The Life of the Author: John Milton

Richard Bradford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119621621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR

An expansive biography of John Milton, including an assessment of his poetry and prose and an account of the ways in which he has been presented over the past three and a half centuries—written by a leading scholar in the field

It is hard to overstate the role that John Milton played in the historical, political and literary controversies of seventeenth century England; his writings and very life challenged the status quo. Living through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, Milton was involved at every turn. Struggling to reconcile his private beliefs with his involvement with a radical political experiment, a republic which involved the killing of the monarch, his star rose and fell several times during his life. Married three times, struck blind at a cruelly early age, he was a famed pamphleteer and political activist whose revolutionary political credos placed him in mortal danger after the Restoration. Milton's varied life makes for fascinating reading but it also produced some of the most important poetry in the English language. Paradise Lost, the only poem in English recognized as an epic, challenged conventional thinking on widespread topics from religion and gender equality to the fundamental question of why we behave as we do.

This fascinating new biography is divided into two parts. The first separates the man from the myth, and elucidates the complicated details of Milton's life from his early years as a literary artist uncertain of his destiny, through his work as a propagandist for the Cromwellian republic, to his rewriting of the Old Testament story of the Fall as a poetic allegory of more recent history. The second looks at how biographers and critics from the seventeenth century to the present day have distorted and manipulated the personality of Milton to suit their biases. Balancing accessibility with academic rigor, this volume:

• Examines the significant aspects of Milton's life and work, including his poetry and prose, his government writings, his travels, and his final years
• Explores Milton's Protestant and republican influences in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and his other literary works
• Highlights the differences and similarities between Milton's poetry and political prose
• Follows the history of biographical and critical presentations of Milton from the seventeenth century onwards, including his adoption as a hero of Romanticism and his survival in the twentieth century as, allegedly, a sceptical humanist
• Addresses modern critiques of Milton in Marxism, Feminism, and other branches of Theory

The Life of the Author: John Milton. Poet and Revolutionary is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, university lecturers, and academic researchers in relevant fields, particularly seventeenth century poetry and history, as well as literary biography and the history of criticism.

Part One
Life

1
The City of London

William Shakespeare and John Milton are the two most important poets in English. Shakespeare’s achievements are unchallengeable and secure. Milton can make a far more controversial claim to eminence. He wrote the only poem in English recognised as an epic, a poem moreover which challenged the beliefs and presuppositions of all of its readers. As a literary writer, his political and historical significance is unique; he was at the centre, involved in, the most traumatic period of modern British history, and this left an imprint on his writings.

The family into which John Milton was born on Friday, 9 December 1608 exemplified the mutations and uncertainties of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His paternal grandfather, Richard, had been a yeoman and worked a farm near Stanton St John, a village about four miles north of Oxford. Richard had initially occupied a position in the social hierarchy only just above that of the medieval serf but by means still undisclosed, ‘probably a good marriage’, he acquired an estate that in 1577 was recorded as providing the considerable income of £500 per year.

Milton never made reference to his grandfather in print, which is not entirely surprising given that Richard was also a recusant whose public allegiance to Roman Catholicism earned him excommunication from the Elizabethan Church of England in 1582 and in 1601 fines amounting to £120. Religious difference caused a feud between Richard and his son John, Milton’s father. It is known that John senior attended Christ Church, Oxford, sometime during the 1570s, although there is no record of whether he did so as a chorister or a student: he did not receive a degree. In any event it is likely that in Oxford John witnessed the disputations that attended the new theology of Protestantism, then in England barely fifty years old. One day after John had returned to the family home, Richard discovered his son in his room reading that symbolic testament to Anglicanism, the Bible in English. Quarrels between father and son intensified, with the eventual result that in the early 1580s John was disinherited and left Oxfordshire for London, never to return, nor as far as is known to communicate again with Richard.

