I

The manuscript comprises Locke’s comments and queries on a bill to create ‘the Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’ presented to the Irish House of Commons on 22 November 1695 by the Irish Whig MP and linen promoter James Hamilton of Tollymore, County Down (1644–1706).Footnote ¹¹ The document carries no title or endorsement but may be called Locke’s ‘Remarks on the bill to create the Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’ (hereafter, ‘Remarks’).Footnote ¹² These ‘Remarks’ are bound into a copy of the 1695 bill carrying the title ‘Manuscript/about the linnen manufacture in Ireland’; both are contained in a miscellany of ‘Historical and other tracts’ from Sir John Somers’s noted antiquarian collection now held by the British Library as Additional MS 27,382.Footnote ¹³ This volume appeared in the earliest catalogue of Somers’s manuscripts as ‘MS Miscell. relating to matters of State and Policy … Liber 30’ and it was among the moiety of Somers’s library acquired in 1729 by his brother-in-law, the master of the rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll (1663–1738), thirteen years after Somers died intestate in 1716.Footnote ¹⁴ On 1 March 1739, it was sold at the auction of Somers manuscripts from Jekyll’s library for 7s. 6d. to ‘Paul Jodrell Esq^r., of Sion Hill. Middx.’Footnote ¹⁵ This was presumably the barrister, bencher, and sometime librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, Paul Jodrell (1679–1744).Footnote ¹⁶ Jodrell’s purchase of the miscellany in 1739 ensured that it escaped the fire that destroyed the bulk of Somers’s private papers in January 1752.Footnote ¹⁷ Both Somers’s manuscript catalogue and the list of the Jekyll auction note the copy of the bill but neither mentions the accompanying notes.Footnote ¹⁸ The volume’s whereabouts are so far unknown between March 1739 and June 1866, when the British Museum library acquired it from the Anglo-American book dealer Henry Stevens.Footnote ¹⁹ A note on its binding records that it was rebound a century later, in July 1967. At that point, the pages were conserved using Japanese paper and the folios consecutively numbered in pencil: it was presumably then that Locke’s ‘Remarks’ were bound within the pages of the 1695 bill, where they remain today.

The ‘Remarks’ consist of a single half-sheet (152 mm × 195 mm), folded once to make four leaves, with chain lines as well as a watermark that cannot now be identified.Footnote ²⁰ The first three leaves (fos. 10r–11r) carry manuscript text, while the fourth leaf (fo. 11v) is blank save for the inverted endorsement, ‘Lo^.’, possibly an abbreviation for ‘lord chancellor’: that is, Somers as he was from April 1697 to April 1700. The accompanying copy of the 1695 Irish linen bill comprises ten sheets (184 mm × 295 mm), written on each side, with the bill’s paragraphs numbered sequentially in Locke’s hand.Footnote ²¹ This is one of the only two remaining copies of the 1695 bill, both now in Britain: as the first historian of the Irish linen industry ruefully noted in 1925, much relevant Irish material ‘failed in the catastrophe of the Dublin Record Office’ in 1922.Footnote ²² Locke remarked on sixteen of the bill’s twenty-eight paragraphs (§§ 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16–19, 20, 22–5, 28), before ending his comments summarily with a dismissive concluding sentence (Figure 1). Because he keyed his ‘Remarks’ directly to the copy of the 1695 bill in the Somers miscellany, it seems likely that they have been together since 1697.

Figure 1.

John Locke, Remarks on the bill for creating the Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland, late October 1697?, BL, Add. MS 27, 382, fo. 11r. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

Locke’s ‘Remarks’ follow a pattern of manuscript commentary that he deployed across his career, by which he compiled short responses on a document seriatim, either on the flyleaf of a book or manuscript or on a separate sheet, as here, together with questions or ‘Quæres’ (often marked ‘q’ or ‘Q’) and occasional answers to those queries.Footnote ²³ This was his practice when commenting on Charles Wolseley’s Liberty of conscience, the magistrates interest (1668) in 1667–8; when editing and amending the ‘Fundamental constitutions’ of Carolina in 1669 and 1682; when criticizing William Penn’s ‘Great law’ and his Frame of the government of the province of Pensilvania (1682) in 1686; and when taking notes on other documents while on the Board of Trade between 1696 and 1700, for example.Footnote ²⁴ This process was not as elaborately structured as Locke’s better-known method of commonplacing, yet it was characteristic of his practice of ‘studying for action’, particularly (but not only) in his secretarial and bureaucratic capacities.Footnote ²⁵ In this case, the ‘Remarks’ fulfilled two immediate functions. For Locke himself, they comprised an aide-memoire as he summarized the contents of the 1695 bill and assessed its weaknesses and obscurities. For Somers, Locke’s notes and concluding judgment formed an executive summary together with actionable advice as he weighed the bill’s provisions.

