CHAPTER 5

Beginning as a Poet

Fatal Vespers

King James I died on 27 March 1625, some six weeks after Milton was admitted to Christ’s College. Cambridge produced an anthology of Latin and Greek verse, Cantabrigiensium Dolor et Solamen, to mark the death of the monarch and the accession of his son, Charles. As a first-year undergraduate, at a college with little representation in the volume—King’s College men contributed sixteen poems to the anthology, compared to only two from Christ’s—Milton would hardly have expected to feature, regardless of how lofty a sense of his poetic facility he might already have developed. (Although he might have observed that the precocious Thomas Randolph, who had matriculated at Trinity College less than year earlier, contributed a longish Latin poem to the Cambridge anthology later in 1625 for the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.) The closest Milton got to writing an epitaph for James are four Latin epigrams—pointed, witty verses that in ancient Greece and Rome were originally inscribed on tombs—between four and twelve lines in length, all entitled In Proditionem Bombardicam (On the Gunpowder Plot), and grouped in the 1645 Poems with a fifth epigram on the topic of gunpowder itself, In Inventorum Bombardae (On the Inventor of Gunpowder); and the 226-line In Quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), which turned out to be the longest Latin poem that Milton would ever write. Milton’s topic in these poems is James’s escape from assassination near the beginning of his reign, when the conspiracy of a group of Roman Catholics to blow up king and Parliament was foiled on 5 November 1605. In Quintum Novembris was probably written in Cambridge in the autumn of 1626 to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot—the headnote in the 1645 Poems informs us that the poet was Anno aetatis 17, a phrase which is usually used in the volume to mean his age at the time of composition—and it can reasonably be presumed, given that the epigrams seem to prepare the way for the much fuller treatment of the same topic in In Quintum Novembris, that they were composed around the same time. The previous autumn is less likely, for soon after Milton arrived in Cambridge, the university had to shut down due to plague and did not reopen fully until December of 1625.

The pressure of James’s recent death is felt: the poet addresses the ghost of Guy Fawkes, the explosives expert in the Catholic cell, who is represented as the personification of the apocalyptic ‘Beast’ of Roman Catholicism, and declares that ‘James has now gone to join the starry brotherhood, at a ripe old age, without the help of you or your infernal gunpowder’ (lines 5–6).¹ All four epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot play on the supposed irony that the conspirators sought to blow James up to heaven even while their Pope condemned him to hell; but only this one (placed second of the four in the 1645 Poems), makes explicit reference to James having died. In the first of the epigrams, Milton jokes about about Fawkes’s ‘perverse sense of devotion’ (line 4) in attempting to effect the king’s apotheosis, or ascension to semi-divinity, in the manner of the prophet Elijah, who was swept up to heaven in a fiery chariot before he could die (2 Kings 2: 11). As Milton puts it in the fourth and briefest of the four epigrams, Rome now wants to ‘elevate [James] all the way up to the god above’ (line 4). Images of apotheosis were associated with biblical figures such as Elijah but also with Roman emperors, who from Augustus to Constantine were depicted after their death as ascending to the gods on a giant eagle or in a chariot.² Jacobean poets and artists had commonly identified James’s reign with that of Augustus, a period in Rome’s history marked by comparative peace after a bloody civil war, the patronage of great writers such as Virgil, and, crucially, the birth of Christ. The opening of In Quintum Novembris adopts this conventional representation of James as rex pacificus, the ‘peace-bearing’ (line 5) monarch who brought unity and stability to Britain by joining the crown of England with that of his native Scotland. Milton celebrates James in terms of his peaceful reign, union of the English and Scottish crowns, and final apotheosis in the style of the Roman emperors—anticipating exactly the themes of three large canvases painted by Rubens, the Flemish Baroque painter, on the commission of Charles I, and installed on the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1636 (where they remain today).

The epigrams also reveal Milton to have been reading James’s own works of religious controversy, specifically the king’s justification of the Oath of Allegiance, which was required of all his subjects in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Milton refers in the third of the epigrams to how James, in the ‘Premonition’ prefixed to the second edition of his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance in 1609, had ‘made fun of the fire that purges the soul and without which the celestial dwelling is impossible’ (lines 1–2)—a reference to the Roman Catholic doctrine, rejected and ridiculed by Protestants, that the souls of the dead undergo purification in the fires of Purgatory before being sped to heaven by the prayers, offerings, and donations of friends and relatives. James’s ‘Premonition’ was primarily a response to the arguments against the Oath of Allegiance advanced by the formidable Jesuit cardinal, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621): James mocks ‘Purgatorie and all the trash depending thereupon . . . Bellarmine cannot find any grounds for it in all the Scriptures . . . as for me, I am sure there is a Heaven and a Hell, proemium et poena [reward and punishment], of the Elect and reprobate’.³ The controversy initiated an array of English Protestant attacks on Bellarmine, as well as a fashion among learned Englishmen interested in theological controversy of compiling commonplace books, or notebooks of quotations and references culled from reading and stored for later use, that were organized according to standard categories of polemical response to Bellarmine. There is some evidence from cross-references in his extant commonplace book that Milton himself compiled such a theological notebook during the 1630s, which is now lost; if so, his undergraduate reading of James’s anti-Bellarmine works would have laid its foundations and perhaps even initiated its composition.⁴ The logic underlying the Protestant abolition of Purgatory would eventually lead Milton beyond Lutheran and Calvinist orthodoxy to one of his more significant and unusual theological conclusions—that the soul is completely unified with the body and thus dies with it. Indeed young Milton’s fascination with apotheosis, with bodily ascension to the heavens—a theme that we will find repeatedly in the early poetry, both secular and devotional—may already hint at a dissatisfaction with orthodox Protestant ideas of the separation at death between the material body and an immaterial, immortal soul.⁵

