Milton and His Family

In 1595 when he must have been long past the usual age of apprenticeship, do we hear of his preparation for the profession of a. scrivener; and not till February 1590 - 1600, when he was about thirty-seven years of  age, did he become a qualified member of the Scriveners’ Company. It was then that he set up his "house and shop" at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street, and began his business of drawing up wills, marriage-settlements, and the like, with such related business as that of receiving money from clients for investment and, lending it out to the best advantage. It was at the same time that he married, not, as stated by Aubrey, a lady named Bradshaw, but Sarah Jeffrey, one of the two orphan daughters of a Paul Jeffrey, of St Swithin’s, London, citizen and merchant tailor, originally from Essex, who had died before 1583. At the date of her marriage she was about twenty-eight years of age. Six children were born to the scrivener and his wife, of whom three survived infancy, Anne, who married Edward Phillips; John, the poet; and Christopher (1615—1693), who was knighted and made a judge under James II.

Not long after Milton’s return the house at Horton ceased to be the family home. Christopher Milton’ and his wife went to reside at Reading, taking the old gentleman with them, while Milton himself preferred London. He had first taken lodgings in St Bride’s Churchyard, at the foot of Fleet Street; but, after a while, probably early in 1640, he removed to a pretty garden house of his own, at the end of an entry, in the part of Aldersgate Street which lies immediately on the city side of what is now Maidenhead Court. His sister, whose first husband had died in 1631, had married a Mr. Thomas Agar, his successor in the Crown Office; and it was arranged that her two sons by her first husband should’ be educated by their uncle. John Phillips, the younger of them, only nine years old, had boarded with him in the St. Bride’s Churchyard lodgings; and, after the removal to Aldersgate Street, the other brother, Edward Phillips, only a year older, became his boarder also. Gradually a few other boys, the sons of well-to-do personal friends, joined the two Phillipses, whether as boarders or for dairy lessons, so that the house in Aldersgate Street became a small private school. 

Milton’s conduct under the insult of his wife’s desertion was most characteristic. Always fearless and speculative, he converted his own case into a public protest against the existing law and theory of marriage. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored to the good of both Sexes from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes was the title of a pamphlet put forth by him in August 1643, without his name, but with no effort at concealment, declaring the notion of a sacramental sanctity in the marriage relation to be a clerically invented superstition, and arguing that inherent incompatibility of character, or contrariety of mind, between two married persons is a perfectly just reason for divorce. If the date, the 1st of August, is correct, the pamphlet must have been written almost immediately on his wife’s departure and before her definite refusal to return. There was no reference to his own case, except by implication; but the boldness of the speculation roused attention and sent a shock through London. It was a time when the authors of heresies of this sort, or of any sort, ran considerable risks. The famous Westminster Assembly of Divines, called by the Long Parliament, met on the 1st of July 1643. Whether Milton’s divorce tract was formally discussed in the Assembly during the first months of its sitting is unknown; but it is certain that the London clergy, including not a few members of the Assembly, were then angrily discussing it in private. That there might be no obstacle to a more public prosecution, Milton put his name to a second and much enlarged edition of the tract, in February 1644, dedicated openly to the parliament and the assembly. Then, for. a month or two, during which the gossip about him and his monstrous doctrine was spreading more and more, he turned his attention to other subjects.

