Читать книгу The Life of the Author: John Milton - Richard Bradford - Страница 11

Milton, just sixteen, arrived in Christ’s College, Cambridge on 12 February 1625 and he matriculated on 9 April (Figure 2.1). It is more than likely that Milton was conveyed between Cambridge and London by Thames Hobson who made the journey with his own carriage once a week and rented horses or drawn carriages to students when they required more urgent transportation. Milton certainly remembered him. Shortly after Hobson’s death in 1631 he wrote a poem called ‘On the University Carrier’. It is a mock-heroic piece which does not exactly satirise Hobson but it treats him more as a subject for amused curiosity than with respect.

Figure 2.1 Milton at Cambridge, c. 1629. Source: National Portrait Gallery.

Merely to drive the time away he sickened,Fainted, and died, nor would with ale be quickened,Nay, quoth he, on his swooning be outstretched,If I may not carry, sure I’ll ne’er be fetched.

(16–18)

We tend to date the quintessentially English tendency toward class consciousness and snobbery to the nineteenth century but Milton’s patronising tribute to Hobson causes us to question that. Perhaps Milton’s time at Christ’s encouraged a feeling of superiority. The college itself was not the grandest in Cambridge – Trinity and King’s paraded their wealth and eminence with ostentatiously expensive buildings – but it carried an air of the modest country house. Its buildings were distributed across what were once open fields which had by Milton’s arrival become mature, planned gardens, now known as Christ’s Piece. The gardens also included an orchard and an enclosed tennis court, and to the West of the college its members could walk along the banks of the Cam. Its buildings were shared, on average, by 250 students and more than 20 fellows all of whom lodged in generously spaced rooms in the two-storey quadrangles. The day at Christ’s began at five with morning service in the college chapel. Breakfast would follow in Hall between six and seven and the rest of the morning involved disputations between students and their tutors, the origin of the modern-day tutorial, and lectures either in the Public Schools or in college. Dinner, the main meal of the day, was taken at noon and during the afternoon students, unless required for specific disputations, were left largely to themselves. Recreation during these hours took the form of games of tennis, fencing, bathing in the Cam or wrestling. Some, if from wealthy enough backgrounds, would stable horses in the town and ride during their spare time. Regulations stated that undergraduates must be accompanied by dons when they ventured beyond the gates of the college but few if any had the time or inclination to observe this rule. We cannot be certain of how Milton occupied his free hours but he later insisted that he was an adept swordsman so it is possible that he acquired this skill at Cambridge. ‘When he was Young’ claims Richardson, ‘he learnt to Fence, probably as a Gentlemanly Accomplishment, and that he might be Able to do Himself Right in Case of an Affront’ (Darbishire, 1932, p. 204). Just as likely, the vast acres of open land surrounding the colleges encouraged his enduring love of walking in the countryside. After vespers, supper would be taken at seven and unless they had a special dispensation no one was allowed out of college after nine o’clock.

His friend Diodati had gone up to Oxford two years earlier and it is likely that the Miltons chose Cambridge because of its reputation as generally more sympathetic to the cause of radical Protestantism. University dons were mostly clergymen, but if Milton had expected to join a community which addressed itself to the theological and political controversies of the day he was to be very disappointed. His Cambridge experiences, of which in any event there are few reliable records, can best be described as dull. He made no close friends there; the curriculum, unchanged for several hundred years, involved the standard retinue of rhetoric, logic and ethics, with a smattering of Greek and mathematics (Latin was the language of instruction). Speculation and open argument during disputations were frowned upon, and inculcation preferred. If the move from school to university involved the expectation of a shift from regimentation to intellectual challenge, this for Milton seemed to have gone into reverse. St Paul’s had offered a far more stimulating, unorthodox environment than his new home.

Christ’s might have conformed to the educational regime of the rest of the university but another aspect of its milieu contributed to the one notable occurrence during Milton’s time there as a student, his temporary expulsion from the university in the Spring Term of 1626. Most of the fellows and students were advocates of various aspects of Calvinism and Puritanism and by the time Milton arrived Christ’s, along with Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex, was becoming an outpost of resistance against the High Anglicanism that had taken root in much of the rest of the university. Milton’s younger brother Christopher would many years later tell of how John had, after disagreements with his tutor William Chappell, ‘received some unkindness’. Speculative biographers subsequently assumed that this had meant that he had been ‘sent down’ from the university as a punishment for insubordination and such assumptions are based upon a poem in Latin by Milton himself called ‘Elegia prima ad Carlolum Diodati’ (‘Elegy I to Charles Diodati’) which is a versified letter to his friend – they corresponded regularly and always in Latin – which includes references to his college rooms as ‘forbidden’, and to his ‘exile’ and ‘banishment’.

