MILTON FOUND AND SEIZED his moment. These three works were prepared for the press in the autumn of 1670, having been licensed in the summer. The History of Britain appeared in November 1670, and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes came out in a joint edition in the months that followed. All three spoke powerfully to the times.
The title of Paradise Regained marks it out clearly as the sequel to Paradise Lost. Milton’s new poem offered another story of temptation, of the Son of God by Satan. This time, however, Satan fails. The eloquent opening lines, with all of Milton’s trademark qualities of epic invocation, authorial self-consciousness, inverted syntax and suspended clauses, culminates in the simple statement of belief that ‘one man’ undid the work of the Fall, that ‘one man’ will raise Eden again in the ‘waste wilderness’:
I who erewhile the happy garden sung,
By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing
Recovered Paradise to all mankind,
By one man’s firm obedience fully tried
Through all temptation, and the tempter foiled
In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed,
And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.
(I:1–7)
In Paradise Regained, Satan offers a series of temptations to the Son of God, who has retreated to the wilderness after his baptism by his cousin John. The Son will refuse all of them. The poem could be merely a succession of moments in which the Son says ‘no’, but, in a significant development of his biblical sources (primarily the Gospels of Matthew and Luke), Milton links Satan’s temptations with the revelation of the Son’s true status and destiny.
Satan certainly does not fully comprehend who he is dealing with. He only sees that the Son is ‘unfriended, low of birth’. He tells his followers in hell, still ready to take his lead, that ‘Who this is we must learn, for man he seems …’ Moreover, the Son himself remains unaware of the way in which he will fulfil his redemptive purpose, how he will indeed restore Eden. Thus the poem as a whole not only celebrates ‘one man’s firm obedience’ fully tried but shows how the trial of that obedience enables the Son to understand fully his own role in humanity’s redemption.
To make the contest more real, the Son is fully human. He undergoes his temptations as a man, without any divine powers, experiencing hunger and cold, unaware at first even that the temptations are going to happen. Having endured Satan’s attempts, the poem ends by saying simply, ‘… he unobserved / Home to his mother’s house private returned.’ Yet as he does so, this private man is being glorified by the angels in heaven as the ‘Queller of Satan’. In each of his three great late works, Milton moves towards a profound simplicity of language, all the more compelling in its contrast with the often challenging complexities, of language and viewpoint, that have come before.
This is true of Paradise Regained, in which the quiet dignity of the Son’s closing actions completes the reader’s journey away from Satan’s psyche. As he had done in Paradise Lost, Milton allows Satan a complex and compelling psychological realism, and, as in the earlier epic, he takes risks in doing so. One of the achievements of Paradise Regained is that the reader sees the Son of God through Satan’s eyes. Satan simply does not understand, cannot begin to comprehend, what the Son is, and what he will do to redeem humankind. In Satan’s view, God the Father is just another ambitious parent: ‘… what will he not do to advance his son?’ Satan is equally confused and then enraged by the Son’s resistance to temptations, whether of money or power, food or learning.
Milton makes sure that Satan does his very best, adding in a new, non-biblical temptation. Satan creates a glorious banquet to tempt the Son, ‘A table richly spread, in regal mode’. But it is not just the food that entices, it is the company.
And at a stately sideboard by the wine
That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood
Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue
Than Ganymede or Hylas …
(II:350–53)
These ‘stripling youths’, more lovely than even the archetypal objects of desire in Classical myth, are there to tempt the Son. Milton has set it up beautifully. Earlier in Book II, Satan had been getting advice from his fellow-devils. Belial, ‘the dissolutest spirit that fell’, had a plan: ‘Set women in his eye and in his walk.’ Satan was dismissive, pointing out that just because Belial and his followers cast ‘wanton eyes on the daughters of men’ as they lurk ‘in courts and regal chambers’, it did not mean that the Son would fall to the ‘assaults’ of beauty. Satan suggested that the Son was interested in higher things than women, but when he actually got around to the banquet temptation, he had obviously decided that offering young boys was worth a try. Sadly for Satan, the Son remains unmoved by both the regal banquet and the decorative young men.
When the Son rejects even glory, Satan is silenced, suddenly aware of his own failings.
So spake the Son of God; and here again
Satan had not to answer, but stood struck
With guilt of his own sin, for he himself
Insatiable of glory had lost all,
Yet of another plea bethought him soon.