The evil days were those of the Restoration in its first or Clarendonian stage, with its revenges and reactions, its return to high Episcopacy and suppression of every form of dissent and sectarianism, its new and shameless royal court, its open proclamation and practice of anti-Puritanism in morals and in literature no less than in politics. For the main part of this world of the Restoration Milton was now nothing more than an infamous outcast, the detestable blind republican and regicide who had, by too great clemency, been left unhanged. The friends that adhered to him still, and came to see him in Jewin Street, were few in number, and chiefly from the ranks of those nonconforming denominations, Independents, Baptists or Quakers,’ who were themselves under similar obloquy. Besides his two nephews, the faithful Andrew Marvell, Cyriack Skinner and some others of his former admirers, English or foreign, we hear chiefly of a Dr Nathan Paget, who was a physician in the Jewin Street neighborhood, and of several young men who would drop in upon him by turns, partly to act as his amanuenses, and partly for the benefit of lessons from him— one of them a Quaker youth, named Thomas Ellwood. With all this genuine attachment to him of a select few, Milton could truly enough describe his condition after the Restoration as one of “solitude.” Nor was this the worst. His three daughters, on whom he ought now to have been able principally to depend, were his most serious domestic trouble. The poor motherless girls, the eldest in her seventeenth year in 1662, the second in her fifteenth and the youngest in her eleventh, had grown up, in their father’s blindness and too great self-absorption, ill-looked-after and but poorly educated; and the result now appeared. They “made nothing of neglecting him “; they rebelled against the drudgery of reading to him or otherwise attending on him; they “did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketing's”; they actually “had made away some of his books, and would have sold the rest.”

It was to remedy this state of things that Milton consented to a third marriage. The wife found for him was Elizabeth Minshull, of a good Cheshire family, and a relative of Dr Paget. They were married on the 24th of February 1662/3, the wife being then only in her twenty-fifth year, while Milton was in his fifty-fifth. She proved an excellent wife; and the Jewin Street household, though the daughters remained in it, must have been under better management from the time of her entry into it. Meanwhile, he had found some solace in renewed industry of various kinds among his books and tasks of scholarship, and more particularly he had been building up his Paradise Lost. He had begun the poem in earnest, we are told, in 1658 at his house in Petty France, not in the dramatic form contemplated eighteen years before, but deliberately in the epic form. He had made but little way when there came the interruption of the anarchy preceding the Restoration and of the Restoration itself; but the work had been resumed in Jewin Street and prosecuted there steadily, by dictations of twenty or thirty lines at a time to whatever friendly or hired amanuensis chanced to be at hand. Considerable progress had been made in this way before his third marriage; and after that the work proceeded apace, his nephew, Edward Phillips, who was then out in the world on his own account, looking in when he could to revise the growing manuscript.

It was not in the house in Jewin Street, however, that Paradise Lost was finished. Not very long after the third marriage, probably in 1664, he removed to another house, with a garden, in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. Here Paradise Lost was certainly finished before July 1665 for when Milton and his family, to avoid the Great Plague of London, went into temporary country-quarters in a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, the finished manuscript was taken with him, in probably more than one copy. This we learn from Thomas Ellwood, who had taken the cottage for him, and was allowed to take a copy of the manuscript way with him for perusal, during Milton’s stay at Chalfont (Life of Thomas Ellwood, 1714). The delay in the publication of the poem may be explained partly by the fact that the official licenser hesitated before granting the necessary imprimatur to a book by a man of such notorious republican antecedents, and partly by the paralysis of all business in London by the Great Fire of September 1666. It was not till the 27th of April 1667 that Milton concluded an agreement, still preserved in the British Museum, with Samuel Simmons, printer, of Aldersgate Street, London, to dispose of the copyright for £5 down, the promise of another £5 after the sale of the first edition of 1300 copies, and the further promise of two additional sums of £5 each after the sale of two more editions of the same size respectively. It was as if an author now were to part with all his rights in a volume for £17, loss. down, and a contingency of  £52, ions. more in three equal installments. The poem was duly entered by Simmons as ready for publication in the Stationers’ ‘Registers on the 20th of the following August; and shortly after that date it was out in London as a neatly printed small quarto, with the title Paradise Lost: A Poem written in Ten Books: By John Milton. 

