Читать книгу Milton and the English Revolution - Christopher Hill - Страница 16
ОглавлениеAlthough I desired also to cross [from Italy, in 1639] to Sicily and Greece, the said tidings of civil war from England summoned me back. For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind while my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty.
Milton, Second Defence of the English People (1654), C.P.W., IV, p. 619
The fifteen months of Milton’s Italian journey are of crucial importance in his intellectual development. But again we have to guess at their precise significance. Milton’s route was wholly conventional: the only unusual thing about his tour was his enthusiastic and flattering reception by intellectuals of the academies in the Italian towns which he visited.1 We have no certain answer to the perplexing question of why this thirty-year-old middle-class Englishman, with virtually no publication to his credit in English or Latin, was received so ecstatically. Milton prepared very carefully for his tour. He obtained an introduction to Sir Henry Wotton doyen of British diplomats, either through Henry Lawes, with whom Milton had collaborated in Comus, or through the Diodatis.2 Wotton gave him introductions to the English embassy in Paris, and doubtless others.
Wotton had been thrice Ambassador to Venice. In the course of his efforts to win Paolo Sarpi’s republic for the Protestant cause he must have worked with Giovanni Diodati, and have made contacts with other liberal elements in Italy, as well as earning the hostility of Spain. Wotton was a keen Baconian. He knew and admired Galileo, whom Sarpi protected and whom Milton visited in Florence. Wotton’s liberalism extended to friendship with Isaac Dorislaus, the history lecturer who to Milton’s indignation had been hounded out of Cambridge by the Laudians for his radical political attitudes. Dorislaus subsequently helped to prepare and manage the trial of Charles I, and was assassinated by Royalists when he was Ambassador of the English republic in the Netherlands.1
In Paris Lord Scudamore gave Milton recommendations to English merchants in Italy. But the poet’s most important introductions probably came through the Diodatis. Thanks to Charles he must have known the English branch of the family well. In Paris he made contact with Charles’s cousin Élie, who was a translator and regular correspondent of Galileo, to whom he may well have given Milton an introduction. Élie moved in intellectual circles in Paris, acting as go-between to Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Gassendi, whose close friend Élie was; he also knew Samuel de Sorbière, Gabriel Naudé and Guy Patin, and was friendly with Peiresc and Campanella. But Milton could have been introduced to Galileo by the friend he made in Florence, Carlo Dati, a former pupil of Galileo’s. The great astronomer is the only contemporary to be mentioned in Paradise Lost, where he occurs three times.2 Milton may also have had introductions from London booksellers – one of whom might have been George Thomason, to whom Milton presented copies of his pamphlets in the early sixteen-forties.3
In Paris Milton managed to meet Grotius, another correspondent of Galileo’s, who had been a contemporary of Charles Diodati’s father for several years at Leiden University, and may have maintained contact with him. Milton was to quote Grotius later, and almost certainly read and was influenced by his Adamus Exul.4 He would be aware of his reputation as a suspect Socinian. During his Italian journey Milton paused at Siena, where Faustus Socinus was born, and may have discussed him with his Florentine friends. He spent several days at Lucca, the town from which the Diodatis originated and in whose academic life they were deeply involved.5
It has been suggested that the Italian academies, or some of them, acted as secret societies, preserving vestiges of the spirit of intellectual inquiry which had led men like the Diodatis to emigrate. The spirit of Galileo still ruled over Florence, where Milton felt most at home; and Naples, where Campanella was not forgotten, had a reputation greater than that of any other Italian city for propagating Galileo’s views.1 The academies preserved something of the neoplatonist/humanist tradition: J. V. Andreae received a new sense of mission from his Italian journey of 1612 no less than did Milton a quarter of a century later.2 Some such suggestion would help to account for the enthusiasm with which a young liberal Englishman with the right introductions was received. It would also explain Milton’s favourable reaction to Italy, unexpected since for over a dozen years he had expressed the strong anti-papal sentiments which he was never to abandon. He clearly felt a close intellectual and spiritual kinship with some at least of those whom he met. He must indeed have been especially at home among the Apatisti and Svogliati in Florence – recently founded small private academies, pietistic yet liberal and humanist.