(III:145–9)
As Milton indicates in that final line, Satan is not silent for long. He presses on, knowing that he will fail, knowing that he will suffer from this son of Eve, but rationalising his struggle with a desperate, empty courage:
Let that come when it comes; all hope is lost
Of my reception into grace; what worse?
For where no hope is left, is left no fear;
If there be worse, the expectation more
Of worse torments me than the feeling can.
I would be at the worst; worst is my port,
My harbour and my ultimate repose,
The end I would attain, my final good.
My error was my error, and my crime
My crime …
(III:204–13)
Satan cannot stop. He is compared to a swarm of flies, to waves crashing against a solid rock. He is driven on not by hope of the Son relenting but by an overwhelming desire to understand the nature of the entity he is seeking to corrupt. Even the title ‘Son of God’
bears no single sense;
The Son of God I also am, or was,
And if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are Sons of God.
(IV:517–20)
So Satan’s final, strange temptation is part of his attempt to get the Son to reveal his identity. He takes the Son to a high pinnacle. He expects him to fall and thus for his divine status to be revealed when angels rush to his rescue. But Milton’s Son has a surprise for Satan and for the reader: ‘Also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood.’ (IV: 560–61)
The simple words ‘and stood’ have perplexed and excited critics over the years: one has only to glance at an annotated edition of Paradise Regained to get a flavour of the theological debates surrounding the phrase. While the Son’s ability to stand firm is, in literary and spiritual terms, the culmination of his resolute defiance of everything that Satan can throw at him, the reader is left with a mystery. How and why does the Son stand? Perhaps it is not necessary for the poem to explain that he ‘stood’. The reader needs only to be assured that he does.
The paradox at the heart of Christian belief runs through the poem, articulated most clearly by God himself, although with some characteristically Miltonic additions. The Son raised by ‘merit’ (in Milton’s heterodox theology at least) will conquer Sin and Death ‘by humiliation and strong sufferance’: ‘His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength.’ This is something that the Son himself is still unclear about at the start of the poem, at least when he looks back at his own youth. Then he dreamt of being a great hero, rescuing Israel from its Roman oppressors, bringing down tyrannical power, ‘till truth were freed, and equity restored’. Now, however, he recognises that it is more humane and more heavenly ‘By winning words to conquer willing hearts / And make persuasion do the work of fear’.
The Son’s thoughts about how best to restore Eden exemplify the political thinking of Paradise Regained. At first, the message seems uncomplicated. Unsurprisingly, given that the author is John Milton, courts and monarchies are presented as places of corruption and tyranny. The sons of Belial lurk in ‘courts and regal chambers’, Satan attempts his second temptation dressed as a courtier and offers the hungry Son ‘a table richly spread, in regal mode’. But what should the Son, what should those who suffer the oppression of tyranny, do in response?
Milton refocuses the question. The Son does not seek an earthly sceptre. Instead he offers another model of kingship, the man who ‘reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, desires, and fears’. Yet, as Satan knows full well, it has been prophesied that the Son will liberate the Jewish people, and Paradise Regained cannot simply dismiss earthly politics. Satan taunts the Son with this prophecy, suggesting that he is hardly going to free Judea ‘by sitting still’. The Son, however, continues to refuse to engage with human military or political solutions, arguing that God will fulfil his promises in his own way and in his own time: ‘All things are best fulfilled in their due time, / And time there is for all things.’
Above all, he reveals to Satan that he will deliver all humankind through his own personal suffering, through ‘tribulations, injuries, insults, / Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence’. These are the deeds ‘above heroic’ with which the Son will redeem men and women. The contempt and scorn will ultimately contribute to a triumphant outcome. As the Son reminds Satan pointedly, ‘my rising is your fall.’
This emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to ‘reign within himself and to leave the politics, the violence and the revenge to God is utterly traditional Christian thinking, and precisely the kind of argument that Milton had eloquently overturned in order to justify the active removal of the man he saw as a corrupt tyrant, Charles I. Now, twenty years later, Milton appears to have been returning to a far more conservative view of matters. It is, however, a complicated conservatism.
Satan, demonstrating some of his old cunning, shows the Son a vision of corruption and tyranny in Rome. The Son could expel the dictator there and rule himself. Surely that would be better than letting tyranny flourish? The Son, however, has a tough-minded response. He launches a stinging attack on the Roman Empire and its people, once victorious, ‘now vile and base’. They are ‘deservedly made vassal’, having given up their ‘frugal, and mild, and temperate’ lifestyles, and succumbed to the temptations of empire, governing
ill the nations under yoke,
Peeling their provinces, exhausted all
By lust and rapine.