The reception accorded to Paradise Lost has been quoted as an example of the neglect of a great work, but the sale of an edition of 1300 copies in eighteen months proves that the poem found a wide circle of readers. “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too “is the saying attributed to Dryden on the occasion; and it is the more remarkable because the one objection to the poem which at first, we are told, “stumbled many” must have “stumbled” Dryclen most of all. Except in the drama, rhyme was then thought essential in anything professing to be a poem; blank verse was hardly regarded as verse at all; Dryden especially had been and was the champion of rhyme, contending for it even in the drama. That, notwithstanding this obvious blow struck by the poet at Dryden’s pet literary theory, he should have welcomed the poem so enthusiastically and proclaimed its merits so emphatically, says much at once for his critical perception and for the generosity of his temper. According to Aubrey, Dryden requested Milton’s leave to turn the poem into a rhymed drama, and was told’ he might “tag his verses if he pleased.” The result is seen in Dryden’s opera, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man (1675). One consequence of Milton’s renewed celebrity was that visitors of all ranks again sought him out for the honor of his society and conversation. His obscure house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill, we are told, became an attraction now, “much more than he did desire,” for the learned notabilities of his time.

Accounts have come down to us of Milton’s personal appearance and habits in his later life. They describe him as to be seen every other day led about in the streets in the vicinity of his Bunhill residence, a slender figure, of middle stature or a little less, generally dressed in a gray cloak or overcoat, and wearing sometimes a small silver-hilted sword, evidently in feeble health, but still looking younger than he was, with his lightish hair, and his fair, rather than aged or pale, complexion. He would sit in his garden at the door of his house, in warm weather, in the same kind of gray overcoat, “and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality.” Within doors he was usually dressed in neat black. He was a very early riser, and very ‘regular in the distribution of his day, spending the first part, to his midday dinner, always in his own room, amid his books, with an amanuensis to read for him and write to his dictation. Music was always a chief part of his afternoon and evening relaxation, whether when he was by himself or when friends were with him. His manner with friends and visitors was extremely courteous and affable, with just a shade of stateliness. In free conversation, either at the midday dinner, when a friend or two happened, by rare accident, to be present, or more habitually in the evening and at the light supper which concluded it, he was the life and soul of the company, from his” flow of subject “and his” unaffected cheerfulness and civility,” though with a marked tendency to the satirical and sarcastic in his criticisms of men and things.

This tendency to the sarcastic was connected by some of ‘those who observed it with a peculiarity of his voice or pronunciation. "He pronounced the letter r very hard," Aubrey tells us, adding Dryden’s note on the subject: “ litera canina-, the dog-letter, a certain sign of a satirical wit.” He was extremely temperate in the use of wine or any strong liquors, at meals and at all other times; and when supper was over, about nine o’clock, “he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of water, and went to bed.” He suffered much from gout, the effects of which had become apparent in a stiffening of his hands and finger-joints, and the recurring attacks of which in its acute form were very painful. His favorite poets among the Greeks were Homer and the Tragedians, especially Euripides; among the Latin's, Virgil and Ovid; among the English, Spenser and Shakespeare. Among his English contemporaries, he thought most highly of Cowley. He had ceased to attend any church, belonged to no religious communion, and had no religious observances in his family. His reasons for this were a matter for curious surmise among his friends, ‘because of the profoundly religious character of his own mind; but he does not seem ever to’ have furnished the ‘explanation.’ The matter became of less interest perhaps after 1669, when his three daughters ceased to reside with him, having been sent out “to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold or silver.” After that the household in Bunhili consisted only of Milton, his wife, a single maid-servant, and the “man “or amanuensis who came in for the day.