We do not know how John, then in his early twenties (b. 1562), kept himself when he first arrived in London, but in 1583 or thereabouts he was taken on as an apprentice by James Colbron, a scrivener, and by 1590 had become a successful and independent member of that profession. Scriveners combined the functions of contract lawyer, accountant, financial adviser, money lender and debt collector. They had serviced the guilds and middle-ranking professional classes of the metropolis since the early Middle Ages and by the turn of the sixteenth century they had become, perhaps more than any other profession, the financial beneficiaries of the growing status of London as one of the major trading and seafaring capitals of Europe. John Milton senior did well. By 1600 he felt financially secure enough to court Sara Jeffrey, a woman from a comfortably off family of merchant tailors, whom he married within a year. The marital home would be a five-storey house in Bread Street, near Cheapside, a region favoured by wealthy, upwardly mobile traders and merchants (see Figure 1.1). A street carrying the same name still exists in roughly the same location but all of the properties from the Milton family’s time were destroyed in the Great Fire. Their first child died before it could be baptized in May 1601 but a few years later a daughter, christened Anne, survived. John junior later entered the exact details of his own birth in the family Bible: ‘the 9th of December 1608 die Veneris [Friday] half an hour after 6 in the morning.’ He was baptized in All Hallows parish church, Bread Street on 20 December 1608.

Figure 1.1 City of London and original St Paul’s Cathedral before the Great Fire. Bread Street, where Milton grew up, would have been in the foreground between the Cathedral and the Thames.Source: Mayson Beeton Collection.

The London into which Milton was born and where he would spend most of his life was undergoing the most radical changes in its history. In 1608 it was effectively two different places. The City itself was an assembly of parishes crowded around the old Gothic St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower, a thriving centre for trade and finance and the obvious location for a scrivener such as Milton senior to base his home and business. Roughly three miles along the curve of the Thames to the west would bring one to Westminster and Whitehall. This was the nation’s seat of government, where the monarch held court and the Lords and representatives of the commoners met. Between these two sites there were the Inns of Court, effectively England’s third university and devoted entirely to the study of law. Milton’s brother Christopher would begin his career as a lawyer at one of the Inns and during his youth Milton himself spent brief periods in residence there, without registering as a student. Fleet Street and the Strand made up the main highways between Westminster and the City, though our notion of them as urban thoroughfares bears no relation to their character in the early seventeenth century when they were surrounded by what amounted to small palaces and rural estates occupied by the aristocracy and the senior episcopy. To the north of these, the region that we now refer to as the West End, there was little more than lanes and open countryside. Throughout the 1620s and 1630s this area became a magnet for England’s first wave of property speculators. In 1609 Robert Cecil, Early of Salisbury, received James’s consent to develop a ‘Close of fine houses near Leicester Fields’ (what is now Leicester Square). Many other similar projects in this region followed and in 1631 Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, received permission to construct a number of even grander residences in the so-called Covent (‘convent’) Garden, again north of the Strand. The likely residents would either be members of a growing gentry and aristocracy – both James and Charles were profligate in their conferring of titles and privileges – or those who were amassing wealth from the growing import/export economy based on the river to the east of the City, in what would eventually become London’s thriving docklands. Their employees, along with various tradesmen who serviced this expanding metropolis, created an overspill from the City and set themselves up in squalid residences adjacent to the ever expanding squares of the new West End.

The topography of the area altered year by year and it was symbolic of a deeper social and demographic tension. Bedford, for example, was not simply indulging his taste for luxury in his Covent Garden development. His move was tactical. He, like many others in the gentry and aristocracy, was becoming alienated from the Court of Charles I. Eventually, the alliance between disaffected gentry and those with interests in the City – individuals like John Milton senior – would make up the power base of the Civil War anti-monarchists. The Bread Street house, where Milton grew up, would have been a spacious, but shapeless, half-timbered structure, each storey being added at various points in its history by a worthy individual with ambitions for more space. The street would have been narrow, crowded and filthy. Drains, as we understand them, did not exist in seventeenth-century London and waste, domestic and human, would lie in these open thoroughfares awaiting heavy, scouring rain. Fresh water, supplied by elm pipes, came at cost shortly after Milton’s birth and it is probable that his family would be able to afford this. Milton, from Cambridge onwards, cultivated an intense love for the peace and innate beauty of the natural countryside and his upbringing in the crowded dirty city must have played some part in this.