(IV: 135–7)
The Son makes absolutely clear that the Roman people have brought their political degradation upon themselves through their own moral degeneracy: ‘Degenerate, by themselves enslaved, / Or could of inward slaves make outward free’. (IV: 144–5) There is nothing for the Son to do, nothing he should do, until and unless the Roman people shake off their inner slavery. If applied to John Milton’s England, these passages confirm the views so often expressed by him that the revolution had failed because the English people were ‘inward slaves’, unwilling and unable to sustain their own liberty. What is left unclear is whether it would ever be possible to sustain political and religious freedom. Would the English always slide back into being ‘vassals’, or were they capable of throwing off their slavery?
Paradise Regained’s companion piece, Samson Agonistes, raises similar questions and offers some provocative answers. Milton retells the story of Samson and his treacherous wife, Delilah, from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the source of his strength, his hair, the blind Israelite Samson eventually wreaks terrible revenge upon his Philistine oppressor. The imprisoned Samson is asked to entertain the Philistines with his great strength at a ‘solemn feast’, with ‘sacrifices, triumph, pomp and games’. Although he refuses at first, he changes his mind, for reasons that remain deliberately obscure in Samson Agonistes. Once at the ‘games’, Samson regains his God-given strength, lost to him through the betrayal of Delilah:
Straining all his nerves he bowed,
As with the force of winds and waters pent,
When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro
He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath,
Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but each Philistian city round
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only scaped who stood without.
(ll. 1646–59)
It is no wonder that in recent years, Samson Agonistes has been described, controversially, as ‘a work in praise of terrorism’.1 The destruction of the temple is a carefully targeted terrorist atrocity in which Samson loses his own life.
Milton interestingly added the non-biblical detail that it was only the leaders of Philistine society, the ‘lords, ladies, captains, counsellors’ and ‘priests’, who were killed. The ordinary people, the ‘vulgar’, escape the violence, but these nuances are lost on Samson’s supporters within the drama. All they feel is uncomplicated delight. ‘O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!’ they cry, insisting that Samson has ‘fulfilled’ his God-given ‘work for which thou was foretold’. Samson’s own father, who until this point has been looking for ways to free his son from imprisonment and get him home, is now equally joyous. His son is a hero.
Come, come, no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause, Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished
A life heroic, on his enemies
Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning,
And lamentation to the sons of Caphtor
Through all Philistian bounds.
(ll. 1708–14)
Earlier, the Chorus, members of Samson’s tribe, had spelled out the two options available to those who suffer from political oppression. The Chorus believed that God would enable the violent overthrow of their enemies:
O how comely it is and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long oppressed!
When God into the hands of their deliverer
Puts invincible might
To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor.
(ll. 1268–72)
But God also gives people ‘patience’ and may send the oppressor as a ‘trial’ of the people’s ‘fortitude’. In these cases, each individual is responsible for accepting their subjugation and maintaining their own inner freedom, ‘making them each his own deliverer’.
It is this latter model that Samson struggles with in the earlier part of the drama, working painfully to achieve a patient acceptance of his bondage and humiliation. ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ he begins the drama in spiritual and actual darkness: ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon’. He is struggling psychologically: Samson can find ‘ease to the body some, none to the mind / From restless thoughts’. Torments find ‘secret passage’ to the ‘inmost mind’, grief creates wounds that ‘rankle, and fester, and gangrene’. As his friends tell him, ‘Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!) / The dungeon of thyself.’
To dramatise Samson’s struggle, both physical and mental, Milton adopts a sometimes knotty syntax, often using Latinate constructions which place the verb at the end of the phrase, packing words against each other. There is little space for lyricism. As the scholar Sharon Achinstein points out, Samson Agonistes imitates ‘the rhythms and shapes of Hebrew poetry’, resisting the neatness and conclusiveness of the fashionable heroic couplet.2 Instead, he creates a claustrophobic and dense prosody, entirely fitting for its subject:
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased,
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,
They creep, yet see, I dark in light exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
(ll. 70–79)3
Samson learns, slowly and unevenly, of his own culpability in his fall: ‘Sole author I, sole cause’. He may have had great physical strength, but he did not use it wisely. Over the course of the drama, he moves beyond despair (death will be the ‘welcome end’ of all his pains) and anger (‘I was his nursling once’ but God ‘hath cast me off as never known’) to eventual action. He becomes worthy again of being God’s freedom fighter, or so Milton’s drama suggests.
