Читать книгу Milton and the English Revolution - Christopher Hill - Страница 14
ОглавлениеIt is commonly seen that historians are suspected rather to make their hero what they would have him be than such as he really was.
John Toland, The Life of John Milton (1698), in Darbishire, p. 84
The family into which John Milton was born in December 1608 was Protestant, bourgeois and cultured. His father, John Milton the elder, had been turned out of his Oxfordshire home by his yeoman father, who adhered to the old religion whilst his son became a Bible-reading Protestant. John the elder came to London some twenty-five years before the poet was born, and pursued a very successful career as a scrivener. Scriveners performed functions for which to-day one would go to a solicitor or an investment adviser; but their main business, and certainly their most lucrative business, was money-lending. It was a time of rapidly rising prices, and of ostentatious expenditure among an aristocracy slow to adapt itself to new economic realities; it was also a time when merchants and business men often needed the sort of bridging loan for which they would to-day turn to a bank. The scrivener might be the go-between linking borrower and lender, as well as lending on his own account. Interest rates were high; by close attention to detail, good timing and firm use of legal processes, there were handsome profits to be made. John Milton senior did well. By 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, he had made enough money to retire. After setting up his younger son, Christopher, as a lawyer, and providing a good marriage portion for his daughter, he was still able to maintain his elder son in a leisure which included an expensive fifteen months’ continental tour.
So successful a career in such a profession suggests considerable toughness, not to say ruthlessness. In the last resort legal processes had to be used; the scrivener could not afford to be too squeamish when faced with the protestations of a garrulous widow who claimed that she had not understood what she had committed herself to. In 1625 the elder John Milton made an apprentice his partner, perhaps to look after the less agreeable aspects of the business. His retirement may even have been connected with the increasingly brash behaviour of this partner. We do not know. But even when John Milton senior had retired to rural Horton, he continued to assert himself. He built a pew in the parish church which exceeded the authorized height, and he was ordered to cut it down to size.1 The poet, growing up in London, in a street ‘wholly inhabited by rich merchants’,2 must have absorbed the ‘protestant ethic’ with the air he breathed. It would be taken for granted that hard work was a religious duty, that bargains were made to be kept, and enforced by law against those who could not or would not keep them, that the weakest went to the wall, that God helped those who helped themselves. A tough tenacity was one of the younger Milton’s lasting characteristics. He inherited some of his father’s property and – as we shall see – some problems of debt-collection. The poet frequently expressed dislike of the legal profession; but he never hesitated to use legal process to enforce what he believed to be his rights, and he had a remarkably extensive knowledge of the law. Unlike the elder John, the poet remained on excellent terms with both his parents until their death. He worried from time to time about the ethics of usury, but decided on balance that it was lawful.
But though it was a business-like bourgeois household, it was also a civilized household. The Mermaid Tavern was just round the corner. The scrivener loved music, and was himself no mean composer. In 1601 he participated in The Triumphs of Oriana, a tribute to Queen Elizabeth from the best composers in the country. In 1614 (twice), 1616 and 1621 he contributed to other collections, again in excellent company. He is said to have composed a 40- (or 80-) part song for a Polish (or German) prince in 1583 (and/or 1611).3 The elder Milton was also capable of turning a sonnet himself. So though he had hoped originally that his eldest son would go into the church, he was amenable to discussion when John decided otherwise. Father-like, the scrivener would have preferred his son to have entered some recognized profession – the law if not the church – rather than dedicating himself to poetry, which was even less likely to bring in a regular income in the seventeenth century than to-day. (Only after the publishing outburst of 1640–60 did the literary market develop sufficiently for the career even of hack-writer to become possible. Milton’s nephews, John and Edward Phillips, seem to have made a living of sorts this way. But aristocratic patronage was still desirable.) The discussions in the Milton family seem to have been fairly amicable, and the elder John financed his son’s expedition to Italy (with serving man) at a time when the future career of the thirty-year-old poet was still uncertain. John senior was clearly a patient, sensitive man, who remembered his difficulties with his own father. Posterity as well as his son should be grateful to the scrivener for his discernment. His biographer comments on the paradoxical combination in the elder Milton of Puritanism with a respect for the complex traditions of mediaeval church music; he set vernacular texts from the Geneva Bible to polyphonic music. His son was to experience similar fruitful tensions between the old and the new.1
The poet’s mother was the daughter of a London merchant taylor, and may have been a widow when she married the scrivener; perhaps she brought him a useful dowry. But we know very little about her. Mrs. Milton appears to have been related to the Bradshaws, though if there was any connection with the John Bradshaw who presided over the trial of Charles I in 1649, it was very distant. She had weak eyes, which John inherited; his father read without spectacles at the age of eighty-four. Otherwise all that history records is her son’s remark that she was very charitable. John’s later attitudes would suggest that Mrs. Milton accepted with docility the position of subordination expected of seventeenth-century wives. Yet the poet had an exceptionally high ideal of married love, and he believed that a sexual union was a true marriage only if mutual compatibility created a genuine oneness. It is difficult not to suppose that these views are somehow related to the music-loving sociable home in which he grew up, and to the mother whose generosity was the characteristic which he most remembered.
