CPW = Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1953–82.
Life Records = The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1949–58
Shorter Poems = John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, second edn, Longman, London 1997
Paradise Lost (Fowler) = John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, second edn, Longman, London, 1998
N.B. John Milton’s earliest poetry can be found in Shorter Poems.
1. See Scott Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538–1700, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 17. Many a John became Jack. While William Shakespeare can become Will in our world, and perhaps could in his own, it seems that John Milton never had, and never can have, that kind of familiarity applied to him.
2. Ellen (or Helen) Jeffreys was buried on 26 February 1611.
3. These early biographies are helpfully collected in a volume edited by Helen Darbi-shire, The Early Lives of John Milton, Constable, London, 1932, which includes a life written by one of Milton’s nephews, Edward Phillips; another by one of his friends (Cyriack Skinner most probably, rather than John Phillips as suggested by Darbi-shire); and other biographical materials. None of these early biographies are completely reliable. Milton’s nephew, for example, even gets the year of his uncle’s birth wrong: Early Lives, p. 50. For the references to Sara Milton, see Edward Phillips, in Early Lives, p. 52; John Toland, in Early Lives, p. 85; John Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secundo (Second Defence), 1654, CPW IV (I) 612.
4. Richard Milton, baby John’s grandfather, was a respectable churchwarden in the Church of England in 1582 but was excommunicated in the very same year. In 1600 and then again in 1601 he was fined £60 for three months of non-attendance.
5. The Brome family house, for example, just down the road at Holton, south-east of Oxford, and nearby Waterperry House were both operating as Jesuit safe houses.
6. Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1460–1700, Longman, London, 1984, p. 171.
7. See Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, for this and many other details of John Milton’s life.
8. Milton, Second Oefence, CPW IV (I) 612. As was normal, families merged in fluid ways. At the death of his wife Sara’s father, and in the absence of brothers, John Milton became in effect the head of the Jeffreys family. He, for example, represented his mother-in-law in the negotiations over the marriage of her other daughter, Margaret, in 1602.
9. One early biographer records that he wrote ‘an In Nomine of Forty Parts: for which he was rewarded with a Gold Medal and Chain by a Polish Prince, to whom he presented it’ (Edward Phillips, in Early Lives, p. 51).
10. See A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds, London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, Longman, London, 1986, p. 142 passim.
11. David Cressy Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 141. Cressy has been an indispensable source of information on family life in the period.
12. Ibid., esp. pp. 97, 106–7, 131.
13. Skinner’s biography, in Early Lives, p. 18.
14. Aubrey’s biographical notes, in Early Lives, p. 10.
15. Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (I) 612.
16. Tradition has it that the artist was the up-and-coming twenty-five-year-old Flemish painter Cornelius Janssen. Whether he did the portrait or not, Janssen was very much a London painter, known variously as Johnson, Jensen and Janssen in this cultural melting pot of a city. He would go on to be patronised by Royalty, becoming the portrait painter for the country-house set until eclipsed by Van Dyck.
17. A legal document of 1626 has Anne’s signature but only her mother-in-law’s mark.
18. The vast majority of events in John Milton’s life are under-documented, leading to heated debates among Miltonists over both major and minor issues. For a sense of the debate about Thomas Young’s tutoring, for example, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 5. Lewalski is an excellent first stop for many, though not all, of the biographical debates. See also Gordon Campbell’s revised edition of William Riley Parker’s Milton: A Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, which offers superbly detailed references enabling readers to make up their minds about the biographical evidence.
19. Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Pazen, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 96ff.
20. Thomas Warton, The Life of Sir Thomas Pope, London, 1772, pp. 73–4.
21. John Milton, Latin Writings: A Selection, ed. and trans. John K. Hale, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1998, p. 3. Hale’s translations and notes have been essential to my understanding of Milton as Latinist.
22. See Paul Hammond, ‘Classical Texts: Translations and Transformations’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 143.
23. Pierces supererogation, or, A new prayse of the old asse, a preparatiue to certaine larger discourses, 1593, sig. B4v. The terms Britain and England can be confusing. The title ‘Great Britain’ had come into use only after 1603, when the Scottish King James VI became the English King James I, uniting under one person’s rule Scotland, Wales and England. Often, Milton writes of himself as an Englishman, and addresses or speaks for ‘the English people’. At times, however, he turns his attention to ‘Britain’ as a political and historical entity, but he did not refer to himself as British.
24. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was argued that before a truly original Czech literature could be created, authors would have to master ‘the reading and translating of excellent books’. This was not mere passive submission to cultural impulses from abroad: instead, translation of great works from other cultures was ‘viewed as an active, even aggressive act, an appropriation of foreign cultural values’. See Vladimir Macura’s essay in Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevre, eds, Translation, History, Culture, Pinter, London, 1995, pp. 68–9.
25. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 1642, CPW I 889–90.
26. Alexandra Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, p. 23.
27. Fiston, School of Good Manners, sig. C2v-C3r, quoted in Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 102.
28. Quoted in Shepard, Manhood, p. 56.
29. Epigram 60, 11. 1–13, in Guy Lee, ed. and trans., The Poems of Catullus, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 49.
30. Lewalski, Milton, p. 9, argues that ‘Diodati’s precocious accomplishment probably contributed to Milton’s anxieties about his tardiness in fulfilling his obvious promise’, and Christopher Hill notes that the Diodati family could be seen as a symbol of international Protestantism, in Milton and the English Revolution, Faber, London, 1977, pp. 30–31.
31. Edward Phillips’s family was from Shrewsbury, yet another example of the magnetic pull of London. In the event of her husband’s death, Anne would receive as her jointure two tenements in Shrewsbury, in Milk Street and Mardall, and four others in Dog Lane, plus yet another unspecified building. The property could only be used if her husband died during her natural life.
N.B. Milton’s early Latin poems can be found in Shorter Poems. The World’s Classics edition (John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991) has the Latin and English on facing pages. John Milton, Latin Writings: A Selection, ed. and trans. John K. Hale, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1998, has a new translation of Elegy IV to Thomas Young
1. Quoted in The Atlas of Historic Towns, 3 vols, Scolar Press, London, 1975, vol. II, p. 20.
2. Alexandra Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 223–6.
3. I have drawn heavily on John K. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing in the Genres 1626–1632, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, 2005, in this chapter and elsewhere. The quotations in the following paragraphs come from pp. 1–4.
4. Some of these Latin exercises (prolusions) would be published in the last year of Milton’s life. They are printed in CPW I 218–306.
5. Richard J DuRocher, Milton and Ovid, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1985, p. 43.
6. The poem, which begins ‘Siccine tentasti caelo…’, can be found in Shorter Poems, p. 36.
7. See Shepard, Manhood, p. 120.
8. Quoted in ibid., p. 110.
9. Leo Miller argues that the Prolusions act as a record of John’s clash with his tutor, William Chappell, and argues strongly for a date of spring 1627 for the rustication, although it could have occurred the previous year. See ‘Milton’s Clash with Chappell: A Suggested Reconstruction’, Milton Quarterly 14 (1980), pp. 77–87.
10. Skinner biography, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of John Milton, Constable, London, 1932, pp. 18–19.
11. An Apology against a Pamphlet, 1642, CPW I 923.
12. Aubrey’s biographical notes, in Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 10.
13. See Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, third edn, Pearson, Harlow, 2003, pp. 60–61 for further details.
14. Records of St Botolph’s parish, in Thomas R. Forbes, ‘By What Disease or Casualty: The Changing Face of Death in London’, in Charles Webster, ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 133–4.
15. These records are unreliable at times, not only because of the women’s lack of medical knowledge (although it is to be doubted that many professional medical practitioners knew better) but also because they could be bribed to report incorrectly. It was in the family’s interest to conceal a plague death, since the family of any victim was quarantined: no plague, no quarantine.
16. The child is not named. If it is indeed a response to a niece’s death, it may be Anne Phillips, who was buried on 22 January 1628.
17. This is Carey’s translation (p. 54); the phrase might be translated more precisely as ‘luxuriously weeping’.
18. Hale, Cambridge Latin, p. 11.
19. The correspondence between John and Charles can be found in CPW I 307ff. The poem, Elegy I, takes the form of a verse letter to Charles.
20. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 114–15.
21. Circe turned men into swine, and Milton, like the Greek hero Odysseus, is protected by the herb ‘moly’.
22. Shepard, Manhood, pp. 9, 30.
23. Bryson, Civility p. 152.
24. Roger Ascham, The Whole Works, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols, J. R. Smith, London, 1864–5, vol. III, p. 106.
25. Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing Longman, London, 2001, p. 27.
26. Shepard, Manhood, pp. 122ff
N.B. The early English and Latin poems can be found in Shorter Poems. Prolusion VI can be found in John K. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing in the Genres 1626–1632, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, AZ, 2005.
1. Matthew Wren (Master of Peterhouse) to Archbishop Laud, State Papers Domestic 1627 86.88.
2. Although the suspension officially lasted for only two lectures, it seems that Dorislaus never lectured again. See John Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution 1626–1688, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1990, p. 13.
3. 6 September 1628, State Papers Domestic 1628 116.56.
4. A poem in Greek by Milton may allude to Gill, imagined as a philosopher condemned to death by an ignorant King. The philosopher claims that if he is killed, the King will regret the act and realise, too late, that he has deprived his ‘city of a bulwark of such renown’. If it was a response to Gill’s predicament, then its very opacity suggests that Milton was either unwilling or unable to express any direct opinion.
5. CPW I 314.
6. Hale, Cambridge Latin, p. 106.
7. Salting itself crossed the Atlantic quite early, and there were saltings recorded at Syracuse, NY, until 1919.
8. In a contemporary pornographic work, for example, a woman exclaims, speaking of language and sex, ‘Salsam rem! nam salsa seminis vis’ (This is salty stuff, for the virtue of semen is salty). This reference comes from James Grantham Turner, ‘Milton Among the Libertines’, in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds, Milton, Rights and Libertines’, Peter Lang, Bern, 2007, p. 450. I am indebted to Turner for much of the material on sales.
9. Turner, ‘Milton Among the Libertines’, p. 449. John Hale is less certain of the linguistic interconnection between sales and the salt of semen. In a private communication he points out that words such as ‘salax’ and ‘salacitas’ derive from the word ‘salio’, to leap.
10. Aubrey’s notes, in Early Lives, p. 6. The word fair now, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is used almost exclusively of women (epitomised in the phrase ‘the fair sex’), and, although in Milton’s time the term could be used to describe men and women, its primary referent was beauty in women. The secondary meaning was to describe something clean, pure and unspoiled.
11. The Onslow Portrait is named for the man who bought the picture from John’s widow many years later. The original is lost, but a later copy is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The portrait is typical of its time, the face carefully painted over a starched white collar, the head slightly misaligned with the shoulders.
12. New translation by Hale, in Cambridge Latin, p. 283.
13. Hale, Cambridge Latin, p. 273.
14. Ibid., p. ix.
15. ‘Gratia sola di su gil vaglia, inanti / Che’l disio amoroso al cuor s’invecchi.’
16. I am grateful to Dr Manuele Gragnolati of the University of Oxford for his advice concerning this translation.
17. Translation by Hale, in Cambridge Latin, p. 267.
18. The copy of Giovanni della Casas Rime e Prose (1563) that John purchased in December 1629 survives in the New York Public Library, complete with marginal notes and text corrections in Milton’s hand. These bear witness to the thoroughness of his reading, his assiduity in learning the language, and his dedication to acquiring the craft of writing poetry in it.
19. The translation can be found in CPW I 326. The original Latin is printed in The Works of John Milton, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1936, p. 24.