Whatever the exact nature of the event – and Christopher also refers to Chappell as having ‘whip’t him [contrary to] ye Rules of ye College’ – what is known is that Chappell had a reputation as a formidable intellectual disciplinarian and unyielding debater, having once reduced James I to virtual silence during a University Assembly. He was also an intractable Arminianist, unwilling even to countenance the possibility of any other theological principle. As has been made clear, Milton too would come to champion the Arminianist emphasis upon freewill and the power of conscience but it is likely that he took against a man who exemplified theological totalitarianism, even if he shared his interpretation of Scripture. The fact that on his return Milton was assigned a different tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, reinforces the suspicions of a temperamental antipathy between him and Chappell, as does the poem to Diodati on his ‘exile’ to London. ‘I am not pining away for any rooms … I do not like having always to stomach the threats of a stern tutor and other things which my spirit will not tolerate’ (II, 12–16 translated from the original Latin into English prose). Aside from the poem, we cannot be certain of what exactly Milton did during his time away from the university, yet so rhapsodic is his portrayal of what amounts to his first period of independence that one begins to wonder about its authenticity. He speaks of ‘how badly that place [Cambridge] suits the worshippers of Phoebus!’ and tells of his days walking in the countryside just beyond the city, of his new-found enjoyment of the theatre, of the vibrancy of the streets, and writes almost in wonder at the visions of womanhood abroad in the metropolis, as if he had encountered real members of the opposite sex for the first time. Does he protest too much? The fact that the poem is in Latin might seem of no great significance since it would have been standard for Milton and Diodati to advertise their mutual respect as able practitioners of the language and its poetic conventions but it seems not accidental that it was also a suitable vehicle for his presentation of experiences that might have been borrowed from any number of Classical poems celebrating the joys of bucolic, social and literary life. And, despite numerous attempts during the Renaissance to reconcile Classical culture and learning with Christianity, the former remained doggedly pre-Christian. Perhaps Milton was creating for himself, and Diodati, a fantasy world in which the pressures and conflicts of Cambridge, which exemplified those of England as a whole, might be suspended.

Apart from a few revisions of psalms the only poems in English by Milton before he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1629 were ‘On the Death of an Infant Dying of a Cough’ and ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’. Both are skilled and competent pieces of work, yet as the latter suggests they read more as exercises than as confident poetic statements. The ‘Elegia’ to Diodati on the other hand is a precocious, masterly blend of technical refinement and candid informality. Latin seemed to be the medium in which the teenage Milton felt most comfortable. It was the principal language of intellectual and theological debate, reliable and established; while English, like England, appeared to incorporate unease and uncertainty.

In February 1626, Charles I was crowned at Westminster Abbey. His predecessor James I (crowned 1604) had attempted to maintain Elizabeth’s balance between religious radicalism and conservatism and with a degree of success. But for various reasons – including the fact that James had previously been King of Scotland and had brought with him to London many Calvinist advocates of Scottish Presbyterianism – division still continued in England. Little was known of Charles’s intentions but it soon became evident to those close to the centre of power that the new monarch lacked the intellectual and tactical acumen of his two predecessors and that the traditionalist rather than the Puritan wing of the Church of England was gaining ground. For example, it would have been customary for the Dean of Westminster, John Williams, to have officiated at the Coronation but Williams was known to sympathise with the more radical elements of Anglicanism. He was mysteriously absent, his place being taken by William Laud, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, who favoured the practice of Catholic rites and who would eventually become Archbishop of Canterbury and fervent supporter of the Royalist cause during the Civil War.

As the episode with Chappell suggests, there is evidence that Milton maintained an informed awareness of contemporary religious and political developments. Indeed, during 1626 Cambridge itself became the stage for a series of events which reflected the ongoing tensions of London. Two candidates stood for the post of Chancellor of the University: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham enjoyed the explicit support of the king, while Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire was promoted by the House of Commons. Effectively, it was High Anglicanism versus Puritanism. Chancellors were elected by fellows of colleges and Buckingham won by a very slight majority. The Commons suspected Royal intrigue and vote rigging, demanded the suspension of Buckingham, and Charles, in response, prorogued Parliament on 26 June. It was as though the early scenes of the Civil War were being rehearsed in the Halls of Academe.

