Nathan Paget (March 1615 – January 1679) was an English physician, active during the English Civil War, under the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and after the Restoration. Despite being a mainstay of a generally conservative profession, he was interested in the experimental methods of the Enlightenment. Although from a strongly Presbyterian background, he seems to have developed radical political and religious sympathies.
Origins Paget was baptised at Manchester on 31 March 1615., also at He was the son of
Thomas Paget - at the time a minister at Blackley, although he later served in Amsterdam, Shrewsbury and Stockport. Blackley chapel was subsidiary to St Mary's Church, Manchester, a great collegiate church with many subsidiary chapels across its vast parish of more than 35,000 acres.Booker, p. 2. Thomas Paget had proceeded to M.A. only in 1612 and was recruited to serve at Blackley by William Bourne, a Puritan fellow of St Mary's, who was particularly interested in the quality of preaching at the outlying chapels.Booker, p. 66. Thomas Paget's elder brother and Nathan's uncle was John Paget, a Presbyterian theologian and controversialist who had gone into exile in 1605 and was serving as pastor of the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam. They probably belonged to the Paget family of Rothley in Leicestershire, although their parentage is unknown.
Margery Goldsmith of Nantwich, daughter of the mercer Nicholas Goldsmith and his wife Dorothy.Hall, p. 479 The Goldsmiths were closely allied with the Minshull family of Wistaston and Marjorie's sister, Ellen, was married to Richard Minshull of Weld's Green (now Wells Green, south of Crewe).Cf. Minshull Pedigree in Hall, p. 476-7
Thomas Paget already had family connections with Nantwich, as John Paget had served as Rector there 1598–1604 and in 1602 had married the widow Briget Thrushe née Masterson,Hall, p. 416 who belonged to the oldest of Nantwich's major families.Hall, p. 295 Nathan's parents were married at St Mary's Church, Nantwich on 6 April 1613.Hall, p. 296 He was their first child and had two surviving younger sisters, Dorothy and Elizabeth.
Early life and education
Nathan Paget was part of a combative, sometimes persecuted, Puritan family from the outset and his early experience reflected this. As early as 1617 his father emerged as a leader of the Puritan opposition to Thomas Morton, the Bishop of Chester, and was referred to the Court of High Commission,Halley, p. 130-1 although at this point he emerged with little more than a warning and substantial expenses to pay. Nathan was educated first at Northwich grammar school (now Sir John Deane's College), where the head was Richard Pigot, a staunch Calvinist who was later head of Shrewsbury School.
The pace of persecution increased with the accession of Charles I and Thomas Paget was under increasing pressure from Morton's successor, John Bridgeman.Halley, p. 132 Nathan's mother, died in 1628 and was buried at Bowdon in Cheshire on 31 August.Hall, p. 279. Bowdon was one of the villages where the Puritan ministers held their monthly exercises Urwick, p. xi-xii. and was close to Dunham Massey, the home of the leading Presbyterian layman in Cheshire George Booth, Urwick, p. 370. which suggests the family were already feeling the need of protection. With the imposition from 1629 of Thorough, an attempt at absolute monarchy, the situation deteriorated further. In 1631 Thomas Paget was pursued with attachments for fines he had incurred and threatened with imprisonment.Halley, p. 133 He went into hiding and escaped with his family to the Dutch Republic.
They took refuge in Amsterdam, where Thomas assisted his brother John at the English Reformed Church. Nathan's education seems to have advanced rapidly, both formally and informally. He must have entered the University of Edinburgh fairly soon after their flight to the Netherlands, as he graduated MA in 1635. While Scotland was under the same king as England, it had a Presbyterian polity and was outside English law, so it was sufficiently safe and familiar. Thereafter Paget seems to have taken a three-year break from formal study, although it is unlikely he was any less involved in intellectual striving. John Paget was described by Robert, his nephew and adopted son, as having rare skill in the languages that conduce unto the understanding of the originall text of the Scriptures; for he could to good purpose and with much ease make use of the Chaldean, Syriack, Rabbinicall, Thalmudicall, Arabick, and Persian versions and commentaries.Preface to Meditations of death (1639), quoted in Hall, p. 295.
To pursue such wide linguistic interests the Pagets must have drawn on the resources of Amsterdam's substantial Jewish community: the Sephardim alone numbered about 800 in 1626 and 1200 in 1655.Boxer, p. 144. Nathan took a considerable interest in ancient languages and in later life his library contained several Hebrew Bibles and a Hebrew language Bible concordance.Miller, Some Inferences from Milton's Hebrew: Abstract He became part of a philo-semitic, polyglot and polymath circle that overlapped with other intellectual networks across Western Europe. One contact was John Dury, an eirenic Scottish Protestant minister, who had close contacts with the Jewish community. On 5 November 1634 John Paget and his congregation wrote to congratulate him on a recent sermon and invited him again to Amsterdam.Hartlib Papers, Ref: 5/52/1A-2B: 1B, 2A BLANK. A copy of the letter was sent to Samuel Hartlib, a German scientist and polymath who had sought refuge from the Thirty Years' War in England. Hartlib clearly kept up with the Pagets' activities, noting in July 1638 that John was recovering from an illness.Hartlib Papers, Ref: 11/1/117A-B John died the following month, although he had effectively retired from leadership of the English Reformed Church the previous year.