The focus of these Gunpowder Plot poems is finally less on the recently departed James, however, than on the demonic threat of Roman Catholicism. In Quintum Novembris features the first appearance of the Miltonic Satan, envious at the sight of a peaceful, fertile Jacobean England, and enraged that the English people are ‘worshipping the holy divinity of the true God’ (lines 33–4). The depiction anticipates Satan’s first view of Eden and Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (‘but much more envy seis’d / At sight of all this World beheld so faire’; 3. 553–4). Satan disguises himself as St Francis, with ‘a cowl hung from his tonsured head’ (lines 82–3), and comes to the Pope in the night, planting the idea of the Gunpowder Plot in his mind—as Satan will come to Eve in a dream in Paradise Lost—promising that the catastrophe will cause ‘the Marian age [to] return at last to that region’ (line 127; Sæcula sic illic tandem Mariana redibunt). A distinguishing feature of neo-Latin verse is the drawing of historical and cultural equivalence between the classical and the contemporary Christian world: the triple pun in the Latin here is that the success of the plot will herald a return to the Catholic England of Mary I and thus also of worship of the Virgin Mary, and that this reign will also be like a return to the notoriously harsh and bloody rule of Gaius Marius, Roman consul of the second century BC.

Milton’s Gunpowder Plot poems are indebted to the satirical, anti-clerical neo-Latin poetry of James I’s own childhood tutor, the great Scottish humanist and (in his later life) Calvinist George Buchanan (1506–82). Buchanan’s Somnium (A Dream), first published in 1566, has St Francis appear at the foot of the sleeping poet’s bed, ‘a holy habit in his hands, the hood with a cord’, enticing him to join a Franciscan order whose members, the poet objects in response, ‘cheat, flatter, and prevaricate as occasion prompts’ (lines 7, 23). Buchanan’s Franciscanus (The Franciscan; first published 1566) offers a thousand lines of eloquent ridicule of ‘the monkish mind, inflamed by greed’: the Franciscan order is characterized by its ability to deceive and seduce through the performance of godliness, leading ‘astray the stupid people with the show of piety’ (lines 14, 53). The corrupt uses to which the notion of Purgatory are put are a particular target for Buchanan, who repeatedly represents the monks as hypocrites whose outward piety and humble dress conceal a rapacious desire for material gain:

Let the flames burst forth from the mouth of Purgatory,
Their heat unendurable, except that they do not burn forever,
But may be put out by prayers, and quenched by holy water,
Diminished by indulgences, alleviated by masses.
This is a rich field, the tillage of our holy Father. (lines 642–6)

Milton’s lament in his 1628 letter to Alexander Gil that his fellow students were entering the ministry with ‘learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever[,] and patching it with worn-out pieces from various sources’, echoes the anti-clericalism of Buchanan, who has his Franciscan friar boast:

And there is no need to study the nonsense of grammar,
Or spend time in the gloomy schools. Just choose a few snippets
From books by the ancient authors, three periods of Cicero,
As many verses of Virgil, or half an ode by Horace.
Have these ready as seasonings for every sermon[.]⁶

Buchanan’s poetry is animated by the same polemical connection between the dominance of Roman Catholic clericalism and the decline and abuse of classical learning that structures the thought of post-Reformation humanists such as Ascham.

In composing In Quintum Novembris, Milton was likely also trying to imitate the Latin style and theme of a contemporary: his friend Gil, with whom, as we have seen, he exchanged Greek and Latin poems and whom he hailed for his erudition and ability to judge poetry. When scores of Catholic worshippers died in a collapsed secret chapel in the French ambassador’s residence in Blackfriars, close to St Paul’s, on 26 October 1623—Milton was fourteen at the time—Gil had celebrated the catastrophe as providential revenge for the Gunpowder Plot in his poem In Ruinam Cameræ Papisticæ (c. 1623; first published, 1632). Gil was far from extreme in doing so: the event was widely interpreted in England as providential, and pamphlets were still being published about it as late as 1657, namely Samuel Clarke’s The Fatal Vespers: A True and Full Narrative of that Signal Judgement of God upon the Papists, by the Fall of the House in Black Friers, London, Upon Their Fifth of November, 1623. (The episode was deemed ‘their Fifth of November’ because 26 October in England equated to 5 November in the Gregorian calendar used in Rome; Gil is quick to point this out in his poem.) There are hints that Milton was inspired by Gil’s poem. For instance, the same pun on the reign of Mary / Marius is found in Gil’s poem (Marianque precantes re-dire sæcula; line 8), closely followed, as in In Quintum Novembris, by the assumption that Catholic saints and feast days are equivalent to the polytheistic rituals in worship of pagan deities: Milton’s Satan commands the Pope to ‘welcome the support of the gods and goddesses and all those divinities that are celebrated in your feast-days’ (lines 129–30), while Gil’s poem opens with Rome, immediately identified as the Antichrist, invoking its gods (Dios) and praying to its divinities (numina).⁷ Gil was likely one of the readers whom Milton had in mind for In Quintum Novembris, and there is reason to think Milton’s early verse may have been read by contemporaries alongside Gil’s poems: an English translation of Gil’s In Ruinam Cameræ Papisticæ by an unknown hand is found in a large manuscript verse miscellany, belonging to the great antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617–92), that also contains an early variant of the lyric that Milton called ‘On Time’ in the 1645 Poems, but which is entitled ‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’ in the Ashmole manuscript, a title closer to the one that Milton originally gave the poem in his own manuscript draft.⁸ The manuscript translation of Gil’s poem is notable for its striking comparison of the Blackfriars episode with Samson’s collapsing of the Philistine temple in Judges 16: ‘Thus when Philistines griev’d Gods Israël / The house of Dagon on a suddaine fell, / Suddaine destruction did them all surprize / That scoff’t at matchles Samsons miseries’. Gil’s poetic representation of the supposedly providential destruction of the Blackfriars chapel may have lingered long in Milton’s memory.⁹