Among early influences on the young Milton we must notice the rector of his parish, Richard Stock (1569?-1626). All Hallows was one of those rare parishes where the congregation had the right to elect their own minister: another was St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, whose minister in the sixteen-forties was John Goodwin. We shall often encounter his name in association with Milton. Stock was naturally a Puritan. He was one of the Feoffees for buying in impropriations – a Puritan attempt to reconstruct the church from within.2 Three of the five ministers involved in this scheme were incumbents of parishes where the minister was elected. As befitted the rector of a parish of rich business men, Stock was a well-known sabbatarian, with strong views about the duties of servants. Milton was to repudiate many of Stock’s ideas – his firm defence of tithes, his decisive rejection of polygamy and of divorce for any reason other than adultery, his insistence that the principal object of marriage was the propagation of children, his surprisingly sharp condemnation of usury and his frequent citation of the early Fathers of the church.1 But Stock’s preaching may have started Milton thinking on some of these topics; so may his anti-papal sermons on November 5. Milton’s poems on Gunpowder Plot were all written in Stock’s lifetime. Others of Stock’s views proved more acceptable to the poet – for instance that a man should be charitable to himself and his family as well as to others.2
Stock had a strong sense of social justice. He denounced usurers whose ostentatious charity restored only a fraction of their ill-gotten gains; and the landlord or employer who oppressed his inferiors, confident that ‘there is no civil law against him, or if there be, either his greatness or purse will carry it out well enough’. In 1606 Stock had been rebuked as a ‘greenhead’ for criticizing the system of assessing rates by which they fell especially heavily on the poor. Stock repeated his charge when he could describe himself as a ‘greyhead’. This is testimony to his consistency and social sympathy, but does not suggest great influence on the financial conduct of citizens. One wonders whether Milton’s phrase in The Reason of Church Government, ‘now while green years are upon my head’ was consciously echoing Stock; an author should be judged by the validity of his arguments, not by his age, Milton added. Stock gave much thought to justifying the ways of God to men. ‘The Lord ofttimes destroys the wicked, enemies of God and his church, by the hands of his church and by their means’ was his enigmatical gloss on Malachi 4:3. Among his flock was Captain John Venn of the City militia, future M.P. in the Long Parliament and regicide, as well as John Milton, future defender of regicide.3
Other important early influences on Milton were teachers and friends at St. Paul’s School. None of his Cambridge tutors or contemporaries seems to have won anything like the confidence which he gave to Thomas Young, the younger Alexander Gil and Charles Diodati. Young was a Scottish minister who came south some time before 1612, when episcopacy was being imposed on Scotland. We cannot say definitely that Young decided to emigrate because of Presbyterian convictions, but in 1606 his father had protested against the introduction of episcopacy, and the rest of Young’s career makes it a likely assumption. As a refugee in London Young assisted the Puritan Thomas Gataker in his ‘private seminary for divers young gentlemen’. He presumably got the job of tutor to Milton through Richard Stock, a friend of Gataker’s.1 We do not know exactly when Young taught Milton. It may have been before he went to St. Paul’s. (We do not know the date of that either.) Or Young may have given him extra tuition whilst at school. What we do know is that he won John’s affection and respect, in a way that few of the poet’s seniors were to do. We know too little about Young’s personality to account for his hold over his pupil: but we may guess that Milton was impressed by Young’s austere courage in refusing to ‘subscribe slave’, preferring the hazards of an exile’s life in a foreign land.