20. I am grateful to David Cunnington for this point, and in general for his expert help with the Latin writings.
21. The term sodomite was not applied exclusively to male/male sex but also to acts between men and women, and between men and animals. In Milton’s time, there was little or no pressure for someone to define for himself what his sexuality was in any modern sense, since homosexuality, or sodomy, was regarded as an act, not a category of identity. Overall, it was a loose term: John Donne would make a casual conflation of all kinds of sexual indecency, talking of those who love ‘whores, who boys, and who goats’. Debauchery was the key idea. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, rev. edn, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1995, p. 79 passim.
22. Milton scholars who do acknowledge the presence of homoerotic elements in his writing tend to view them as one of many literary voices adopted by the young poet, or as an emotional safety valve, a way of expressing and exploring feelings upon which he would never act. There are those who have denied any suggestion of homosexuality, in John or his poetry, conscious that ‘sodomy’ was a sin punishable by death and that Milton himself was vociferous in the defence of the chaste life. And, predictably, there are generations of critics and biographers who have refused even to address the issue. The notes, for example, to the Longman edition of the poetry resolutely avoid glossing even the least contentious references to homoerotic literature.
23. Charles had obviously apologised for the quality of his poems, making the excuse that he had been having such a good time with his friends. Critics have been dismissive of Diodati’s abilities as a poet, based on a reading of his one surviving Latin verse, so it was probably for other reasons than his poetic talent that John chose to share this vision of himself with Charles. See Hale, Cambridge Latin, p. 152.
24. Translation from CPW I 336. The two surviving Greek letters are in the British Library, Add MS 5016. The Greek originals can be found in Works, vol. XII, pp. 292–4. The Columbia translation has Charles ‘long for’ John’s ‘society’ and look forward to ‘learned and philosophical discourse’. The great Marxist historian of the seventeenth century, Christopher Hill, has written, refreshingly directly, that Milton clearly adored Diodati more than he ever adored any human being except possibly his second wife; see Milton and the English Revolution, Faber, London, 1977, p. 31.
25. Both men enjoyed making teasing references to homosexual or effeminate figures, making the joke, let alone the intention, difficult to recover now. When Charles tells John to ‘be joyous – though not in the fashion of Sardanapalus in Cilicia (Soli)’, he seems to be warning John against imitating a particular seventh-century BC Assyrian King known for his effeminacy and voluptuousness. This is all very well, if a little strange, given the fact that John, unlike Charles, seems everywhere else in his writing to advocate the strictest chastity, but then Charles follows this up by suggesting that if John were with him, he ‘would be happier than the King of Persia’, a historical figure known for his effeminacy and good living. See the translation in CPW I 337.
26. When John writes that he rushed to find John in his rooms in London, the word he uses is cellam. This has traditionally been translated as ‘crib’, but the word can be used to mean a room in a brothel. John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1993, p. 57.
27. Ibid., p. 125.
28. CPW I 337 has ‘Could I but add to these a good companion, learned and initiate, I would be happier than the King of Persia’. Bruce Boehrer, ‘Animal Love in Milton: The Case of Epitaphium Damonis’, English Literary History, 70 (2003), pp. 787–812. Boehrer adds ‘cut out from the herd’, p. 803.
29. The evidence suggests that illicit sexual contact with women was possible. Indeed, marriages were sometimes made, much to the horror of the King, who denounced scholars making marriage ‘with women of mean estate and of no good fame’. Rather predictably, the women involved bore the blame, painted as seducers of innocent Cambridge students. See Alexandra Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 119–20.
30. John Aubrey notes, At Geneva he contracted a great friendship with Carolo Diodati.’ He then crosses this through, and substitutes ‘the learned Dr Diodati of Geneva’, replacing Charles with his uncle, and missing completely the fact that Charles and John went to school together in London (Darbishire, ed., Early Lives, p. 2). In recent years, A. N. Wilson has acknowledged the significance of the relationship. For Wilson, Diodati was Milton’s ‘great love’, but the emotions involved are consigned to the ‘romantic attachments of adolescence’; see The Life of John Milton, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, pp. 15, 21.
31. John’s nephew would write that his uncle’s early poems ‘contain a Poetical Genius scarce to be parallel’d by any English writer’; see Darbishire, ed., Early Lives, p. 54.
32. An Apology against a Pamphlet, CPW I 890.
N.B. The poems ‘On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, and the Maske at Ludlow are all in Shorter Poems, and appear in almost all collections of Milton’s poetry. These works are available on line at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton, an excellent internet resource.
1. John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2004, offers a superbly detailed account of key members of John Milton’s family, including his brother Christopher, his nephews John and Edward Phillips, and his brother-in-law, Thomas Agar. I do not, however, always come to similar conclusions about the evidence.
2. Shawcross, Arms of the Family p. 58 passim.
3. It seems likely that little Anne Agar died a few years after her father’s remarriage, since when Anne Milton Phillips Agar gave birth to a daughter in 1636, she was named Anne, presumably to honour her dead stepsister as much as her mother. This was a common practice at the time.
4. Horton was then in Buckinghamshire and is now in Berkshire, close to Heathrow Airport. A lovely little pamphlet entitled Horton Parish Bucks A Short History of [sic], published before the Second World War, describes Horton as ‘a peaceful village, shadowed by large trees, and having its ancient calm apparently undisturbed by the rush of modern life, despite the fact that an omnibus route now passes through.’
5. John Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 613–14.
6. Edward Phillips and John Toland, in Darbishire, ed., Early Lives, pp. 66, 88.
7. CPW I 319–21.
8. This remarkable manuscript (the Trinity Manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge R. 3. 4. contains handwritten copies of many of Milton’s early poems, and includes his revisions. The Scolar Press have produced a facsimile (1972).
9. The key documents are detailed in Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997.
10. See www.sph.org for the history of the church.
11. There is even a rare hint of toleration of Roman Catholicism. In 1631, John wrote an epitaph for the Marchioness of Winchester, a member of the old Catholic aristocracy.
12. The Reason of Church-Governement Urg’d against Prelaty CPW I 822.
13. The New Birth: or, A treatise of Regeneration, delivered in certaine sermons, London, 1618, pp. 158–9.
14. Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 11.
15. Travellers would set out from London near Hyde Park Corner, and then journey through Kensington, Hammersmith, Turnham Green, Brentford and Hounslow, stopping to ‘bait’ at Colnbrook before heading on further west, to Maidenhead, Reading and beyond.
16. As an editor of Classical Greek, Milton is superb and, astonishingly, still followed by today’s editors of Euripides. See John K. Hale, ‘Milton’s Euripides Marginalia’, Milton Studies 27 (1991), pp. 23–33.
17. The music written by Henry Lawes for the entertainment, together with four additional songs, has survived in a manuscript now at the British Library, Add MS 11518. In this manuscript the date for the performance is given incorrectly as October 1634.
18. Cedric Brown, John Milton: A Literary Life, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 45ff.
19. It is possible that John’s father’s connections with the London music world, and his business dealings with the Egerton family, helped to secure the commission for his son.
20. In practice the Great Hall at Whitehall became more of a Royal Presence Chamber for the formal reception of visiting dignitaries. Rubens’s resplendent ceiling, painted in 1636, ensured that the room could not be used for masques because the ‘ceiling richly adorned … might suffer by the smoke of many lights.’ See Simon Thurley Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments 1240–1698, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999, pp. 82–97.
21. Tempe Restore A masque presented by the Queene, and foureteene ladies, to the Kings Majestie at Whitehall on Shrove-Tuesday 1631, London, 1631, sig. A2.
22. John Summerson, Inigo Jones, second rev. edn, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, London and New Haven, CT, 2000, p. 105.
23. The fight went on. Jonson would caricature Jones in his Tale of a Tub (c. 1633) as an Islington cooper (barrel-maker) called In-and-in Medlay. Later, Jonson would lampoon Jones’s ambitions for a peerage in a poem, ‘To Inigo Marquess Would Be’.
24. For further insight into the masque form, see David Lindley ed., The Court Masque, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, and Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1981.
25. Mickle, meaning ‘great’, was an archaic word even in Milton’s time, and typical of the language of Edmund Spenser, an important influence on John’s poetry through the 1620s and 1630s.
26. William Prynne, ‘To the Christian Reader’, in Histrio-mastix. The Players scourge, or, actors tragaedie, divided into two parts, London, 1633, sig. **6v, note.
27. James Sutherland, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, p. 42.
28. There are clear verbal echoes of Tempe Resto’d (in which a male character speaks the following lines):
Tis not her Rod, her Philters, nor her Herbs
(Though strong in Magic) that can bound men’s minds
And make them prisoners, where there is no wall.
It is consent that makes a perfect Slave. (p. 5)
29. I have drawn heavily on Annabel Patterson’s thoughtful response to the Maske, ‘Milton and Ideological Constraint’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds, ‘The Muses Common-weal: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO, 1998.
30. The very vagueness of ‘haemony’ leaves plenty of room for interpretations. It has been argued that the ‘certain shepherd lad’ who knew about haemony refers to Charles Diodati. Others, more convincingly, argue that haemony figures the word of God. Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested the word came from haema-oinos, ‘blood-wine’, and that the herb represents the blood of Christ.
31. Catherine Belsey John Milton: Language, Gender, Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988, p. 46.
32. From a work almost definitely read by Milton, Puteanas’ Comus, Sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria: Sommum (or The Cimmerian Banquet: A Dream), 1608. See Ross Leasure, ‘Milton’s Queer Choice: Comus at Castlehaven’, Milton Quarterly 36 (2002), pp. 65ff.
33. The sons of Belial demand sex with a young man sheltering in an older man’s house. Instead the older man offers up his concubine, who is subjected to gang rape, and then cut up into pieces by her master. To include the boys in the threat to chastity indicates, not for the last time in his work, Milton’s daring approach to sexual matters.
34. Two different manuscripts survive: the Bridgewater and the Trinity, the former shorter than the latter. The published version of 1645 has an expanded epilogue and a long speech by the Lady on ‘the serious doctrine of virginity’ (1. 786), together with Comus’ reaction to this speech. There is some debate as to which version is closest to the actual performance at Ludlow (probably the Bridgewater Manuscript) and which version is closest to Milton’s own vision of the work (probably the 1645 printed edition).
35. Only one other aristocratic entertainment by Milton survives, and it is unclear whether it was commissioned before or after the Maske at Ludlow. The piece was written for the Dowager Countess of Derby at her country estate, Harefield, and it was there that the victims of Mervin Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, were cared for. The Countess was not only grandmother to the children who performed at the masque in Ludlow but also mother to the wife, and grandmother to the daughter Touchet raped. See Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 58; also see p. 563, n. 20 for an interpretation of the connection which emphasises the Dowager Duchess’s Protestant agenda.
N.B. The letters to and from Charles Diodati can be found in CPW, while the Greek originals can be found in The Works of John Milton, 18 vols, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1936, vol. XII, pp. 292–4. Lycidas is in Shorter Poems, online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton and printed in most editions of Milton’s poetry.
1. See Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 82–3.
2. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, CPW II 271.
3. The Latin originals can be found in Works, vol. XII, pp. 18–30.1 follow the translation in CPW I. The quotation here is on p. 323.
4. Letter of 1637, CPW I 326.
5. It seems absurd, as some have done, to attempt to reassure a modern readership that there was nothing improper in the relationship between the two men. Peter Levi, for example, writing of Epitaphmm Damoms (Elegy for Damon), writes that ‘a biographer is bound to note the first touch, however slight, of that conventional homoeroticism for which pastoral poetry in the period was famous. It is innocent enough, as their lives obviously were …’; see Eden Renewed: The Public and Private Life of John Milton, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996, p. 113. An interesting version of this attitude is the argument that the relationship cannot have been homosexual, since if it had been, Milton would have been courageous enough to act upon his feelings and announce them to the world. See William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, p. 49, a fascinating and controversial book that makes provocative connections (for example, between Martin Luther’s ‘secret furious inviolacy’ and that of Milton, p. 44) and offers a sophisticated Freudian analysis of Milton’s ‘feminine identification in the oedipal context’, p. 49.