Consider the analogous Italian journey of another English intellectual, John Cook. Cook, like Milton, made the Italian tour ‘in his younger years’. Like Milton, he spoke at Rome with so much ‘liberty and ability against the corruptions of that court and church’ that he had to beat a speedy retreat. Cook then ‘resided some months in the house of signior Gio. Diodati’ at Geneva.3 He returned to England to become a leading Independent and legal reformer, prosecutor at Charles I’s trial.
Milton recorded later how his learned Italian friends counted him ‘happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought’. Such conversations must have started up many lines of thought. In The Reason of Church Government Milton announced that if England missed her chance of winning freedom, at least it would not be for lack of his speaking out: he had no intention of merely ‘bemoaning’ a servile condition, but of fighting against it.4 When he came to write Areopagitica he remembered that he had been greeted in Italy as a citizen of a country of greater intellectual freedom, who had something to give Italian intellectuals as well as to take from them. His contempt for the ‘prelatical duncery under which no free and splendid wit can flourish’ would be reinforced by contact with men who chafed under an even stricter censorship, and under the corruption of youth and good learning which was attributed by ‘many wise and learned men in Italy’ to the Jesuits.1 Milton already knew of the two worlds from the Diodatis, who had kept their faith so pure of old in the Italian fields where popery still ruled.2 Milton’s visit to Lucca followed by the news of Charles’s death must have brought the contrast much more directly home to him. He would feel the same sort of obligation to his Italian friends as a West European socialist to-day feels towards dissident socialist intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. It strengthened his sense of England’s international responsibilities to radicals of other nations, Catholic as well as Protestant.
Critics have expressed scepticism about the motives which Milton attributed to himself in the passage cited as epigraph to this chapter. So far from hurrying back to England in 1639, Milton spent several months on the return journey. But for our purposes what Milton believed in 1654 is no less important than his unascertainable motives in 1639. The Bishops’ War of that year brought Charles I’s first defeat, and opened up the possibility of fundamental changes in England too.
The Italian visit must have intensified Milton’s cultural hatred of popery and absolutism, which had reduced Italian writing to ‘flattery and fustian’, and stiffened his hatred of the Laudian régime, which seemed to him to be dragging England down to the Italian level. He thought that his Italian friends had illusions about English liberty; but his interest and pride in English history seem to have been excited, and he set about writing a fulldress History of Britain from the earliest times.3 When freedom really was established after 1640, Milton was equipped and eager to play his part in politics. In 1641 he wanted to see Parliament stimulating ‘the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies’, in order to ‘civilize, adorn and make decent our minds’.4 One of the eight authors most frequently cited in Milton’s Commonplace Book was Paolo Sarpi, whose History of the Council of Trent he seems to have been reading in 1643. He quotes and echoes him regularly, especially in Areopagitica and Eikonoklastes.5
Milton’s Italian journey, combined with his historical reading, no doubt helped him to get English affairs into perspective. His studies of the early church had fortified all his prejudices against popery, acquired at home and at school; but Italian intellectuals still had much to offer – the new astronomy of Galileo, the neo-Hermeticism of Bruno and Campanella, the mortalism of Padua, the libertinism of Vanini, who denied the divinity of Christ and affirmed the eternity of nature, and of Malatesti. Malatesti was a friend and possibly pupil of Galileo. He dedicated to Milton a series of mildly indecent sonnets, La Tina. Biographers have shaken their heads over Malatesti’s stupidity in not knowing his Milton better, but perhaps the laugh is on them. Certainly in 1647 Milton sent good wishes to Malatesti via Carlo Dati, which he need not have done if he disapproved of him. He may even have studied Malatesti’s sonnets carefully enough to adopt some of his tricks of word-play in the Second Defence of the People of England.1
It still seems to be necessary to combat the view that Milton was a gloomy Puritan. This is part of a general misunderstanding, arising from reading back into the seventeenth century the characteristics, or alleged characteristics, of nineteenth-century nonconformity, and adding the idea that Milton was a ‘misogynist’, though in fact, as we shall see, his views were on the whole more favourable to women than those of most of his articulate contemporaries. The ‘nonconformist’ interpretation is quite inappropriate to Milton, the poet and musician who regarded elegance as one of the virtues.2 All who knew him stressed his ‘Very cheerful humour’, his ‘sweet and affable nature’, his ‘unaffected cheerfulness and civility’; he was ‘delightful company, the life of the conversation’ and ‘very merry’.3