Milton would have witnessed these events – the election was the subject of public debate throughout the university – and a Latin poem written a few months later in early 1627, as a letter to his ex-tutor Thomas Young, shows that he knew and thought a great deal about closely related matters. In ‘Elegia Quarta’ he presents Hamburg, where Young was still Pastor of the English Church, as a city under siege by the pro-Catholic armies of the ongoing Thirty Years War. (In military terms it was not, but its reputation as a centre for Lutheran Protestantism offered evidence to its symbolic status as a bastion.) In the poem he addresses Young as a tragic exemplar of the true religion who like many others has been forced to flee to the solidly Protestant enclaves of Europe or New England.

Milton, in April 1629, was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree. With his new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, he had worked hard and acquired a qualification which was the equivalent, in modern classification, of a borderline First. He decided to stay on and do a Master’s degree. Since the late sixteenth century, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge have been allowed to shift to MA from BA status by virtue of some almost magical notion of grandeur conferred by the two institutions; they could leave and earn themselves a postgraduate qualification as a kind of long-service award. Why exactly Milton chose to continue with a regime of intensive study is a matter for speculation; what is known is that, on Christmas Day 1629, he began what would be his first significant poem in English, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Poems celebrating holy days were a customary feature of Renaissance culture, but what is striking about this one is a sense of intellectual presence which carries it beyond standard expectations of a respectful poeticisation of the birth of Christ. He virtually challenges the reader to engage with the gigantic complexity of the event. It set a precedent for verse that would follow, and introduced Milton as a figure for whom poetry, while attending to its aesthetic obligations, was a vehicle for contention, exposition and ratiocination.

The political and theological issues of Milton’s early years would play their part in subsequent writing and thinking, but what of the role of contemporary poetry?

Shakespeare was still alive during Milton’s early childhood and the Mermaid Tavern, where Ben Jonson and other writers with a taste for drink held their ‘merry meetings’, was a few hundred yards from Bread Street. In 1621, John Donne, then aged forty-nine, became Dean of St Paul’s and Milton, as a pupil at the Cathedral school, would have heard him preach. Donne’s verse would not appear in print until 1633, shortly after his death, but manuscript copies were in circulation among poetry enthusiasts of the day and it is not impossible that these would have passed through the Bread Street household. Even if the young Milton knew little of the verses themselves he must have been aware that the Dean, the renowned religious orator, had turned his skills privately to the secular mode of verse. It is therefore both intriguing and puzzling that Donne and his work feature neither in Milton’s writings nor in records of his opinions.

Twentieth-century consensus esteems Donne as the archetype of a school of writing, predominant in England during the early seventeenth century, known as Metaphysical Poetry. Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779) offered a concise description of the Metaphysicals’ technique; in their verse ‘heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Johnson was referring, albeit disapprovingly, to the so-called conceit, a metaphor which emphasises and frequently does not attempt to resolve the paradoxical relationship between two ideas, perceptions or states of mind. T.S. Eliot in a 1921 essay on the Metaphysicals offered a single line from Donne’s ‘The Relic’ as an example of this: ‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone’. The bone referred to is the wrist of a man’s skeleton, uncovered many years after burial but still bearing the thread of a woman’s hair as a token of his endless love for her. In eight words Donne has compressed a catalogue of opposing concepts: life as temporary versus love as timeless; physical decay versus imperishable beauty; a decorative token versus eternal commitment, etc.

Other poets of the period whose work involved the frequent use of the adventurous conceit were George Herbert (1593–1633) and Andrew Marvell (1621–78). As these dates indicate several of the writers who would later be classified as belonging to the Metaphysical School were near contemporaries of Milton – indeed Marvell would become his colleague and close friend. As a young man, when evolving his own perceptions of English poetry, Milton would have been aware of the writings of the first generation of the Metaphysicals, particularly that of Donne and Herbert (Herbert, incidentally, was University Orator during Milton’s first few years at Cambridge), but we know practically nothing of what he thought of it. Parker, Milton’s biographer, writes that ‘London was not so large that a young poet found it impossible to meet the masters of his art if he desired to do so. Milton, unfortunately, left us no account of such meetings’ (1968, p. 61).

