The Story of Milton

The first sixteen years of Milton’s life, coinciding exactly with the last sixteen of the reign of James I., associate themselves with the house in Bread Street. His father, while prospering in business, continued to be known as a man of ingeniose tastes, and acquired distinction in the London musical world of that time. He contributed a madrigal to Thomas Morley’s Triumph of Oriana (1601), four. motets to Sir William Leighton’s Tears and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soul (1614), and some hymn tunes. Music was thus a part ofthe poet’s domestic education from his infancy. Again and again Milton speaks with gratitude and affection of the ungrudging pains bestowed by his father on his early education. 

Already, however, for a year or two his teaching had been only supplementary to the education which the boy was receiving by daily attendance at St Paul’s public school, close to: Bread Street. The headmaster of the school was Alexander Gill, an elderly divine, of high reputation for scholarship and teaching ability. Under him, as usher or second master, was his son, Alexander Gill the younger, also an Oxford graduate of scholarly reputation, but of blustering character. Milton’s’ acquaintanceship with this younger Gill, begun at St Paul’s school, led to. subsequent friendship and correspondence. . Far more affectionate and intimate was the friendship formed by Milton at St Paul’s with his schoolfellow Charles Diodati, the son of an Italian physician, Dr Theodore Diodati, a naturalized Englishman settled in London, and much respected, both on his own account and as being the brother of the famous Protestant divine, Jean Diodati of Geneva. Young Diodati, who was destined for his father’s profession, left the school for Trinity College, Oxford, early in 1623; but Milton remained till the end of 1624. In that year his’ elder sister, Anne, married Edward Phillips, a clerk in the Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery.

Milton had then all but completed his sixteenth year, and was as scholarly, as accomplished and as handsome a youth as St Paul’s school had sent forth. At the age of sixteen years and two months, Milton was entered as a student of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the grade of a Lesser Pensioner, and he matriculated two months later. The master of Christ’s was Dr Thomas Bainbrigge; and among the thirteen fellows were Joseph Meade, still remembered as a commentator on the Apocalypse, and William Chappell, afterwards an Irish bishop. It was under Chappell’s tutorship that Milton was placed when he finit entered the college. At least three students who entered Christ’s after Milton, -but during his residence, deserve mention. One was Edward King, a youth of Irish birth and high Irish connections, who entered in 1626, at the age of fourteen, another was John Cleveland, afterwards known as royalist and satirist, who entered in 1627; and the third was Henry More, subsequently famous as the Cambridge Platonist, who entered in 1631, just before Milton left. Milton’s own brother, Christopher, joined him in the college in February 1630—1631, at the age of fifteen.

Milton’s academic course lasted seven years and five months, bringing him from his seventeenth year to his twenty-fourth. The first four years were his time of undergraduateship. It was in the second of these, the year 1626, that there occurred the quarrel between him and his tutor, Chappell, which Dr Johnson, making the most of a lax tradition from Aubrey, magnified into the supposition that Milton may have been one of the last students in either of the English universities that suffered the indignity of corporal punishment. The legend deserves no credit; but it is certain that Milton, on account of some disagreement with Chappell left college for a time, though he did not lose his term; and that when he did return, he was transferred from the tutorship of Chappell to that of Nathaniel Tovey. From the first of the Latin elegies one infers that the cause of the quarrel was some outbreak of self-assertion on Milton’s part. We learn indeed, from words of his own elsewhere, that it was not only Chappell and Bainbrigge that he had offended by his independent demeanor, but that, for the first two or three years of his undergraduate, he was generally unpopular, for the same reason, among the younger men of his college. They had nicknamed him the Lady a nickname which the students of the other colleges took up, converting it into the Lady of Christ’s; and, though the allusion was chiefly to the peculiar grace of his personal appearance, it conveyed also a sneer at what the rougher men thought his unusual prudishness, the haughty fastidiousness of his tastes and morals. 