Milton was no shy recluse, no sexless scholar. F. W. Bateson, speaking of the poet’s letters to Alexander Gil in 1628, rightly describes their tone as ‘humorous and self-assured, … exactly that of “L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso”.’4 Milton’s First Cambridge Elegy celebrates the attractions of British girls. His Fifth Elegy is, in Tillyard’s words, ‘full of sex’, of lustful satyrs (‘a god half-goat, a goat half-god’), of beds and bared breasts, of nymphs as anxious for rape as the earth is ready for the embrace of the sun.5 When he published these elegies in 1645 Milton felt obliged to apologize for them, for reasons which we shall discuss later.6 The Seventh Elegy describes a hopeless passion, the Italian sonnets probably record an experience with a real but unidentified Italian girl – Emilia – which, however, came to nothing. Even in the Nativity Ode, Parker points out, Milton is ‘conspicuously and unnecessarily concerned about guilty passion’.1
We should not make too much of Milton’s erotic imagery. But we should not make too little of it either. It is in part neo-Platonic common form; in part it derives from the Song of Songs and from Revelation. ‘To be with Christ is to have the marriage consummated’, Sibbes had written.2 Nevertheless, Milton exploited to the full the sexual imagery which the Christian tradition had read into the Bible. Its recurrence, especially in his early writings, is remarkable, from the Muses in Prolusion VII who granted him ‘the supreme favour’ to the conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis which envisaged Diodati taking part ‘for ever in the immortal marriage rite, … where the festal orgies rave in Bacchic frenzy’.3 In his divorce tracts and in the De Doctrina Christiana Milton was to speak of ‘the accident of adultery’ as a relatively venial sin. Love, Milton thought, was ‘not in Paradise to be resisted’.4 ‘Without love no happiness’, as Raphael blushingly put it (P.L. VIII.621; cf. 365, 633). In Paradise Lost Milton suggested that ‘fierce desire’ which could not be satisfied was ‘not the least’ of the torments which Satan suffered (IV. 505–11).5 Even after his blindness Milton could still flirt with a girl whose singing voice impressed him so much that he swore she must be beautiful.6
Milton quotes God’s own example to justify man’s need of woman. ‘God himself conceals not his own recreations before the world was built. “I was”, said the Eternal Wisdom, “daily his delight, playing always before him.”’ Solomon ‘sings of a thousand raptures between those two lovely ones, far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment’. And in Areopagitica Milton asked ‘wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue ?’7 As in so many other matters, Milton here appears far closer to the antinomian fringe than to the austerities of orthodox Puritanism, though his firm conception of self-discipline and personal dignity held him back from libertinism.8 But it is not surprising that this distinction escaped those of his contemporaries who called him a libertine. On the surface they had a point.
In the Seventh Prolusion Milton assumed that human society and human friendship offer the greatest earthly happiness. To Diodati in 1637 he spoke of taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, ‘both for companionship, if I wish to remain at home, and as a more suitable headquarters if I choose to venture forth’.1 Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips tells us of the ‘gaudy day’ which in the early forties Milton used regularly to keep with ‘some young sparks of his acquaintance, the chief whereof were Mr. Alphry and Mr. Miller, two gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, the beaux of those times’. When in 1642 Milton was accused of haunting brothels and playhouses, he indignantly and at length refuted the first allegation: he did not deny the second, and three years later he published evidence of its truth in his First Elegy. He smoked, wore a sword whilst he retained his sight, and was skilled in using it. He seems to have been a betting man.2 Music and exercise always played an important part in his life: both are emphasized in Of Education. The sonnet to Harry Lawes springs from friendship as well as professional respect.
At Cambridge Milton had been invited to make bawdy speeches, and he accepted. Prolusion VI is a rumbustious playing to the gallery, a piece of knockabout undergraduate humour. Yet it was not just a lapse. Milton clearly enjoyed the bawdry in this speech; he printed it in 1674, and in the fifties he equally enjoyed the firework display of obscene puns in his Defences – to the considerable embarrassment of commentators ever since who cling to the ‘aloof Puritan scholar’.
About Milton’s literary tastes we have to guess. He told Dryden much later that Spenser was ‘his original’. The publisher of Milton’s Poems introduced them in 1645 as imitations of Spenser; and Milton himself referred to Spenser as ‘a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’.3 Spenser, like Milton, was the son of a London citizen. Neither was a court poet. But in Spenser’s time national unity survived in face of the threat from Spain and Catholicism: Spenser was associated with the radical Protestant wing in government circles, with Leicester, Walsingham, Ralegh. Spenser, like Milton after him, saw the poet’s as a high calling, reserved for the elect. He was God’s chosen agent, responsible to God for his country: in return God would send him inspiration. Spenser too was anxious to justify God’s ways to men. In the cave of despair belief that God was the author of evil could lead men to suicide or murder.