A number of questions are raised by Milton’s apparent reluctance to address himself to contemporary verse. Did he, as a classicist, regard the Greek and Latin poets as innately superior to their English-language counterparts? If that were the case then why did he also begin to write verse in English? Another possibility is suggested by the thesis and indeed the title of a book by the modern critic Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which Bloom argues that many aspiring poets are so convinced of their own uniqueness that they set about detaching themselves from the reputations of both their precursors and their contemporaries. The only occasion on which Milton did refer in print to another major English poet was in a short poem called ‘On Shakespeare’, written in Cambridge in 1630 and printed in 1632 among prefatory material to the Shakespeare Second Folio. Shakespeare had been dead for fourteen years when Milton wrote the poem and it was already becoming evident that his enduring genius would outstrip his contemporaneous popularity. Milton’s poem is at once diligently respectful and unnerving, in that he addressed it not so much to Shakespeare the man as to his work which, he implies, is of far more significance than his living presence. The question of whether, or to what extent, Milton was familiar with Shakespeare’s writing has been the cause of speculation for three centuries. They were near-contemporaries and by consensus the most important English authors of the Renaissance whose legacies have endured matchlessly since their time. ‘On Shakespeare’ demonstrates that Milton was in awe of his reputation – anyone of the period who was not would have been a hermit – but it tells us nothing of whether he had formed an opinion on his work from reading it or seeing it performed. It would be misleading to assume that because he had been commissioned to contribute to the Preface of the Folio he had read the rest of it. Before 1623 less than half of Shakespeare’s works were in print, largely individual plays in short books known as quartos, and many of these contained only the names of the theatre companies which had performed them rather than that of the author. The rest were ‘foul’ copies, longhand versions of the plays, often transcribed and amended by those involved in performances. There is no proof that Milton purchased a copy of the Folio and it is unlikely that he would have been given a complimentary volume – this convention of token rewards for contributors to publications is relatively recent – but there is now convincing evidence that he owned a copy and read it diligently. One of the rare surviving 1623 Folios has been deposited in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 1944. It was annotated in longhand in the seventeenth century by its seemingly anonymous first owner but in September 2019 the Cambridge Milton specialist Jason Scott Warren looked at it and found striking similarities between Milton’s handwriting, recorded in various documents from his youth onwards, and the annotator’s. Other academics familiar with Milton manuscripts concurred, notably Will Poole of Oxford, and some went further. Not only is the handwriting identical to that known to be by Milton, the Folio annotator and the poet share grammatical and stylistic habits. The annotations are generally brief marginal notes rather than observations on the nature of Shakespeare’s qualities as a literary artist. For example, he underscores idiosyncratic rhyme echoes which, perhaps coincidentally, resurface in Milton’s verse. Nonetheless, the indication that Milton ‘close read’ Shakespeare raises questions about how this dialogue, albeit a one-sided exchange, between the two men would impress itself on the work of the former, notably Comus and Paradise Lost.

‘On Shakespeare’ marked his first encounter with his esteemed predecessor and one couplet is particularly unsettling:

Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,Dost make us marble with too much conceiving

Here Milton seems to be, with polite ambiguity, suggesting that the influence of Shakespeare, or at least his work, could be counterproductive. Milton implies that ‘too much conceiving’ (the overuse of extravagant metaphor) will consign poets to the past (‘make us marble’) rather than cause them to endure via their work. Is he suggesting that Shakespeare’s surpassing skill with figurative language has become both his monument and, more sadly, the self-indulgent inheritance of his successors, the Metaphysicals? ‘On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ makes it clear that Milton regarded poetry more as a vehicle for the clarification of essential notions of human condition than, as he implied of Shakespeare, an excuse for performing tricks with language.

He does not alter the detail of the Biblical story, but the feature of the poem which has maintained its accredited significance is its tendency to cause the reader to think closely about the very notion of God’s incarnation, the intersection of the timeless and ineffable with the transient and fragile state of mortality.

In Stanza 14 he evokes the effect of the angelic choir:

For if such holy songEnwrap our fancy long,Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,And speckled vanityWill sicken soon and die,And lep’rous sin will melt from earthly mould,And hell itself will pass away,And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

(133–40)

This and the stanza following it are ambiguously optimistic. The birth of Christ seems to offer a relatively painless and generous form of redemption. Sin, hell, mortality (‘the dolorous mansions’ and ‘the peering day’) are briefly removed; humanity seems to have been returned to ‘the age of gold’. But as we should be aware, this age, our prelapsarian state, is irretrievable, and in Stanza 16 Milton reminds us of the fact.

But wisest fate says noThis must not yet be so.

(149–50)

The child in the manger must be crucified:

The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,That on the bitter crossMust redeem our loss.