Young’s subsequent career fits the pattern. By 1620, Milton tells us, England was becoming too hot to hold Young, and he accepted a post in Hamburg as chaplain to a company of English merchants. He returned in 1628, to a living in Stowmarket worth £300 a year, where for ten years he managed to avoid wearing the surplice. During this period Milton went to visit him, sent him letters and poems from time to time, and clearly valued both his friendship and his literary judgment. In 1639 Young published (anonymously) a Sabbatarian tract, Dies Dominica, which was not translated into English until 1672. If Milton read it – as is probable – he may have noticed a statement of the progressive evolution of truth: ‘Men of every age, studiously following after the known truth, … are blessed with a new light of knowledge not observed by their predecessors. It sometimes also falleth out that some things may be revealed to men of inferior condition, which are hid to others of greater name and authority.’2 In the long run Milton was to reject the Presbyterianism and sabbatarianism which meant so much to Young. But the poet’s attitudes in the early forties owe a good deal to the previous influence of his tutor, who almost certainly instigated Milton’s participation in the attack on episcopacy in 1641–2. Milton’s emphasis on the Bible as the source of all truth may also derive from Young. But after the mid-forties the two drifted apart, as Young became two things Milton now heartily disliked – a Presbyterian pluralist and the head of a Cambridge college.3
The two Alexander Gils were successively High Masters of St. Paul’s School, the father during Milton’s years there. The elder Gil’s literary tastes, and particularly his devotion to Spenser and the Spenserians, may well have influenced Milton. He perhaps also imbibed at St. Paul’s Gil’s disparaging attitude towards ‘ploughmen, working-girls and river-men’ as contrasted with ‘learned and refined men’.1 Gil’s treatise on the Trinity, originally published in 1601, was reprinted in 1635. Milton may have been interested enough to read it, though there is no evidence of any connection between this and his own anti-Trinitarian speculations. The elder Gil’s Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (1635, reprinted 1651) was an attempt to make reason, ‘that especial and principal gift of God to mankind’, serviceable to ‘the principal and especial end for which man himself is created, that is his drawing near unto God by faith in him’.2 In this work Gil argued that there could be no clash between faith and reason, a view which Milton later found attractive.
The younger Gil’s influence was very different. He was an usher during Milton’s time at the school, ten or a dozen years older than the poet. Their friendship continued for many years after Milton left. Alexander was a brash, swaggering intellectual, who never seems quite to have recovered from being a very clever young man. He was ‘accounted one of the best Latin poets in the nation’. Milton admired his poems, and Gil succeeded Young as literary mentor to the young poet. Milton thought him ‘the keenest judge of poetry in general and the most honest judge of mine’. He never talked to him ‘without a visible increase and growth of knowledge’. But Gil also had political opinions. Ben Jonson, attacking the elder Gil in 1623, spoke of ‘licentious persons’ who ‘censured the Council’ of the King. ‘We do it in Paul’s, … yea and in all the taverns.’3 In October of that year, when Prince Charles delighted the nation by returning from Spain without the popish Infanta whom he had gone to woo, the 114th Psalm was sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral – ‘when Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among the barbarous people’. It was a political gesture. So was Milton’s paraphrase on this Psalm, ‘done by the author at fifteen years old’ – i.e. in 1623–4:
When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son
After long toil their liberty had won.
must certainly have shown it to the usher. Ten years later he sent Gil a Greek translation of the same Psalm. In Psalm 136, which Milton also translated about 1623–4, the neutral phrase ‘the Lord of Lords’ is expanded to (him) ‘who doth the wrathful tyrants quell’.1
In 1628, when the hated favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated by John Felton, the younger Gil was foolish enough to propose the assassin’s health. He had recently become a Bachelor of Divinity, and was visiting his old college, Trinity College, Oxford, where he no doubt thought he was among friends. Most of those present cheerfully joined in the toast. But one of them denounced him to the all-powerful Bishop Laud – almost certainly the famous William Chilling-worth, Laud’s protégé. Not only did Gil speak slightingly of Buckingham, and place him in hell; he also wrote of James and Charles as ‘the old fool and the young one’, in papers which were seized. Charles, Gil added, was ‘fitter to stand in a Cheapside shop with an apron before him and say “What lack ye?” than to govern a kingdom’. Under examination he did not improve matters by adding that drinking Felton’s health was common in London and elsewhere. He admitted saying that ‘he had oftentimes had in mind to do the same deed upon the Duke, but for fear of hanging’. He was explicit about Buckingham’s homosexual tendencies. A poem was found in which Gil called on God to save
My sovereign from a Ganymede
Whose whorish breath hath power to lead
His Majesty which way it list.