Locke’s ‘Remarks’ can be dated within four weeks, between about 20 October 1697 and 17 November 1697, with a date in late October 1697 most likely. Locke was then in close contact with Somers, as both were involved in considering the legislation regarding the Irish linen manufacture in their respective public offices: Locke as a commissioner of the Board of Trade, Somers as lord chancellor on the privy council. Before that moment, Locke and Somers had been prepared by years – in Locke’s case, decades – of engagement with the political economy of Ireland’s relationship with England, and more specifically with the question of replacing Ireland’s woollen industry with linen manufacture. The abortive 1695 linen bill returned to discussion when competing interests in Ireland sought to derail passage of the 1697 bill. As the renewed Irish legislation wound its way through the bureaucracy in Whitehall, Locke and Somers were both subject to lobbying. The ‘Remarks’ provide evidence of that campaign and of Locke’s critical response to it.

II

Ireland’s ambiguous relationship with England, as a separate kingdom with its own parliament and effectively a colony under English legislative and administrative control, became increasingly fraught after the Restoration.Footnote ²⁶ Competition between the Irish and English woollen industries – a point of controversy readily exploited by English political and economic lobbies, especially by woollen interests in the west of England – sharply exposed that ambiguity. The three main options for the stewards of the English economy were to throttle rising competition from the Irish woollen industry outright; to discourage it piecemeal; or to encourage Irish manufacture of linen in place of wool in order to rebalance relations between the two kingdoms.

Locke first faced these questions while secretary to Charles II’s Council of Trade in the early 1670s. The king brought Irish competition with English woollens to the council’s attention in May 1673, in the context of economic depression in the west of England. Later that year, Locke’s patron at the time, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83), argued that the immediate cause of the depression in the West Country was a labour shortage in England rather than Irish woollen production, and he opposed legislation penalizing the Irish woollen trade because it could be easily circumvented by smuggling.Footnote ²⁷ In light of earlier efforts to promote Irish linen production by Strafford in the 1640s and Ormond in the 1660s, both Locke and Shaftesbury believed at the time that gradually replacing Irish woollen production with cultivation of hemp and flax and manufacture of linen would most effectively create complementarity between the English and Irish economies.Footnote ²⁸

Following the Glorious Revolution, English administrators and the Irish parliament reached similar conclusions about the need to promote the linen industry in Ireland. For instance, when Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Tewkesbury (1638–96), was appointed lord deputy of Ireland, his instructions in May 1695 included ‘endeavour[ing] to improve the trade of Ireland, so far as may consist with the laws made and in force for the welfare and benefit of commerce in England … particularly to improve the fishery trade and the linen manufacture’.Footnote ²⁹ When the Irish House of Commons convened later that year, it created a committee in early October 1695 ‘to consider of the Improvement of Trade, as to the Linen Manufacture, Butter Casks and Iron, and other Merchandize of this Kingdom’: among its members were Hamilton of Tollymore and the Dublin merchant and writer on trade Sir Francis Brewster (ante 1642–1705), who would later become the crucial link with Locke and Somers in late 1697.Footnote ³⁰ Within a few weeks of its creation, the committee produced the ‘Heads of a Bill for promoting the Linen, Sail Canvas, Cordage, and other Manufactures of Hemp and Flax’ in Ireland that Hamilton laid before the Irish House of Commons in November 1695 and that two years later would find its way into Locke’s hands via Brewster and Somers.Footnote ³¹ In 1697, Hamilton would call this, in a letter passed to Locke via their common friend, William Molyneux (1656–98), ‘the Shcheme Offered to my Lord Capell in 1695’ and, more simply, ‘the Scheme in 1695’.Footnote ³² By then, however, Hamilton was backing the different 1697 project for Irish linen manufacture, while Brewster promoted a revised version of the 1695 ‘Scheme’ in its place.