The remaining years of Milton’s life, extending through that part of the reign of Charles II. which figures in English history under the name of the “Cabal Administration,” were by no means unproductive. In 1669 he published, under the title of Accedence commenced Grammar, a small English compendium of Latin grammar that had been lying among his papers. In 1670 there appeared, with a prefixed portrait of him by Faithorne, done from the life, his History of Britain . . . to the Norman Conquest, being all that he had been able to accomplish of his intended complete history of England; and in the same year a Latin digest of Ramist logic, entitled Artis logicae plenior institutio, of no great value, and doubtless from an old manuscript of his earlier days. In 1671 there followed his Paradise Re gained and Samson Agonistes, bound together in one small volume, and giving ample proof that his poetic genius had not exhausted itself in the preceding great epic. In 1673, at a moment when the growing political discontent with the government of Charles II. and the conduct of his court had burst forth in the special form of a “No-Popery” agitation and outcry, Milton ventured on the dangerous experiment of one more political pamphlet, in which, under the title “ Of True Religion., Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery,” he put forth, with a view to popular acceptance, as mild a version as possible of his, former principles on the topics discussed. In the same year appeared the second edition of his Poems . . . both English and Latin, which included, with the exception of the Sonnets to Cromwell, Fairfax, Vane and the second address to Cyriack Skinner, all the minor poems.

Thus we reach the year 1674, the last of Milton’s life. One incident of that year was the publication of the second edition of Paradise Lost, with the poem rearranged as now—into twelve books, instead of the original ten. Another was the publication of a small volume containing his Latin Epistolae familiares, together with the Prolusiones oratoriae of his student-days at Cambridge—these last thrown in as a substitute for his Latin state-letters in his secretaryship for the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, the printing of which was stopped by order from the Foreign Office. A third publication of the same year, and probably the very last thing dictated by Milton, was a translation of a~ Latin document from Poland, relating to the recent election of the heroic John Sobieski to the throne of that kingdom, with the title A Declaration or Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John the Third. It seems to have been out in London in August or September 1674. On Sunday the 8th of the following November Milton died, in his house in Bunhill, of “gout struck in,” at the age of sixty-five years and eleven months. He was buried, the next Thursday, in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, beside his father; a considerable concourse attending the funeral.

Before the Restoration, Milton—what with his inheritance from his father,what with the official income of his Latin secretaryship— must have been a man of very good means indeed.  Since then, however, various heavy losses, and the cessation of all official income, had greatly reduced his estate, so that he left but £900 (worth about or over £2700 now) besides furniture and household goods. By a word-of-mouth will, made in presence of his brother Christopher, he had bequeathed the whole to his widow, on the ground that he had done enough already for his “undutiful” daughters, and that there remained for them his interest in their mother’s marriage portion of £1000, which had never been paid, but which their relatives, the Powells of Forest Hill, were legally bound for, and were now in circumstances to make good. The daughters, with the Powells probably abetting them, went to law with the widow to upset the will; and the decision of the court was that they should receive £100 each. With the £600 thus left, the widow, after some further stay in London, retired to Nantwich in her native Cheshire. There, respected as a pious member of a local Baptist congregation, she lived till 1727, having survived her husband fifty-three years.

By that time all the three daughters were also dead. The eldest, Ann Milton, who was somewhat deformed, had died not long after her father, having married “a masterbuilder,” but left no issue; the second, Mary Milton, had died, unmarried, before 1694; and only the third, Deborah, survived as long as her step-mother. Having gone to Ireland, as companion to a lady, shortly before her father’s death, she had married an Abraham Clarke, a silk-weaver’in Dublin, with whom she returned to London about 1684, when they settled in the silk-weaving business in Spitalfields, rather sinking than rising in the world, though latterly some public attention was paid to Deborah, by Addison and others, on her father’s account. One of her sons, Caleb Clarke, had gone out to Madras in 1703, and had died there as “parish-clerk of Fort George” in 1719, leaving children, of whom there are some faint traces to as late as 1727, the year of Deborah’s death. Except for the possibility of further and untraced descent from this Indian grandson of Milton, the direct descent from him came to an end in his granddaughter, Elizabeth Clarke, another of Deborah’s children. Having married a Thomas Foster, a Spitalfields weaver, but afterwards set up a small chandler’s shop, first in Holloway and then in Shoreditch, she died at Islington in 1754, not long after she and her husband had received the proceeds of a performance of Comus got up by Dr Johnson for her benefit. All her children had predeceased her, leaving no issue. 