(151–3)

This concertinaing of Christ’s life, most specifically the image of a crucified infant, is deliberately shocking. The effect of the image underpins Milton’s message – before we can return to a golden age, comparable to the time before the fall, there is much suffering to be done, by Christ and us.

Throughout the poem Milton interweaves his presentation of the events attending the birth of Christ with intimations of theological truths that underpin it. In the first two stanzas he notes that,

Nature in awe to himHad doffed her gaudy trim

(32–3)

Nature has chosen to ‘hide her guilty front with innocent snow’, has thrown ‘the saintly veil of maiden white’ upon her ‘foul deformities’. Later in Stanza 7 he returns to this theme and tells how the sun,

Hid his head for shameAs his inferior flameThe new enlightened world no more should need.

(80–2)

The natural world was presented frequently in Renaissance verse as an approximation of its Edenic counterpart, its beauty a part of God’s design, but Milton turns this strategy around and reminds the reader that nature, incorporating man, is an element of our post-lapsarian state. Its attractions are but ‘foul deformities’ compared with what we have lost and appropriately it hides itself from the coming of Christ.

The poem is striking in that it continually projects its ostensible topic into a broader, all-inclusive contemplation of man’s relationship with God, focusing particularly upon the reason for the coming of Christ – man’s original act of disobedience and its consequences. Again, we should note that while this was an ever-present feature of Renaissance, post-Reformation consciousness, its emphatic resurfacings in Milton’s early verse suggests that as a poet he had an agenda, a scale of priorities. And he would eventually address himself directly to its apex: Paradise Lost, the fall of man.

It is evident from Milton’s early poetry that he was as confident and skilled in his use of figurative devices as any of his contemporaries, but it is equally clear that, unlike most of the Metaphysicals, he used language, poetic language, as a means of logically addressing the uncertainties of life, unlocking them; not as an experiment but as a harsh confrontation with the relation between language and knowledge.

Two other poems, written in 1631, during Milton’s final year at Cambridge, attest to his growing perception of poetry as a vehicle for both creative and intellectual endeavour. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ are poetic versions of the academic debating exercise where one person displays his skill as a rhetorician by arguing the relative values of two opposing, sometimes antithetical, ideas or propositions. Milton was required to do this as part of his Master’s degree and the two poems are based upon his engagement with the question of ‘Whether Day or Night is More Excellent’. The principal criterion for success in this academic exercise involved the extent to which equanimity and balance could be achieved between the opposing perspectives, and Milton’s poetic celebration of the various joys, benefits and opportunities of daytime and night-time experience attempts a similar exercise in symmetry. There is, however, a slight but detectable sense of empathy and commitment in ‘Il Penseroso’ (the night poem), while ‘L’Allegro’ (the day poem) involves more of an exercise in allegiance. In short, Milton discloses himself to be more innately predisposed to a state of mind which is removed from the distractions of unreflecting pleasure – he prefers night to day.

For example, two lines in ‘L’Allegro’ have exercised the attentions of numerous commentators:

Then to come in spite of sorrowAnd at my window bid good morrow

(46–7)

No-one was able to demonstrate precisely who or what comes to the window. It might be the mountain nymph (referred to in line 36), the singing lark (line 41) or Milton himself. The most likely explanation for this case of loose ambiguous syntax – very uncommon in a young man so alert to the discipline of composition – was that Milton in this poem was performing a duty, listing the pleasures of the day in the manner of a filing clerk, without any real enthusiasm or private enjoyment. As a consequence his attention lapses and he offers up a lazily constructed sentence.

Try as he might Milton cannot quite prevent elements of his temperamental disposition from disrupting the exercise in balance supposedly enacted in the two poems. At the conclusion of ‘Il Penseroso’ he asks night-time to

Dissolve me into ecstasiesAnd bring all heaven before mine eyes

(165–6)

implying that only the inner eye, the contemplative state, can enable human beings to properly understand what lies beyond the given world. In ‘L’Allegro’ he celebrates the pleasure of daytime as

Such sights as youthful poet’s dreamOn summer eves by haunted stream

(129–30)

and one should note that these sights inspire ‘youthful’ poets, implying that their more mature counterparts have moved beyond such distractions to thought.

The closing couplets of both poems are intriguing. The one from ‘L’Allegro’ is conditional:

These delights, if those can’st give,Mirth with thee, I mean to live

(151–2)

This suggests, subtly, that he could live with Mirth, if only … Compare this with the certainty of ‘Il Penseroso’:

These pleasures Melancholy give,And I with thee will choose to live.