According to the copy surviving among Somers’s papers, the 1695 bill proposed a unitary national corporation – ‘The Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’ – to manage the Irish linen industry. This was to be floated on £300,000 provided by ‘diverse persons of quality in England and well wishers to this Kingdome of Ireland’, together with some money from Ireland itself. The company would disburse equal amounts of capital to each Irish county to launch the manufacture. For the following twenty-five years, it was to receive annual quantities of flax, yarn, and hemp from every able-bodied adult in Ireland except those in holy orders, with penalties for any who failed to submit their quota. It would also run competitions, with prizes for the best weavers, each year. Tithes levied on manufactures would support the elderly and the infirm, together with spinning schools for young children. All the company’s plant would be exempt from taxes, as its buildings would be free from billeting and its officers from impressment. The company itself would choose the members of county commissions to supervise its operations, with commissioners receiving large annual salaries for their work; the Irish parliament would select general commissioners – also well remunerated – to oversee the company’s affairs. Finally, the company would have the power to make its own by-laws, so long as they were not repugnant to the terms of the Irish parliament’s original act.Footnote ³³

The 1695 linen bill reached the floor of the Irish parliament with support from the English authorities. In October 1695, Capell reported to Somers that he had promised the bill’s promoters ‘all the assistance I could make for it’ and ensured that a copy reached Somers himself by way of its ‘Cheife compiler’: that is, Sir Francis Brewster.Footnote ³⁴ However, the house adjourned in December 1695 before the bill could advance out of committee. The Irish parliament would not meet again until July 1697. When it did reconvene, the lords justices of Ireland reminded its members that ‘the Linen Manufacture … is the most beneficial Trade that can be encouraged in Ireland’. A new committee was rapidly appointed once more ‘to prepare Heads of a Bill for Encouraging the Linen Manufacture in this Kingdom’ from scratch; Brewster and Hamilton were again among its members.Footnote ³⁵

The Board of Trade was born while the Irish parliament was adjourned. William III’s charge to the board to consider the position of Ireland within his archipelagic empire soon brought the Irish linen industry back to Locke’s attention, initially in the context of sourcing naval supplies for the king’s wars, in aid of which the English parliament had passed its own ‘Act for Encouraging the Linen Manufacture in Ireland’ in April 1696.Footnote ³⁶ After his appointment to the board, Locke wrote in September 1696 to his closest friend and most frequent correspondent in Ireland, William Molyneux, soliciting local information about linen production there. He admitted to Molyneux that his motives were hardly disinterested: ‘my conscience will never reproach me for not wishing well to my country, by which I mean Englishmen and their interest every where’. If Locke mean to include the Anglo-Irish Molyneux in his idea of country, Molyneux swiftly corrected him: ‘England most certainly will never let us thrive by the Wollen trade’, Molyneux retorted: ‘This is their Darling mistris, and they are jealous of any Rival.’ He told Locke that ‘now all is blown up’ because two previous attempts to promote linen manufacture in Ireland had failed: the first, by English parliamentary statute in 1666, due to a sunset clause after twenty years; the second, set up as the King’s and Queen’s Corporation for the Linen Manufacture in 1690, amid ‘Quarrels and Controversys’ and ‘Tricks’ by the corporation’s promoter, the enterprising French Huguenot refugee Nicholas Dupin.Footnote ³⁷

In this exchange, Molyneux did not refer to the 1695 linen bill, though he had been a member of the Irish parliament at the time and knew Hamilton of Tollymore well.Footnote ³⁸ When the issue returned in late 1697, Brewster and Hamilton would be at odds with one another, as Brewster directly lobbied Locke and Somers in London while Hamilton pressed his case with Locke at a distance via Molyneux. It was out of that moment in late October and early November 1697, with competing draft bills from 1695 and 1697 under scrutiny in London alongside Locke’s own report on the Irish linen industry, that Locke’s ‘Remarks’ emerged.