The song continued in denunciation of flatterers, court corruption, illegal taxes, papists and especially Jesuits.2
It was decided to make an example of Gil, who was certainly right in saying that he had only expressed what many felt.3 He was had up before Star Chamber, degraded from the ministry and from his degrees, fined £2,000, sentenced to the pillory and to lose both his ears. Under great pressure from his friends – his father no doubt had useful connections – the physical mutilation was remitted. But he stayed in prison for over two years before being pardoned, and the sentence was not just in terrorem. In the same year Alexander Leighton suffered the tortures which had been designed for Gil, and then languished in prison for ten years, for publishing Sions Plea against the Prelacie. This was the first of many savage sentences, including those on Prynne, Burton, Bastwick and Lilburne, for which Laud was usually held responsible.1 Milton’s revulsion against episcopacy and clerical interference in politics must have been intensified by the Gil case. The line in his sonnet on the new forcers of conscience, ‘Clip your phylacteries but baulk your ears’, may refer to Gil as well as to Prynne and the others.2
We can assume that Milton knew the political views of the loquacious and extrovert Gil: they had ‘almost constant conversations’ together. Two months before Gil’s attack on Buckingham and Charles, Milton confided to him his own fear lest ‘the priestly ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our clergy’. Two years later – probably writing to Gil in prison – Milton chose for special praise the latter’s poem celebrating a Dutch victory over the Spaniards, and hoped that Gil might have the opportunity of writing something even greater ‘if by chance our own affairs [become] at last more fortunate’. Already in his Sixth Prolusion Milton had sneered at Buckingham’s foreign policy. There is never the slightest suggestion in his letters to Gil of political disagreement or disapproval: whether or not he supported Gil’s seditious sentiments in 1628, he certainly did so later. In 1631–2 Gil published verses and pamphlets on behalf of the Protestant cause and Gustavus Adolphus. In 1639 a poem by him was prefixed to Henry Glapthorne’s The Tragedy of Albertus Wallenstein. This poem was dated 1634, but the date could refer to Wallenstein’s death rather than to Gil’s poem. Both in Glapthorne’s play and in Gil’s poem Wallenstein is referred to as ‘the Duke’, ‘traitor Duke’.3 Margot Heinemann suggests that Gil may have seen an analogy between Wallenstein, whose assassins claimed to be executing God’s sentence, and the Duke of Buckingham.4 Ultimately Gil turned round and won the favour of Laud and the King sufficiently to succeed his father as High Master of St. Paul’s in 1635. His friendship with Milton does not seem to have survived this volte face. Gil lived to tell Charles in 1641 that the sentence on Strafford was tragic but just.5 He was dismissed from St. Paul’s in 1640, and died soon after. He may have failed to trim his sails to the new political winds in time.
So two of the people who most impinged on the young Milton were relatively radical. Gil was perhaps not very stable, but eloquent, witty and outrageous in his political views: Young a dour, solid martyr for convictions which Milton would leave behind in the forties but which represented in the twenties and thirties a fundamental critique of the existing order. The third influence, the greatest of the three, is similar – Charles Diodati. Their friendship probably dates from Milton’s schooldays at St. Paul’s. The Diodatis were an immensely talented family, originally from Lucca. They found the religious and political atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Italy stifling, and in various exciting ways they escaped into exile. The main branch settled in Geneva, where Giovanni Diodati was Professor of Hebrew and an internationally famous theologian – liberal by Genevan standards. He translated the Bible into Italian and attended the Synod of Dort in 1618–19 as Genevan representative. He was an important figure in international Protestant circles, secretly revisiting Italy several times and travelling to Holland and England. He collaborated closely with the English Ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, in attempts to win the republic for the Protestant cause in 1608. He was a patron of John Dury’s attempts at Protestant reunion.1 Diodati’s Annotations on the Bible were translated into English in 1643, and were selling excellently in London by the following year. In 1645 Milton referred to Diodati as a theologian ‘of best note’, although by that time Diodati had expressed Royalist sympathies.2
Another branch of the Diodatis settled in Paris: we shall meet them later.3 Charles Diodati’s father, Theodore, came to England about 1598, and for a refugee prospered remarkably. He became tutor to Sir John, second Lord Harington, an intimate friend of the heir to the throne, Prince Henry. When Harington died in 1612 Richard Stock preached his funeral sermon. Theodore then became physician to Henry’s sister Elizabeth, until she left England on marrying the Elector Palatine in 1613. With this flying start Diodati went on to a very successful medical career, claiming in 1621 to be as good a man as the President of the College of Physicians. His will was witnessed in 1649 by (probably) Major-General Skippon, a member of the Council of State which had just appointed Milton Secretary for Foreign Tongues.4
