Читать книгу Milton and the English Revolution - Christopher Hill - Страница 13
ОглавлениеGod may leave a nation that is but in outward covenant with him, and why not England? … Our God is going, and do you sit still on your beds ?
Thomas Hooker, The Danger of Desertion (1641): a farewell sermon ‘preached immediately before his departure out of old England’ in the early sixteen-thirties.
Milton was born in December 1608, and was self-consciously slow in maturing. The years before 1640 we can regard as the period of his apprenticeship. The world in which he grew up was changing rapidly. Under the pressures of expanding population, economic crisis and ideological rivalry, the consensus which had held Elizabethan society together was breaking down. All thought about economics and politics at this time took religious forms; men saw the national crisis primarily as a religious crisis, though Milton (I shall suggest) came to see it also as a cultural crisis.
National sentiment in England had been intimately associated with Protestantism ever since Henry VIII declared England’s independence of the papacy. Under Elizabeth, when the great Catholic power of Spain emerged as the national enemy, the connection of Protestantism and nationalism was sedulously emphasized. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was used as government propaganda. A legend was carefully built up, of Catholic cruelty and treachery. Evidence in plenty could be found to support it: Alva’s Council of Blood in the Netherlands, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, innumerable Roman Catholic plots in England culminating in that of Guy Fawkes in 1605, on which Milton in his teens wrote five Latin poems. England’s victory in 1588 over the Spanish Armada – allegedly full of whips and instruments of torture for use on Protestant Englishmen – was attributed to direct divine intervention, and played a big part in building up the conception, which Milton adopted, of Protestant England as a chosen nation.
James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, five years before Milton’s birth. James had many disadvantages. He was a foreigner, married to a papist, and son of Mary Queen of Scots who had been the Spanish and papal candidate to replace Elizabeth on the throne. But Gunpowder Plot gave James a good start, and he might have continued to exploit the patriotic anti-Catholic legend, since he was certainly a more convinced Protestant than Elizabeth. For a variety of reasons, however, good, bad and indifferent, James hankered after the role of peace-maker in Europe, of mediator between Protestant and Catholic extremists. But he was short of cash, for which he depended on the vote of M.Ps. most of whom accepted the full Protestant legend and had no use for James’s pacific schemes. He suffered the normal fate of the would-be mediator who lacks the wherewithal to intervene effectively. Spain was interested only in preventing Parliament from driving James into the Protestant camp as Europe lined up for the Thirty Years War.
When war started in 1618 James failed – despite prodding from Parliament whenever it met – to give effective military aid to his son-in-law the Elector Palatine, who had been ignominiously ejected not only from the Bohemian throne to which he had aspired but also from his hereditary dominions in the Palatinate. Instead, James sent his favourite the Duke of Buckingham with Prince Charles to Madrid to woo the daughter of the King of Spain. It looked in the early twenties as though all continental Europe was going to fall before the Catholic sword. Church lands were being resumed in Germany, and it seemed only a matter of time before England’s national independence and the property of the inheritors of monastic lands fell too. When John Rushworth began to publish his documented history of the English Revolution in 1659, he found it necessary to go back to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, though he had originally intended to start in November 1640.1
Charles I, who succeeded in 1625, did not share his father’s illusions of European grandeur; but he too suffered from lack of money. He abandoned the unpopular scheme for a Spanish marriage alliance: instead he married the daughter of the King of France. In terms of Realpolitik this was sound: France was as hostile to Spain as could be wished. But Queen Henrietta Maria was no less Catholic than the Infanta of Spain; the marriage involved concessions to English Catholics, seen by many as a potential fifth column in England. Buckingham continued to be influential under Charles as under James, and many of his relations were Catholics. After Buckingham’s assassination in 1628 the influence of Henrietta Maria over her husband grew; conversions to Catholicism became fashionable; and in 1637 a papal agent was admitted to England, for the first time since the reign of Bloody Mary. Contemporary fears of an international Catholic plot against English independence appeared to be confirmed when eight years later a papal nuncio arrived in Ireland to head a full-scale Catholic revolt against English rule. Two generations earlier Nicholas Sander had been papal legate to the Irish rebels who rose in 1579.