III

The mounting effects of wartime agricultural depression and renewed pressure from pastoral interests in the west of England brought Irish linen manufacture back onto the political–economic agenda in 1697. In late April that year, the English secretary of state, Sir William Trumbull, asked the Board of Trade to inquire into the state of Anglo-Irish commercial relations ‘and how they may be improved to the advantage of both Nations’.Footnote ³⁹ At the end of the month, Brewster testified to the board in Locke’s absence that the Irish poor, though ‘so idle a People’, were nonetheless better suited to manufacture linen than wool.Footnote ⁴⁰ On 17 August, when the board met again to examine the subject, Somers surprisingly joined them, ‘unexpected of the rest, and proposing the very same subject of deliberation, as of great importance to be Expedited; because of the present sitting of the Irish Parliament’ that had begun in late July.Footnote ⁴¹ The board then called further witnesses on the topic, one of whom noted that Locke in particular was ‘very desirous to inform himself what may conduce to the improvement of the Linnen Manufacture in his Majesties Dominions’.Footnote ⁴² On 24 August, the board ‘pitched upon’ Locke’s proposal for the Irish linen industry and on 30 August Locke presented his detailed report, together with plans for its promotion; within two days, all the board’s members had endorsed his ‘Draught of a Representation … tending particularly to the discouragement of the Woollen Manufacture and Encouragement of the Linnen Manufacture in Ireland’.Footnote ⁴³

The key planks of Locke’s report were consistent with complaints from the English lobby against Irish woollens; they also confirmed his and Shaftesbury’s earlier concerns that embargoes and penalties would be impractical because ‘the Temptation of greate profit may Encourage private men to bribe Officers, and run other risks’. The aim of Locke’s plan was gradually to ‘hinder … the Growth of the Woollen Manufacture in Ireland’ by imposing duties on the oil, teasels, and other materials needed to promote it. At the same time, he urged that parallel fiscal measures for linen manufacture ‘be set on foot and soe encouraged in Ireland, as may make it the Generall Trade of that Country’: no duties on importing hemp seed and linseed; remissions of tithes and taxes from flax and hemp growing for twenty-one years; and graduated increases in duties on imported hemp, flax, and the products derived from them. Locke also proposed setting up spinning schools for children aged between six and fourteen, or even as young as four, where they could learn to spin flax using the hands-free ‘double wheel’ invented by his friend the Unitarian philanthropist and projector Thomas Firmin (1632–97).Footnote ⁴⁴

Annual prizes would be offered for the best linen and sailcloth that Irish men and women could produce. To defray the costs of the new industry, every person over fourteen years old would have to deliver an annual quantity of linen yarn to be woven into cloth and then sold; defaulters would be fined and any financial shortfall made up by duties on tobacco imported into Ireland. A board of directors would appoint officers in each county and oversee every stage of the manufacture, from buying and selling to building and bleaching. Locke concluded with an elaborate scheme for pegging the directors’ salary increases to expansion of linen manufacture: ‘as the whole success of this undertaking seems unavoidably to depend upon the facility, skill, and Diligence of the said Directors’, he wrote, they should not be offered ‘great salaries’ to begin with. Crucially, he argued that the enterprise should not be ‘put into the management of a Company’ because ‘the Greediness of present gaine, occasions stock jobbing, or contests amongst themselves, about sharing the profitt, whilst the improvement thereof is neglected’.Footnote ⁴⁵ There is no evidence that Locke knew any details of the 1695 Irish bill at the moment he wrote his report, but this criticism of corporations would soon shape his reaction to it.

As he prepared his plan, events were moving swiftly in Ireland. Four days before Locke submitted his report to the board on 30 August 1697, Hamilton of Tollymore laid the new ‘Heads of a Bill to Encourage the Linen Manufacture in Ireland’ before the Irish parliament, on 26 August.Footnote ⁴⁶ In contrast to the 1695 bill, this new legislation proposed multiple corporations to oversee the linen industry rather than a single national body, with a president and board of directors in each county as well as one for Dublin. Spinning schools were to be set up for every forty children in each county, where they could be educated, catechized, employed, and ultimately apprenticed. All weavers had to register with their respective corporations and follow standard measures for reels of flax mandated throughout Ireland. The corporations’ methods were to be more coercive than those in the 1695 scheme, with a wide array of fines for counterfeiting their seals and marks and for breaking into their bleaching yards. To encourage domestic industry, competing imports would be taxed while exports would remain duty-free.Footnote ⁴⁷

The bill went through its committee stages in the Irish parliament between 3 and 16 September 1697 but final approval still had to come from England.Footnote ⁴⁸ Under the provisions of Poynings’ Law as it had been revived after the Restoration, Irish MPs proposed heads of bills to the English privy council; if the privy council accepted a bill, it would be returned to the Irish parliament for a final vote without further amendment.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because the measures in Hamilton’s bill concerned the political economy of Ireland and England, the Board of Trade would have to advise the English privy council on the proposed legislation. Both Locke and Somers thereby became implicated in its fate.