The circle around Prince Henry included many internationally-minded radical Protestants, who were critical of James I’s pacific foreign policy. After Henry’s premature and much lamented death in 1612, the husband of his sister Elizabeth became the key figure in this international grouping. His acceptance of the throne of Bohemia in 1619 precipitated the Thirty Years War: throughout the sixteen-twenties and -thirties the Queen of Bohemia was the toast of the Parliamentarian and patriotic opposition, her exile and the defeat of her cause standing evidence of the ineffectiveness of the government. It is inconceivable that Milton did not discuss these matters with Charles Diodati as well as with Alexander Gil. Diodati’s family was almost a symbol of international Protestantism, and knowing them must have contributed to Milton’s bitter criticisms of the Stuarts’ failure to live up to the ideals of Protestant patriotism and internationalism. These ideals were accepted not only by the Parliamentary opposition but also by devotees of the Winter Queen of Bohemia like Sir Henry Wotton, a friend of Lord Harington. The international connections of the Diodatis must have been of great use to Milton in his careful preparations for his Italian journey.1
We can only speculate on Charles Diodati’s influence over Milton before his premature death in 1638. Milton clearly adored him more than he ever adored any human being except possibly his second wife. Diodati was slightly younger than the poet, but he went up to the university earlier and started a career earlier. He had all the ebullient charm of Alexander Gil and much more sense. Clearly he took the lead and Milton followed: the latter developed slowly as long as Diodati lived. His death during Milton’s absence in Italy was a terrible blow. The Epitaphium Damonis was the first poem Milton took the trouble to get separately printed. In Latin because of the continental connections of the Diodatis, it marks some sort of a turning point and re-dedication of Milton. One of the most extraordinary passages which Milton ever wrote is the conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis in which he envisaged the dead Charles enjoying Bacchic orgies in heaven.2 Earlier lines suggest that he may have seen himself as married to Diodati (65 – ‘innube’). Psychologists may speculate on the significance for Milton of what looks like a platonic homosexual passion (cf. Milton’s sexual confidences to Diodati in Elegy I).3 What is its relation to the ideal of chastity in Comus? Is there any connection between Diodati’s death and Milton’s decision to marry at the age of thirty-three? What is the relation between Milton’s high standards of matrimonial compatibility and this earlier quasi-sexual relationship? Did the first Mrs. Milton suffer for her inability to fill Diodati’s place? We can neither answer these questions nor refrain from asking them. What we do know is that, unlike Young and Gil, Diodati did not live to get left behind as Milton grew more and more radical in the sixteen-forties: his memory remained sweet and pure.
Milton went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625. It was an unhappy period in the university’s history. On the one hand government and bishops were trying to bring both universities and their colleges under tighter control. Since the universities trained parsons – the opinion-formers – and were also attended by many gentlemen – the ruling class – control seemed more and more necessary as tensions increased in church and state. On the other hand, the universities were failing to keep pace with intellectual developments in the country, and greater control from on top tended to make for conformity, playing safe, careerism, idleness. But among some younger dons and undergraduates hostility to traditional scholasticism was accompanied by receptivity to new ideas. Milton, as was to be expected, soon aligned himself with the reformers.
Milton’s allusions to Cambridge and its teaching are uniformly critical, in sharp contrast to his respectful references to Young and Gil. Not that Christ’s was an obscurantist college, as colleges went. It had a solid Puritan tradition. William Perkins (Fellow 1584–94), who died six years before Milton was born, was by general consent the leading English Puritan theologian, one of the few Englishmen with a continental reputation. Other distinguished theologians were William and Laurence Chaderton and Edward Dering in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; Hugh Broughton (Fellow 1572–8), Andrew Willett, the hammer of the papists (Fellow 1583–8), Arthur Hildersham (M.A. 1584), Francis Johnson the separatist (Fellow 1584 till his expulsion in 1589), George Downham the Ramist (Fellow 1585–1616), Samuel Ward (Scholar 1592–5), John Smyth the Se-Baptist, Francis Johnson’s pupil (Fellow – probably – 1594–8), Thomas Taylor (Fellow 1599–1604), Paul Baynes (Fellow 1600–4). This was a very radical collection of Puritans. Greatest of all Perkins’s successors was William Ames, undergraduate and Fellow of Christ’s (1602–10), who was suspended by the Vice-Chancellor for preaching against ‘licence’ in Cambridge colleges during the ten days’ Christmas saturnalia. His theology, acclaimed by Thomas Young in Dies Dominica, was to be one of the starting points for Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana.