‘That Little Swimming Isle’

In Quintum Novembris and the Gunpowder Plot epigrams should also be connected to wider, institutional traditions of composing poetry: the composition of Latin epigrams on the subject of the foiled Gunpowder Plot seems to have been a set exercise in the grammar schools and universities, encouraged by official government and church commemorations of the event.¹⁰ Sermons of thanksgiving were delivered at public pulpits such as Paul’s Cross, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and at St. Mary’s, the University Church in Cambridge. Milton would have heard the sermons at Paul’s Cross in his youth, which were characterized by their vitriol towards Roman Catholicism as much as their giving of thanks for the deliverance of James: as we saw in Chapter 1, Richard Stock, rector of the Bread Street parish in which Milton grew up, delivered the first anniversary sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1606, in which he preached a ‘national warning’ on the dangers of popery and called on James to impose harsher measures against Catholics in England.¹¹ Colleges such as Christ’s had their own celebrations, and Milton may well have performed his Gunpowder poems in front of his fellow students, just as he performed before them the various exercises of oration and declamation required of a student. There is some evidence of Gunpowder Plot celebrations at Oxford and Cambridge including oral performance of Latin poetry composed for the occasion. One of the extant English poems of John Cleveland, Milton’s fellow Christ’s student, is entitled ‘On the Pouder Plot’ and refers to the topic of the poem as ‘This Annuall subject’ (line 15).¹² As we saw in the last chapter, Milton’s success as a writer of ‘acts verses’ had brought him to the attention of the college hierarchy, and the successful composition of Latin poetry offered a route to reputation and preferment in the college. The composition of epigrams on sacred themes was a standard practice in Caroline Cambridge: satirical epigrams such as Milton’s Gunpowder poems, which seized on aspects of Catholic devotion or theology, were in effect parodic inversions of the sacred epigram.

In Quintum Novembris also derives from a Cambridge tradition of neo-Latin ‘brief epic’ on the topic of the Gunpowder Plot, although most of the examples date from comparatively early in James’s reign. The most prominent example of a brief epic on the plot, Phineas Fletcher’s Locustae, was printed in Cambridge in 1627, along with an English paraphrase, The Apollyonists; but manuscripts of the Latin poem were being circulated by Fletcher as early as 1612, while he was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.¹³ The genre is characterized by a combination of parodic epic language satirizing the failure of the Gunpowder Plot with a tone of genuine epic grandeur in proclaiming James as a second Augustus. Milton’s combination of anti-Catholic satire and elevated Virgilian imagery likely has one source in Fletcher’s Locustae / Apollyonists, which he would have to have seen in manuscript if the 1626 date of In Quintum Novembris is correct. The Locustae begins with Satan rousing the ‘counsel’ of devils in Hell to rise up against England and its Protestant king, who is presented as fighting the demonic forces of papistry with his pen rather than his spear:

That little swimming Isle above the rest,
Spight of our spight, and all our plots, remaines
And growes in happines: but late our nest,
Where wee and Rome, and blood, and all our traines,
Monks, Nuns, dead, and live idols, safe did rest:
Now there (next th’ Oath of God) that Wrastler raignes,
Who fills the land and world with peace, his speare
Is but a pen, with which he downe doth beare
Blind Ignoraunce, false gods, and superstitious feare.

As in Milton’s seventh Prolusion, ‘blind Ignorance’ presides over a nation under Roman Catholic rule. The Locustae and its English version are an under-appreciated influence on both the opening books of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, itself a version of brief epic, especially Milton’s depiction of a Satan who declares it ‘Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n’ (1. 263). The general sentiment is a commonplace, expressed by Julius Caesar in Plutarch’s Lives—‘I had rather be the first man among these fellows [in a barbarian village] than the second man in Rome’, as John Dryden has it in his 1683 translation—but Milton reverses the phrasing of Fletcher’s narrator, who scoffs at ‘rebellious Spirits’, who ‘Change God for Satan, heaven’s for hells Sov’raigne: / O let him serve in hell, who scornes in heaven to raigne!’¹⁴