On 11 September 1697, Locke – no doubt concerned about his own recommendations, which had just been dispatched from London to the Irish lords justices in Dublin – again asked Molyneux ‘how the linen manufacture goes on, on that side the water, and what assistance the parliament there is like to give to it, for I wish prosperity to your country’.Footnote ⁵⁰ For his part, Molyneux wondered what might happen to the new linen bill when it reached England. He was aware that the privy council would seek the Board of Trade’s advice and that Locke would review it. ‘You will find … that we have framed a Bill to be Enacted for the Encouragement’ of the Irish linen manufacture, Molyneux wrote to Locke on 4 October 1697: ‘This Bill is now before the Council of England pursuant to our Constitution of Parliament.’ In the knowledge that his friend would soon ‘have the Consideration and Modelling thereof at your Committee of Trade’, he introduced Hamilton – ‘an Indefatigable Promotor of this Designe … the whole Scheme is owing to his Contrivance’ – to Locke as ‘an harty admirer of Yours’; he also enclosed an ‘Abstract’ of the 1697 bill that Hamilton had provided ‘purposely for [Locke’s] satisfaction’.Footnote ⁵¹

Molyneux noted that ‘some papers’ from ‘your Board’ had just reached Dublin, presumably including Locke’s report, though Molyneux could not then have known his friend was the author, nor did Locke ever tell him.Footnote ⁵² The Irish parliamentary committee studying the bill took almost a week to consider ‘the Proposalls of the Commissioners of Trade’ before the Irish lords justices transmitted a revised bill to London, adding such ‘further Clauses … out of the Proposalls transmitted from England as should be thought necessary’.Footnote ⁵³ On 15 October 1697, the earl of Galway dispatched the bill from Dublin to Whitehall for conciliar scrutiny; on 28 October, the English lords justices remitted a copy to the Board of Trade for its advice.Footnote ⁵⁴ That copy reached the board on the 30th.Footnote ⁵⁵

The 1697 Irish linen bill proved more divisive than its 1695 predecessor. It helped to break the earlier alliance between Hamilton and Brewster and the Ulster and Munster interests in parliament that they respectively represented: as Brewster later testified to the board, ‘he was in the House of Commons … when the said Bill was brought in, but did not approve it’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The main point of contention was whether a single corporation would be ‘the most Effectual Means for making the Manufactures Nationall’ (as the 1695 bill had proposed) or if multiple county corporations should be set up instead (as the 1697 legislation mandated). In the letter that Hamilton relayed to Locke via Molyneux, Hamilton admitted that he was ‘apprehensive that Sir Francis may make a stir in England about the same thing’ and attempted to head off Brewster’s objections. ‘Now if the Corporations to be Errected by the present Bill are Capable of ingroseing or Cramping thereof’, as Brewster and his ally the Belfast merchant and MP Thomas Knox (c. 1640–1728) alleged, then the 1695 scheme had been ‘much more Subject to Objections’. Hamilton argued that multiple corporations would in fact be less open to charges of monopoly; gentry interests would safeguard the new bill; and the corporations proposed in 1697 were primarily set up ‘to put the Laws concerning the Manufactures in Execution’, while in 1695 ‘the Corporation was chiefly employed in the Merchandizing part’ of the enterprise.Footnote ⁵⁷ Molyneux informed Locke that Hamilton had rebutted Brewster ‘at the Council Board’ in Dublin but both men wanted to forewarn Locke against Brewster, ‘for we judge, this whole matter will come under the Consideration of your Council of trade’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Their concerns proved well founded.

Brewster travelled from Dublin to London, carrying copies of ‘the Bills now transmitted’, to promote an updated version of the ‘Scheme of 1695’ in place of the 1697 legislation.Footnote ⁵⁹ He went with the backing of the lord chancellor of Ireland, John Methuen (1650–1706), who recommended Brewster to his highest contacts in England, including Somers. Methuen informed Somers that Brewster was soon ‘going to have the happyness of waiting on you’ and ‘will be able to inform your Lordship of every thing you will desire to know’ regarding recent affairs in the Irish parliament.Footnote ⁶⁰ Brewster reached London in the third week of October 1697 and soon called on Somers to discuss the updated 1695 bill, the Board of Trade’s recent report, and the 1697 bill. Somers was then living at Powis House (later Newcastle House), the lord keeper’s residence on the north-western corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just a few hundred metres from Locke’s lodgings at the time with Robert Pawling in Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields (on what is now Carey Street).Footnote ⁶¹ That physical proximity explains why so few letters survive between Locke and Somers in 1697.Footnote ⁶² One brief note does remain from the last week of October 1697, in which Somers wrote to Locke,