A change in this state of things had certainly occurred before January 1628-1629, when, at the age of twenty, he took his B.A. degree. By that time his intellectual preeminence had come to be ‘acknowledged. His reputation for scholarship and literary genius, extraordinary even then, was more than confirmed during the remaining three years and a half of his residence in Cambridge. A fellowship in Christ’s which fell vacant in 1630 would undoubtedly have been his had the election to such posts depended then absolutely on merit. As it was, the fellowship was conferred, by royal favor on Edward King, his junior in college standing by sixteen months. In July 1632 Milton completed his career at the university by taking his MA. degree. Tradition still points Out Milton’s rooms at Christ’s College. They are on the first floor on the first stair on the north side of the great court.

Just before Milton quitted Cambridge, his father, then verging on his seventieth year, had practically retired from his Bread Street business, leaving the active management of it to a partner, named Thomas Bower, a former apprentice of his, and had gone to spend his declining years at Horton in Buckinghamshire, a small village near Colnbrook, and not far from Windsor. Here, in a house close to Horton church, Milton mainly resided for the next six years, from July 1632 to April 1638.

Although, when he had gone to Cambridge, it had been with the intention of becoming a clergyman, that intention had been abandoned. His reasons were that “tyranny had invaded the church,” and that, finding he could not honestly subscribe the oaths and obligations required he “thought it better to preserve a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, begun with servitude and forswearing.” i In other words, he was disgusted with the system which Laud was establishing and maintaining in the Church of England. Church-outed by the prelates, as he emphatically expresses it, he seems to have thought for a time of the law, but he decided that the only life possible for himself was one dedicated wholly to scholarship and literature. His compunctions on this subject, expressed already in his sonnet on arriving at his twenty-third year, are expressed more at length in an English letter of which two drafts are preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge, sent by him, shortly after the date of that sonnet, and with a copy Of the sonnet included, to some friend who had been remonstrating with him on his “ belatedness” and his persistence in a life of mere dream and study. There were gentle remonstrances also from his excellent father. Between such a father and such a son, however, the conclusion was easy. What it was may be learnt from Milton’s fine Latin poem Ad patrem. There, in the midst of an enthusiastic recitation of all that his father had done for him hitherto, it is intimated that the agreement between them on their one little matter -of difference was already complete, and that, as the son was bent on a private life of literature and poetry, it had been decided that he should have his own way, and should in fact, so long as he chose, be the master of his father’s means and the chief person in the Horton household. For the six years from 1632 this, accordingly, was Milton’s position. In perfect leisure, and in a pleasant rural retirement, with Windsor at the distance of an easy walk, and London only about 17 m. off, he went through, he tells us, a systematic course of reading in the Greek and Latin classics, varied by mathematics, music, and the kind of physical science we’ should now call cosmography.

It is an interesting fact that Milton’s very first public appearance in the world of English authorship was in so honorable a place as the second folio edition of Shakespeare in 1632. His enthusiastic eulogy on Shakespeare, written in 1630, was one of three anonymous pieces prefixed to ,that second folio. Among the poems actually written’ by Milton at Horton the first, in all probability, after the Latin hexameters Ad patrem, were the exquisite companion pieces L’Allegro and Il Peneroso. There followed, in or about 1633, the fragment called Arcades.

From September 1634 to the beginning of 1637 is a comparative blank in our records. Straggling incidents in this blank are a Latin letter of date December 4, 1634, to Alexander Gill the younger, a Greek translation of Psalm CXIV, a visit to Oxford in 1635 for the purpose of incorporation in the degree of M.A. in that university, and the beginning in May 1636 of a troublesome lawsuit against his now aged and infirm father. The lawsuit, which was instituted by a certain Sir Thomas Cotton, hart., nephew and executor of a deceased John Cotton, Esq., accused the elder Milton and his partner Bower, or both, of having, in their capacity as scriveners, misappropriated divers large sums of money that had been entrusted to them by the deceased Cotton to be let out at interest.