Richard Stock may have called on James to do even more to root out Catholic treason in his 1606 Paul’s Cross sermon, but James himself had maintained in his ‘Premonition’ that ‘Rome is the Seat of the Antichrist’, to the great aggravation of Bellarmine. Once again, zealous anti-papal rhetoric can evidently not be identified with Puritan opposition to the Church of England in the Jacobean period, but with mainstream, institutional sentiment, whether in the court, the Church, or the universities. In his ‘Premonition’, James voices what would become the common polemical identification during his reign of radical Puritans who wanted to get rid of episcopacy with Catholics who wanted to get rid of the Protestant Church. The two apparently opposed factions in fact desired the same outcome:

That Bishops ought to be in the Church, I ever maintained it, as an Apostolike institution, and so the ordinance of GOD; contrary to the Puritanes, and likewise to Bellarmine; who denies that Bishops have their Jurisdiction immediatly from God. (But it is no wonder he takes the Puritanes part, since Jesuits are nothing but Puritan-Papists).¹⁵

It was in great part the shared rhetoric of anti-Catholicism that kept ‘conformable Puritans’ such as Stock, who supported the episcopal structure of the Church of England and who repeatedly attacked Bellarmine in his sermons, in alliance with the spokesmen of Jacobean ecclesiastical orthodoxy, such as Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), one of the most prominent court preachers and Bishop of Winchester from 1618. Andrewes delivered a series of Gunpowder Plot sermons before James that can at times sound very like Milton’s gunpowder epigrams in their imagery of demonic, hellfire conspiracy: ‘Blow them up, they shall not, but blow themselves downe they shall; downe, after Coreh, the same way he went: Even to their owne place, with Coreh, and Judas, to the bottome of hell’.¹⁶ Indeed before the posthumous publication in 1629 of his selected sermons, Andrewes’s best-known works were his defences of James against Bellarmine, Tortura Torti (1609) and Responsio ad apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini (1610).

There is thus no ideological contradiction, or even obvious tension, in the fact that Milton also composed in autumn 1626, around the time that he likely wrote In Quintum Novembris, a Latin funeral elegy for Andrewes, In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis (On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester), labelled Elegia tertia in the 1645 Poems. In the opening lines of Milton’s elegy, the poet laments the passing of Protestant ‘heroes’ who have recently been killed in battle against the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years’ War, before insisting that the death of Andrewes has caused him even more anguish: the implication is that Andrewes’s intellectual struggle with Counter-Reformation champions such as Bellarmine ranks alongside, and even above, the feats of those who have given their lives in the violent struggle against international Catholic domination. At his death in September 1626, Andrewes epitomized the learned Jacobean response to the intellectual challenge of Counter-Reformation thought—although that reputation would be altered with the rise of Laudianism over the next decade.

The Nature of a Composition

Immediately after the death of Lancelot Andrewes, Charles I gave William Laud the crucial post of Dean of the Royal Chapel that had been held by Andrewes and promised him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Laud had come to regard zealous anti-Catholic and Calvinist views as extremist and subversive, and he had recently represented Puritanism as inherently non-conformable—as a threat to ecclesiastical and civil government, the fortunes of which were for Laud inextricably linked. In a sermon before Charles and the court in Whitehall in July 1626, Laud warned of the danger to the monarchy posed by those who sought further godly reform of the Church and ‘would faine know all the secrets of Predestination’. He equated the Puritans’ curiosity about ‘God’s cause’ with a similarly sacrilegious attitude toward the divine authority of the king: ‘And here Kings may learne if they will, I am sure ’tis fit they should, That those Men which are sacrilegious against God and his Church, are for the very Neigbour-hood of the sinne, the likeliest men to offer violence, to the Honour of Princes first, and their Persons after’.¹⁷ Laud and his friends in the Durham House group, a circle of bishops and theologians who became increasingly influential at court in the 1620s and who emphasized ceremonialism and the role of the clergy over preaching and lay Biblicism, were in turn stigmatized as ‘Arminians’—after the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), who, against the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, emphasized the universality of the Atonement and the capacity of the human will to reject grace. On the basis of a royal proclamation of June 1626 prohibiting the public discussion of ‘innovations’ in religion, discussion of predestinarian teaching was banned from the Cambridge Commencement ceremony; and a further royal proclamation in January 1629 more explicitly prohibited preaching and publishing about predestination.¹⁸

English Arminianism was represented by Puritans as no better than closet Catholicism, and their fears about pro-Catholic sympathies in the Caroline court, stoked by Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France in 1625, were further fuelled by Laud’s growing prominence. After he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Laud would become the key figure in the religious disputes that played a vital role in the outbreak of civil war and the downfall of Charles I. During his ‘Personal Rule’ without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, the king fully backed the Laudian promotion across England of church services characterized by the increased prominence of set prayer, more elaborate clerical and sacramental ceremony, and the reintroduction of devotional objects and church ornamentation.¹⁹ Laud edited Andrewes’s sermons for publication in 1629 as part of his effort to claim an impeccable intellectual heritage for anti-Calvinist doctrine within the Church of England. Andrewes may have been more circumspect and less public in his criticism of predestination and Puritan zeal, but ‘Laud and his circle regarded him as an intellectual father figure’.²⁰ The Jacobean religious consensus, into which Milton’s Gunpowder poems and elegy for Andrewes smoothly fit, was fractured and eventually broken by the accession of Charles I and the rise of Laudianism after 1626, as anti-Puritan polemic increasingly encompassed those who had previously regarded themselves as conformable to the episcopal Church of England, and anti-Catholic polemic increasingly came to be viewed by the episcopal hierarchy of the Church as seditious rather than unifying, and thus in need of suppression. The change in official preferences is indicated by the fact we know of only one Gunpowder Plot sermon preached at Paul’s Cross after John Donne’s 1622 sermon on the topic: as one historian has observed, commemoration of 5 November ‘began to lose its unifying character’ in Caroline England, as ‘railing against’ Catholics became a practice officially banned from the pulpit.²¹