John senior planned for his son a conventional route to success via the educational channels that had been denied to himself. When Milton was ten his father hired for him a private tutor called Thomas Young, a graduate of St Andrews University. Two years later John was admitted to St Paul’s School, an esteemed institution adjacent to the Cathedral and only a few minutes’ walk from Bread Street. Five years after that, aged sixteen, he would matriculate as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and enjoy the decent status of a ‘lesser pensioner’, meaning that his father was wealthy enough to pay for modest privileges and accommodation in college.

The influence of these years upon John Milton the writer is a matter of speculation but what we know of them is more than suggestive of their effect. Milton, during the later seventeenth century, was to become the most esteemed and controversial living poet in England, and Paradise Lost would remain as the poem in English most deserving of the title of epic. His status and reputation were sustained partly by his mastery of language and verse form, but only partly. In his writing he addressed himself to fundamental issues – our relationship with God, our origins, our condition as a species and our fate. These are recurrent features of all Renaissance verse, but Milton had a special, almost unique perspective upon them. He was born into the cauldron of tensions and divisions that characterised English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a state which began with Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 and which would reach its apocalyptic climax in the Civil War of the 1640s. Milton not only observed these events, he was a participant in them. He served the republican cause as its most eminent pamphleteer and polemicist during the Civil War years and he would become Latin Secretary – an office not unlike the modern post of a foreign minister – for the victorious Cromwellian governments. No other major English writer has been so closely involved with the intellectual and political shaping of their age. His early years had trained him well for his role and to properly appreciate the nature of this involvement we should broaden the context, allow ourselves a clearer understanding of the world – essentially the religious turbulence which prevailed in England and much of Northern Europe – which greeted the arrival of John Milton.

Martin Luther had initiated the Protestant break with Rome, but it was John Calvin, a Geneva theologian, who had created the most radical branch of Protestant theology. His Institutions of Christian Religion (1535) became the benchmark for division. In it he proposed a complex theological, indeed philosophical thesis. Essentially, Calvinism was founded upon the tenet of predestination. God has in advance ‘elected’ those who will be rewarded with eternal, heavenly existence. Human beings enter life in a state of sinfulness, carrying the burden of Adam and Eve’s Fall. Therefore we are offered the possibility of redemption, but God has already decided which of us will choose the path to redemption or damnation.

Calvinists maintained the difficult, and some would argue, paradoxical tenet that (a) we must by our actions redeem ourselves, while (b) the redeemed have been preselected by God. This might trouble us because the original sin of Adam and Eve condemned the human race to a state of punitive detachment from God’s wisdom: we must accept even that which we cannot properly understand. Consequently Calvinists argued that the ceremonial rituals of the Roman Church were self-indulgent, even decadent distractions from an attainment even of a limited knowledge of our God-willed condition and fate.

In its early years the English Reformation, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII, was less a theological than a political rebellion; the monarch rather than the Pope became the acknowledged head of the Church, with all the financial, ideological and legislative benefits carried by that role. The practices of the Church itself were largely unaltered by Henry’s 1534 Act of Settlement but gradually, through the sixteenth century, more and more Anglicans become apologists and campaigners for what they perceived to be true Protestantism. Influenced by Calvinism they acquired the collective title of ‘Puritans’; they sought to purify the Church of England of its Roman practices and beliefs. As a result there was conflict, evidenced respectively in the reigns of Henry’s son Edward VI (1547–53) and daughter Mary I (1553–8). Edward, the so-called boy-King, was pro-Calvinist. He instituted the persecution and execution of Catholics and licensed the radical Book of Common Prayer (1549) which for the first time ever offered scripture in vernacular English, an act of independence from predominantly Latinate Roman doctrine. Mary, his sister, went to the other extreme, married Philip II of Spain, a fanatical anti-Protestant, reinstituted Roman Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted radical Protestants. Bishop Latimer and Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer, both Anglicans with Calvinist sympathies, were burnt at the stake. The reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) restored a degree of compromise. Despite the official re-establishment of an independent Church of England the nation remained divided, with numerous factions of Protestantism as much set against each other as united in opposition to Catholicism.

Elizabeth was obliged to play the role of mediator, which she did with tactical brilliance.

Significantly, the Elizabethan period also involved the emergence of England as a major financi...