6. CPW I 328.
7. Shawcross is brilliant and controversial in his translation of this letter, finding puns where others fear even to look for them. ‘Contention’ is both ‘argument’ and ‘sexual play’. The Latin word partibus refers to both the genitals and Milton’s excuses. Literary correspondence (consuetudine) and consuevims (‘chat’) are both also sexual intercourse. Diodati’s friends are erudituli, ‘young learned people’, but also those experienced in love. See John Milton: The Self and the World, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1993, pp. 57–8.
8. My thanks to David Cunnington for this point.
9. CPW I 369.
10. Bearing in mind that John’s main home was in Horton, his comment that he is looking for ‘wherever there is a pleasant and shady walk; for that dwelling will be more satisfactory, both for companionship, if I wish to remain at home, and as a more suitable headquarters, if I choose to venture forth. Where I am now, as you know, I live in obscurity and cramped quarters’ (CPW I 327) appears rather strange. Presumably there were shady walks aplenty in the countryside of Horton, so what was the special appeal of a place in London among lawyers? Why did John always seek the shady walks? And what kind of companionship was he seeking? Did he literally mean venturing forth – that is, going out in public – or was he talking in more metaphorical terms, about starting a career? And why were his quarters in Horton (if that was what he was referring to) ‘cramped’ and obscure? As is often the case, Milton’s Latin phrases remain tantalisingly elusive.
11. CPW I 327 has ‘So help me God, an immortality of fame’. I am grateful to David Cunnington for his advice on the translation.
12. The date of the poem is much disputed. It is linked with the strange double letter to an unknown friend, and therefore to John’s early years at Horton. There is no firm evidence.
13. ‘Milton’s Crises’, Listener, 19 December 1968, p. 829.
14. Indeed, there is no significant performance history for the work.
15. Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at several times, 1645, pp. 69–70.
16. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 67.
17. Theocritus, Idylls, trans. Anthony Verity, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, p. vii.
18. The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, p. 31.
19. Lewalski, Milton, p. 64. Earlier biographers, such as the eminent and highly enjoyable David Masson, were happy to extrapolate from small shreds of village hearsay the vision of John Milton walking through the village with the local squire’s children at his heels; see The Life of John Milton, 7 vols, Macmillan, London, 1881–95, vol. I, p. 556. At the time of Masson’s biography, it was not known that the Miltons had previously lived in Hammersmith.
20. Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books, second edn, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1965, p. 197.
21. State Papers Domestic 1636–7 344.40.1
22. John Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 614.
23. Wotton to Milton, 13 April 1638, CPW I 340–43.
N.B. Many of the quotations in this chapter come from Milton’s Second Defence of the English People (1654), printed in CPW and online (without annotation) at http://www.constitution.org/milton/second_defence.htm.
1. France under Louis XIII looked even more of an absolute monarchy than the regime of Charles I. Cardinal Richelieu, the King’s chief minister, was viciously repressive of French Protestants, known as Huguenots. It had been Richelieu’s forces which had seen off the ill-fated Duke of Buckingham’s expeditions back in the 1620s.
2. Wotton to Milton, 13 April 1638, CPW I 342.
3. It has been estimated that in any given year the hospitals of Venice cared for 4,000 ‘perpetual poor’ or nearly 3 per cent of the city’s population, and the figure was similar in Florence.
4. John Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 615–17.
5. John A. Marino, ed., Early Modern Italy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 218–24. See also Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 91, for some helpful context.
6. Brendan Dooley ‘The Public Sphere and the Organisation of Knowledge’, Marino, Early Modern Italy, pp. 209–28.
7. For a sceptical review of the evidence, see George F Butler, ‘Milton’s Meeting with Galileo: A “Reconsideration”’, Milton Quarterly, 39 (2005), pp. 132ff.
8. See Thomas James Dandelet, Spanish Rome 1600–1700, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 2001, p. 195.
9. See Joseph Connors, A Copy of Borromini’s S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Gubbio’, Burlington Magazine, 137 (1995), p. 588.
10. See Michael O’Connell’s essay, in Mario A. Di Cesare, ed., Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Binghampton, NY, 1991, pp. 224–7.
11. CPW IV (1) 617.
12. Ibid., 618.
13. A sign of the times became apparent the following year when the most famous bandit, Giulio Pezzola, was given lodging by the Spanish ambassador when he went to Rome.
14. Anthony Low, ‘Mansus: In Its Context’, Milton Studies 19 (1984), pp. 105–26.
15. Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 618.
16. Ibid., 619. As the translators point out, ‘Milton well knew the claims to orthodoxy asserted by the pope, and he was fully aware of the fact that he was a guest in the one city where those claims were pre-eminently accepted.’ In asserting that orthodoxy lay elsewhere than Rome, Milton was being highly contentious.
17. It was probably the comic opera Chi soffre speri, written by Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, who would later become Pope Clement IX, with music by Virgilio Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzuoli, and stage design by Bernini, the most celebrated designer in Rome.
18. Milton to Lukas Holste, 1639, CPW I 334.
19. Ad Salsillum poetam Romanum aegrotantem. Scazontes (Scazons Addressed to Salzilli, a Roman Poet, When He Was Ill), in Shorter Poems, p. 262.
20. Salzilli’s praise was inserted into the preface to the collection of his Latin poems published in 1645.
21. Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 609.
22. Ibid., 619.
23. Ibid.
24. With trade came empire, bringing its own problems. Venice struggled to maintain its stranglehold on the coastal regions of Crete, Dalmatia and the Ionian islands, while day by day, pirates harried the Venetian ships sailing through the Adriatic and beyond.
25. It was in Venice that the most notorious libertine of his generation, Ferrante Pallavicino, author of numerous novels of sex and blasphemy, plied his trade. Pallavicino would be punished for his sins but not in Venice. He was executed in Avignon in 1644.
26. The chapel on the estate is equally remarkable. The elegant eroticism of the image on the exterior speaks more of urbanitas and sales than it does of conventional piety.
27. Giovanni Diodati secretly revisited his native Italy several times and travelled to Holland and England in the Protestant cause. He had collaborated closely with the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton (who of course had been instrumental in helping John get to Italy in the first place) in attempts to win the Republic for the Protestant cause in 1608.
28. Reason of Church Government, 1641, CPW I 809–10.
29. The Itinerary 1:392, quoted in O’Connell, in Milton in Italy, p. 227.
30. Shawcross speculates that the news reached Milton in a letter in Venice, at the embassy there, a place where he would be sure to receive one, ‘the Embassy operating like an American Express office today’; John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2004, pp. 89–90.
N.B. Epitaphium Damoms (Elegy for Damon) is printed in Shorter Poems and online (with a slightly different translation) at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/damon/index.shtml. This, of all Milton’s poems, deserves a new translation for contemporary readers.
1. See Matthew Curr, The Consolation of Otherness: The Male Love Elegy in Milton, Gray and Tennyson, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC, 2002, for a compelling reading within this tradition. A. N. Wilson also links Milton with Tennyson, suggesting that the friendship and intimacy Milton experienced with Diodati was ‘analagous to the feeling Tennyson had for Arthur Hallam’. Wilson, quoting In Memonam, suggests that after Diodati’s death, Milton’s life had ‘some of this quality of widowhood’; see The Life of John Milton, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, p. 93. This is a profoundly suggestive connection to make, but Wilson does not pursue the issue.
2. 11. 131–7, in Theocritus, Idylls, trans. Anthony Verity, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, p. 28. Thyrsis, as has been seen, does not only appear in Virgil; he is the central character in Theocritus’ Idyll I, where he offers a powerful lament for Daphnis.
3. James Grantham Turner, ‘Milton among the Libertines’ in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds, Milton, Rights and Liberties, Peter Lang, Bern, 2007, collects together the key phrases associated with Charles in Milton’s writing about him, and notes the amorous connotations of blanditiae in Elegy V, 1. 70 and elsewhere.
4. See, for example, Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 13, for a subtle version of this argument.
5. Curr, Consolation, p. 32.
6. Turner, ‘Milton among the Libertines’, p. 452.
7. Edward Phillips, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of John Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 62.
8. See A. L. Beier, in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, Longman, London, 1986, p. 153.
9. There was no legal obligation on John Milton to take on responsibility for his nephews, at least when there were not large sums of money and land involved, and no involvement from government in the matter. In practice, however, maternal uncles often filled this role. See Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1460–1700, Longman, London, 1984, p. 219, for instances where the arrangement went horribly wrong.
10. Houlbrooke, English Family, pp. 51–3.
11. Many years later, Agar would leave nothing to his stepson John in his will. This probably had more to do with political differences between the two men than a personal dislike begun in childhood.
12. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 45.
13. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life, Longman, Harlow, 2005, p. 246.
14. Quoted in ibid., p. 251.
15. Ibid., pp. 263–4.
16. Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, third edn, Longman, Harlow, 2003, p. 193.
17. As reported in a letter from the Elector Palatine to the Queen of Bohemia. Reference from S. R. Gardiner, History of England 1603–1642, 10 vols, Longmans, London, 1883–4, vol. IX, pp. 366–7.
18. British Library c 57 d 48.
19. Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 553.
N.B. Of Reformation and Reason of Church Government are printed in CPW. The latter is on line at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/reason/book_l/in-dex.shtml, and the former is at http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/index.php, the website of the Online Library of Liberty.
1. An invaluable account of this era is in Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 1994. See also Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, which offers a groundbreaking analysis of the importance of pamphlet literature in the seventeenth century.
2. John Milton, Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 621–2.
3. Paradise Lost, pp. 1–3.
4. On his return from Italy, John maintained his useful connections with members of the book trade, as is evident in a 1640 invitation from the printer Thomas Cotes to provide verses for Cotes’s new edition of Shakespeare’s Folio. Cotes had moved into the printer William Jaggard’s establishment at the corner of Aldersgate Street and Barbican, and was thus a close neighbour.
5. The poems that do get into the manuscript miscellanies are the Hobson poems from University, the elegy for the Marchioness of Winchester and one copy of ‘Fly envious time …’ See Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 78–9.
6. The excellent Hanover Historical Texts Project (http://history.hanover.edu) has the text of the Root and Branch Petition, together with numerous other historical documents. This quotation is item six in the petition.
7. It is possible that Milton had already published a ten-page, unsigned postscript to the Smectymnuan pamphlet, offering data from English history to prove the redundancy of bishops.
8. CPW I 517ff
9. Ibid., 520.
10. Ibid, 536–7.
11. Ibid, 617.
12. Ad Joannem Rousium Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecarium (To John Rouse, Librarian of Oxford University), 23 January 1647.
13. Prynne gives his own graphic account of the proceedings in A New Discovery of the Prelate’s Tyranny, 1641.
14. See Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 28–9.
15. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, p. 9.
16. The work is Animadversion upon the Remonstrants Defence, against Smectymnuus, printed in July or August 1641.
17. CPW I 726.
18. See Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, p. 30.
19. This was the case with all the other male members of his family. See John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2004, p. 5 passim.
20. Colastenon, 1645, CPW II 724.
21. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/ddd/book_l/notes.shtml. ‘So-teriologically’ means pertaining to salvation’. This Milton website is one of the best.
22. Second Defence, CPW IV (l) 623.
23. Ibid., 621–2.
24. See Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 66.
25. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 132–3.
26. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 7.
27. Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 266.
28. The middle and upper classes usually provided hundreds, not thousands, of pounds when their daughters married. Ralph Josselin, a comfortably off minister, gave portions to his daughters of £240 and £500, with an annual income of about £100. See MacFarlane, Marriage, p. 266.