An important part of this process is Samson’s bitter rejection of his wife, Delilah, by whom he has been ‘effeminately vanquished’. As Samson’s father, Manoa, points out, it had never been a good idea to marry a Philistine, but Samson had been determined, believing himself to be directed by God and having a crafty political plan besides, as Manoa reminds him:
I cannot approve thy marriage-choices, son,
Rather approved them not; but thou didst plead
Divine impulsion prompting how thou might’st
Find some occasion to infest our foes.
(ll. 420–23)
Now he is imprisoned in Gaza, Delilah returns to visit her husband, offering to intercede on his behalf with the Philistine lords, and proposing a nice, quiet, domestic life with her away from a world in which he needs his eyes:
At home in leisure and domestic ease,
Exempt from many a care and chance to which
Eyesight exposes daily men abroad.
(ll. 917–19)
To regain his masculinity, his power, Samson must reject her ‘foul effeminacy’, which he does, and viciously. The drama as a whole is equally harsh towards Delilah. The Chorus is particularly misogynist, extrapolating her failings to all women, just as all women in the seventeenth century were tarred with the brush of Eve. God spent too much time on the outward features of women; their ‘inward gifts’ were left unfinished; they lack ‘judgement’, are full of ‘self-love’, incapable of constancy – ‘that either they love nothing, or not long’, argues the Chorus.
Milton does something rather subtle here. Delilah proves to be quite happy with these kinds of generalisations about women. In her attempts to appease Samson, she claims that everything she did was done because she is weak, as all women are. She is simply demonstrating ‘a woman’s frailty’. It is, however, a pose. Once rejected, she spits out the truth. She knows she has a bad press in Judah, but
in my country where I most desire,
In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath
I shall be named among the famousest
Of women.
(ll. 980–83)
On one level, Milton is tackling the political implications of having an idolatrous marriage partner (as Charles I had had in Henrietta Maria, and as Charles II currently had in Catherine of Braganza), and suggesting that the best thing would be to cast off this dangerous connection. To read Delilah’s portrayal merely as political allegory is, however, to soften its harshness: Samson may not be Milton, but the misogyny of Samson Agonistes does belong to its author. There is a wider issue, however. The problem with Samson and Delilah is ‘in the end their loyalties to different cultures, different nations, and religions’. Delilah should have left ‘parents and country’, says Samson at her marriage to him, and the drama supports that view4
At first sight, therefore, Samson Agonistes might seem the exact opposite to Paradise Regained, a bloodthirsty rallying cry to the oppressed who can be inspired by Samson’s example to acts of heroic, godly violence against their enemies. All this, seasoned with a dash of politically fuelled misogyny. Samson himself explicitly justifies the use of force to a Philistine visitor:
My nation was subjected to your lords.
It was the force of conquest; force with force
Is well ejected when the conquered can.
(ll. 1205–7)
This is resistance theory in the name of God. Samson does not fight as a private man, but as God’s soldier.
I was no private but a person raised
With strength sufficient and command from heaven
To free my country …
(ll. 1211–13)
The Chorus ends Samson Agonistes insisting both that God has born ‘witness gloriously: whence Gaza mourns’ and that God’s servants will learn from Samson’s story, from ‘this great event’, and end ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’.
Yet Milton asks his reader to be more wary of events within the drama than the characters are. The characters are living within the time frame of the story: Samson, for example, believes that he is part of a battle between gods, between the God of Israel and Dagon, the God of the Philistines. The reader, however, is asked to place Samson’s moment of revenge within a much longer narrative of Israel’s captivity. The reader is also asked to resist any easy conflation of John Milton and Samson, both blind, both defeated: yes, there may be parallels, but overall the drama places Samson’s experiences within a larger understanding of human history.
To this end, Milton develops various elements of his Old Testament story. He makes Samson a lone, unacknowledged sufferer, unsupported by his country, which delivers him up to its enemies. The people of Judah had their opportunity, provided by Samson, but by their ‘vices’ they have been brought ‘to servitude’; they ‘love bondage more than liberty’; would rather have ‘bondage with ease than strenuous liberty’. For this weakness, Israel deserves to be punished, ‘whence to this day they serve’. Above all, Samson’s violence does not free Israel. As Samson’s father says,
To Israel
Honour hath left, and freedom, let but them
Find courage to lay hold on this occasion.