The lawsuit was still in progress when, on the 3rd of April 1637, Milton’s mother died, at the age of about sixty-five. A flat blue stone, with a brief inscription, visible on the chancel pavement of 1-lorton church, still marks the place of her burial. Milton’s testimony to her character is that she was a most excellent mother and particularly known for her charities through the neighborhood.” The year 1637 was otherwise eventful. It was in that year that his Comus, after lying in manuscript for more than two years, was published by itself, in the form of a small quarto of thirty-five pages. The author’s name was withheld, and the entire responsibility of the publication was assumed by Henry Lawes. Milton seems to have been in London when the little volume appeared. He was a good deal in London, at all events, during the summer and autumn months immediately following his mother’s death. The plague, which had been on one of its periodical visits of ravage through England since early in the preceding year, was then especially severe in the Horton neighborhood, while London was comparatively free. It was probably in London that Milton heard of the death of Edward King, who had sailed from Chester for a vacation visit to his relatives in Ireland, when, on the 10th of August, the ship in perfectly calm water struck on a rock and went down, he and nearly all the other passengers going down with her. There is no mention of this event in Milton’s two Latin “ Familiar Epistles” of September 1637, addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, and dated from London; but in November 1637, and probably at Horton, he wrote his matchless pastoral monody of Lycidas. It was his contributicn to a collection of obituary verses, Greek, Latin and English, inscribed to the memory of Edward King by his numerous friends, at Cambridge and elsewhere. The collection appeared early in 1638. The second part contained thirteen English poems, the last of which was Milton’s monody, signed only with his initials “ J. M.”

Milton was then on the wing for a foreign tour. He had long set his heart on a visit to Italy, and circumstances now favored his wish. The vexatious Cotton lawsuit, after hanging on for nearly two years, was at an end, as far as the elder Milton was concerned, with the most absolute and honorable vindication of his character for probity, though with some continuation of the case against his partner, Bower. Moreover, Milton’s younger brother Christopher, though but twenty-two years of age, and just about to be called to the bar of the Inner Temple, had married; and the young couple had gone to reside at Horton to keep the old man company.

Before the end of April 1638 Milton was on his way across the channel, taking one English man-servant with him. At the time of his departure the last great news in England was that of the National Scottish Covenant. To Charles the news of this “damnable Covenant,” as he called it, was enraging beyond measure; but to the mass of the English Puritans it was far from unwelcome, promising, as it seemed to do, for England herself, the subversion at last of that system of “Thorough,” or despotic government by the king and his ministers without parliaments, under which the country had been groaning since the contemptuous dissolution of Charles’s third parliament ten years before. Through Paris, where Milton received polite attention from the English ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and had the honor of an introduction to the famous Hugo Grotius, then ambassador for Sweden at the French court, he moved on rapidly to Italy, by way of Nice. After visiting Genoa, Leghorn and Pisa, he arrived at Florence, in August 1638. Enchanted by the city and its society, he remained there two months, frequenting the chief academies or ‘literary clubs, and even taking part in their proceedings. Among the Florentines with whom he became intimate were Jacopo Gaddi, founder of an academy called the Svogliati, young Carlo Dati, author of Vite de’ pittori antichi, Pietro Frescobaldi, Agostino Coltellini, the founder of the Academy of the Apatisti, the grammarian Benedetto Buommattei, Valerio Chimentelli, afterwards professor of Greek at Pisa, Antonio Francini and Antonio Malatesti. It was in the neighborhood of Florence also that he “found and visited” the great Galileo, then old and blind, and still nominally a prisoner to the Inquisition for his astronomical heresy.