29. MacFarlane, Marriage, pp. 269–71.
30. Ibid., p. 215.
31. John Shawcross [Arms of the Family p. 196) speculates that one of the reasons Milton rushed into a marriage was his knowledge that his father would be coming to live with him – perhaps marriage was another effort to please his father, or simply a wise way of getting a female household manager for a growing number of men.
32. A. N. Wilson, John Milton, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, p. 113.
33. William Riley Parker (rev. Gordon Campbell), Milton: A Biographical Commentary second edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 227.
34. The King’s answer to the petition accompanying the ‘Grand Remonstrance’, 23 December 1641, quoted in Richard Cust, Charles I, Longman, Harlow, 2005, pp. 314–15.
35. Sir Edward Dering, 22 November 1641, in A Collection of Speeches made by Sir Edward Dering Knight and Baronet, in matter of Religion, London, 1642, p. 109.
36. Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, quoted in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 8.
37. See Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, esp. the Introduction.
38. Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 66.
39. See CPW I 664.
N.B. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is printed in CPW and elsewhere, including John Milton, The Major Works, eds Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, 1991, and online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/readin-g_room/ddd/book_ 1 /index.shtml.
1. I have found only one other work surviving from this period that uses the word divorce in its title, and that is a response to Milton’s piece, An Answer to a book (by J. Milton] intituled the doctrine and discipline of divorce, or, A plea for ladies and gentlewomen against divorce, printed in 1644 in London.
2. Quoted in Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 114.
3. CPW II 235.
4. Ibid., 244.
5. Ibid., 245–6.
6. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, pp. 168ff.
7. For a full statement of this argument, see Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 108–9. The second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce elevates the wisdom of Moses yet higher.
8. CPW II 740.
9. See www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/ddd/book_l/notes.shtml, and Bruce Boehrer, ‘Animal Love in Milton: The Case of Epitaphium Damonis’, English Literary History 70 (2003), p. 804.
10. This and the following quotations are all from Capp, Gossips, pp. 10–13, 74–5.
11. CPW II 347.
12. Ibid., 226–7.
13. Ibid., 587.
14. See ibid., 682–3.
15. Daniel Featley The Dippers Dippt or the Anabaptists ducked and plungd over head and eares at a Disputation in Southwark, London, 1645, sig. B2. Life Records IV 356 has the same quotation in a work of Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography 1661.
16. The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning divorce written to Edward the sixt, in his second book of the Kingdom of Christ, and now Englisht, 1644.
17. Twelve Considerable Serious Questions touching Church Government, 1644, p. 7.
18. Milton was taxed at £6 on the house, his neighbours between £3 and £8, suggesting that Mary was mistress of a substantial town house. For a sense of what she was leaving, an inventory taken on 16 June 1646 provides a fascinating glimpse of the Powell lifestyle: the trunks of linen; the piles of timber; the bedstead with green curtains and laced valences; the featherbed with a yellow coverlid’; the two little silver spoons and the ‘one broken silver spoon’. The numerous buildings needed to sustain the estate emerge (the cellar and the cheese-press house, the boys’ chamber and the wash-house), as do the livestock necessary for survival: four hogs, two ewes, one mare and foal, and one bull. See Life Records II 147–50. For more information on the relentless labour of domestic life at this time, see Anna Beer, Bess The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter, Constable, London, 2004.
19. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 20–22.
20. See Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 228.
21. Capp, Gossips, p. 114.
22. See MacFarlane, Marriage, p. 228.
23. Nineteen Propositions Made by Both Houses of Parliament to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie, with his Majesties answer thereunto, Printed by his Majesties speciall command at Cambridge: by Roger Daniel printer to the famous Universitie, 1642, p. 14.
24. The relevant quotes from the Ordinance and Proclamation are in Barry Coward and Chris Durston, The English Revolution, John Murray London, 1997, pp. 9, 57.
25. Lawson Nagel, “? Great Bouncing at Every Man’s Door”: The Struggle for London’s Militia in 1642’, in Stephen Porter, ed., London and the Civil War, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996, p. 78.
26. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 217.
27. Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, third edn, Pearson, Harlow, 2003, p. 204.
28. The traditional four London regiments had been reorganised into forty companies of eight thousand men in six regiments. The soldiers had no uniform as such but wore their normal clothing. Shopkeepers, tradesmen and merchants made up much of the soldiery: the men had to have wealth enough to pay for their own weapons.
29. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, pp. 3–4.
30. Christopher Durston, The Family in the English Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, p. 147.
31. Edward Phillips, in Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 65.
32. John Aubrey’s notes on the marriage, made much later in the century, are interesting in this context. As he adds and deletes notes, talking to witnesses, checking his references, his scrappy, confused account accrues more and more detail. He remains uninterested in Mary in and of herself: he does not even give her name, only that she is a Powell from ‘Fosthill’ (i.e., Forest Hill). What does interest him is that she went to her mother at ‘ye Kings quarters near Oxford’ (a note he makes twice, adding the fact that Mary ‘went without her husband’s consent’). Fascinatingly, Aubrey returns yet again to this passage in order to prove the following tenet: ‘Two opinions doe not well on the same Boulster’ and then yet again, with a further comment that Mary’s upbringing made it difficult for her to adapt to life in London. Aubrey also has her used to ‘a great deal of company & merriment [adds dancing & c]’. Mary found it very solitary: no company came to her, often-times heard his Nephews cry, and beaten. This life was irksome to her; & so she went to her Parents at Fosthill.’ See Darbishire, Early Lives, pp. 3, 14.
33. John K. Hale, ‘Milton’s Euripides Marginalia’, Milton Studies 27 (1991), pp. 32–3.
N.B. Areopagitica is printed in CPW; in John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991; and online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room.
1. Through these difficult years, Christopher’s children stayed with their mother, their grandmother and possibly other carers while their Royalist father went to the wars. When his property was confiscated, payments were then made by a Committee on Christopher’s behalf to Mrs Isabel Webber, his mother-in-law, who was paid £2 14s on 1 July 1644 and then on through the following year.
2. John Milton, Second Defence IV (l) 621.
3. Edward Phillips, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 64.
4. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 159.
5. Milton’s case for the study of agriculture is typical. Using Latin authors, and in imitation of Hercules, the boys would learn ‘to improve the tillage of their country, to recover the bad soil, and to remedy the waste that is made of good’. Their book-learning would be supplemented by input from the ‘helpful experiences of hunters, fowlers, fishermen, shepherds, gardeners, apothecaries; and in the other sciences, architects, engineers, mariners, anatomists, who, doubtless, would be ready, some for reward and some to favour such a hopeful seminary’.
6. CPW II 377–9.
7. The Church courts would eventually be abolished in 1646, when the land owned by the bishops and archbishops was sold off to benefit the clergy and the Commonwealth. The laws on divorce did not change.
8. For further information, see the introduction by John Morrill to John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Longman, London, 1990, and Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996 for a valuable overview.
9. The situation in war-torn continental Europe was hardly more stable, although at least, from the point of view of Queen Henrietta Maria, the French were in the ascendant. In September 1644, they went on the offensive against the Habsburg territories, capturing Mainz, Mannheim, Speyer, Worms and Oppenheim. They commanded the Rhine from Switzerland to Mainz.
10. State Papers Domestic 1644 503.56.10.
11. Martin Dzelzainis, in ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 10 passim, for persuasive arguments about the development of Milton’s political views.
12. CPW II 479.
13. Ibid., 585.
14. The full title of Colasterion (1645) is as much concerned with authorship and licensing as it is with divorce: A REPLY to a Nameless ANSWER against the Doctrine and Discipline of DIVORCE. Wherein the trivial Author of that Answer is discover’d, the Licenser conferr’d with, and the Opinion which they traduce, defended. PROF xxvi. 6. Answer a Fool according to his Folly, lest he be wise in his own Conceit.
15. Tetrachordon, CPW II 579.
16. The Glass of God’s Providence Towards his Faithful Ones, 1644, p. 57.
17. An Answer to a Book, 1644, pp. 33, 16.
18. Thomas Corns, ‘Ideology in the Poemata (1645)’, Milton Studies 19 (1984), pp. 195–6.
19. See David Norbrook, Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Robert Demaria Jr, British Literature 1640–1789, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, p. 23.
20. CPW II 492.
21. Many fonts were ‘used indiscriminately in the same work’; small printers, ‘apparently men of little learning or taste’, rushed into business; and overall the middle years of the seventeenth century ‘found the English book industry in a broken-down condition’. See Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books, second edn, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1965, p. 33.
22. CPW II 514–15.
23. Plant, English Book Trade, p. 19.
24. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography second edn, rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, vol. I, p. 264.
25. Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 31.
26. This and previous quotation, CPW II 526.
27. Written on 28 September 1654, from “Westminster, this was John’s second letter to Philaras. The first was written from ‘London’ in June 1652. See CPW IV (2) 869.
28. There are features of both chronic and acute glaucoma, two distinct illnesses, in Milton’s account. In the former, the loss of sight is usually gradual and painless, and the nerve fibres at the sides of the eye are the first to be affected, leading to a loss of outer (peripheral) vision, which can be hard to notice. Central vision is the last to go. Acute glaucoma is more rare, and the symptoms are more painful. The eye becomes red, and the eyeball becomes hard and sore to the touch. The pupil enlarges, and becomes oval, and, as Milton notes in his own case history, vision becomes misty and haloes are often seen around sources of light. Acute glaucoma becomes more and more painful, with accompanying headaches or toothache, and sometimes nausea and vomiting. Each attack can last for a few hours, with every one causing a further loss of vision. Usually, only one eye is affected. Even now, the causes of glaucoma are not fully understood, although genetic inheritance is seen as crucial. It seems that Milton’s mother had weak eyes. See Lewalski, Milton, p. 4, for further comment.
29. Treatise on Painting, quoted in Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 115.
30. Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory, eds, An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1662–1699, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 120–21.
31. Ibid., pp. 124, 126.
32. Milton was ‘soon dismissed’, wrote Cyriack Skinner (Early Lives, p. 24). It is quite possible he was never there: Gordon Campbell notes that there is no record of the result of his appearance; see A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, p. 83.
33. Colastenon, 1645, CPW II 727.
34. His final divorce tract, Colasterion, takes the name of an Athenian place of punishment, Milton punishing his enemies in print. Milton’s snobbery is everywhere visible. He is savage about his opponent’s lack of education and his bad spelling, and dismisses him as ‘some Mechanic’.
35. Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, p. 1.
36. It sounds unlikely, but it is just possible that John Milton was considered for military service at this time. Edward Phillips’s memoir of his uncle mentions that he was considered for the post of adjutant-general in the parliamentary army, possibly by his friend Capt. Hobson. With the changes in the army, the idea, if it ever existed, was quietly dropped.
37. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of the time, London, 1646, p. 62.
38. Ibid., p. 65.
39. The volume of essays Milton and Republicanism exposes the differences between Milton scholars. Martin Dzelzainis, for example, sees Milton’s break with the Presbyterians as the first clear move towards a republican political theory. Thomas Corns, here and elsewhere, insists that Milton’s republicanism, such as it was, emerged after the event. See ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, p. 25.
40. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 222.
41. Cromwell to a Parliamentary County Committee, 29 August 1643; see W C. Abbott (with the assistance of Catherine D. Crane), ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, vol. I (1599–1649), p. 256.
42. Cromwell to Colonel Robert Hammond, 25 November 1648, in Abbott, Writings and speeches, vol. I, p. 697.
43. See Morrill’s Introduction to Cromwell and the English Revolution.
44. Phillips, p. 66, and Skinner, pp. 22–3, in Darbishire, Early Lives. The story of Dr Davis’s daughter is as unsubstantiated as that of Milton being a military adviser but is taken more seriously by recent biographers, partly because it fits with their vision of him. Not only did John need a wife, but he wanted a clever one: ‘This time, it seems, Milton sought a woman of wit.’ See Lewalski, Milton, pp. 184–5.