Puritanism and poetry went together at Christ’s. Sir Philip Sidney was followed by Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto, both favourites of Milton’s headmaster, and by Francis Quarles, cup-bearer to Elizabeth of Bohemia (John Dively, Secretary to the Queen of Bohemia, was also a Christ’s man) and John Cleveland, 1627–32. Among Milton’s contemporaries were Humphrey Otway, father of the dramatist, Charles Hotham, translator of Boehme, and Luke Robinson, both of whom we shall meet again, and Samuel Torshell, Puritan divine, a friend of Stock’s who published and amplified his posthumous works. Torshell was the author of The Womans Glorie (1645), which Milton no doubt read. Of the Fellows in Milton’s time the most distinguished was Joseph Mede (Fellow 1614–38), who was thought at one time ‘to look too much to Geneva’.1 Mede studied mathematics as a preparation for divinity, and was a great chronological scholar of the school which extends from John Napier through Thomas Brightman to Isaac Newton. Mede’s Key of the Revelation (published in Latin in 1627) could not be translated into English under the Laudian censorship. But in 1643 a committee of the House of Commons ordered it to be printed in a translation made by a Member of Parliament, with Preface by William Twisse, Prolocutor of the Assembly of Divines. Mede believed that the Pope was Antichrist, and had a carefully worked-out chronological scheme of his decline and fall, from the Waldensians to the seventeenth century. Mede was cautious about giving precise dates for the end of the world, but he expected it between 1625 and 1716, with 1654 and 1670 as possibilities.2 His timetable was influential among Presbyterian and Independent divines, and almost certainly contributed to Milton’s belief that Christ’s coming was ‘shortly expected’, as well as to his interest in the Waldenses.3
We do not know that Milton was ever taught by Mede. We do know that Mede’s pupils were introduced to authors like the mathematicians Recorde, Digges and Hariot, to Sidney, to Sir Thomas Smith (whose Commonwealth of England was a favourite of Milton’s), to Ramus (whose Logic – dominant at Cambridge in his day – Milton adapted and amplified in his own Art of Logic), to Purchas (briefly rector of All Hallows in 1626, whose writings form the basis of Milton’s Brief History of Moscovia), to Bacon and Alsted; and that Mede put a special emphasis on cosmography. We also know from Mede’s correspondence that in the sixteen-twenties he warmly supported Parliament against the Duke of Buckingham. In the next decade he was wary about committing himself to any views of which the government and in particular Laud were likely to disapprove.1
Another Fellow of Christ’s in Milton’s time was Robert Gell (1623–39), who probably married Milton to his third wife in 1663. Like Mede, like Milton, Gell anticipated the Second Coming in the near future. He was well known later as a patron of astrology, a Familist who was critical of Ranters, a defender of liberty of the press who in the dangerous year 1661 petitioned the House of Lords in favour of toleration.2 Gell’s name reminds us of another tradition at Christ’s: it was a great centre of Cabbalistic studies. Henry Broughton, Joseph Mede and Henry More (one of the Fellows of Christ’s College who accepted Parliamentary rule in 1644) were experts in the Kabbalah. Milton may already have become acquainted with such studies at St. Paul’s, since the elder Alexander Gill was interested. So were Du Bartas and Robert Fludd, both of whom Milton almost certainly read at one stage or another; so was Samuel Hartlib, later Milton’s friend, who was a correspondent of Mede’s.3
Early in his Cambridge career Milton had some trouble with the college authorities, the exact nature of which has never been explained. It apparently led to his being rusticated for a short period, and when he came back he changed tutors. He was taken over by Nathaniel Tovey, Ramist son of a friend of the Diodatis.4 The man with whom Milton had been unable to get on was William Chappell, later made an Irish bishop by Laud’s favour. We do not know whether this was an ideological or a personal quarrel. By 1628 Milton had taken a firm stand as a Baconian, a supporter of George Hakewill’s defence of the Moderns against the Ancients, a critic of scholasticism and an advocate of more science and more history in the university. ‘This unseemly battle of words tends neither to the general good nor to the honour and profit of our country.’5 Milton was defending the thesis of George Hakewill’s book within a year of its first publication in 1627. If for no other reason he is likely to have read Hakewill because the latter cited Charles Diodati’s father as a physician who had put the Ancients to shame. Some of Milton’s earliest Latin poems adopt a political stance, following that of his schoolboy translations of the Psalms. No less than five poems are about Gunpowder Plot, one of them denouncing the papal Antichrist. Although at the age of seventeen Milton wrote conventional Latin elegies on two bishops, the Vice-Chancellor and the university bedel, he never composed poems to royalty. Edward King, his junior contemporary, between 1631 and 1637 contributed to six collections of Latin verse celebrating royal births, marriages, etc.1
Some of Milton’s undergraduate orations which he printed many years later are difficult to interpret, full of inside jokes and allusions which cannot now be fully understood. Scholars have made very heavy weather of some of Milton’s remarks which they take to imply that he was, or had been, unpopular with his contemporaries. I think they are better interpreted as audience-baiting of a kind that fitted the rather rough humour of the occasion.2 If Milton was called ‘the Lady of Christ’s’, this was not necessarily an unfriendly nickname for a slight, blond and handsome young man: he seems to have remembered it with some satisfaction. More to the point is that Milton’s contemporaries called on him to speak at their more riotous functions and that he rose to the occasion with a freedom of vocabulary that shocked nineteenth-century editors.