By way of Florence and Siena, he reached Rome some time in October, and spent about another two months there, not only going about among the ruins and antiquities and visiting the galleries, but mixing also, as he had done in Florence, with the learned society of the academies. Among those with whom he formed acquaintance in Rome were the German scholar, Lucas Holstenius, librarian of the Vatican, and three native Italian scholars, named Alessandro Cherubini, Giovanni Salzilli and a certain Selvaggi. There is record of his having dined once, in company with several other Englishmen, at the hospitable table of the English Jesuit College. The most picturesque incident, however, of his stay in Rome was his presence at a great musical entertainment in the palace of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Here he had not only the honor of a specially kind reception by the cardinal himself, but also, it would appear, the supreme pleasure of listening to the marvellous Leonora Baroni, the most renowned singer of her age..

Late in November he left Rome for Naples. Here he met the aged Giovanni Battista Manso, marquis of Villa (1560-1645), the friend and biographer of Tasso, and subsequently the friend and patron of Marini. He had hardly been in Naples a month, however, when there came news from England which not only stopped an intention he had formed of extending his tour to Sicily and thence into Greece, but urged his immediate return home. “The sad news of civil war in England,” he says, “called me back; for I considered it base that, while my fellow countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be traveling at my ease for intellectual culture” (Defensio secu’nda). In December 1638, therefore, beset his face northwards.

Of the first proceedings of the Long Parliament, including the trial and execution of Strafford, the impeachment and imprisonment of Laud and others, and the breakdown of the system of Thorough by miscellaneous reforms and by guarantees for parliamentary liberty, Milton was only a spectator. It was when the church question emerged distinctly as the question paramount, and there had arisen divisions on that question among those who had been practically unanimous in matters of civil reform, that he plunged in as an active adviser. There were three parties on the church question. There was a high church party, contending for episcopacy by divine right, and for the maintenance of English episcopacy very much as it was; there was a middle party, defending episcopacy on grounds of usage and expediency, but desiring to see the powers of bishops greatly curtailed, and a limited episcopacy, with councils of presbyters round each bishop, substituted for the existing high episcopacy; and there was the root-andbranch party, as it called itself, desiring the entire abolition of episcopacy and the reconstruction of the English Church on something like the Scottish Presbyterian model. Since the opening of the parliament there had been a storm of pamphlets from these three parties.  

In May 1641 he put forth a defense of the Smectymnuan side in Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it. He reviewed English ecclesiastical history, with an appeal to his countrymen to resume that course of reformation which he considered to have been prematurely stopped in the preceding century, and to sweep away the last relics of papacy and prelacy. Among all the root-and-branch pamphlets of the time it stood out, and stands out stifi, as the most thorough-going and tremendous. It was followed by four others ‘in rapid succession.

The parliament had advanced in the root-and-branch direction so far as to have passed a bill for the exclusion of bishops from the House of Lords, and compelled the king’s assent to that bill, when, in August 2642, the’ further struggle between Charles and his subjects took the form of civil war. The Long Parliament moved on more and more rapidly in the root-and-branch direction, till, by midsummer 1643, the abolition of episcopacy had been decreed, and the question of the future non-prelatic constitution of the Church of England referred to a synod of divines, to meet at Westminster under parliamentary authority. Of Milton’s life through those first months of the Civil War little is known. He remained in his house in Aldersgate Street, teaching his nephews and Other pupils; and the only scrap that came from his pen was the semi-jocose sonnet bearing the title “ When the Assault was intended to the City.” In the summer of 1643, however, there was a great change in the Aldersgate Street household. About the end of May, as his nephew Edward Phillips remembered, Milton went away on a country journey, without saying whither or for what purpose; and, when he returned, about a month afterwards, it was with a young wife, and with some of her sisters and other relatives in her company. 