The French alliance involved Charles in what Milton was to call a ‘treacherous and antichristian war against the poor protestants of La Rochelle’.1 The Protestant cause in Europe was finally saved not by England but by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who in 1630 marched into Germany to win spectacular victories. Court sentiment was expressed by Carew:
What though the German drum
Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise
Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys.2
That was written in 1632, the year of the death of Gustavus Adolphus. On that occasion John Bradshaw, later President of the court that tried Charles I, perhaps Milton’s kinsman, wrote that ‘more sad or heavy tidings hath not in this age been brought since Prince Harry’s death to the true-hearted English.’3 At the time of Gustavus’s intervention the English government was actually negotiating with Spain for an alliance against Sweden and the Netherlands. Those patriotic Englishmen who were bitterly ashamed that Sweden and not England had saved the day for Protestantism did not know of these negotiations. But plainly the English court was less than enthusiastic about the Protestant cause. In 1632 a financial deal with Spain helped the latter to pay her armies in the Netherlands; in 1639 Dutch and Spanish fleets fought a battle in English territorial waters, with the English fleet passively looking on.
Nor was it only a question of foreign policy. There were alarming developments in England itself. William Laud, in effect head of the church from 1628 onwards, introduced innovations which to many Englishmen seemed steps in the direction of popery. Transference of the communion table from the centre of the church to the east end, where it was railed off, seemed to imply the Catholic doctrine of the real presence. ‘A table of separation’, Milton was to call it. It elevated the priest above the congregation, thus undoing what for many had been one of the Reformation’s most important achievements. There was a deliberate re-introduction of Catholic motifs into ecclesiastical architecture and sculpture. Laud was also effective Prime Minister of England. He made the Bishop of London Lord Treasurer – the first cleric to hold that office since the Reformation, Laud proudly noted in his Diary. Laud attempted to increase tithe payments from the laity to the clergy; to recover for the church tithes which had passed to laymen at the dissolution of the monasteries. His partisans dominated the two universities, and got the best preferments in the church; their opponents were silenced or driven into exile. In the eleven years without Parliament, 1629–40, Laud and his dependants ruled through the prerogative courts, Star Chamber and High Commission, which fiercely enforced government policy, regardless of the social rank of those who opposed it. ‘Lordly prelates raised from the dunghill’, ‘equal commonly in birth to the meanest peasants’, as their opponents elegantly called them, inflicted corporal punishments on gentlemen with the same ferocity as the latter flogged and branded the lower orders;1 as soon as a Parliament met they were certain to be called to account.
Parliament ultimately had to meet because of Scotland. The English government had imposed bishops on the Scottish Kirk, and under Laud their power was enhanced. There had been dangerous talk of a resumption of Scottish church lands. When a new prayer book was brought in, with changes which weakened Protestant doctrine, the Scottish gentry and aristocracy encouraged a resistance which soon reached national proportions. Most patriotic Englishmen sympathized with the old but now Protestant enemy against their own government. When Charles sent an army north, the rank and file were more hostile to their papist officers than to the Scots, better at pulling down altar rails than at fighting. National disaster and bankruptcy could be avoided only by calling a Parliament.
By now the idea had taken root in England that the government, under the baleful influence of Henrietta Maria and Laud, was involved in a vast international Catholic plot against the liberties of Protestant Englishmen. Laud of course was no papist. We know, as contemporaries did not, that he refused the offer of a cardinal’s hat. But if they had known, the fact that the Pope thought the offer worth making might have seemed more significant than Laud’s refusal. Events in Scotland seemed to fit into this international conspiracy. So did events in Ireland.
There, in natural resentment at the oppressions of English colonizers, Catholicism had become equated with nationalism just as Protestantism had in England, and as Presbyterianism had in Scotland. In 1598 a Spanish landing in Ireland had been beaten off with difficulty: the possibility of its recurrence was a perpetual nightmare. The appointment of Sir Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 increased anxiety. Went-worth was a Protestant, but he was also a renegade leader of the opposition in the English Parliament. He made what many Englishmen thought excessive concessions to the Catholic majority in Ireland, and started building up an army there composed largely of papists. What for? Wentworth himself suggested using it against the Scottish Covenanters; for most Protestant Englishmen this was equivalent to using it against England, for the subversion of their liberties, religion and property.