The scrivener’s son sneered at rank, and especially at lords, referred gratuitously to ‘Junius Brutus, that second founder of Rome and great avenger of the lusts of kings’, and criticized Charles I’s foreign policy.3 In Prolusion V, whose unpromising subject was ‘There are no partial Forms in an Animal in addition to the Whole’, Milton introduced a totally irrelevant passage about Roman history. This may have been intended to remind his audience of Isaac Dorislaus, the history lecturer recently silenced for using Roman history ‘to speak too much for the defence of the liberties of the people’, as Joseph Mede’s friend Samuel Ward put it on 16 May 1628.4 For Milton’s apparent irrelevance leads up to the conclusion: ‘You have been wondering long enough, my hearers, what can be my reason for enlarging on all this: I will tell you. Whenever I consider and reflect upon these events, I am reminded afresh of the mighty struggle which has been waged to save Truth, and of the universal eagerness and watchfulness with which men are striving to rescue Truth, already tottering and almost overthrown, from the outrages of her foes. Yet we are powerless to check the inroads which the vile horde of errors daily makes upon every branch of learning.’1
So he leads in to his subject, the scholastic nature of which he admitted to finding distasteful. In the Seventh Prolusion, references to Roman history and Turkish tyranny are followed by a complaint of ‘our bad methods of teaching the arts’. It was after he had gone down from Cambridge that Milton sought ‘to learn what was new in mathematics and music, then the objects of my special studies’. Like John Wallis at about the same time, he rightly expected to find better mathematics teaching in London than in Cambridge. Both Gils had been proficient mathematicians: the younger published on the subject. In the early sixteen-forties Milton taught his own pupils arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and mathematics played a prominent part in the scheme offered in Of Education.2
From ‘our Bacon’,3 whom he regarded as one of ‘the greatest and sublimest wits in sundry ages’, and perhaps from Hakewill, Milton acquired a belief in the possibility of an almost unlimited improvement in the conditions of material life – so great that it might undo the intellectual consequences of the Fall of Man. This should be the object of education, Milton declared in 1644; though full truth would not be known until Christ’s Second Coming. At Cambridge Milton foresaw a time when ‘the spirit of man, no longer confined within this dark prison house, will reach out till it fills the whole world and the space far beyond with the expansion of its divine greatness. Then at last most of the chances and changes of the world will be so quickly perceived that to him who holds this stronghold of wisdom hardly anything can happen in his life which is unforeseen or fortuitous. Earth, sea and stars, Mother Nature herself, will obey him.’4
Milton’s reaction against scholasticism and the Cambridge curriculum helps to explain his later attitude towards the universities. As a Baconian undergraduate he wanted to see less disputation, more science – just as a present-day student might call for fewer written examinations, more sociology, more psychology.1 After going down from Cambridge Milton undertook a strenuous course in world history as well as pursuing his mathematical interests. By 1641–2 (and no doubt earlier) he had decided that the universities were unsuitable places for training the clergy, and thought that any gifted craftsman could preach better than ungifted academics.2
Milton did not escape from his Cambridge training: he had become superlatively good at what he regarded as a tedious game. The structure of an academic disputation underlies L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus and Paradise Regained. And though Milton jeered at the atmosphere in which refusal to accept the authority of Aristotle was tantamount to heresy,3 his own thought – especially on politics – remained very Aristotelian. Probably at Cambridge he acquired an interest in astronomy and astrology. The natural concomitant of an interest in science for Milton’s generation was the Hermetic philosophy, to which he seems also to have been attracted at Cambridge. He may have read Robert Fludd at this time, the fashionable synthesizer of Hermeticism and modern science; he almost certainly did so later.4
In December 1631 Milton wrote
How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
The complaint anticipates Schiller’s
Drei und zwanzig Jahre
Und nichts fur die Unsterblichkeit getan!5
But Milton’s conclusion, unlike the romantic poet’s, was that time and the will of heaven were leading him to a significant future:
If I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-master’s eye.