He had, in fact, been in the very headquarters of the king and the Royalist army in and round Oxford; and the bride he brought back with him was a Mary Powell, the eldest daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, near Oxford. She was the third of a family of eleven sons and daughters, of good standing, but in rather embarrassed circumstances, and was seventeen years and four months old, while Milton was in his thirty-fifth year. However the marriage came about, it was a most unfortunate event. The Powell family were strongly Royalist, and the girl, herself seems to have been frivolous, and entirely unsuited for the studious life in Aldersgate Street. Hardly were the honeymoon festivities over, when, ler sisters and other relatives having returned to Forest Hill and left her alone with her husband, she pined for home again and begged to be allowed to go back on a visit. Milton consented, on the understanding that the visit was to be a brief one. This seems.to have been in July 1643. Soon, however, the intimation from Forest Hill was that he need not look ever tO have his wife in his house again. The resolution seems to have been mainly the girl’s own; but, as the king’s cause was then prospering in~ the field, Edward Phillips was probably right in his conjecture that the whole of the Powell family had repented of ‘their sudden connection with so prominent a Parliamentarian and assailant of the Church of England as Milton. While his wife was away, his old father, who had been residing for three years with his younger and lawyer son at Reading, came to take up his quarters in Aldersgate Street.

Among the questions in agitation in the general ferment of opinion brought about by the Civil War was that of a reform of the national system of education and especially of the universities. To this question Milton made a contribution in June 1644, in a small treatise, Of Education, in the form of a letter to Samuel Hartlib, a German then resident in London and interesting himself busily in all philanthropic projects and schemes of social reform, in the very next month, however, July 2644, he returned to the divorce subject in a pamphlet addressed specially to the clergy and entitled The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. The outcry against him then reached its height. He was attacked in pamphlets; he was denounced in pulpits all through London, and especially by Herbert Palmer in ii sermon preached on ‘the I3th of August, before the two Houses of Parliament; strenuous efforts were made to bring him within definite parliamentary censure. In the cabal formed against him for this purpose a leading part was played, at the instigation of the clergy, by the Stationers’ Company of London, which had a plea of its own against him on the ground that his doctrine was not only immoral, but had been put forth in an illegal manner. His first divorce treatise, though published immediately after the “Printing Ordinance ‘ of the parliament of the 24th of June 1643, requiring all publications to be licensed for press by one of the official censors, and to be registered in the books of the Stationers’ Company, had been issued without license and without registration. Complaint to this effect was made against Milton, with some others liable to the same charge of contempt of the printing ordinance, in a petition of ,the Stationers of the House of Commons in August 1644; and the matter came before committee both in that House and in the Lords.

It is to this circumstance that the world owes the most popular and eloquent, if not the greatest, of all Milton’s prose writings, his famous Areopagitica, a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England. It appeared on the 25th of November 1644, deliberately unlicensed and unregistered, and was -a remonstrance addressed to the parliament, as if in an oration to them face to face, against their ordinance of June 1643 and the whole system of licensing and censorship of the press. Nobly eulogistic of the parliament in other respects, it denounced their printing ordinance as utterly unworthy of them, and of the new era of English liberties which they were initiating, and called for its repeal. Though that effect did not follow, the pamphlet virtually accomplished its purpose. The licensing ‘system had received its death-blow; and, though the Stationers returned to the charge’ in another complaint to the House of Lords, Milton’s offence against the press ordinance was condoned. He was still assailed in pamphlets, and found himself “in a world of disesteem “; but he lived on through the winter of 1644/5 undisturbed in his house in Aldersgate Street. To this period there belong, in the shape of verse, only his sonnets ix. and x., the first to some anonymous lady, and the second “to the Lady Margaret Ley.” His divorce speculation, however, still occupied him; and in March 1644/5 he published simultaneously his Tetrachordon: Expositions upon the four chief places of Scripture which treat of Marriage, and his Colasterion, a Reply to a nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In these he replied to his chief recent assailants, lay and clerical, with merciless severity.