Somers ended with his own niggling objection to Locke’s plan: ‘it would please better if the double Wheel had another name then Mr Firmins’.Footnote ⁶³ The ‘proposal sent from England’ was Locke’s report to the Board of Trade, though Brewster would not have known its authorship; ‘Sir Francis Brewsters Paper’ was almost certainly the copy of the 1695 Irish linen bill now in the miscellany at the British Library alongside Locke’s comments.

Locke’s ‘Remarks’ offered a running commentary on what he saw as the key weaknesses of the 1695 bill, an accounting of its likely adverse consequences, and an implicit defence of his own report on the Irish linen industry a few weeks earlier. He carefully tallied underlying costs and outgoing expenses and queried missing information, for example regarding the current price of flax, hemp, and linen yarn in Ireland. He questioned whether the gentry and farmers should have to provide flax like everyone else in Ireland and deemed the provision for maintaining ‘pore children’ particularly misplaced. In line with his own plans for exploiting child labour in Ireland as well as in England, in the draft representation on the English poor law he presented to the Board of Trade on 26 October 1697, he argued that ‘children are able to get more than their lively hood’ and provided ‘a good oportunity of gain to the company’.Footnote ⁶⁴ His main criticisms flagged the high costs for England of any proposed unitary national corporation and the correspondingly low risks for its directors: Locke calculated that the company would be liable only for £690, enough to cover the cost of prizes for the best weavers over thirty years, while the English would have to put up £300,000 of founding capital, roughly equivalent to £46 million at late 2024 prices.Footnote ⁶⁵

Pace Somers, Locke believed that adopting Firmin’s double wheel would spur productivity more than prizes alone, with quantity not quality the overall goal. He also suspected that a single corporation would corruptly funnel large annual salaries to the county commissioners it had selected, as well as to the general commissioners appointed by the Irish parliament: ‘A well contrived cover to skreen the company if they have a minde to play tricks’. Locke judged that all the bill’s provisions unaccountably benefited the company and its directors, not the linen industry or, by implication, the Irish people or economic relations between England and Ireland. His conclusion was damning: ‘I see noe obligation on the company to promote the linin manifacture any more than will turne to their advantage … and those who are managers may noe doubt vijs et modis [by ways and means] make great profit to themselves.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In the face of such withering criticism, the revised 1695 proposals transmitted by Brewster had little chance of prevailing in the battle of the bills.

It is most likely that Locke wrote the ‘Remarks’ in the third week of October 1697, in response to Somers’s note. With Locke’s comments on ‘Sir Francis Brewsters Paper’ to hand, Somers would have been able to respond in an informed way when Brewster pressed the 1695 ‘Scheme’ upon him in place of Hamilton’s 1697 bill. Somers likely then tucked Locke’s notes inside the copy of the bill before filing both documents together. Later, he compiled them in the miscellany ‘relating to matters of State and Policy’, which contained further documentation concerning Ireland in the 1690s and other material discussed at the Board of Trade.Footnote ⁶⁷ The 1695 bill and Locke’s reactions to it then remained together for the next three centuries.

On 11 November 1697, Brewster appeared before the board to attack the latest linen bill from Ireland. He forcefully judged Hamilton’s plan for incorporation ‘to be rather prejudicial than helpfull to that Manufacture’, worrying that any funds raised to support the project would be ‘perverted by the Justices of the Peace and not imployed to the uses directed’, and counselling that penalties for defaulters would backfire: ‘people will not be brought to apply themselves to any Manufacture by Terrour, but by rewards and profit’. He told the board that he ‘with some others had some while ago prepared a Bill to the same purpose, which he thought would have been more effectual but that they could not get it past’; he then summarized the 1695 bill and, ‘for the better understanding of this Project, … promised to send their Lordships a Draught of this Bill it self tomorrow morning’.Footnote ⁶⁸

