page_title: Nathan Paget
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Nathan Paget / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Morton (1564-1659), Fellow (1592–1593), Bishop of Durham (1632)
context_page_description: Nathan Paget 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.
context_section_description: 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, 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. Nathan's mother, died in 1628 and was buried at Bowdon in Cheshire on 31 August. Bowdon was one of the villages where the Puritan ministers held their monthly exercises and was close to Dunham Massey, the home of the leading Presbyterian layman in Cheshire George Booth, 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. 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.
  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. Nathan took a considerable interest in ancient languages and in later life his library contained several Hebrew Bibles and a Hebrew language Bible concordance. 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. 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. 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. 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. The University was probably the best of the Netherlands' five provincial universities, and the one most involved in the country's co
caption: Thomas Morton, Bishop of Chester and later of Lichfield, who clashed with his Puritan clergy and laity despite his own Calvinist theological commitments. A 1637 portrait by Simon Luttichuys.
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