This is the background against which we must set court/country rivalries in the early seventeenth century. Under Elizabeth, the danger from Spain and from the Pope, and perhaps from the English lower classes, had forced unity on the ruling class. Every man, as Fulke Greville put it, believed that ‘his private fish-ponds could not be safe whilst the public state of the kingdom stood in danger of present or expectant extremities’.1 But after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, political attitudes, especially attitudes to foreign affairs, began to diverge. Gradually what had been healthy tensions between different groupings on Elizabeth’s Privy Council became ruthless faction feuds. Ultimately two sides lined up to fight a civil war. A deep breach opened up between the early Stuart court and the main body of respectable opinion in the country. In so far as this opinion was expressed in any organized way, ‘Puritanism’ in a very wide and loose definition of that over-worked word can serve to describe it. But the roots of hostility to the court were not merely theological but political, moral and cultural as well.
The divergences showed up more clearly under James I. Neither Elizabeth’s own behaviour nor the conduct of her courtiers had always been impeccable. Yet certain standards of decorum had been maintained, not least because of the prudent parsimony of the Virgin Queen. But there were many things about James I which shocked country squires and London merchants – the drunken orgies which marked the visit of the King of Denmark in 1606 for instance. James’s public fondling and slobbering over his male favourites might have been forgiven, but not the fact that he allowed them to influence policy. This was utterly foreign to the Elizabethan tradition. When the Earl of Somerset, a Scottish favourite, wanted the Earl of Essex’s wife, James egged on a bevy of bishops to declare the marriage annulled on the grounds of Essex’s impotence and his Countess’s intact virginity. Some were prepared to believe the former, none the latter. When civil war came, Essex was Lord General of the Parliamentary army.
An even greater scandal broke in 1615, when Somerset and his new Countess were convicted of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury because he knew too much about their affairs. The only way in which the anti-Spanish party at court could think of ending James’s subservience to the Spanish Ambassador was by getting the Archbishop of Canterbury to introduce him to a new boy-friend. The ruse was successful; but as the new minion was the future Duke of Buckingham, the remedy proved worse than the disease. There were scandals of a more conventional sort: two Lord Treasurers and a Lord Chancellor were convicted of taking bribes. With more money about, corruption either increased or was believed to have increased. The price of a peerage, of a baronetcy, and of most court offices was publicly known. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, writing in cipher for his own eye only, accused James of ‘the sin of sodomy’, and added ‘all his actions did tend to an absolute monarchy.’1
Lucy Hutchinson sums up the Puritan view, though she has her own heightened and telling way of putting things. ‘The court of this king [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance. … The generality of the gentry of the land soon learnt the court fashion, and every great house in the country became a stew of uncleanness.’ When James died, ‘the face of the court’, Mrs. Hutchinson admits, ‘was much changed … for King Charles was temperate and chaste and serious.’2 Gross errors of taste and probity were eliminated. Charles was a better judge of men than his father, and his personal fastidiousness offered a more acceptable public image. But the charge of lack of Protestant patriotism ultimately proved fatal. Charles was too devoted to his French wife, too dependent on unpopular bishops. Nor did it do the Church of England any good that the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore had the misfortune to be convicted of whoredom and sodomy in the autumn of 1640.1
The growing court/country rivalries came to include attitudes towards patronage of the arts. Under Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, the first great English art-collector, led the party which favoured an active pro-Protestant foreign policy. Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, was a leader of international Protestantism as well as a great English literary figure. The mantle of Leicester and Sidney fell upon the Russells, Earls of Bedford and upon Shakespeare’s Earl of Southampton, but especially upon the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke. The wife of the second Earl was Sidney’s sister: the fourth Earl was christened Philip after Sidney. The third Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Arundel were brothers-in-law; but in 1616 Arundel was described as ‘head of the Catholics’ and Pembroke as ‘head of the Puritans’; Southampton was ‘head of the malcontents’.2 Arundel and the fourth Earl of Pembroke were to be on opposite sides in the Civil War.