(ll. 1714–16)
Here the parallels with the English revolution seem clearest. Necessary acts of violence may start the liberation process, but a nation needs courage to continue and perpetuate liberty. Israel, in the event, did not have that courage. Nor did the English.
This is a challenging and provocative message, and the form of Samson Agonistes matches its message. In an era when the theatre had exploded back into action with a multitude of sophisticated (and less sophisticated) sex comedies, performed by both men and women actors, Milton chose to write a play designed specifically to be read in the privacy of one’s own home. The chosen form of Paradise Regained, a brief epic on a biblical theme written in austere blank verse, was equally out of step with contemporary poetic movements. Surrounded by the shocking literary antics of men such as the Earl of Rochester and the elegant, ambivalent rhyming verse of his old friend Andrew Marvell, John Milton’s stark and passionate poetry emphasises his separation from what had become mainstream culture.
The third work to appear in 1670, the History of Britain, is much less well known than Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes but was the most obvious candidate for censorship at the time, and its publication ensured that Milton remained a notorious figure. The writing of history in seventeenth-century England was never a neutral act. Not only did individuals justify their actions, however radical or conservative, with an appeal to history, but history was used to call readers to action in the present. When Milton offered a history that he had begun in the earliest months of the republic back in 1649, the censors as expected decided that ‘some passages’ were ‘too sharp against the clergy’: they interpreted Milton’s critique of ‘Popish Monks in Saxon Times’ as a direct criticism of Charles II’s own bishops. It seems likely that one section, a ‘Digression’ of 2,500 words, was cut out completely5
The History, as much as Paradise Lost and the still notorious tracts from the 1640s and 1650s, ensured that Milton remained a well-known figure, and not just in England. Even those who did not agree with his views had to admit that he could write well (‘a very good advocate for a very bad cause’). Old controversies kept simmering away: a work by John Eachard went into its eighth edition in 1672, reminding readers that Milton being ‘a little tormented with an ill chosen wife, set for the Doctrine of Divorce’.6
Despite or perhaps because of his difference from his literary contemporaries, Milton was becoming something of a literary celebrity in the wake of Paradise Lost. John Dryden, appointed Poet Laureate by the King in 1668, came to visit him a few years later. Dryden was first in a long line of poets who were rather daunted by Milton: this man, he wrote, ‘cuts us all out, and the ancients too’.7 This did not stop Dryden continuing work on his imitation of Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic transformed into rhyming couplets for easier digestion in the form of an opera. Here, for example, is Lucifer opening the opera:
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser’s lot:
In liquid burnings or in dry to dwell,
Is all the sad variety of hell.
(I, i, 3–6)8
The opera, which was in fact never acted on stage (perhaps because of the nudity of the ‘human pair’) but which was extremely popular in its printed editions, was intended for the marriage festivities of King Charles’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York in 1673.9 One hopes that Milton savoured the irony.
Dryden’s rewriting of Paradise Lost merely served to emphasise how far outside the literary establishment Milton stood. This may not have been a great loss for him, because the late 1660s and early 1670s were characterised by a viciousness and pettiness startling even by the usually low standards of the book world. The Earl of Rochester and Dryden engaged in a literary spat that can be tracked through plays such as Marriage à-la-mode, poems such as ‘An Allusion to Horace’, and again in the theatre, in All for Love. Dryden was also attacked in the play The Rehearsal (which appeared anonymously but was almost definitely written by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham), while a few years later the attacks took physical form when the playwright was seriously assaulted by a group of thugs in Rose Alley, which runs behind the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, in revenge for An Essay upon Satire, in which various prominent figures (including the King, his mistresses and the Earl of Rochester) were crudely vilified. As luck would have it, the Essay had probably not even been written by Dryden.
Milton was separate from this court coterie, but the appearance of three works in 1670 signalled not merely that he still had a political and literary voice but that the City of London and its publishing industry were recovering from the depredations of plague and fire. London’s population would double between 1650 and 1700, with a concomitant increase in readers for the books and pamphlets once again streaming from the city’s printing presses.