A good example close to home for Milton of how tastes had altered by the early 1630s is the fate that befell the biblical scholarship of Joseph Mede, the most prominent of the Christ’s Fellows in Milton’s time at the college. Mede’s most famous work was Clavis Apocalyptica (1627), in which he outlined his method for interpreting the mysteries and chronology of the Book of Revelation, by which he claimed to demonstrate the course of human history that would culminate in the millennium, the thousand-year rule of Christ on earth. Mede took a keen interest in the progress of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, which he regarded as a key stage in millenarian history: throughout the 1620s he transmitted foreign military news that he received in manuscript letters from intelligencers in London, such as the Prussian émigré Samuel Hartlib— to whom Milton would dedicate Of Education in 1644—to friends and patrons among the country gentry, referring to himself as ‘novellante’, or news writer. He also collected scribal copies of political prophecies emanating from continental Europe, such as a prophecy of Protestant victory over the Habsburg cause that was allegedly discovered inside a clock in a Prague library in 1621.²² After the second edition of Clavis Apocalyptica appeared in 1632, Mede felt prevented from publishing any further work on scriptural exegesis because the identification of Rome and the papacy with Antichrist and the Beast of Revelation that was fundamental to his exegetical method was regarded as inflammatory by Laud’s ecclesiastical establishment. Despite Mede’s scholarly standing, his refusal to renounce ‘the Tenet of the Apocalyptical Beast’ prevented him, as he acknowledged privately in 1635, from rising in the Caroline Church.²³

Yet Mede was by no means a Puritan, even of the conformable variety: he certainly never followed the radical Puritan and sectarian practice of extending the identification of Antichrist from Rome to the Church of England. He had obtained his Fellowship at Christ’s through the support of Lancelot Andrewes; if Milton was aware of this, his Latin elegy for Andrewes might have been designed to impress the most renowned scholar at his college. Mede’s ecclesiastical and theological sympathies appear in fact to have been ceremonial and Arminian, as were those of his close friend at Christ’s and Milton’s first tutor, William Chappell, whose career would be promoted under Laud, first as Dean of Cashel in Ireland from 1633 and then Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1634.²⁴ The case of Mede offers a prime example of how anti-Catholic language, argument, and scholarship that had been uncontroversial and even career-enhancing in the world of the Jacobean Church and universities became stigmatized as ‘Puritan’, subversive, and career-threatening in Caroline England. Laud received the good news about his promotion in September 1626 from his close ally George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), to whom Laud acted as chaplain and who maintained with the accession of Charles the status of chief royal favourite to which he had risen in the Jacobean court. Buckingham was the focus of discontent, both religious and political, with the Caroline court in its early years — a discontent that culminated in his murder by a disillusioned soldier in 1628. Milton could hardly not have been aware of the controversy surrounding Buckingham in the aftermath of the death of James, for it had a direct impact upon Cambridge. In May 1626, in the aftermath of wild allegations that Buckingham had even been involved in poisoning James as part of a Spanish and Catholic plot, Parliament had sought to have Buckingham impeached on charges of corruption. Charles responded by dissolving Parliament and helping to ensure Buckingham was installed as the new Chancellor of Cambridge.²⁵

Milton wrote a Latin funeral elegy for the previous Vice-Chancellor, John Gostlin, who died on 21 October 1626, which is packed with Homeric and Ovidian references and imagery. This is another in a series of heavily classicized Latin funeral elegies for prominent figures in the university and Church establishment that Milton composed in the final months of 1626: aside from those for Andrewes and Gostlin, there were also poems for Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely and formerly Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who died on 5 October 1626 (In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis) and Richard Ridding, who in the office of Esquire Beadle at Cambridge fulfilled certain duties on ceremonial occasions, such as carrying the Vice-Chancellor’s mace, and who died on 26 September 1626 (In Obitum Praeconis Academici Cantabrigiensis; entitled Elegia secunda in the 1645 Poems). Evidently Milton threw himself into practise of the genre of the Latin funeral elegy in this brief, intense period of poetic activity—the subjects of these four elegies died within less than four weeks of each other—and it is likely that he performed these pieces before fellow students and Fellows in Christ’s, perhaps at memorial services in the chapel. Alexander Gil composed a Latin funeral elegy for a bishop who died in May 1626, Arthur Lake: as with Felton and Andrewes, Lake was involved with the translation of the King James Bible, the great literary testament to the Protestant consensus fostered under James I.²⁶ As with In Quintum Novembris, Milton may again have been responding to the poetic example of his friend, Gil.