(175–6)

These poems are important because they cause us to look beyond them to more emphatic disclosures of Milton’s state of mind in later work. They re-address a theme raised in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the diversions and attractions of the known world are temporarily suspended for the birth of Christ. Milton would eventually go blind and his sonnet on this condition recaptures the mood of ‘Il Penseroso’; the contemplative, unseeing state is now an obligation, not a choice, and it seems to suit his temperament. More significantly, in the so-called ‘Address to Light’ at the beginning of Book II of Paradise Lost, Milton revisits ‘Il Penseroso’. He is about to bring God into the poem and the lines on how darkness might ‘bring all heaven before mine eyes’ written thirty years before must surely have registered for the now blind poet.

Shortly before Milton’s departure from Cambridge his father was responsible for our first record of his adult appearance and demeanour. John senior, prompted perhaps by his son’s growing reputation as a poet, commissioned a portrait of him which he sat for during the weeks after his twenty-first birthday. The Puritan fashion for short pudding-bowl haircuts was not in 1630 quite as widespread as it would be during the Civil War but it was already worn by many as a sign of allegiance. Milton’s wavy brown hair falls to his collar. His black doublet and white falling ruff is the unashamed costume of a gentleman. Toland, who based his biography on accounts from Milton’s friends and family, describes him in a manner that complements the portrait well: ‘he made a considerable figure … He was middlesiz’d and well proportion’d, his Deportment erect and manly, his Hair of a light brown, his Features exactly regular, his Complexion wonderfully fair as a Youth, and ruddy to the last.’ (Darbishire, 1932, pp. 193–4) This description of the young man as almost feminine in appearance should not mislead us into assuming that Milton used Cambridge to protect himself from the harshness of the real world. He had during his undergraduate years been involved in the ritual known as ‘salting’ where new students would be subjected to a vile form of initiation. Each was asked to give a speech on a topic chosen by their seniors and judged by the latter on their performance. The best were rewarded with wine and beer and the worst be obliged to drink ale to which a barely endurable amount of salt had been added. Particularly bad speakers would have their cheeks scratched with iron nails. On several occasions Milton was appointed ‘Father’ of this activity, the man who ensured that rewards and punishments were fairly distributed. If this calls to mind a seventeenth-century version of more recent and very nasty public schools then the parallels deserve further scrutiny. Public school cruelty and bullying reflect the culture of governance and privilege fed by these institutions. Similarly, the horrible nature of ‘salting’ served undergraduates – essentially the gentry – as an introduction to the society that was equally remorselessly brutal and which they would dominate after Cambridge. Milton had remained in contact with his St Paul’s tutor Gill and in 1628 heard of the horrible punishments visited on him. Between 1627 and 1628 the Duke of Buckingham, on the instructions of Charles I, led 7,000 men in support of the Huguenot Protestants who were defending the west coast French city of La Rochelle against the Royalist/Catholic army of Cardinal Richelieu. On the face of things Buckingham should have been treated as a defender of the Protestant cause but his manifest incompetence as a military commander and his shift of allegiance during the campaign from the Huguenots to Richelieu caused many in England to suspect that he was corrupt, secretly allied to Catholic powers, and that the English king was similarly disposed. Gill’s letters to Milton ceased before the former was arrested but Milton would have learned of what had occurred. In August 1628 Buckingham was assassinated, stabbed to death, in London by one John Felton who openly confessed to the killing of, in his opinion, a traitor who sympathised with the Catholic states of mainland Europe. Felton was executed and soon afterwards Gill voiced his opinions on the affair while drinking with friends in the cellar of Trinity College, Oxford. Gill stated that Charles I was ‘fitter to stand in a Cheapside shop’ then govern ‘this kingdom’, that Buckingham had ‘gone down to hell to meet King James there’ and that he was sorry that Felton had deprived him of doing the ‘brave act’ of killing Buckingham himself. A pro-Carolingian overheard and informed on him; he was removed from his religious ministries, his university degrees were revoked, he was fined £2,000 (a gigantic amount which left him bankrupt) and sentenced to have both of his ears cut off. Eventually this last penalty was revoked but nonetheless Gill’s life was ruined; he spent more than two years in jail.

The poems written by Milton at Cambridge are complex existential pieces, sometimes indicating uncertainties regarding religious doctrine, but we should recognise that behind them Milton was aware of a society, a world, in a state that fluctuated between tyranny and chaos. Eventually the gap between the writing and the experience would narrow. He would become personally involved in a war and a new form of government unlike any in the history of Christian Europe and afterwards he would write a poem about the relationship between God and man.