The London publishing trade started to fight back in the last years of the 1660s. Book-sellers moved to the area north of St Paul’s, between Smithfield Market and Aldersgate Street, still known as Little Britain.10 One shop, Thomas Helder’s, is advertised on the 1669 issues of the ten-book Paradise Lost. By 1670, the recovery in trade was complete, and ‘a younger generation had begun to replace the dead and the bankrupt, and many of these returned to the traditional medieval centre of the trade, in St Paul’s Churchyard.’11
Bookshops were designed to be pleasant places to visit in this new commercial world. Samuel Pepys, as ever, provides first-hand evidence of the pleasures of book-buying in his diary entry for 10 December 1663:
Thence to St Paul’s Churchyard to my booksellers; and having gained this day in the office, by my stationer’s bill to the King, about forty shillings or three pounds, I did here sit two or three hours, calling for twenty books to lay this money out upon; and found myself at a great loss where to choose, and do see how my nature would gladly return to the laying out of money in this trade.12
A year later he was back at his book-sellers, again with money in his pocket. He ‘spoke for several books against New Year’s day’, spending £7 or £8, and also found time to order some plate, spoons and forks. Another time, he headed for ‘Paul’s churchyard to treat with a bookbinder to come and gild the backs of all my books to make them handsome, to stand in my new presses when they come’. Pepys’s progress vividly indicates the way in which book-buying was becoming another form of conspicuous consumption in a culture in which the look of the book was as important as its content.
James Allestry was Milton’s printer/book-seller in 1670 (although he died only two days after the publication of the History of Britain), and his house expressed the wealth he had built up from the book trade. He had a ‘Green Room’ decorated with hangings with ‘gilt scales’, a ‘blue Chamber’, and a dining room decorated with pictures, printed hangings and gilt stars, and furnished with a Spanish table, leather carpets and eight chairs. His shop was equally well furnished, using arches to divide up the space. Allestry intended his shop as ‘a meeting place for prospective authors, prestigious customers or influential members of the Royal Society (which Allestry served in an official capacity as Printer), and as a place where business deals could be negotiated’.13
John Milton was absolutely at the heart of this world as an author, advertised in the new catalogues offered by book-sellers to their public. In May 1671, readers were offered Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as well as Tetrachordon (one of the divorce tracts from the 1640s) and Milton’s recent venture into adult education, Accidence Commenc’t Grammar. As John Beale wrote to his friend John Evelyn on 24 December 1670, Milton was ‘now abroad again, in prose and in verse, epic and dramatic’.
Around him, however, the country seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, all sense of direction lost. Charles II sank to a new low in popularity when his treaty with France was eventually made public in December 1670. He would have been even less popular if the secret clause in which the King admitted his conversion to Catholicism had been known. For a while, the treaty seemed to offer new hope for toleration, both of Roman Catholics (perhaps unsurprising, given the King’s sympathies) and of Nonconformists. Eventually, in March 1672, a Declaration of Indulgence for Catholics and Nonconformists was announced. At the same time, the country renewed its war with Holland. Again the English would be defeated in battle, and only a year after the Declaration of Indulgence, Parliament would push through a Test Act that reversed the previous small steps towards toleration, excluding all those who were not members of the Church of England from holding public office.
The King’s position was beginning to look precarious. His own brother, James, Lord High Admiral, admitted that he was a Roman Catholic and thus, under the terms of the Test Act, was deemed not fit for office. Public hostility to the Anglo-French alliance, seen as a pretext for the establishment of Catholicism in England, reached a new peak. Pamphlets of the time linked France, Popery and Tyranny in a terrifying trinity.14 Like the Earl of Clarendon before him, James, Duke of York had to be sacrificed to protect the King. He resigned from office in June and then married a Catholic princess in September 1673, in a confirmation of his people’s worst fears. James was succeeded as naval commander by Prince Rupert, the old Royalist Civil War commander. Rupert was equally unsuccessful in his military efforts but blamed factions at court and the King’s interference for his defeat. When even Rupert moved into opposition to the Stuart monarchy, if not monarchy itself, then things were certainly serious. (His sister Sophia, married to the Protestant Elector of Hanover, would be the mother of the future George I.) The political crisis showed no signs of abating, with stormy parliamentary sessions in the autumn and winter of 1673 and 1674 seeking to limit the power of any future Catholic monarch, and the eventual brokering of the Treaty of Westminster with the Dutch in February 1674.