45. It is just possible that members of John Milton’s mother’s family enabled the reconciliation. Hester Jeffrey, a maternal relative, married William Blackborough, a leather-seller, and John Milton often visited their house. Edward Phillips takes up the story:
One time above the rest, he making his usual visit, the Wife was ready in another Room, and on a sudden he was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making Submission and begging Pardon on her Knees before him: he might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger or revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion and a firm league of peace for the future.’ (Darbishire, Early Lives, pp. 66–7.)
N.B. The poems referred to in this chapter are all in Shorter Poems, and also in most collections of Milton’s poetry. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates can be seen online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton; in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. C. Gruzelier, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991; and in John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991.
1. Thomas N. Corns, ‘Ideology in the Poemata (1645)’, Milton Studies 19 (1984), pp. 201–2.
2. Translation in Shorter Poems, p. 237.
3. Ibid., p. 236.
4. Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 19–23.
5. Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. I follow Sharp closely.
6. Gold tried in the fire, or the burnt petitions revived, printed in Sharp, Levellers, p. 80.
7. See David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, for a clear narrative history of these complex issues, especially pp. 65–6.
8. See Sharp, Levellers, p. xiv. Sharp outlines (p. xiii) the key Leveller proposals: reforms in the Church-state, and a new constitution of authority to carry out those reforms, which could, and should, be instituted immediately. The Levellers insisted that the fundamental jural facts about being human justified the reforms, as well as the constitution and its institution.
9. ‘Declaration of the New Model Army’, June 1647, quoted in Sharp, Levellers, p. x.
10. See Barry Coward and Chris Durston, The English Revolution, John Murray, London, 1997, p. 116.
11. The members of the movement now known as the Levellers did not, therefore, refer to themselves in these terms. Nor did they use a language of democracy (although they could be described as proto-democrats). Instead, Lilburne and his fellows described themselves as ‘the well-affected’ or many thousands earnestly desiring the glory of God, the freedom of the commonwealth and the peace of all men’. See Sharp, Levellers, p. xxii.
12. See E. H. Evelyn White, ed., The Journal of William Dowsing, Pawsey & Hayes, Ipswich, 1885, p. 26.
13. The House of Commons stopped observing Christmas in 1643, and the ruling became official in January 1645, according to the Westminster Assembly’s Directory of Public Worship. God-fearing merchants, keen to show just how little Christmas Day meant to them, stayed open for business. In response, the shops were stoned, and their owners received death threats. Elsewhere, crowds turned to violence to express their hostility to the changes.
14. One of the most entertaining accounts of travel in Italy dates from this period. John Evelyn, making the most of his escape from war-torn England, had a very different experience to that of John Milton a few years earlier. Knowing that back in England, the Christmas festival was in the process of disappearing, Evelyn made sure he attended ‘the many extraordinary Ceremonies performed then in their Churches, as mid-night Masses, & Sermons; so as I did nothing all this night but go from Church to Church’. See E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diaries of John Evelyn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1959, p. 153.
15. See Mark Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1996, pp. 134–5. This is a fascinating book, packed with contemporary documents, local history at its most compelling and meaningful.
16. Robert Pye fought for Parliament and became the MP for Woodstock, a few miles north-west of Oxford.
17. State Papers Domestic 1646 23.194.
18. Powell’s personal estate in corn and other household stuff amounted to £500 with timber and wood accounting for £400 more, but he owed John Milton £300 (‘upon a statute’) and other individuals £1,200. Moreover, he claimed to have ‘lost by reason of these wars three thousand pounds’.
19. See Christopher Durston, The Family in the English Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp. 50–52.
20. For the first eight days or so after the birth, Mary would have kept to her bed as did almost all mothers at the time. Baby Anne would have been sent away to a wet nurse during this time, since it was believed that on the second day, the baby should be put to the breast of another woman until the eighth day or so, the reasoning being that immediately after giving birth, the mother’s milk was observed to be wheyish, ‘Foul, Turbid and Curdy’. The rejected liquid was, of course, colostrum, and so to deny a baby this vital boost to its immune system was actually destructive.
21. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 67.
22. In baby Anne’s earliest months, her young mother would have had the advice and practical support of her own highly experienced mother. Later on, Mary might have consulted the huge range of advice books, often written by religious authors, telling mothers how to care for babies. There was a growing market for these publications during the seventeenth century, perhaps because an increasing number of women were becoming mothers away from their own mothers or other female relatives. See Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England, Longman, Edinburgh, 2004, pp. 142, 144 and 157 in particular.
23. This letter was taken to Italy by ‘Bookseller James’ or ‘his master, possibly James Allestree, who was apprentice to George Thomason.
24. John Milton was friends with George Thomason and his wife, Katharine. Thomason’s collection of pamphlets has been vital to the study of the print culture of this period. When his wife died in December 1646, John wrote a lovely sonnet in her memory (of which there are no fewer than three copies in the Trinity Manuscript, Milton’s own collection of his poetry). As Milton’s editor John Carey admits, ‘… very little is known of Mrs Thomason. She had nine children, and the mention of her library in her husband’s will indicates scholarly leanings’ [Shorter Poems, p. 300). Scholarly leanings or not, Milton’s poem on Katharine does not provide much more detail, dealing only in brilliant but general praise. Katharine is a perfect woman, ‘meekly’ leaving the world, accompanied by love and faith, her two handmaids, who fly her up to heaven. There they ‘speak the truth of thee’, a lovely phrase, making the judgement of God into something beautiful, and allowing the judge to ‘thenceforth bid thee rest / And drink thy fill of pure immortal streams’.
25. Dati to Milton, 1 November 1647, from Florence, CPW II 772–3.
26. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 110.
27. The Psalms did not appear in print at their time of writing. It is possible that Milton wanted to contribute to a very current debate since the Westminster Assembly had appointed a committee to revise the Psalms, and it sat in April 1648. It is equally possible that his choice of Psalms, which focus on the need for the Church of God’s guidance, expressed his private dismay at the current situation. The translations may simply have been a revelation of the academic translator in Milton. See Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989, esp. p. 5.
28. For one Milton scholar at least, John was still struggling to come to terms with living out the heterosexual values of his society. ‘Was the anxiety potential in the married man with latent homoerotic tendencies contributory to the psychosomatic problems that seem to have advanced Milton’s blindness?’ asks John T. Shawcross, in John Milton: The Self and the World, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1993, p. 57.
29. See David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004 for a clear narrative history, esp. p. 188.
30. The proceedings can be seen at http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/17century/topic_3/trial.htm, where all of the following quotations can be found.
31. See Sean Kelsey ‘Bradshaw, John, Lord Bradshaw (bap. 1602, d. 1659)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online edn, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3201, May 2006 (accessed 21 February 2007).
32. CPW III 190.
33. Lewalski, Milton, p. 230.
34. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 36.
N.B. The History of England (including the ‘Digression’), Eikonoklastes (The Image Destroyer) and A Defence of the People of England are printed in CPW. A Defence can also be found in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, in a new translation by Claire Gruzelier.
1. Quoted in Martin Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 154.
2. Ruth Spalding, ed., The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 229.
3. Matthew Henry Lee, ed., Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, Kegan Paul, London, 1882, p. 12.
4. For this and the following references, see J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary second edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, p. 306.
5. A Single Eye All Light No Darkness, 1650, quoted in Barry Coward and Chris Durston, The English Revolution, John Murray, London, 1997, pp. 136–7.
6. The Quaker leader George Fox recounts in his autobiography his meeting with some Ranters, vividly evoking the dangers of the time, as well as his own religious faith. Fox had heard of’a people in prison at Coventry for religion’, so he walked to the jail. He was happy because ‘the Lord came to me, saying “My love was always to thee, and thou art in my love.”’ Arriving at the prison, however, a great power of darkness struck at me’: the prisoners were Ranters. The prisoners ‘began to rant, vapour, and blaspheme … they said that they were God …’ Having questioned them about their biblical justification for their behaviour (from his point of view, they had none), Fox moved in for the kill: ‘Then, seeing they said that they were God, I asked them if they knew whether it would rain tomorrow. They said they could not tell. I told them God could tell.’ Fox, it seems, rather enjoyed this encounter. His autobiography can be found at http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/title.html. This episode comes in Chapter Three.
7. http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/title.html, Chapter Four.
8. Sig. A4r (unpaged).
9. See Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. xiii. The historical conditions in which they operated meant that to hold these beliefs ‘was a standing temptation to rebellion and a mutiny’. Lilburne and his allies ‘exemplify the difficulties of being democratic in impossible circumstances’. The women’s claims were grounded in their belief that they as much as men were created in the image of God, and had an equal interest in Christ. Therefore, crucially, women had ‘a proportional share in the freedoms of this commonwealth’.
10. To the supreme authority, the Commons of England assembled in Parliament The humble petition of divers well-affected women of the cities of London and Westminster, the borough of Southwark, hamlets, and parts adjacent. Affecters and approvers of the petition of Sept. 11. 1648, London, 1649. Extracts are printed in Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland, eds, Radical Christian Writings: A Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 112.
11. W. C. Abbott (with the assistance of Catherine D. Crane), ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, vol. III (The Protectorate 1653–1655), p. 438 (‘His Highnesse the Lord Protector’s speech to the Parliament in the Painted Chamber, on Monday, the 4th of September, 1654’).
12. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 41–2.
13. In 1649 the soldiers were paid in debentures, entitling them to ex-Crown land. The regiments acted collectively to sell the land, and the cash was distributed. See Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, third edn, Pearson, Harlow, 2003, p. 246.
14. Guy de la Bedoyere, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 68.
15. A Sermon Preached in Northampton, 1607, sig. E3r-v, quoted in James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution, Verso, London, 2000, pp. 377ff.
16. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, pp. 22–3, 27.
17. CPW V 441.
18. Ibid., Ill 192.
19. John Milton, Second Defence, 1654, CPW IV (l) 627–8.
20. An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland, 11. 57–64.
21. Philip A. Knachel, ed., Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1966, pp. 137, 177.
22. CPW III 380–81.
23. Ibid., 592.
24. Ibid., 542.
25. Ibid., 601.
26. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 200.
27. In Observations upon the article of peace, as in Eikonoklastes, Milton was discreet about his own anxieties concerning the Rump’s backsliding, and wrote powerfully about the dangers to be faced if the new England’s enemies joined with those in Ireland or Scotland.
28. State Papers Domestic 25.63.
29. From Harold Love, Was Lucina Betrayed at Whitehall?’, in Nicholas Fisher, ed., That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000, p. 182.
30. People took their spices with them when they moved: cloves, long cinnamon, nutmegs case, long ginger, pepper case, fine mace, middle mace, all spice, marmalade, saffron, ambergris, sugar pieces, ‘raisins of the sun’, currants.
31. Simon Thurley Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of ‘the Royal Apartments, 1240–1698, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999, p. 98.
32. See Joad Raymond, p. 125, and Blair Worden, p. 157, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995; and Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1994, p. 67.
33. I am indebted to www.brysons.net/miltonweb for collecting these insults.
34. John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 68.
35. Thomas Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, in Armitage, Himy and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, p. 33.
36. See Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 204.
37. Life Records III 159 has a slightly different version, noting that Brackley wrote ‘the malicious rascal that wrote this book did highly deserve of the gallows’ into a copy of The Life and Reign of King Charles (a response to Eikon Basilike), which he believed had been written by Milton. It was not.