If In Quintum Novembris and the Gunpowder epigrams were also composed at this time, the autumn and winter of 1626 was one of unprecedented productivity for Milton as he experimented with, and displayed, his talents as a neo-Latin poet. He may well have believed that this practice in the art of composing in different forms and genres was what was expected of a student after the intensely literary nature of his education at St Paul’s. But poetry also played a central role in the study of language and literature at the seventeenth-century university, and those who acquired a reputation for excellence in the art of poetry were admired by their peers. As the Oxford tutor Thomas Heyward observed later in the century, the business of university students in their first year ‘is to learn to think well, and to express our thoughts to others, so as to communicate to them the very ideas, judgments and reasons we have within ourselves, whenever we discourse or write. In other words ’tis to understand the nature of a composition in generall.’ This understanding was required in order ‘to frame distinct notions’ as well as ‘a theme, a declamation, an oration, an epistle, a character, a dialogue, a discourse or treatise’; or, in poetry, ‘an epigram, a satyr, an ode, whether Sapphyick, Alcaick, or Pindarick, an epistolary poem . . . a pastorall, and an epick poem’. Obadiah Walker advised that a university student must ‘understand and practise (though not much, except he have a considerable dexterity in it) poetry; without which no man can be a perfect orator’: by the latter half of his second year at Christ’s, Milton was displaying this ‘considerable dexterity’ in a range of poetic genres.²⁷

Milton’s activity as a neo-Latin poet during his undergraduate years from 1625 to 1629 was first and foremost demonstrative, both to himself and to his peers, in college and among a few trusted friends such as Diodati and Gil, of his facility of composition in different genres: satirical epigram, Ovidian elegy, funeral elegy, verse letter, ‘brief’ epic. There is very little to sustain the influential claim that this collegiate writing ‘bears an overt or covert political charge—vehemently anti-Catholic, anti-Laudian, critical of Stuart religious repression, supportive of Protestant militancy in Europe, prophetic—a politics that aligns him with reformist and oppositional views.’²⁸ This is to read the vernacular prose polemicist of the early 1640s back into the undergraduate Latin poet of the later 1620s—a teenager who was above all interested, as the burst of funeral elegies at the end of 1626 exemplifies, in experimenting with different poetic forms and conventions. It is also to ignore that fact that anti-Catholicism and a generalized support for the Protestant cause against the Holy Roman Empire in Europe were characteristic values of the religious consensus of the Jacobean era, which encompassed ‘conformable’ Puritans such as Richard Stock and Thomas Young as well as a millenarian scholar with Arminian leanings such as Joseph Mede and, for much of the time, a bishop who was only later claimed by the Laudians for Arminian ceremonialism, Lancelot Andrewes. It might be the case that Milton’s particular interest in Gunpowder Plot poetry in 1626, and somewhat anachronistic deployment of the Virgilian tropes of Jacobean panegyric, given James was dead and Charles had ascended to the throne, convey an implicit anxiety that any relaxation of vigilance in the new Caroline era could allow the re-emergence of such Catholic plots to overthrow Protestant rule. The publication of Fletcher’s Locustae in 1627 after it had circulated for over fifteen years in manuscript may be seen as a sign of growing concern over such episodes as Charles’s marriage to a Catholic, the continuing influence of Buckingham on the new king, and the rising prominence of Laud, with his antipathy towards ‘Puritans’ of all stripes and desire to push anti-Catholic rhetoric out of public discourse. The falling-off of Gunpowder Plot sermons from the mid-1620s onwards indicates how the climate changed with the rise of Laud’s influence in the Church and court. Yet comparison of Milton’s satirical Latin epigrams with the sort of vernacular satirical verse that was circulating in manuscript in Caroline Cambridge is instructive with regard to any claim for the political charge of Milton’s student writing.

Satire and Libel

A host of vernacular libels and satires on Buckingham and his relationship with the Stuart kings circulated anonymously in manuscript in the 1620s. ‘The Five Senses’, probably written in 1623, illustrates how Buckingham was seen to personify a popish influence in the court that manifested itself in undeserved favouritism, fiscal corruption and moral laxity, in particular disordered sexuality. It was widely believed that the close relationship Buckingham had formed with James I had a sexual element, and the author of ‘The Five Senses’ prays that God will save ‘My Soveraigne from a Ganimede / Whose whoreish breath hath power to lead / His excellence which way it list’ (lines 59–61).²⁹ Sodomy is linked with judicial corruption as the poet calls on the heavens to

    blesse my King
From such a bribe as may with drawe
His thoughts from equitie, and lawe
From such a smooth, and beardlesse chinn
As may provoke, or tempt to sinn[.] (lines 40–3)

The infiltration of popery is the root cause of these other sins and is placed at the centre of the poem, where James is warned away

From the cand[i]ed poyson’d baites
Of Jesuites and their deceipts
Italian Sallets, Romish druggs
The milke of Babells proud whore duggs[.] (lines 31–4)

The reader with literary or court connections could recognize in the very form of the poem a reference to Buckingham’s centrality in the extravagant, expensive theatrical performances for which the Jacobean court had become known. ‘The Five Senses’ is based on a song from Ben Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed, written for Buckingham’s entertainment of James in 1621 and featuring Buckingham and his friends dressed as thieving gypsies who are transformed into impeccably loyal (and impeccably well-dressed) courtiers. One anti-Buckingham satire of 1621, ‘When Charles, hath got the Spanish Gearle’, associates the patronage of the lavish Whitehall masques composed by Jonson and staged by Inigo Jones with the indifference of the court to its waste of the nation’s wealth:

When the Banquetting howse is finishd quite
then Jones Sir Inigo we will call
& Poetts Ben brave maskes shall write
& a Parlament shall pay for all[.]³⁰

The patronage of court masques continued under Charles and attacks on the theatrical culture of the Caroline court as an embodiment of its moral and spiritual corruption would become a motif of Puritan polemic in the 1630s, most notoriously in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix (1633), which condemned female actors as little better than whores at a time when Henrietta Maria herself was in rehearsal for a new masque performance. (The court or private aristocratic entertainments were the only venues in pre-1660 England in which women were allowed to take part in dramatic performance.) Prynne was tried on a charge of treason and was sentenced to have his ears cropped: the episode, to which we shall return in later chapters, illustrates how the sort of criticism of court culture that had previously been found only in manuscript verse satire increasingly became in the 1630s the stuff of printed prose polemic, even if Prynne’s complaints are closer in form to the sermon and retain little of the university wit that characterizes the manuscript libels.

