Harkness opens with four pages of justification for calling her subjects' studies science; if I understand correctly, the word is used contemporaneously for investigations into the natural world, but "scientist" is not used, and also there's some resistance to calling just-pre-Royal-Society work "science" because they were Natural Philosophers, and not empiricists, etc etc.
But! The strain of this book is that the Royal Society rooted in, even fed off parasitically, a broad and deep community of investigators of all kinds; just not reliably English gentlemen. Cities in the sixteenth century had many immigrants; England called them "Strangers", who could win their way to "denizen". And many of these people were traders in useful or artistic or natural wonders, and exchanged descriptions and specimens with colleagues and relatives across Europe as well as new colleagues in all stations in England. At this stage they're still putting together a pointillist picture of the world, discovering that some accepted truths are fables and others understate the wierdness of reality; plants and insects are brought across continents in what, saddlebags?, it's amazing any of them grew; and even collecting and ordering and copying others' knowledge is hard and useful, since print culture is just getting started.
But London, and traders, are not the strongest power in England, and combinations of courtiership and self-aggrandizement by better-born Englishmen -- sometimes much worse scientists -- shouldered aside the Strangers. From this vantage (I'm exaggerating Harkness' argument considerably), the Royal Society was a step backward, freezing out foreigners and hands-on experimenters in its insistence on making science gentle.
This argument is embodied on pp. 212-213. Hugh Plat was a brewers' son (and a lawyer) and rich but London-y, not courtly; his book Jewell house of art and nature is practical and tested knowledge, gathered from many walks of England; applied science, but how not science? On the other hand, Francis Bacon, son of a courtier (and a lawyer) wrote The New Atlantis, which sets up all science in a gorgeously funded, but centralized and presumably controlled, campus.
But Salomon's House was not a wishful romance. Instead, it was a dressed-up representation of the real world of science in Elizabethan London. The streets of the City already boasted several libraries, James Garret's fantastic tulip garden, James Cole's curiosity cabinet, and Giovan Battista Agnello's elaborate chemical laboratories and furnaces. St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where Clowes and Baker worked alongside other physicians and nurses, was known throughout Europe for its cutting-edge medicine, and John Hester's shop on St. Pauls' Wharf belched out all sorts of aromatic fumes as he made powerful new chemical medicines and herbal concoctions for hs urban clientele. The City's workshops produced delicate clocks and mathematical instruments, as well as perpetual-motion machines and large engineering devices. The City of London was already engaged in the study of nature, and [...] did not need Bacon's encouragement [...]
Much later (p. 250):
Those who commented at all tended to criticize Bacon for his unwillingness to do the work of science, as well as for his lack of appreciation for what was already being done.
Find in a Library: The Jewel House
Or the original The jewel house of art and nature..., if you have academic access.
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (16th c.). , Science.