The ‘Highest Roade to Happiness’

Knights explores the writings of the later seventeenth-century merchant James Boevey, which digested his own experiences, apparently for the benefit of himself, his family circle and friends, though possibly with an eye to publication. In thirty manuscript volumes, Boevey set out an ‘Active Philosophy’, developed in the light of his manifold difficulties—extended litigation, imprisonment, associated commercial losses, brushes with death and a far from easy family life. He saw happiness as an art, and as something to be achieved. In that context suffering was something from which lessons could be learned, but he did not employ an orthodox Christian framework for this view: he does not seem to have been a Weberian merchant motivated by protestant ethics but instead endorsed a more speculative set of beliefs which nevertheless helped to advance mercantile values.