The next day, Brewster delivered ‘a Draught of the Act which he spoke of yesterday for setting up the Linnen Manufacture in Ireland’ to the board’s secretary and asked them to make a copy before returning the original to him.Footnote ⁶⁹ Brewster independently argued that English legislation regulating imports from Ireland, together with various inducements for the individual manufacture of linen in Ireland, could gradually smother the Irish woollen industry, relieve poverty there, and spur Irish enterprise, so ‘that the Linnen Spinning will appear in the Country with Garlands when the Woollen will be in Shakels [shackles]’. Although Locke passed his copy of the 1695 bill back to Somers, he retained a copy of Brewster’s ‘project for the Linin Manifacture’ among his papers.Footnote ⁷⁰

The board had discussed the 1697 bill as amended by the Irish lords justices over the course of eight meetings between 1 and 11 November 1697.Footnote ⁷¹ They then compiled a representation on the matter to the English lords justices, including a series of further amendments to the bill, mostly designed to confine its time horizon (from ‘for ever’ to twenty-one years) and to refine its system of rewards and punishments.Footnote ⁷² On 11 November, every member of the board signed that report, ‘except only M^r Locke, who declared that he differed from their Lordships in his Opinion about that Bill and excused himself from signing the said Representation’, the only occasion in his four years on the board that Locke dissented from one of its collective representations.Footnote ⁷³ On 15 November, William III returned in triumph to London from the Netherlands at the end of the Nine Years’ War; three days later, the English privy council informed the Irish lords justices that the 1697 bill, even in amended form, was ‘so farr from Answering the Design exprest in the Title that if it should pass into a Law, it would prove a totall Discouragement to the Effectual setting up of the Linnen Manufacture in Ireland’. The first signatory from the privy council was ‘J. Sommers C[hancellor].’Footnote ⁷⁴ The presence of the ‘Remarks’ among Somers’s papers suggests that he and Locke had co-ordinated their responses on the Board of Trade and the privy council, based on a long-standing relationship in which Somers provided patronage (including Locke’s position on the board) and Locke supplied political and economic counsel in return.Footnote ⁷⁵ The 1697 bill was dead and neither it nor its predecessor from 1695 was sent back to the Irish House of Commons.

The ‘Remarks’ reveal Locke, in tandem with Somers, operating behind the scenes to protect his own plan to reorganize commercial relations between Ireland and England by scuppering both the revived 1695 bill promoted by Brewster and the 1697 bill that Molyneux had pressed upon him. ‘It will not be at all necessary to say anything to you concerning the [1697] linen bill’, Locke informed Molyneux in January 1698: ‘You know (I believe) as well as I what became of that bill.’ The bill’s fate was indeed clear to both of them, though Molyneux hardly knew ‘as well as’ Locke how it had met its doom in committee. Locke thanked Hamilton, via Molyneux, for thinking he might have been ‘able to serve his country in that matter’ and recalled that Molyneux mentioned he had ‘seen the proposals for an act sent from hence’. Those proposals were, of course, Locke’s own, in the report that he had submitted to the board. He trusted that Molyneux and Hamilton would now promote that project in place of the recent bill: ‘The short is, I mightily have it upon my heart to get the linen manufacture established in a flourishing way in your country’, Locke wrote – but only on his own terms.Footnote ⁷⁶

The ‘Remarks’ show that in late 1697 Locke was not worried ‘that the financial provision for the [Irish linen] industry was inadequate’, that the promoters of the Irish legislation ‘wished to profit from stock-jobbing’, or that Irish linen manufacture would ‘simply degenerate into a stock-jobbing bonanza’.Footnote ⁷⁷ He was more concerned that the financial provision for the industry would be excessively draining for England; that the corporation’s directors would corruptly shield themselves from accountability; and that they would selfishly profiteer from the corporation’s revenues, rather than its stock. Such matters were evidently much on his mind in October 1697, when, in correspondence with the Baltic merchant Samuel Heathcote (1656–1708), he similarly objected to overseas trading companies on the grounds that they ‘may lay Extravagant Impositions[,] raise a great Stock[,] divide the money among themselves or amongst those that Govern and so the money they raise be made no ways usefull to the publick but Spent to Feast and Enrich private Persons’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The ‘Remarks’ were also consistent with Locke’s reports to the Board of Trade in the autumn of 1697: on the English poor law and on Irish linen manufacture. Those reports, like the ‘Remarks’, advanced public improvement over private profit, promoted Firmin’s double-handed wheel, and put young children to productive work, all within ‘a strategy for economic development centered on invigorating proto-industries’ in both England and Ireland.Footnote ⁷⁹ Legislation on Irish linen manufacture would not return until 1699, when, after Tory victory in the general election, the wool lobby successfully pressed the English parliament to pass the punitive Irish Woollen Act (10 William III, c. 16) under radically changed political circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁰ Locke and Somers may have won a battle over Anglo-Irish political economy in 1697 but the 1699 Woollen Act confirmed that they ultimately lost the war.Footnote ⁸¹