In literature we can trace a line of descent from Spenser (patronized by Leicester) through a group of poets patronized by Southampton, Bedford and Pembroke, ranging from Shakespeare, Drayton, the two Fletchers, William Browne and Samuel Daniel to George Wither. While drama was decaying under court influence, the third Earl of Pembroke encouraged Thomas Middleton’s attempt to produce an opposition drama in the anti-Spanish A Game at Chess.3 George Herbert, Pembroke’s kinsman and protégé, withdrew from court to write his great poetry in a country parsonage. In such an atmosphere ‘no free and splendid wit can flourish’, Milton was soon to say. For the concomitant of Charles I’s patronage of the arts was a savage censorship which, in George Wither’s words, brought ‘authors, yea, the whole commonwealth and all the liberal sciences into bondage’.4
The court culture, like court religion, came to be isolated from the mass of the population, and – a new feature – from many of the propertied class. The censorship and government pressures prevented many of the intelligentsia from expressing their point of view, or frightened them out of doing so. Art, like everything else at Charles’s court, was smeared with the trail of finance. The King’s most ambitious projects were paid for by abuses which contributed to bring about the Civil War. Thus the unrealized plan for reconstructing Whitehall as a single great palace, comparable with the Escorial or the Louvre, was a magnificent design which ‘reflects clearly enough the absolutist ideals of the King’. But it was also a megalomaniac idea. As Sir John Summerson says, it ‘would have been a grave and fitting backcloth for the bloodier revolution which it would most certainly have helped to precipitate’. There was ‘a close association between the arts of the court and those elements in Stuart policy which precipitated the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century.’1
As the narrow ruling circle became more and more isolated from public opinion, so it needed the flattery of artists and poets to buttress its morale. How different things had been under Elizabeth! When the monarchy was really popular, it did not need to be so repeatedly reassured that it enjoyed divine approval. All the masques allegorizing peace and concord imposed by royal authority, the apotheoses and descending goddesses, betray a deep insecurity and longing for help from outside.
There was then an abnormal cultural situation in the England in which Milton reached maturity. P. W. Thomas speaks of ‘two warring cultures’. With ‘the growing isolation, exclusiveness and repression of the Court’ he contrasts the earlier ‘literature that had been the authentic voice of patriotic high seriousness and protestant nationalism’. The Caroline court, ‘however refined, seemed to speak for narrow snobbery and effete indulgence’. ‘Royal patronage had failed to sustain … a culture … of unequivocal moral and intellectual vigour. It mistook … a governing clique for the nation. … It managed to create a mythology of itself that was deeply divisive.’ This was seen by the Puritan opposition as ‘the pollution of the high seriousness and moral earnestness of the mainstream of English humanism’. Ben Jonson represents the last attempt to infuse moral commitment into court art; and he was first absorbed into the court and then ultimately squeezed out. Milton was aware of ‘a decadent Court, its art an index to a deep malaise’. Thomas rejects the view which sees Cavalier humanism as ‘life-affirming’, by contrast with Puritan prudery. We shall find ample reason, at least so far as Milton is concerned, to confirm his opinion that ‘far from suppressing the sensual and sentimental element in sexual relationships, English Puritanism exposed it to the full force of its habit of scrupulous analysis.’2 As the unity of Elizabeth’s reign slowly dissolved, the Laudian innovations isolated bishops from the mass of the population. One may suspect that popular hostility extended to the new taste for Counter-Reformation absolutist art favoured by the court clique.
There is an inevitable danger in history of falling for ‘the illusion of the epoch’, of accepting a ruling group at its own valuation whilst ignoring evidence from other sources. It is the criticism which Paine made of Burke on the French Revolution: he pitied the plumage but forgot the dying bird. We must not go to the opposite extreme and say that the aesthetic taste of Charles and his circle was a significant cause of the Civil War; that would be as absurd as to argue that the Civil War destroyed English art. What we can say is that the years in which Milton grew up were years of increasing national disillusionment, of a widening gap between the court and the more Protestant elements in the country. The golden age of the drama and of English literature generally was over; so was the golden age of English music, and of English miniature painting. The religion of court and universities was diverging from the Elizabethan consensus; the new scientific ideas were popular in London, and had won some advocates in both universities, but no official recognition. The censorship grew increasingly severe.1 The young gentlemen who went to the Inns of Court continued to be consumers and patrons of literature, but after the first decade of the seventeenth century ‘the energies which had previously been devoted to literature and scholarship were channelled instead towards political and theological concerns.’2
I quote Thomas again: ‘There were two warring cultures. But it is more accurate to talk of a breakdown of the national culture, an erosion through the sixteen-thirties of a middle ground that men of moderation and good will had once occupied.’ ‘The civil war was about the whole condition of a society threatened by a failure of the ruling caste to uphold traditional national aims and values, and to adapt itself to a rapidly changing world.’3 It is important to remember this cultural component in what we call ‘Puritanism’, as well as the political and religious tensions between court and country on which the books normally dwell. It was felt especially strongly by John Milton. It has been suggested, on the evidence of the Nativity Ode and Lycidas, that Milton’s ‘imagination of revolution as the supersession of one ground of values by another’ antedates the historical revolution in which the poet was to play a leading part.4