Spenser had affinities with the Puritans. Virtue is perfected by trial, in The Faerie Queene as in Areopagitica. False truth offers herself; real truth (Una) has to be won. The destruction of the Bower of Bliss has been regarded as an act of iconoclasm,1 to which Spenser certainly had no aesthetic objection. But his Epithalamion is not in the later sense of the word a ‘Puritan’ poem.
Pour out the wine without restraint or stay
Pour not by cups but by the bellyful.
Spenser cultivated some bourgeois virtues – Idleness, Gluttony and Lechery are the first three vices encountered in the House of Pride: waste is what they have in common. Sloth is the height of wickedness, parent of poverty and dissipation.2 Spenser’s is a philosophy of hard work, verging on a morality of success. Like Milton, he stresses the victory of small things over great, and denounces over-spending, waste which leads to stagnation and decay.3 ‘The general end … of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ – note the profoundly Miltonic word (cf. ‘This wild man being undisciplined’ – VI. v. 1.). In The Shepheardes Calendar Spenser was almost Brownist in his praise of a primitive unpaid priesthood.
Milton’s headmaster at St. Paul’s used to praise Spenser especially (‘our Homer’), together with Sidney (‘our Anacreon’), Harington (‘our Martial’), Wither (‘our Juvenal’), Daniel (‘our Lucan’) as well as Edward Dyer, John Davies and Ben Jonson.4 (Similarly Quarles called Phineas Fletcher ‘the Spenser of this age’. For Abraham Holland Browne and Drayton recalled Spenser.)5 That good Parliamentarian Anne Bradstreet’s political heroine was Queen Elizabeth: her literary heroes Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh and Du Bartas.6 The Spenserians, it has been said, could equally well be called Bartasians.7 There is no need to revive the question of Du Bartas’s influence on Milton; but Milton was reading him as early as 1625, he breathed the same intellectual atmosphere, and some of Milton’s less orthodox points are anticipated by Du Bartas/Sylvester.1
Greatest of the Spenserians is Walter Ralegh, whom I shall mention from time to time because of his association with the unorthodox ideas of Hariot and his circle. Milton, like most English radicals, greatly admired Ralegh. Toland says that Milton published Ralegh’s Maxims of State in 1642; in 1658 he printed The Cabinet Council, attributing it to Ralegh, from a manuscript which had long been in his possession. ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ echoes Ralegh’s ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay.’ Ralegh’s biographer suggested that Ralegh’s influence on Milton’s style would repay further investigation. It ‘is greater … than that of any other English prose writer’. We might go further and speculate on the attraction of Ralegh’s whole mode of thought for the young man who copied him so copiously into his Commonplace Book. Ralegh’s openness to the magical tradition as well as to Calvinist orthodoxy, the daring speculations current in his circle, his tolerance, the wide embrace of the History of the World, whose object was to justify the ways of God to men – all these must have reinforced the political attraction of Ralegh’s anti-Spanish stance to which he died a martyr when Milton was ten years old.2
Another Spenserian, William Browne, was a protégé of the Pembrokes. Browne’s Inner Temple Masque of 1614 has its affinities with Comus – the Circe myth, moly, freedom and the Fall. Milton’s ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ appears to echo Browne’s ‘Epitaph on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke’.3 Browne was very consciously in the Protestant patriotic tradition. He praised Ralegh, Essex and Drake, and was very anti-Spanish. Browne never had a good word for James I, still less for his favourites and courtiers; but he lavished praise on both Elizabeth and Prince Henry. The latter’s death in 1612 cut England off from the Continent.4 Browne’s ‘freeborn Muse’ scorned patronage. One of his characters ‘had as quickly all things past forgotten / As men do monarchs that in earth lie rotten’.5 Browne praised Spenser and Sidney, Drayton, John Davies and Wither; he was a friend and political ally of Selden and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd.6 Browne was a fierce critic of ‘the clergy’s crimes’.7
Another poet who saw himself in the Spenserian succession was George Wither, friend of William Browne and John Selden, protégé of the third Earl of Pembroke and Elizabeth of Bohemia. He has many striking affinities with Milton. He criticizes dumb dogs and the scholastic curriculum of the universities, the effete luxury of the court and its unpatriotic foreign policy.1 Wither believed in liberty of private judgment on individualistic grounds, though not for papists. We shall encounter Wither later as one who shared some of Milton’s positions.2 They part company only in their poetry, though even here it may be that Wither’s early poems are under-rated.