Milton’s brother Christopher, who had always been on the opposite side in politics, rose to the questionable honor of a judgeship and knighthood in the latter part of the reign of James II. He had then become a Roman Catholic—which religion he professed till his death in retirement at Ipswich 111 1692. Descendants from him are traceable a good way into the 18th century. Milton’s two nephews and pupils, Edward and John Phillips, both of them known as busy and clever hack-authors before their uncle’s death, continued the career of hack-authorship, most industriously and variously, though not very prosperously, through the rest of their lives: Edward in a more reputable manner than John, and with more of enduring allegiance to the memory of his uncle. Edward died about 1695; John was alive till 1706. Their half-sister, Ann Agar, the only daughter of Milton’s sister by her second husband, had married, in 1673, a David Moore, of Sayes House, Chertsey; and the most flourishing of all the lines of descent from the poet’s father was in this Agar-Moore branch of the Miltons.

Of masses of manuscript that had been left by Milton, some portions saw the light posthumously. Prevented, in the last year of his life from publishing his Latin State Letters in the Posthumous same volume with his Latin Familiar Epistles, he had the charge of the State Letters, prepared for the press, together with the completed manuscript of his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrines, to a young Cambridge scholar, Daniel Skinner, who had been among the last of his amanuenses, and had, in fact, been employed by him especially in copying out and arranging those two important MSS. Negotiations were on foot, after Milton’s death, between this Daniel Skinner and the Amsterdam printer, Daniel Elzevir, for the publication of both MSS., when the English’ government interfered, and the MSS. were sent “back by Elzevir, and thrown aside, as dangerous rubbish, in a cupboard in the State Paper Office. 

Meanwhile, in 1676, a London bookseller, named Pitt, who had somehow got into his possession a less perfect, but still tolerably complete, copy of the State Letters, had brought out a surreptitious edition of them, under the title Literae pseudo-senatus anglicani, Croinwellii . . . nomine et jussu conscriptae a Joanne Miltono. No other posthumous publications of Milton’s appeared till 1681, when another bookseller put forth a slight tract entitled Mr John Milton’s Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, in 1641, consisting of a page or two, of rather dubious authenticity, said to have been withheld from his History of Britain in the edition of 1670. In 1682 appeared A Brief History of Moscovia, and of other less-known Countries l7ing Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay . . . undoubtedly Milton s, and a specimen of those prose compilations with which he sometimes occupied his leisure. Of the fate of his collections for a new Latin Dictionary, which had swelled to three folio volumes of MS., all that is known is that, after having been used by Edward Phillips for his Enchiridion and Speculum, they came into the hands of a committee of Cambridge scholars, and were used for that Latin dictionary of 1693, called The Cambridge Dictionary, on which Ainsworth’s Dictionary was based. In 1698 there was published in three folio volumes, under the editorship of John Toland, the first collective edition of Milton’s prose works, professing to have been printed at Amsterdam, though really printed in London. A very interesting folio volume, published in 1743 by” John Nickolls, junior,” under the title of Original Letters and Papers of State addressed to Oliver Cromwell, consists of a number of intimate Cromwellian documents that had somehow come into Milton’s possession immediately after Cromwell’s death, and were left by him confidentially to the Quaker Ellwood. 

Finally, a chance search in the London State Paper Office in 1823 having discovered the long-lost parcel containing the MSS. of Milton’s Latin State Letters and his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine, as these had been sent back from Amsterdam a hundred and fifty years before, the Treatise on Christian Doctrine was, by the command of George IV., edited and published in I825 by the Rev. C. R. Sumner, keeper of the Royal Library, and afterwards bishop of Winchester, under the title of Joannis Miltoni Angli de doctrina christiana libri duo josthumi. An English translation, by the editor, was published in the same year. Those state papers of Milton which had not been already printed were edited by W. D. Hamilton for the Camden Society, in 1859.

 

 

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