With John Paget's death, the Paget family in Amsterdam dispersed. His widow Briget became his literary executor and went to live with her adopted son, Robert, in Dordrecht. Thomas had already taken over as pastor of the English Reformed Church, where he was assisted by Julines Herring, a comrade of the struggles in Cheshire and formerly public preacher in Shrewsbury. Urwick, p. ix.Coulton, p. 78-80. On 25 November 1638 Nathan entered as a student of medicine at the University of Leyden: his surname was badly Latinised at admission to Pagelius.Peacock, p. 75. The University was probably the best of the Netherlands' five provincial universities,Boxer, p. 176. and the one most involved in the country's colonial aspirations and international mission: in the quarter century 1626–50 52% of its students came from abroad.Boxer, p. 177. It was also active in other areas of Paget's intellectual interest: Joseph Justus Scaliger had established a strong tradition of Semitic studies and the university had acquired an Oriental press, complete with appropriate fonts, in 1625. Paget graduated M.D. on 3 August 1639. His thesis was published under the title De Peste (On the Plague). He dedicated it to various Puritans of Cheshire and Shropshire and in it described himself as Mancestr. Anglus.,Booker, p. 67. a Mancunian and Englishman.
Making of a reputation
The Civil War Nathan Paget moved back to England just as the period of absolute monarchy closed. He was admitted an extra licentiate of the College of Physicians of London on 4 April 1640,Physicians and Irregular Medical Practitioners in London 1550-1640 Database: College membership. allowing him to practise in England, outside London. Almost certainly supportive of the Parliamentarian cause, he probably took care to remain in areas with similar political sympathies. His Leyden degree of M.D. was incorporated at the Puritan University of Cambridge on 3 June 1642, just before the outbreak of full-scale hostilities in the English Civil War.
In 1643 Paget took up residence in London at Coleman Street, a noted centre of political and religious radicalism where the Five Members had taken refuge the previous year. He was now settled enough to marry Elizabeth Cromwell. She was a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector, although he was still a relatively minor figure, if an able commander, in the army of the Eastern Association. Paget subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant at St. Stephen Coleman Street, pledging himself to support a Presbyterian polity under the king. However, he was a parishioner of John Goodwin, whose works he owned.John Coffey. John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (2008), p. 281. Goodwin was an Independent and a radical whose preaching went far beyond the Presbyterian mainstream, and his more conservative parishioners got him sequestered in 1645.
Paget became a Candidate of the College of Physicians on 17 October 1643 and was elected a Fellow on 4 November 1646. Six months later he presented the College with a copy of the works of Francis Bacon, the most important 17th century philosopher of science, signalling a commitment to his empirical method.
Success and preferment
Over the next three years, Paget's political connections became crucial. Most importantly, his wife's cousin Oliver emerged as a leader of the increasingly dominant Independent faction in the New Model Army. Moreover, his father, Thomas Paget had become a "a magisterial figure in Shrewsbury,"Coulton, p. 106. where he had taken up the incumbency of Chad's Church. In this important garrison town he preached and wrote powerfully in favour of the regicide, making him a key regional ally of Oliver Cromwell and taking him well-outside the Presbyterian mainstream, in which he had previously been conspicuous. After the king's execution, Thomas issued a pamphlet, entitled A Religious Scrutiny, in which he asserted the religious necessity of the "capital punishment of the polluting and crying sin of wilful murder"Coulton, p. 110. – a sin of which he considered the king guilty. Nathan Paget was thus well-connected in the new republican regime, which offered significant patronage to him. On 31 December 1649 he was nominated physician to the Tower of London by the Council of State of the Commonwealth of England.Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1649–1650, 31 December 1649, p. 460. This was confirmed on 5 February 1650.Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1649–1650, 5 February 1650, p. 506.
Around 1645 Paget had been one of the seven physicians associated with Caius College, Cambridge who began to exchange notes on rickets.Hochberg, p. 7. This seems to have been a response to the inaugural lecture of Daniel Whistler at Leyden University, entitled De morbo puerili Anglorum.Williamson, p. 43. George Bate and Assuerus Regimorter were given responsibility for arranging publication of their work. The original intention was to publish a collection of papers. However, Francis Glisson emerged as the best writer in the group, as the others conceded:
But when Dr Glisson in the judgment of the rest had accuratly interweaved his part (which comprehended the finding out of the Essence of this Diseas) and in that had propounded many things different from the common Opinion of Physitians (though perhaps the less different from the truth) we altered our Resolution, and committed the first Stuff of the whol (sic) Work to be woven by him alone, lest at length the parts should arise deformed, mishapen and heterogeneous to .Glisson, Preface to the Reader.