III Hammersmith and Horton, 1632–8
The years from 1632 to 1638 are in one sense well documented, in another sense rather mysterious. From about 1635 we know in considerable detail what Milton was reading. In Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1638) and in his poem to his father we have indications of Milton’s intention to dedicate himself to poetry. A carefully planned programme of reading would fill the gaps which, he well knew, had been left by Cambridge. He aimed at something like universal knowledge. But at his internal development during this six-year period biographers have to guess.
This used to be spoken of as ‘the Horton period’, but we now know that the first three years were spent in the elder Milton’s country house in the suburban village of Hammersmith. Nor was Horton itself, in the Buckinghamshire woodlands, quite the escapist rural retreat which some romantics have depicted, on the false assumption that L’Allegro and II Penseroso were written there.1 As early as 1614 Michael Drayton noted that ‘the Chiltern country’ was ‘beginning… to want wood’ – deforested by James I despite the growing fuel famine. It was not in Horton that
the rude axe with heaved stroke
Was never heard the nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt.
(II Penseroso)
Horton was an industrial village. In the year the Miltons moved to Horton the owner of a paper-mill there was presented to the ecclesiastical court for working his mill on the Sabbath throughout the year. He paid wages so low that they had to be supplemented by poor relief to the extent of £7 5s od a week. Paper-making was an unpopular industry: it depended on rags, which were alleged to import the plague. In 1626 there had been 34 plague deaths at Horton; in 1637, the year in which Milton’s mother died, 14 out of 31 deaths there were ascribed to the plague.2
Horton was a large parish, which included the chapelry of Colnbrook a mile away from the village. Robert Fludd the Hermetic philosopher seems to have been living there in the sixteen-thirties or earlier.3 Colnbrook was something of a radical centre. In 1634 Joan Hoby was in trouble there for saying ‘that she did not care a pin nor a fart for my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury’; she hoped that she would live to see the Archbishop hanged. In the following year the town received a new charter – which meant that it was brought under closer government control. The first mayor died of a surfeit of drink. In 1646 Thomas Edwards described the heretic John Hall of Henley as ‘sometime of Colnbrook’. Colnbrook was one of the places visited by the Digger emissaries in 1650 in quest of financial and moral support for their communist colony on St. George’s Hill.1 The class divisions which the Lady in Milton’s Comus denounced so fiercely in 1634 would have been found in the parish of Horton as well as in the City of London.
The vast amount of reading, especially in history, that Milton got through at Hammersmith and Horton stood him in good stead for the rest of his life; he drew on it both for his prose pamphlets and for the great poems. His father observed, in a not entirely complimentary spirit, that he had kept John till the age of thirty. The poet admitted the justice of the charge; he referred later to the obligations incurred by living so long off the sweat of other men’s labours. Milton’s later rejection (in Areopagitica) of a fugitive and cloistered virtue may sound like a condemnation of the Hammersmith-Horton period. But we should not see these years, even in retrospect, as an escapist interlude. In 1629 Milton had been prepared to sign the three Articles of the Church of England, in order to take his degree. By so doing he accepted the royal supremacy, agreed that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the Word of God and declared that the Thirty-nine Articles were agreeable to the Word of God. But within three or four years he had decided that he could not take up a career as parson of the Church of England. It was no doubt out of pride as well as moral revulsion that he refused to ‘subscribe slave and take an oath withal’.2 In these years he was consciously and deliberately preparing himself to be the poet who would speak to and for the English nation.
So various influences combined to push Milton in a radical direction. From his father he learnt that authority – even parental authority – could be disobeyed. From his parents (probably), from Richard Stock and Thomas Young certainly, he learnt to be critical of the episcopal state church. In Young he admired the courage which led an opponent of the bishops to prefer exile and poverty to submission. From the younger Gil Milton heard a great deal of criticism of court and government. Milton was expressing hostility towards monarchy while still a schoolboy. From the elder Gil he learnt that reason had a place in religious discussion; he also acquired from him a keen linguistic patriotism and a respect for the ‘Puritan’ line of poets from Spenser to Wither. At Cambridge he came to feel a modern-style contempt for the old-fashioned curriculum and teaching methods: we may assume that he was already familiar with Bacon, Hakewill and Dorislaus as well as with Fludd and the Hermetic tradition. Milton was aware of a crisis in the universities, one form of which was the conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns. He was also aware of a crisis in literature and the arts, of a religious crisis caused by the Laudian régime. During the sixteen-thirties he may have come to see all these as one crisis.