‘The Five Senses’ contains the motifs common to many of the libels on Buckingham but it has been deemed a particularly significant example because of its focus upon the person of the king rather than merely upon Buckingham or other courtiers.³¹ That this significance was recognized by contemporaries is made clear by an episode that must surely have made an impact on Milton, but which has attracted comparatively little interest in accounts of his life. When Alexander Gil was drinking in an Oxford tavern on 1 September 1628—a couple of months after Milton had written to him complaining about the poor learning of his fellow students going into clerical careers—he drank the health of John Felton, who had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham the previous week. Two days later, while drinking in the cellar of Trinity College, Oxford, Gil made derogatory comments about both the new king, Charles, and his father, James. Gil’s behaviour was reported to Laud, who by this time was Bishop of London, and on 4 November Gil was arrested at St Paul’s School and imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster. The rooms in Trinity College of Gil’s friend, William Pickering, were searched and incriminating ‘libels and letters’ belonging to Gil were found, including a copy of ‘The Five Senses’.³² (It is intriguing to think that correspondence from Milton might have been among the letters confiscated by the state.) Gil was examined by Laud, and on 6 November the Court of Star Chamber, the official organ of censorship in early modern England, sentenced Gil to be degraded from the ministry, dismissed from his ushership at St Paul’s, deprived of his university degrees, fined two thousands pounds, to lose one ear in the pillory at Westminster and the other in Oxford, and to imprisoned in the Fleet prison. Gil escaped the penalty of mutilation on the petition of his father, before finally receiving a royal pardon on 30 November 1630. Although it has been assumed that Gil must thus have remained in prison for a full two years—which would mean that Milton was writing to a man in prison when he wrote to him on 20 May 1630—Gil states in a letter addressed to Laud on 23 November 1629 that ‘the best of kings’ has ‘released me from prison’ after ‘fifteen months of distress’ (although fifteen months would go back to the initial offence in September 1628 rather than his sentencing in November).³³

Milton was surely aware of this underground satirical verse culture of the later 1620s: as the discovery of the libels among Gil’s papers in an Oxford college indicates, the universities were the most important centres for the transmission of manuscript libels, and the mock epitaph was both a feature of the neo-Latin anti-papal satire that influenced Milton’s Gunpowder epigrams and the most common form employed in the vernacular verse libels of the 1620s. The comic reference in Prolusion VI, the Christ’s ‘salting’, to the infamous and humiliating failure of Buckingham’s military expedition in 1627 to the Isle of Rhé off the west coast of France, in an attempt to relieve the besieged Huguenots of La Rochelle, indicates Milton’s sense of the sort of anti-Buckingham humour that would find favour with his varsity audience: ‘I should send you all off so nicely pickled that you would be as sick of salt water as were those soldiers of ours who lately managed to escape from the Island of Rhé.’ The retreat from Rhé was a popular topic of the anti-Buckingham libels circulating in manuscript, such as ‘Upon the Duke Buckingham his opposition to the Parliament’:

O Admirall! since thou camst back againe
more base from Rhee, then Cecill did from Spaine
Since thou hast bin againe receaved at Court
beyond thy owne conceite beyond Reporte.
Since thou hast guilt of all the bloud Rhee spent
must thou still live to breake a Parliament!³⁴

The unfolding events in Europe were of much interest to important figures in Christ’s: in one of his regular letters reporting the recent news of the European wars to Sir Martin Stuteville, Mede lamented on December 1627 the lack of reliable news about ‘this shameful overthrow’, the ‘disaster at Rhee’. One 1626 verse libel, ‘The Kinge and his wyfe the Parliament’, is comparable to Milton’s epigrams in its representation of Buckingham as an instrument of Satan, even worse than the sulphuric Guy Fawkes in the popish dangers he poses to the state:

An art sprunge from a blacker seed,
then that which he powred in that weed
Whom we call Guido Faux:
Who if he fiered had his vessell,
of Sulphure standeinge on beare tressell,
in his sepulchrall walkes:
Could not have soe disperst our state,
Nor opened Spayne soe wyde a gate,
as hath his gracelesse grace[.]³⁵

