alchemy was within the interests of the Hartlibian group,Young, p. 161. and both Dury and his wife were involved. In 1649 they were quizzing Worsley on distillation.William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe (2002), Alchemy Tried in the Fire, p. 244. In the first half of 1651 Dury was a witness to George Starkey, in an apparent transmutation,Young p. 229. and then recommended Starkey to Johann Moriaen.Newman and Principe, p. 246.
Family
In 1645 he married Dorothy Durie (née King), an Irish Puritan widow.Pal, Carol Republic of Women Cambridge University Press 2012 p.133 Dorothy Durie (sic), daughter of Sir John King and Catherine Drury, was a noted writer on education and the role of women in the church. The match was arranged by Dorothy's niece, Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615–1691),Pal (2012) p.133 daughter of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and wife of Arthur Jones, 2nd Viscount Ranelagh.Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), p. 146; Hill there also confirm the Lycidas connection. To be precise on the somewhat tenuous relationship, Arthur Moore, Dorothy's first husband, and Frances Jones née Moore, mother of Arthur Jones, were brother and sister, both children of Garret Moore, 1st Viscount Moore.Cokayne, G.E. Complete Peerage reprinted in 6 volumes Gloucester 2000 Vol. VIII p.543 By this marriage Dury was connected to Robert Boyle, brother of Lady Ranelagh.
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