More than half of Milton’s lesser poems are addressed to individuals – relations, friends, girl-friends – and they reveal ‘a writer with a distinctly social tone’.3 The sonnets to young Lawrence and one of those to Cyriack Skinner are invitations to a convivial evening. Much of Milton’s Cambridge poetry had been social too, written for a group. The Latin elegies, the poems about Guy Fawkes Day, and perhaps the English Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, were also written with a university public primarily in mind. It may be that On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, L’Allegro and II Penseroso and others were circulating in manuscript before Milton went down from the university. Otherwise it is hard to understand how he came to be asked to contribute a poem to the second folio of Shakespeare, edited by Ben Jonson. In 1632 Milton’s poem was anonymous: when it was reprinted in 1640 it was signed I.M. His light verses, like those of his nephew John Phillips, appeared in anthologies with titles like A Banquet of Jests, Wits Recreations and Wit Restor’d.4 That the only time Wordsworth got drunk should have been in Milton’s room at Christ’s may not have been as totally unfitting as the later poet thought.
It is right to emphasize the jovial and sociable side of Milton because it has been overlooked, at least in the popular legend. But he was more than a mere cheerful extrovert. Nobody any longer equates him with his own Il Penseroso, but there are hints in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that Milton thought of himself as ‘inclined to melancholy’, ‘of a pensive nature and course of life.’5 His aspirations were already polemical and outward-looking as well as literary and personal. In 1633 he told a friend that ‘to defend and be useful to his friends, or to offend his enemies’ was ‘that which all mortals most aspire to’.6
In many ways Milton developed slowly, but by the time he returned to England in 1639 to face the Revolution, he had been jolted out of the traditional orthodoxies of his class and generation. He had abandoned a clerical career: he had strong if unspecific liberal Puritan predilections; he believed that he might become a major poet in the English language. He already had a mind, I suspect, more open than most of his peers to change, to novelty, to improvement, to heresy. At all events, that is the way he went.
I suggested that we should read Comus and Lycidas in the light of the growing alienation from Charles I’s court of large numbers of English intellectuals (though not only intellectuals). It is in this light too that we should regard Milton’s elevated conception of the poet’s role in society. He, no less than the preacher, could ‘imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility’. So Milton believed that, though church-outed, he still had a message for the people of England.
‘Ease and leisure were given thee’, he told himself, ‘for thy retired thoughts out of the sweat of other men.’ It was therefore his duty to society, to the church of God, especially in this time of national crisis, to use his talent and ‘the honest liberty of free speech’ to contribute what he could to the betterment of society, by way of repayment for what he had received. He was prepared to undertake ‘the meanest under-service if God by his secretary Conscience enjoin it’.1 It was one approach to an advocacy of lay preaching, different from that of the ‘mechanic preachers’ with whom Milton’s enemies were soon to associate him.
