Henry Robinson, best known for a work…

Henry Robinson, best known for a work on religious toleration, Liberty of Conscience from 1644, in 1650 opens his Office of Addresses and Encounters in Threadneedle Street, London.

He charges six shillings for answers to certain types of queries, concerning real estate and employment among other matters.

There is a free service for the poor.

The creation of such an Office had been pushed for three years by Samuel Hartlib, who had lobbied for public funds for it.

Robinson is an associate of Hartlib, and provides a limited implementation of a grand reformist scheme, which draws also on the French model of Théophraste Renaudot that had operated by then for twenty years.

Through the simple provision of a central Register of Addresses, Robinson argues, employers can find employees.

He advocates the "free trading of truth", and writes that "no man can have a natural monopoly of truth".

He is one of a group of authors slightly ahead of John Milton in the arguments of Areopagitica against censorship.

It has been said that there is essentially nothing in Milton's work that had not been anticipated by Robinson, William Walwyn, Roger Williams.

Other contemporaries writing in the area of freedom of publication are John Lilburne and John Saltmarsh, and John Goodwin.

The production of pamphlets in 1644 arguing for toleration had been part of the Independents' campaign against the rigid Presbyterians.

Robinson was against religious coercion, and therefore against the setting-up of a new national church for England if the result was persecution.

Toleration was apparently not to be extended to Roman Catholics.

He writes extensively on trade and economics, including advocacy for English trade policy during the Rump Parliament.

In economic policy his writings have some effect: in the areas of interest rates, naturalization of foreigners, redistribution of trades from the London center, and inland navigation, there is a measure of economic reform in the directions he with Hartlib had proposed.

He, in common with some of the Levellers, argues against jury trial.