38. Life Records III 58.
39. Ibid., Ill 65.
40. Reason of Church Government, CPW I 815.
41. Life Records III 42.
42. The letters can be found in CPW IV (2) 828ff
43. For the details of property deals, legal cases and financial transactions, see Campbell, Milton Chronology. What follows is just one example of Milton’s financial dealings. Milton bought an excise bond from one George Foxcroft. This was a useful way of raising income in the early days of the Commonwealth. The government had raised £150,000 in excise duties through an Ordinance of Parliament in the last years of the 1640s. Some of the money was spent on government business, but it was also possible for individuals to buy into the government’s excise income. So one could buy a bond, say for £400, and receive the interest on that bond at 8 per cent paid twice a year, a useful income of £16 every six months. These bonds were quite reliable sources of income, or so John must have thought when he bought his in May 1651 from a man who had bought it himself from a Maj. Alexander Elliott, who in turn had bought it from one Hugh Curtney
44. State Papers Domestic 1651 23.110 (see pp. 595, 597).
N.B. The poems mentioned in this chapter are printed in Shorter Poems, and in most collections of Milton’s poetry.
1. Mylius to Milton, CPW IV (2) 837.
2. Life Records III 140.
3. Milton to Mylius, CPW IV (2) 835.
4. Both quoted in Ralph Houlbrooke, English Family Life 1676–1716: An Anthology from Diaries, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988, pp. 108, 109.
5. Quoted in Houlbrooke, English Family p. 112.
6. John Toland in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 83.
7. Deborah was as radical a choice of name as, for example, Tower, the child of Levellers John and Elizabeth Lilburne (the baby had been born in the Tower of London) or indeed Prisonborn, the son of the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers, born in imprisonment in Windsor Castle.
8. British Library Add MS 32310.
9. This is, of necessity, speculation. It is equally possible that the Milton children were nursed and raised by their mother, and played with by their father, all in the family home. One father recorded just this experience in the years 1646–7. Delighted when he found that his new baby, Jane, could be nursed by his wife, a few days later he was acutely anxious when his wife thought she was going to die (she was ‘weakly and faint’ and suffering from toothache, while the baby had a cold). By May the baby had cut her first tooth, and, at last, in August the parents got a good night’s sleep: “… we enjoyed our rest well in the night.’ By November, celebrating her first birthday, Jane ‘began to go alone’, and in May 1647, when she was about eighteen months old, the father reported that ‘my wife weaned her daughter Jane; she took it very contentedly; God hath given me much comfort in my wife and children, and in their quietness.’ Another father recorded in detail the different dates when his young children returned home from their nurses. He took home ‘my daughter Mary from nurse’ when she was just two, ‘she having eight teeth and having been weaned three quarters of a year before’. In contrast, Alexander, who was ‘almost two year old, cannot go yet alone, but by holding he can go about the house. He hath twenty teeth, as his nurse saith’. The nurse who reported on Alexander’s teeth probably cared for him in the family home. See Houlbrooke, English Family pp. 110–11.
10. Guy de la Bedoyere, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 84.
11. See David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 383.
12. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 70.
13. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
14. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 71.
15. This father was mourning a ten-day-old baby. What evidence there is suggests that parents felt the death of older babies even more painfully. One father wrote that his baby died at twenty-one months, ‘leaving myself and my dear wife the saddest and most disconsolate parents that ever lost so tender and sweet an infant’. He recorded that he was far more grieved than at the death of three other babies who had died shortly after birth ‘who dying almost as soon as they were born, were not so endeared to us as this was’. See Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England, Longman, Harlow, 2004, p. 153. The familiarity of death did not diminish its impact. Sir William Brownlow recorded in his family Bible mourning texts for all his lost babies; even his last-born, George, who died at ten months in 1642, was noted: ‘I was at ease, but thou O god has broken me asunder and shaken me to pieces.’ Childcare practices and religious faith did not stop fathers being emotionally attached to their children and grieving intensely when they died. To make matters worse, John was Milton’s only son. Historians have shown that special children, oldest sons above all, could generate a powerful commitment and equally intense grief even if they died before they had much passed infancy. See Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1600–1700, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1994, p. 78.
16. Quoted in Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, Loewenthal Press, New York, NY, 1985, p. 49.
17. See Ruth E. Mayers, Vane, Sir Henry, the Younger (1613–1662)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online edn, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28086; accessed 31 January 2007.
18. Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England: Essays, Longman, London, 1988, p. 85.
19. This is the copy in Canterbury Cathedral Library. Noted in William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, second edn, rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, vol. II, p. 988.
20. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 13.
21. The Society ceased operations in 2005. See http://ca.geocities.eom/jmscan@rogers.com/History.html.
22. CPW IV (2) 859.
23. Milton to Bradshaw, 21 February 1653, CPW IV (2) 859–60.
24. Meadows in Lisbon used a mixture of bravado and common sense to save the day, and on his return his success was recognised by the Council, which voted him a ninety-nine-year lease on lands worth £100 ‘in consideration of the maim received … in execution of his duty’. In a sign of the times, the Council found it difficult to find any spare land to give him. See Timothy Venning, ‘Meadows, Sir Philip (bap. 1626, d. 1718)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online edn, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/l8479, May 2006; accessed 21 February 2007.
25. Three slightly differing eyewitness accounts are printed in Wilbur Cortez Abbott, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1939, vol. II, pp. 641–4.
26. J P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary second edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, p. 318 (‘His Highnesse the Lord Protector’s speech to the Parliament in the Painted Chamber, on Tuesday, the 12th of September, 1654’).
27. See Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, p. 2, for a superb summary.
28. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, ed. W. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1888; 1969, vol. V (Bks XII-XIV), p. 282.
29. Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, third edn, Longman, Harlow, 2003, p. 261.
30. See Simon Thurley Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1698, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999, p. 98.
N.B. The Second Defence of the English People is printed in CPW and online (without annotation) at http://www.constitution.org/milton/second_defence.htm.
1. Milton to Philaras, 28 September 1654, CPW IV (2) 869.
2. Ibid., 870.
3. The work was Joanms Miltoni Angli Pro Se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum (John Milton Englishman His Defence of Himself against Alexander More), CPW IV (2) 703. Kestar Svendsen, the editor of this work for CPW (IV (2) 687), writes that ‘Pro Se Defensio is unique among Milton’s prose works because it was occasioned by the worst mistake of his public career,’ his belief that Alexander More had written Regii Sanguinis Clamor, a belief that informs his Second Defence.
4. Marvell to Milton, 2 June 1654, CPW IV (2) 864.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Vossius to Heinsius, 21 January 1653, Life Records III 316.
8. Bramhall was a Royalist ex-bishop in exile. Having left the country in 1650, he administered Communion to Charles Stuart en route to a life spent moving between Royalist communities in The Hague, Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Utrecht, Flushing and Paris. The Royalist exiles developed their own literary and intellectual subculture. Bramhall, for example, was embroiled in a lively battle with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, which began in Paris at the Earl of Newcastle’s residence.
9. Milton to Oldenburg, 6 July 1654, CPW IV (2) 866.
10. The linguistic jokes lose what wit they have in translation. Milton puns on the Greek meaning of morus (‘a fool’) and on the Latin meaning (‘a mulberry bush’): ‘… the pun on morus or mulberry brings on a delirium of bawdy jokes about gardening, planting, grafting, shady patches, statues of Priapus … In the potting shed with his landlord’s maid, More shows her the modus of inserting the mulberry graft into the fig and many other things …’ See James Grantham Turner, ‘Milton among the Libertines’, in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsythe, eds, Milton, Rights and Liberties, Peter Lang, Bern, 2007, p. 452.
11. CPW IV (1) 582.
12. Ibid., 583.
13. Ibid., 638.
14. Ibid, 685.
15. The translation is from The Works of John Milton, 18 vols, Columbia University Press, New York, 1933, vol. VIII, pp. 13–15.
16. Scholar Joad Raymond has shown that after this date a determined newsman could get his news published, but not necessarily in newsbooks. See ‘“A Mercury with a Winged Conscience”: Marchamont Nedham, Monopoly and Censorship’, Media History, 4 (1998), pp. 7–18.
17. James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution, Verso, London, 2000, p. 279.
18. Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, 1654, 22, 19–20, quoted in ibid., p. 285.
19. Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, p. 286.
20. 7 February 1654, State Papers Domestic 1653–54, 66.20.
21. Subsequently, as the Fifth Monarchist movement divided among itself, her life becomes less clear. There are glimpses of her in May 1656 in Cornwall, contemplating linking up with the Quakers, and emigrating. Trapnel was, however, still prophesying later in the decade.
22. The defeat in the Caribbean followed sharply upon a highly successful period in the Protectorate’s foreign policy. By the mid-1650s, the two great powers in Europe, France and Spain, had accepted the new regime in England, and were each now seeking an alliance with Cromwell. Through 1654, he had toyed with each country, favouring overall a trading alliance with France, if only because Charles II was ensconced in Paris, and in a secret clause in a commercial treaty, the French promised to expel him. In turn, rather than declaring open war on Spain, Cromwell was plotting an attack on Spanish territories in the West Indies. The intention was to seize these regions and colonise them, boosting trade and spreading true religion. It was a good plan, and the reasons for military failure were equally good: reliance on faulty military intelligence, the deployment of pressed troops, and unexpectedly heavy surf in the Indies. But for Cromwell no explanation other than God’s displeasure could be found.
23. For the instructions to the Major-Generals, see J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, second edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 322–4.
24. See Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, and David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992.
25. Rumours of readmission, and Cromwell’s support for the idea, encouraged the story that Cromwell intended ‘to sell St Paul’s’ to the Jews ‘for a Synagogue … to reward that Nation which had given the first noble example of crucifying their King’. See Ezekiel Grebner, The Visions and Prophecies Concerning England, Scotland, And Ireland, 1661, p. 369.
26. From the Jewish point of view, readmission to England would be another step towards the fulfilment of the prophecy in the Book of Daniel: And when the dispersion of the holy people shall be completed in all places, then shall all these things be completed.’ The Messiah would not come and restore the Jews to Israel until they had been scattered over all the earth.
27. Mark Goldie, ‘James Harrington’, in E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Routledge, London, 1998; retrieved 30 September 2004 from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/S074SECT4.
28. Mercunus Politicus, 19 November 1657.
29. Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite, Berg, Oxford, 2003, p. 21.
30. Cromwell, Speech to the Committee, 13 April 1657, in W. C. Abbott (with the assistance of Catherine D Crane), ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, vol. IV (The Protectorate 1655–1658), p. 473.
31. Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1993, p. 139.
32. The Works of John Milton, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1933, vol. XIII, p. 159.
33. Fallon, Milton in Government, p. 176.
34. CPW IV (1) 676.
35. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, second edn, rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, vol. II, pp. 1054, 1055.
36. Katherine was the eldest of four sisters. She lived apart from her mother (who lived with another sister) and may well have supported herself in some way.
37. See Houlbrooke, English Family Life, p. 71.
38. Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour: Or the Mutuall Crowne and comfort of godly, loyall, and chaste Marriage, London, 1642, p. 45, quoted in ibid., p. 212.
39. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2003, pp. 82–3.
40. Life Records IV 216.
41. The account survives in the College of Arms (Painters Workbook I. B. 7, fol. 46b). ‘Buck’ stands for ‘buckram’. The pall was to cover the coffin. Escutcheons were attached to the pall.
42. See Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family 1460–1700, Longman, London, 1984, pp. 209–10, for further details about widowhood. John would not have been damaged financially in any way by his wife’s death, possibly quite the opposite.
43. Life Records IV 217.
44. See Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, Loewenthal Press, New York, NY, 1985, for the case against Milton’s governmental significance.
N.B. Three of the prose works mentioned in this chapter are only available in the Yah Complete Prose Works: Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, Hirelings, and De Doctrina Christianae. The Readie & Easie Way is printed in John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991.