IV

Editorial conventions. The transcription retains the manuscript’s original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, with the following exceptions. Manuscript forms of words such as ‘y^e’, ‘y^t’, ‘agⁿ’, ‘w^ch’, and ‘P^r’ have been expanded or replaced with the usual printed forms. Strikethroughs indicate Locke’s deletions. Angle brackets indicate his substitutions and his additions on the line, caret marks his additions above the line, and square brackets an editorial expansion or addition. The bill itself had no paragraph numbers: Locke supplied them in his own hand for his and Somers’s ease of reference. He keyed each of his comments to the relevant sections of the bill by the paragraph numbers in the left-hand column. Footnotes record the detailed provisions of the 1695 bill to which Locke refers in each of his remarks.

Transcription. British Library, Add. MS 27,382, fos. 10r–11v.

[fo. 10r]

§

1. 3 The money ^£300.000^ designed to be raised in EnglandFootnote ⁸²

1. 6 100.000 subscribed shall constitute the CompanyFootnote ⁸³

1. 7 £1000 of the originall stock to be laid out in each county for purchaseing Lands building workeing houses erecting bleacherys &c for carying on the Manifacture

   one Moietie of the said £51.000 to be laid thus out within 18 Months after the company takes place. & the other Moietie within the next 18 monthsFootnote ⁸⁴

   NB This cannot but be disproportionate to the end for one County may need £200.000 to be laid out in it to this purpose, when in an other county it would be madnesse to lay out one hundred pounds

1. 8 Q what is the value, at the midle rate, of marchantable flax in Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁵ If it be 4^d Then every person ^male^ will pay yearly to the company 2^s−4^d if it be 3¼ every male will pay 7^d. The same Q upon the Spangles of Linin yarne.Footnote ⁸⁶ By § 14 each spangle of yarne is valued at 6^d <but in the valuation of the flax there I can finde noe proportion>Footnote ⁸⁷

   Q who shall be judg whether the linen yarne be well spun & even sized

1. 10 Q What well dressd hemp is worth per pound in IrelandFootnote ⁸⁸

   These 3 taxes may amount to a great yearly sum

   Q Whether it be not improper for country Gent[lemen] & farmers to be obleigd to bring in dressed hemp? The [fo. 10v] incouragement for sowing of hemp ^& flax^ would be greater to make their payments only in rough hemp & flax.

1. 14 This maintenance for pore children a good oportunity of gain to the companyFootnote ⁸⁹

1. 16 Large priviledgesFootnote ⁹⁰

17

18

1. 19 They are to take in children of 6400 at 7 years old & keep them to 21.Footnote ⁹¹ There needs noe allowance faor this, for such children are able to get more than their lively hood

1. 20 Q What chardges This is all the charge I see the company is obleiged to be at for encourageing the Linin woollen manifacture viz £690.Footnote ⁹² Though their income by the contribution of Flax Hemp & yarne be many thousands. Besides this incouragement is misplaced. since it should be more to introduce the double wheele than reward weavers though that too should not be neglectedFootnote ⁹³

1. 22 £3000 per annum to ^county^ commissioners of their owne chooseing to inspect &c.Footnote ⁹⁴

1. 23.24 And £1200 to 3 General Commissioners to be chosen by the Parliament.Footnote ⁹⁵ A well contrived cover to skreen the company if they have a minde to play tricks

   [fo. 11r]

1. 25 And £200 more for the rewarding the 12 best we webs. This is again for shew, & rewar incourages only weavers & that in makeing fine cloth, which is not the businesse in the beginingFootnote ⁹⁶

1. 28 Q Whether this power of makeing by laws be like to be made use of more for the advantage of the Company or of the Manifacture.Footnote ⁹⁷

   I see noe obligation on the company to promote the linin manifacture any more than will turne to their advantage though they have great rewards given them ^without account^ & those who are managers may noe doubt vijs et modisFootnote ⁹⁸ make great profit to themselves

[fo. 11v]

Lo^. [inverted]