Yet the differences are as striking as the similarities: the manuscript libel applies the language and imagery of Gunpowder Plot epigrams to mockery of the most prominent courtier in the new reign of Charles I; while Milton’s Latin epigrams, if it were not for their awareness of the recent death of James I, could feasibly have been composed fifteen years earlier, with their allusions to James’s 1609 ‘Premonition’ and debate with Bellarmine. At the same time, it would also be an error to regard the composition and possession of anti-court manuscript libels as a barometer of later radicalism. The authorship of the notorious ‘The Five Senses’, found in Gil’s papers, has been ascribed to William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), the leading Scottish poet of the time, best known for recording his literary conversations with Jonson. Drummond can hardly be described as a Puritan radical: he wrote verses to welcome Charles I on the king’s visit to Scotland in 1633, and during the conflicts of the later 1630s and 1640s Drummond was constant in his anti-Presbyterianism and loyalty to the crown.³⁶ It remains possible that Gil himself was the author of ‘The Five Senses’, although the evidence for his authorship rests upon only the discovery of a copy of a much copied poem in his papers and the apparent lack of any denial on his part during the proceedings against him that he was indeed the author. The many surviving manuscript copies of ‘The Five Senses’—more than fifty copies are extant—show it to have been much in circulation in Caroline Oxford and Cambridge, found in the poetic miscellanies of men such as William Sancroft (1617–93), a student and then Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later, after the Restoration, Archbishop of Canterbury.³⁷ Gil’s collection of his Latin poems in 1632, Parerga, is dedicated to Charles I and includes not only poems on the death of James I and the accession of Charles, but a panegyric addressed to Laud. He wrote at least five letters to Laud between 23 November 1929 and 20 September 1633, beseeching Laud in oleaginous terms to act as his patron, and one to the king himself on 26 December 1631, the same date as his fourth letter to Laud. Gil refers to having sent Charles a copy of his recent poem on the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, communicated to the king by the poet and courtier Thomas Carew, and offers to compose in the ‘honour of my own prince, to whom I owe my life and health, some Caroloïdes, in imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid’.³⁸ Doubtless the protestations of loyalty are in some measure expatiatory after Gil’s recent imprisonment, but later poems that Gil put into print reinforce his loyalty to the crown as civil war broke out: they include an elegy for the Earl of Strafford, beheaded by Parliament in 1641, and congratulatory verses to Charles on his return from Scotland in late 1641.³⁹

Gil died in 1642, so we cannot know which side he would have taken in the civil wars: these 1641 verses indicate he would probably not have agreed with the aggressively anti-episcopal and pro-Scottish polemic that his friend Milton unleashed in his prose work Of Reformation in the same year. As we have seen, however, Gil’s 1632 collection dedicated to Charles also includes his poem on the collapse of the Blackfriars chapel and In Sylvam-Ducis, the poem celebrating the taking of the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch by Protestant forces in 1629, the Virgilian qualities of which Milton expressed such admiration in his letter of May 1630. In his letter to Gil thanking him for the poem, Milton might be read as expressing his support for the entry of England into the Thirty Years’ War, although the sentiment is hardly transparent: ‘But, as we hear you sing the prosperous successes of the Allies in so sonorous and triumphal a strain, how great a poet we shall hope to have in you if by chance our own affairs, turning at last more fortunate, should demand your congratulatory verses!’⁴⁰ In 1632 Gil published his Latin poem on the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden and great Protestant military hero of the Thirty Years’ War: dedicated to Charles, the poem was swiftly published in an English translation by William Hawkins, who was an MA student at Christ’s when Milton arrived in 1625.⁴¹ The pagan celebrations of Polish Jesuits—who apparently commemorated a recent military victory by burning pictures of Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers—are mocked as a prelude to their providential destruction by Adolphus, in a manner similar to Gil’s poem on the ‘fatal vespers’ in Blackfriars:

Now triumph, Popelings, Bonfyres make, & Feasts,
Drinke, dance & be as mad as Baachus Priests;
Let thy grave mens pictures bee your games,
And making up your sports, then burn in flames.
But feare, lest that true Thunderers just ire
Send forth fyre from heav’n to mingle with your fyre.⁴²

Evidently Gil, seeking to reassure Charles and Laud of his loyalty after his commuted punishment, perceived no tension in dedicating verse to them in 1632 which can be characterized as vehemently anti-Catholic and supportive of Protestant militancy in Europe.

Milton’s 1626 Gunpowder poems might be read as (very) implicit warnings that the Catholic threat to the English state, so vividly embodied for the English by Guy Fawkes, was at risk of again becoming urgent in the early years of the reign of Charles I; but even highly explicit, aggressive verse libels of the 1620s, which identified the Caroline court as a source of crypto-Catholic corruption in the nation, should not be taken as evidence of anti-monarchical sentiment. The ear-cropped William Prynne, after all, would go on to condemn the regicide as an illegal and irreligious act—by which stage he had become one of the figures in public life whom Milton most detested. Nonetheless, the themes of the manuscript libels on Buckingham in the 1620s—courtly corruption, popery, and extravagance—became a staple of Parliamentarian propaganda of the 1640s and shape the polemical strategies of Milton’s prose polemics: the association of theatricality and the moral corruption at the heart of Caroline culture and society is an important element of his anti-episcopal prose and is central to his attack on the reign of Charles in the post-regicide writing. Moreover, what happened to Gil in 1628 offered a brutal example of how the state could intervene to repress poetry and persecute the poet. During the 1630s, Milton would increasingly identify such persecutory conditions with forms of Roman Catholic rule as he read about the decline of intellectual and literary culture in Counter-Reformation Italy. While Puritan activists such as William Prynne were increasingly subject to persecution and public punishment under Laudian rule after 1633, the experience of his friend Gil five years earlier was a more personal encounter for Milton with the potential consequences of state censorship, and one that can only have made him aware, perhaps for the first time, of the political dangers that poets could potentially face.