1. N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 6.
2. See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Protectorate’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
3. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxtenanae, ed. Matthew Sylvester, 1696, p. 100; Thomas Birch, ed., Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, 7 vols, 1742, vol. VII, p. 374. Both quoted in Keeble, Restoration, p. 5.
4. CPW VII 241, 242.
5. Ruth E. Mayers, ‘Vane, Sir Henry, the Younger (1613–1662)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online at http://www.ox-forddnb.com/view/article/28086; accessed 31 January 2007.
6. Keeble, Restoration, p. 7.
7. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898, vol. I, pp. 289–91.
8. lona Sinclair, ed., The Pyramid and the Urn: The Life in Letters of a Restoration Squire: William Lawrence of Shurdington, 1636–1697, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1994, p. 6.
9. A Letter to a Friend, CPW VII 325.
10. Worden, in Armitage, Himy and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, p. 166.
11. CPW VII 463.
12. A Letter to a Friend, CPW VII 324–33.
13. Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1993, p. 222. The manuscript itself can be found in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, no. X823M64S62.
14. Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994, is the best source of information on this aspect of Milton’s life and work.
15. The debate continues: Oxford University Press will launch its celebration of the quartercentenary of Milton’s birth with the publication of a new study of the evidence, written by Gordon Campbell, Thomas Corns, John Hale and Fiona Tweedie.
16. Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 291.
17. Letter to Revd John Owen, 29 November 1659, quoted in Roger Hainsworth, The Swordsmen in Power: War and Politics under the English Republic 1649–1660, Sutton, Stroud, 1997, p. 259.
18. Guy de la Bedoyere, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 112.
19. Mynors Bright, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Everyman, London, 1906, vol. I, p. 30.
20. Ibid., p. 33.
21. The Readie & Easie Way was advertised on 8 March in Mercunus Politicus, edn no. 610 of this republican newsbook. This was to be the paper’s final edition. The advertisement came complete with errata, indicating John’s close involvement with the printing of the work, despite his blindness, and despite the pressure of time.
22. CPW VII 388.
23. Bright, Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. I, p. 45.
24. John, for example, transferred an excise bond to his friend Cyriack Skinner on 5 May, only three days before the Restoration was proclaimed.
25. Sir Richard Bulstrode, Memoirs and Reflections upon the Reign and Government of King Charles Ist and King Charles IInd, 1721, p. 222.
26. Philip Henry, quoted in Keeble, Restoration, p. 48.
27. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, p. 227.
28. Edward Phillips wrote that his uncle stayed in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield; see Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 54.
29. The book-burning process was not smooth, with different people proclaiming different things at different times. See Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, pp. 191ff. Parliament was probably the driving force, since Charles II was rarely vindictive, famously saying, ‘I must confess I am weary of hanging except upon new offences.’ In contrast, Parliament energetically ‘set about the formal and public humiliation of the legislative, legal, religious and intellectual bases of the previous regimes’. See Keeble, Restoration, pp. 90–91.
30. Mayers, ‘Vane’.
1. Quoted in N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 57.
2. Ibid., p. 49.
3. For further details of L’Estrange and his methods, see ibid., p. 152.
4. Quoted in Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden, John (1631–1700)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8108; accessed 1 February 2007.
5. The Trial of Sir Henry Vane, knight, at the King’s Bench, Westminster, June the 2nd & 6th 1662, 1662, p. 77.
6. Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, pp. 199, 200.
7. Pepys did so on 1 April 1662, having earlier seen a ‘pretty good play’. See John Warrington, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Everyman, London, 1906, vol. I, p. 242.
8. See Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England, Berg, Oxford, 2003.
9. 23 February 1663; Diary vol. I, p. 359.
10. Gordon Campbell, ‘Milton, John (1608–1674)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; online at http://wwwoxforddnb.-com/view/article/18800; accessed 1 February 2007. Scholars generally agree that Milton began work on the epic at some point after 1655, although, without new evidence, there is no certainty.
11. Grub Street is now Milton Street. Nearby, Bunhill Fields was converted in 1666 from a plague pit into the burial ground for Nonconformists. It is now a peaceful spot in the centre of a resolutely commercial area of London, the resting place of men such as John Bunyan and William Blake.
12. Quoted in Ian Atherton, News, Newspapers and Society ed. Joad Raymond, Frank Cass, London, 1999, p. 39.
13. Among his works are ‘translations from Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, with a suggestion that Phillips may also have known Dutch’. John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2004, p. 107, argues that Phillips’s talents have been underrated.
14. 24 October 1663, in Guy de la Bedoyere, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 135.
15. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, pp. 74, 78.
16. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1994, p. 90.
17. Jerrard Winstanley The Law of Freedom in a Platform or, True Magistracy Restored, London, 1652, p. 34. Winstanley actually wrote ‘the first link of the chain Magistracy’ [sic].
18. Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700, Longman, London, 1984, has much material on these vexed issues; see esp. p. 21.
19. Those who found this transition difficult often had strong loyalties to their mothers: ‘… the experience of childbirth in particular held mothers and daughters together; many mothers when their own period of child-rearing was past were eager to assist at the endless lyings-in of the next generation,’ according to Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 89–90.
20. Life Records V 222.
21. John’s niece (the daughter of his sister Anne and her second husband, Thomas Agar) did something similar when she married in 1662. When she married David Moore of Richmond, Surrey, he gave his age as thirty but was actually forty-three. Ann was twenty-six. Their first child, Thomas, born the following year and baptized on 13 October 1663 at Richmond, would go on to be a playwright of no talent whatsoever.
22. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 75.
23. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, pp. 398, 411, 489.
24. The Milton scholar John Shawcross has a typically provocative view of the relationship, when he wonders ‘about the sex life of an older blind man with a younger wife. Perhaps there has been a “subordination of the phallus to the tongue”, but the female world in which Milton found himself, with wife, children, and servants, may have been the only answer finally to the homoerotic, to the moral strictures of carnality, to the need for companionship and avoidance of the “lonely” life’; Self and the World, p. 232. This ‘female world’ had existed for many years, certainly since the early 1650s, when John Phillips had left the household.
25. James Nayler, The Railer Rebuked, in a reply to a paper subscribed Ellis Bradshaw, who calls it The Quaker’s whitest devil unvailed, London, 1655, p. 7, and James Nayler, A collection of sundry books, epistles and papers written by James Nayler, some of which were never before printed. With an impartial relation of the most remarkable transactions relating to his life, ed. George Whitehead, London, 1716, pp. 113–14.
26. See James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution, Verso, London, 2000, p. 294, from which I take the term.
27. Thomas Ellwood, The history of the life of Thomas Ellwood. Or, an account of his birth, education, &c, second edn, London, 1714, pp. 191–2.
28. Keeble, Restoration, p. 154.
29. Ellwood, History, p. 156.
30. Edmund Ludlow, A Voice from the Watch Tower Part 5: 1660–1662, ed. A. B. Worden, Royal Historical Society, London, 1978, p. 283.
31. 15 January 1662; Diary p. 126.
32. Phillips wrote that Paradise Lost was composed in ‘a parcel of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time, which being written by whatever hand came next, might possibly want correction as to the orthography and pointing’. He also noted that his uncle wrote most happily during the winter months, so that ‘all the years he was about this poem, he may be said to have spent but half his time therein.’ See Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 73.
33. The correspondence can be found in CPW VIII 1–4. The comment on the Latin is from Masson, and quoted on p. 1.
34. 3 September 1666; Diary p. 154.
35. Quoted in Giles Mandelbrote, “Workplaces and Living Spaces: London Book Trade Inventories of the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, eds, The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, London, 2003, pp. 21–43.
36. At the same time, the contract handed over all ‘benefit profit and advantage’ arising from the manuscript of the poem to Simmons and gave all rights to future impressions after the third ‘without let or hindrance’ from the author. Peter Lindenbaum, ‘The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons’, in P. G. Stanwood, ed., Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Tempe, 1997, and Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, are both invaluable resources for an understanding of the practicalities of Milton’s writing career.
37. Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies 47 (1996), pp. 479–99, is authoritative on this subject; see esp. pp. 480–84.
38. See Lewalski, Milton, p. 454, for a summary of the issues.
39. The surviving licensed copy of Book I of Paradise Lost shows evidence of discretion. It omits Milton’s name, while the entry of the epic into the Stationers’ Register refers only to Simmons, Tomkins (the licenser) and a ‘Mr Warden Royston’. Milton appears as just ‘I.M.’ While it is hard to believe that the censors were unaware of the work’s authorship, there was no attempt to draw attention to it in word or deed.
40. Since the average rate of printing production was about one and a half to two sheets per week, and Paradise Lost contains forty-three sheets, the printers may well have been working on the poem for twenty-two weeks, between May and October 1667.
41. The anecdote, given by Richardson, in Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 295, is disputed. See Theodore H. Banks, Jr, ‘Sir John Denham and Paradise Lost’, Modern Language Notes 41(1926), pp. 51–4. Lewalski, Milton, p. 456, suggests that it has ‘an apocryphal ring’ to it.
N.B. The ten-book Paradise Lost (1667) can be found online at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/lost/lost.html and, in print, Harris Francis Fletcher, ed., John Milton’s Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, 4 vols, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1945, vol. II.
1. John Hale writes persuasively of the fusion of Milton’s Greek, Latin, English and indeed Hebrew consciousnesses in Paradise Lost, demonstrating how Milton thinks in Greek or Latin ‘about a Hebrew subject which he might make into an English tragedy’; see ‘The Classical Literary Tradition’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, p. 29.
2. Line references refer to what has become the standard twelve-book version of Paradise Lost. When the work was first published in 1667, Milton divided his epic into ten books. See the Introduction to Paradise Lost (Fowler), pp. 25ff.
3. Margaret Kean, John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 1.
4. Alistair Fowler’s notes are invaluable at these moments. In this instance, he points out that Milton has made an error. Ophiuchus is not an Arctic constellation; Milton may have confused Anguitenens with Anguis, an easy error, since the Greek name for Anguis is similar. See Paradise Lost (Fowler), p. 146.
5. Of Education, CPW II 405–6.
6. See the final chapter of David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, which offers a complex but highly rewarding reading of Paradise Lostm its time, to which I am indebted.
7. John Leonard, ‘Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost’, in Corns, Companion to Milton, p. 401 passim.
8. Paradise Lost (Fowler), p. 39.
9. Christopher Ricks’s study of Milton’s language (in which he makes a similar argument) remains one of the best on offer: see Milton’s Grand Style, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963.
10. As has been seen, Belial was one of the Old Testament devils associated with ‘sodomy’. The ‘sons of Belial’ are not only linked with homosexuality (‘worse rape’) but, more importantly, with the corruption of courts and palaces.
11. See also Book VI:568–90 for some outrageously obscene punning.
12. The arguments are outlined at the start of Book X when the reader is reminded that man was ‘sufficient’ – strong enough – to have withstood Satan, and that humanity’s failure to stand firm is therefore justly punished by God. Earlier, in Book V, the archangel Raphael instructs Adam, and the reader: ‘God made thee perfect, not immutable …’ Above all God ‘requires’ our ‘voluntary service’.
13. The Geneva Study Bible of 1599 is less generous in its interpretation of these lines, offering the note: ‘… instead of confessing her sin, she increases it by accusing the serpent.’
N.B. Accidence Commenc’t Grammar is printed in CPW.
1. Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 39.
2. Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 28.
3. John Hale considers this passage in his essay ‘The Classical Literary Tradition’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, pp. 22–36.
4. This is the midpoint in both the ten-book and twelve-book versions of the poem.
5. The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford … Written by himself, 3 vols, London, 1759, vol. III, p. 799.
6. Letters from Sir John Hobart to his cousin, also John Hobart, in January 1668, quoted in Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies 47 (1996), p. 490.
7. Thomas Ellwood, The History of Thomas Ellwood, Or, an account of his birth, education, &c, second edn, London, 1714, p. 117.