John Milton’s one new work from this period was the tract Of True Religion, published in 1673.15 It was his last original prose work. The title page was soberly functional but also packed with eye-catching terms of which POPERY was the most boldly capitalised. Of True Religion states Milton’s basic commitment to free speech and tolerance in religion. This short tract has been seen by critics as one of his most accomplished performances in prose, both politically canny and emotionally calm, a work seeking for consensus, demonstrating, according to the Milton scholar Martin Dzelzainis, ‘a renewed and even enhanced ability to match his rhetoric to political realities’. Yet, ‘to judge from the lack of response at the time … [it] might as well never have been published.’16
Why did it not have any impact? Dzelzainis offers an intriguing answer. At a time when there were some very strange alliances being formed, for example between committed Catholics such as the Earl of Castlemaine (husband to Charles II’s mistress Barbara Villiers) and Nonconformists, who, Castlemaine claimed, at least looked on Catholics ‘as Englishmen, and would not have us persecuted for religion’, there were some figures who remained beyond the pale. John Milton was one of those figures, and Castlemaine for one showed unremitting hostility towards him. Milton’s previous track record, in politics and religion, could not be forgotten. ‘The somewhat depressing conclusion,’ writes Dzelzainis, ‘is that however much ingenuity Milton expended in contriving formulas that were acceptable to many and offensive to few, there was in truth no form of words which would allow him to break through the bonds of his own reputation.’ The manner in which his name was invoked at this period suggested that he had assumed an iconic status that got in the way of anything he might still have to say.
If the image of Milton the Divorcer and Milton the Regicide cast the longest shadows in these years of restored monarchy, another image refused to fade: Milton the Sodomite. When Richard Leigh launched a sustained, detailed and vituperative attack on Andrew Marvell, focusing on Marvell’s sexuality, Milton was caught in the cross-fire.17 Leigh’s The Transproser Rehears’d (1673) makes allegations about the homosexual activities of ‘Nol’s Latin Pay two clerks’ – that is, Oliver Cromwell’s Latin secretaries, Milton and Marvell. Marvell is a ‘gelding’, Milton a ‘stallion’, and both are ‘turn’d pure Italian’ (the latter shorthand for sexual perversion). The issue, of course, was not whether ‘Milton sodomized Marvell in the office of the Latin secretary’, in the words of the scholar Paul Hammond (who suggests this is an extremely unlikely scenario), but that in the climate of the 1670s, sexual preference could be used, explicitly, to attack both men.
Yet alongside the vilification, which in the short term may have suppressed the impact of Milton’s views, there existed a kind of celebrity, which in the long term would serve to neutralise, far more effectively, his powerful political and religious vision. Famous poets such as Edmund Waller and John Dryden visited Milton; bishops visited him; it was even rumoured that the King’s brother, James, Duke of York, visited him. At the same time, the Crown refused a licence for the publication of his Letters of State from the 1650s.
Milton himself to some extent fuelled this growing iconic status with a series of publications that look rather like a Complete Works, if an apparently politically neutered Complete Works. In addition to the works on language and logic, resuscitated from the 1640s, he republished his 1645 poems late in 1673 with some additions. The sonnets he had written to prominent republican figures did not, however, make it into print. Although his Letters of State could not be published, his personal correspondence could be, as well as some of his Latin poetry, with Epistolae Familiares (Personal Letters) and Prolusions appearing in 1674, the ‘familiar’ or personal letters advertised for sale for Is in a catalogue of May of that year. By the end of 1674, as the catalogues informed them, readers could buy a wide range of Milton’s works, from his History to his Samson, from his personal letters to his Latin primer.
This process culminated in the publication of the second edition of Paradise Lost in 1674. The work had been transformed in appearance from its original publication seven years earlier. First, the physical size of the book had changed from a quarto to an octavo (a far more respectable format). The ten books of the original had been changed to twelve, with the simple expedient of dividing up Book VII and Book X, the two longest books from the earlier edition. Paradise Lost was thus now aligned with the twelve-book Classical epics it sought to surpass. The new edition cost 3s and came complete with commendatory poems from Andrew Marvell and one ‘SB’, probably Samuel Barrow, the court physician. There was even a frontispiece portrait.
This run of publications masked the fact that Milton was not writing anything new. A textbook on logic that appeared in May 1672, in itself a work of little originality, had been prepared perhaps thirty years earlier. It may have been a success (it was reissued the following year), but it hardly marked a new phase in Milton’s writing career. With all of his major works, and many of his minor ones, in print, he had done what he could as a writer. There was no energy to do more.