Milton’s idea of poetry was firmly opposed to that of Charles I and his courtiers, just as his idea of chastity was poles apart from Henrietta Maria’s ‘Platonic love’. The epic poet, Milton had told Diodati in Elegy VI, must be as pure as the priest who rises to face the angry gods – an anger which our sins have provoked. Listen by contrast, to Charles I rebuking Sir John Denham for writing poetry: ‘When men are young and have little else to do, they might vent the overflowings of their fancy that way; but when they were thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it would look as if they minded not the way to any better.’2 The difference between that point of view and Milton’s could hardly be more complete, though Charles’s is the attitude more usually associated with the vulgar idea of Puritanism. Milton’s attitude is not of course unique. George Wither, that good Spenserian, saw himself as no less a dedicated poet than Milton.1 Ben Jonson spoke of ‘the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man’, words that Milton was to echo in 1642.2
What we have then is a reaction of disgust from the flippancies, obscenities and trivial wit of the court and Inns of Court poets, the Randolphs, Carews, Sucklings, combined nevertheless with a conviction of the power of true poetry. A healthy patriotism depends on having a healthy country which one can love, Milton told an Italian friend in September 1638.3 As poet and scholar no less than as Puritan, Milton felt a deep need for liberation from Laudianism. Idolatry is a short summary of what he detested: regarding places as holier than people; interfering with the strongly-held convictions of Christians about how they should and should not worship God; use of financial and corporal punishments in spiritual matters; all the sordidness of church courts progging and pandering for fees. No free and splendid wit could stand it. Milton’s brief period of support for Presbyterianism sprang perhaps from the idea that because Presbyterians opposed Laud they also shared Milton’s hatred for ecclesiastical interference with freedom of expression, whether religious or literary. He even urged Parliament to open a state theatre for public ‘recreation and instruction’.4
The point at which religion and culture met was the censorship. It is difficult for us to grasp to-day how severe this censorship was in the early seventeenth century, and it is even more difficult to establish its consequences for literature. But something can be conveyed. Glynne Wick-ham suggested that ‘the decadence in Jacobean and Caroline dramatic writing’ was ‘due in far greater measure to the censorship … than to any particular failing in the writers themselves’.5 Among those who suffered from censorship were Chapman, John Davies of Hereford, Donne, Drayton, John Fletcher, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Middleton, Wither; Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Camden, Sir Edward Coke, Nicholas Ferrar, Joseph Hall, Thomas Hariot, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Selden, Archbishop Ussher, Peter Heylyn. Laud was said to have refused licences to print Luther’s Table Talk, Bishop Jewell’s Works, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Bishop Bayley’s Practice of Piety. He blue-pencilled even writers like William Chillingworth and Joseph Hall. We know of many who deliberately refrained from publication before 1640 – Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Joseph Mede: there must have been hundreds more. Censorship was tightened as the Revolution approached, enforced by savage corporal penalties against Bastwick, Lilburne and others who evaded it. The number of pamphlets published after the press was liberated from what Elias Ashmole called ‘the malice of the clergy’ shot up from 22 in 1640 to 1,966 in 1642; the number of newspapers, ballads and almanacs increased in like proportion.1 Many works were published after 1640 which could not have appeared earlier because of ‘the iniquity of the times’ – I quote from the title-page to Thomas Taylor’s Works (1653). Examples are Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney, Sir Robert Naunton’s Fragmenta Regalia, the later volumes of Coke’s Institutes, the memoirs of Arthur Wilson and Bishop Goodman, the millenarian writings of Joseph Mede, and translations of Brightman, Alsted and many others, William Gilbert’s Physiologia Nova, many of Bacon’s works, translations of Harvey.2
Those rather tedious but too often forgotten points may perhaps be summed up by recording the Advice which the Duke of Newcastle, a survivor from the old régime, gave to Charles II after the Restoration. Bishops, he said, are ‘the most effective guards against dissemination of wrong opinions among the people’, and so must be selected with great care. Too much preaching is a bad thing, and should be replaced by the reading of homilies, which will instruct the people in ‘their obedience to their superiors and governors, with all the respect that may be’. There should be less education, and books on controversial subjects should be printed in Latin only, ‘for controversy is a civil war with the pen which pulls out the sword soon afterwards’.3
The reader may from time to time think that I am reading too much between the lines, that I treat what Milton and others wrote as cryptograms to be decoded. But I believe this is the right way to read rebellious writers in the decades before 1640. ‘These times are dangerous for men to write,’ said a Kentishman in the fifteen-nineties, ‘much more to write opinions.’4 ‘Things with us are in such a condition’, the great mathematician Hariot wrote to Kepler in 1608, ‘that I still cannot philosophize freely. We are still stuck in the mud.’1 ‘The times are dangerous’, John Chamberlain told Sir Dudley Carleton in 1622, ‘and the world grows tender and jealous of free speech.’2 ‘I dare go no further,’ wrote Joseph Mede, Fellow of Milton’s college, in a private letter of July 1635, after referring to the Thirty Years War; ‘it may be I have said too much already.’3 Under the Laudian régime Mede dared not even publish the results of his researches into the date of Christ’s Second Coming. Yet if there was an acknowledged scholarly expert in England on this important topic, he was the man.
Aesopian writing is familiar to anyone in the twentieth century who has had to live and write under a censorship. We must be on the alert all the time when reading what Milton published before 1640 and after 1660, for he then had truths to convey which he felt to be vitally important, and which authority felt to be wickedly seditious.4