8. In his prefatory poem to the 1674 edition of the epic, 11. 45–6.
9. See Cedric Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 58–60.
10. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 467.
11. Von Maltzahn, ‘First Reception’, p. 480.
12. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 439.
13. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 465.
14. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, p. 14.
15. On 26 April 1669, John received a further £6 from Samuel Simmons, and 200 copies of the work for himself, the receipt for the money signed on his behalf, possibly by Thomas Ellwood.
16. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, pp. 2–3.
17. Ellwood, History, p. 88.
18. See Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing Longman, Harlow, 2001, p. 18, for this and many more fascinating insights into women’s lives at this time.
19. Bathsua Makin, An Essay To Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues. With An Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education, London, 1673, reprinted by the Augustan Reprint Society, no. 202, with introduction by Paula L. Barbour, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 1980, p. 25.
20. Ibid., pp. 4, 42–3.
21. Lady Grace Mildmay quoted in Clarke, Early Modern Women’s Writing p. 21.
22. Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory, An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1662–1699, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 85–7.
23. Makin, An Essay, p. 23.
24. There is more. If either Mary or Deborah Milton had evidenced the slightest aptitude for languages and the slightest desire to learn, their father would have taught them. The admirer of Queen Christina, the friend of Lady Ranelagh and Lady Margaret Ley, was no advocate of ignorance in women’ (p. 586). This is a generous assessment of Milton’s attitude towards learned women: the sonnet to Lady Margaret Ley for example, is dominated by praise of her father. Margaret herself is praised only for her ability to praise him.
25. See Clarke, Women’s Writing p. 26.
26. Darbishire, Early Lives, pp. 77–8.
27. National Archive PROB 24/13.
28. John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1993, pp. 225–6.
29. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, esp. pp. 10, 143.
30. Life Records V 4, quoting Thomas Birch’s biography of Milton from 1753. Birch had interviewed Elizabeth Foster, Deborah Milton’s daughter, on 11th February 1738.
31. National Archive PROB 24/13.
32. See Life Records V 5. Elizabeth Foster’s comment was noted by Birch but did not appear in his printed life of Milton, attached to his edition of the Works of 1753.
33. Life Records V 5, quoting the notes of Thomas Birch from an interview with Elizabeth Foster on 17 November 1750.
34. Elizabeth Fisher’s deposition is the National Archive, PROB 24/13/311–313.
35. Life Records V 104.
36. A note about land and money might be from John, might be to Christopher: the editor of the Life Records warns that everything about this piece is highly uncertain.’
37. Quoted in John Richardson, ed., The Annals of London, Cassell & Co., London, 2000, p. 145.
38. J R. Jones, Charles II Royal Politician, Allen & Unwin, London, 1987, p. 10; Ronald Hutton, Charles II, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, pp. 447ff.
39. John Warrington, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Everyman, London, 1906, vol. III, p. 197.
40. Ibid., vol. III, pp. 151–2.
41. The case involved Lord and Lady Ross (or Roos), her father, an illegitimate son, violence on all sides and the couple’s separation. The law as it stood could provide some sort of mechanism to resolve issues of paternity, legitimacy and separation. The problem was that now Lord Ross wanted to marry again. To do so, a special Bill needed to be passed by Parliament.
42. Cyriack Skinner mentions the case; see Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 33.
43. Letter to William Popple, 14 April 1670, in Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols, vol. II (Letters), third edn, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis with E. E. Duncan-Jones, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, p. 317. The following quotation comes from the same letter, p. 316.
44. Charles also agreed to give the King of France, Louis XIV (also his brother-in-law), military support in Holland and Spain. Charles’s conversion was undoubtedly the most contentious part of the treaty, and Louis originally offered an extra £150,000 and 6,000 troops ‘for the execution of this design. This clause was left out when the treaty was officially signed by Charles and his closest advisers on 21 December 1670.
45. Letter to William Popple, 28 November 1670, in Marvell, Poems and Letters, vol. II, pp. 317–18.
46. Ibid., p.315.
47. Ellwood, History, pp. 246–7.
48. Edward Phillips, in contrast, writes that Paradise Regained was written between 1667 and 1670. The stylistic and thematic concerns of Samson Agonistes argue for an early dating for the work, which may have been begun in the 1640s. While there is no consensus among Milton scholars, it seems plausible that Milton returned to the work in the mid-1660s. See Shorter Poems, pp. 349–50, and p. 417 for the debates.
N.B. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are in Shorter Poems, and can be found in most collections of Milton’s poetry. The History of Britain (including the ‘Digression’) is printed in CPW
1. John Carey made the argument in the Times Literary Supplement of 6 September 2002. Although his argument was not a new one (there have always been those who have read the drama as a call to violent action), his language of terrorists and suicide bombers struck a deep chord in the run-up to the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
2. ‘Samson Agonistes’, in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p. 416. Achinstein points out that Hebrew poetry was ‘not based upon accentual-syllabic organisation’, but ‘instead vaunted parallelism, alliteration and assonance, echoing rhythms within irregular line lengths’, p. 416.
3. Milton’s style in Samson is one of the main reasons that John Carey, the editor of The Complete Shorter Poems, took many years to accept that the work was not written in the 1640s.
4. Cedric Brown, John Milton: A Literary Life, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 200ff.
5. In this ‘Digression’, Milton took a hard look at his country on the eve of the republic, comparing the condition of the ancient British people at the time of the Roman departure with that of the English in his own day. In an extended historical parallel, he comments unfavourably on the shortcomings of State and Church in the 1640s, and concludes with his belief that only education will repair his countrymen’s natural failings as citizens of a free state. This sounds very like the old republican Milton, and many of the History’s readers saw that his ‘earlier views were still writ large’. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, pp. 1, 47, 49.
6. The Life of the Reverend Dr John Barwick, 1724, p. 296; John Eachard, The Grounds & Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, eighth edn, 1672, sigs A3r-v.
7. Jonathan Richardson, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 296.
8. The State of Innocence, and fall of mam an opera. Written in heroic verse, and dedicated to Her Royal Highness, The Duchess, London, 1677.
9. See Vinton A. Dearing, ed., The Works of John Dryden: Plays, 20 vols, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1994, vol. XII, p. 322, for details.
10. Along Aldersgate Street itself there were two printing presses run by widows, Ellen Cotes and Milton’s publisher, Mary Simmons. In the maze of small courts and alleyways running off the street were John Wilkinson bookbinder, Robert Dakers printer, Evan Tyler printer and William Terry bookbinder.
11. Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, eds, The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century Oak Knoll Press and British Library, London, 2003, p. 24.
12. John Warrington, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Everyman, London, 1906, vol. I, p. 465.
13. See Myers, Harris and Mandelbrote, The London Book Trade, pp. 35–6.
14. Popery and tyranny: or, The Present state of France: in relation to its government, trade, manners of the people, and nature of the countrey. As it was sent in a letter from an English gentleman abroad, to his friend in England. Wherein may be seen the tyranny the subjects of France are under, being enslaved by the two greatest enemies to reason, as well as to Christian or humane liberty, I mean popery and arbitrary power, London, 1679.
15. It can be found in CPW VIII.
16. Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion and the Earl of Castlemaine’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), pp. 53–69, esp. p. 54.
17. See Paul Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, in Thomas Healy ed., Andrew Marvell, Longman, London, 1998, pp. 170–204; Hammond sets these attacks in context.
18. John Aubrey, p. 5, and Jonathan Richardson, p. 229, in Darbishire, Early Lives.
19. The term gout could refer to a range of illnesses, but it seems likely that Milton did indeed suffer from what we still know as gout, an acute joint disease caused by the deposition of crystals of monosodium urate monohydrate and calcium pyrophosphate around the joints, tendons and other tissues of the body. Attacks of gout, untreated, last for days or weeks but eventually subside. Attacks are, however, recurrent, and increase in frequency until the condition is constantly present. The most common cause, in which levels of uric acid are abnormally high in the body, is that the kidneys fail to excrete uric acid quickly enough.
20. Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout The Patrician Malady, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 1998, p. 3.
21. I have drawn heavily on ibid. See esp. pp. 4, 24–7, 45–6.
22. Porter and Rousseau, Gout, p. 174.
23. Quoted in ibid., p. 46.
24. Unlike in earlier years, the title of Reader was no longer linked with any readings, or lectures: Readers simply paid a fine to the Temple to be relieved of their duties. By 1678 the practice had completely ended. The Inner Temple was glad of the money, and the lawyer could return to his business, or to his country estate.
1. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton, Constable, London, 1932, p. 74.
2. Jonathan Richardson, in ibid., pp. 203–4.
3. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 33.
4. David Cressy Birth, Marriage, Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 387.
5. Three days between death and burial was normal. Death ‘was rarely sanitary, and often left a detritus of disfigurement. Even those who died a “good death” could leave behind a cadaver defiled with sweat and vomit, urine and excrement, or pus and blood. Rigor mortis, corruption, and putrefaction would surely follow. It was therefore a matter of urgent practical necessity to prepare the dead body for burial and to transport it promptly from the deathbed to the grave’ (ibid., p. 425).
6. Ralph Houlbrooke’s essay, in Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds, Death in England: An Illustrated History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, p. 174.
7. See Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Mutons England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 256–7.
8. The case can be seen at the National Archive in Kew, PROB 24/13/311–313.
9. Being a practicer in the law and a bencher in the inner Temple but living in vacations at Ipswich’, he usually visited his brother at the end of the legal term, as he did in midsummer 1674, in the forenoon because the Ipswich coach left at noon. Christopher ‘found him in his chamber within his own house situate on Bunhill within the parish of St Giles Cripplegate London’. John ‘being not well’ and knowing he might not see Christopher for some time, declared his will. Betty Minshull Milton and the servant Elizabeth Fisher, a vital witness, were ‘at the same time going up and down the room’.
10. As ever, Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, p. 218, lists what evidence there is. It is possible that Deborah Milton Clarke made the long journey from Ireland to London to be at the hearing, but the evidence suggests that, if she did, she had returned by March to Ireland, where she signed the documents concerning this settlement.
11. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 1.
12. Letter from Daniel Skinner to Samuel Pepys, November 1676, quoted in Gordon Campbell et al., ‘The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana’, Milton Quarterly 31 (1997), p. 71.
13. Aubrey calls Minshull Milton’s second wife; see Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 3.
14. Darbishire, Early Lives, pp. 3, 12.
15. University of Cambridge, Christ’s College MS 8.
16. Letters of State, written by Mr John Milton, to most of the sovereign princes and republicks of Europe, from 1649, till 1669, 1694.
17. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography rev. edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 399.
18. Darbishire, Early Lives, p. vii.
19. James Holly Hanford and James G. Taaffe, A Milton Handbook, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1929, pp. 1, 2.
20. ‘Life Records’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, p. 483.
21. See Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Dispatches from the Archives’, Milton Quarterly 36 (2002), pp. 46–54. Brabazon Aylmer slowly sold his rights to Paradise Lost to another printer, Jacob Tonson. Aylmer probably decided to offload Paradise Lost because he needed to raise capital for another major project, Isaac Barrow’s complete theological Works. In hindsight this was a misjudgement. When asked many years later which poem he had made most money from, Tonson would answer simply ‘Milton’.
22. John Hopkins, Mutons Paradise Lost imitated in Rhyme, London, 1699, p. 49.
23. The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton. Together with explanatory notes (by PH.) on Paradise Lost, London, 1695.
24. 21 July 1683, Anthony a Wood, quoted in Leo Miller, ‘The Burning of Milton’s Books in 1660: Two Mysteries’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), p. 432.
25. The translation is from Milton’s Second Defence, in The Works of John Milton, 18 vols, Columbia University Press, New York, 1933, vol. VIII, pp. 13–15.