The prevalent image of Milton at this time in biographies is of a triumphantly peaceful old age, of serenity rather than exhaustion. This sanitised image of a benign elderly figure, the Grand Old Man of Letters, was initiated by the early biographers: ‘… he would be cheerful even in his gout-fits and sing,’ writes one commentator, or he was ‘delightful company, the life of the conversation’, full of ‘unaffected cheerfulness and civility’.18 Perhaps.
The reality was that Milton spent his final year in intense and increasing pain, culminating, most probably, in death from kidney failure.19 Contemporaries described his illness as gout: if the causes of the disease are still not understood today, it is unsurprising that seventeenth-century medical thinkers struggled to explain the condition. What was well known was its agonies. Thomas Sydenham, a sufferer, described a typical episode:
The patient goes to bed and sleeps quietly till about two in the morning, when he is awakened by a pain which usually seizes the great toe, but sometimes the heel, the calf of the leg or the ankle. The pain resembles that of a dislocated bone … and this is immediately succeeded by a chillness, shivering and slight fever.20
The pain increases with every hour, becoming ‘so exquisitely painful as not to endure the weight of clothes nor the shaking of the room from a person’s walking briskly therein’. Then, about twenty-four hours after the onset of the attack, there is relief, the patient ‘being now in a breathing sweat he falls asleep, and upon waking finds the pain much abated, and the part affected to be then swollen’.21
Sydenham, a medical practitioner himself, went on to suggest that some of the more violent treatments were so dangerous that ‘most of those who are supposed to perish of the gout are rather destroyed by wrong management than by the disease itself Some of the treatments do sound unpleasant if not horrific, based as they were on purging the body, by various means, of the bad humours thought to cause the illness. Thus copious blood-letting, forced vomiting, sweating and purging were all common, supplemented by other cures such as spirits of salts – that is, hydrochloric acid – developed by a professor at Oxford, and ‘puppy boiled up with cucumber, rue and juniper’ (un-attributed). Most commentators emphasised the importance of diet, Sydenham advocating a barley water that he referred to as his ‘diet-drink’. As with almost all illnesses, moderation in diet was seen as vital but particularly so in the case of gout, where intemperate living, overindulgence, luxury and venery were condemned. Those leading this kind of sinful life would have ‘hope for no health by the use of medicines’.
Set in this context, gout was a somewhat embarrassing illness for a man of ostentatiously moderate habits such as John Milton, remembered by his granddaughter (recounting the words of her mother) as very ‘temperate in his eating and drinking, but what he had he always loved to have of the best’. There were, however, some psychological compensations. Gout was at least a thoroughly masculine illness, the vast majority of sufferers being men. More importantly, there existed the view, still current in the early twentieth century, that gout occurred often in ‘men of such pre-eminent intellectual ability, that it is impossible not to regard it as having a real association with such ability’.22 It was a consolation to Thomas Sydenham for one that ‘kings, princes, generals, admirals, philosophers and several other great men have thus lived and died.’23
Gout may have been a sign of Milton’s greatness, but it was excruciatingly painful, disabling and, above all, made him even more reliant on his young wife, Betty. All this exacerbated the potential humiliations of old age, particularly for a man now aged sixty-six in a society in which the elderly were viewed as returning to childhood, even to infancy in their dotage.
John’s younger brother Christopher was also growing old but was protected from many of old age’s challenges by wealth, status and a sense of dynasty. He had been made a Reader at the Inner Temple (the most important legal college of its time) – a great honour and the occasion of a huge feast, the rituals accompanying the post having been triumphantly re-established with the return of monarchy after some years’ interruption.24 His duties were not onerous, and Christopher could spend most of his time in Suffolk, where, in 1671, his was named as one of the gentry families. Life had been equally kind to Milton’s brother-in-law Thomas Agar. By the time of his death in November 1673, he was Deputy Clerk of the Crown Office in Chancery. Agar would be succeeded in his post by one of Christopher Milton’s sons, Thomas. Agar left £200 to his Royalist ‘son-in-law’ (what we would call a stepson) Edward Phillips but nothing to the more anti-establishment John Phillips. The Royalists in the extended Milton family were doing well for themselves, and by each other. John Milton, in contrast, remained in his small house in the heart of the City of London, his only son long dead, his daughters gone, his library sold.