Through the latter part of 1644, Milton had been saved from the penalties which his Presbyterian opponents would have inflicted on him by the general championship of liberty of opinion by Cromwell and the army Independents. Before the middle of 1645 he, with others who were on the black books of the Presbyterians as heretics, was safer still. Milton’s position after the battle of Naseby may be easily understood. Though his first tendency on the Church question had been to some form of a Presbyterian constitution for the Church, he had parted utterly now from the Scots and Presbyterians, and become a partisan of Independency, having no dread of “sects and schisms,” but regarding them rather as healthy signs in the English body-politic. He was, indeed, himself one of the most noted sectaries of the time, for in the lists of sects drawn out by contemporary Presbyterian writers special mention is made of one small sect who were known as Miltonists or Divorcers.

So far as Milton was concerned personally, his interest in the divorce speculation came to an end in July or August 1645, when, by friendly interference, a reconciliation was effected between him and his wife. The ruin of the king’s cause at Naseby had suggested to the Powells that it might be as well for their daughter to go back to her husband after their two years of separation. It was not, however, in the house in Aldersgate Street that she rejoined him, but in a larger house, which he had taken in the adjacent street called Barbican, for the accommodation of an increasing number of pupils.

The house in Barbican was tenanted by Milton from about August 1645 to September or October 1647. Among his first occupations there must have been the revision of the proof sheets of the first edition of his collected poems. It appeared as a tiny volume, copies of which are now very rare, with the title, Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, composed at several times. Printed by his true Copies. The songs were set in Musick by Mr Henry Lawes. . . . The title-page gives the date 1645, but the 2nd of January, 1645/6 seems to have been the exact day of its publication. Whether because his pedagogic duties now engrossed him or for other reasons, very few new pieces were added in the Barbican to those that the little volume had thus made public. In English, there’ were only the four sonnets now numbered xi.—xiv., the first two entitled “On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises,” the third “To Mr Henry Lawes on his Airs,” and the fourth” To the Religious Memory of Mrs Catherine Thomson,” together with the powerful anti-Presbyterian invective or “tailed sonnet “ entitled “ On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament “; and in Latin there were only the ode Ad Joannem Rousium, the Apologus de Rustico et Hero, and one interesting Familiar Epistle (April 1647) addressed to his Florentine friend Carlo Dati.

Some family incidents of importance belong to this time of residence in Barbican. The fall of Oxford in 1646 compelled the whole of the Powell family to seek refuge in London, and most of them found shelter in Milton’s house. His first child, a daughter named Anne, was born there on the 29th of July that year; on the 1st of January 1646/7 his father-in-law Richard Powell died there, leaving his affairs in confusion; and in the following March his own father died there, at the age of eighty-four, and was buried in the adjacent church of St Giles, Cripplegate.

From Barbican Milton removed, in September or October 1647, to a smaller house in that part of High Holborn which adjoins Lincoln’s Inn Fields. His Powell relatives had now left him, and he had reduced the number of his pupils, or perhaps kept only his two nephews. But, though thus more at leisure, he did not yet resume his projected poem, but occupied himself rather with three works of scholarly labor which he had already for some time had on hand. Ore was the compilation in English of a complete history of England, or rather of Great Britain, from the earliest times; another was the preparation in Latin of a complete system of divinity, drawn directly from the Bible; and the third was the collection of materials for a new Latin dictionary. Milton had always a fondness for such labors of scholarship and compilation.

The crushing defeat of the Scottish army by Cromwell in the three days’ battle of Preston (1648) and the simultaneous suppression of the English Royalist insurrection in the southeast counties by Fairfax’s siege and capture of Colchester, left King Charles at the mercy of the victors. Milton’s sonnet “On the Lord General Fairfax, at the siege of Colchester,” attested the exultation of the writer at the triumph of the parliamentary cause. His exultation continued through what followed. When the king was beheaded (1649) the first Englishman of mark out of parliament to attach himself openly to the new republic was John Milton. This he did by the publication of his pamphlet entitled “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, proving that’ it is lawful, and hath been held so in all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected or denied to do it.” It was out within a fortnight after the king’s death, and was Milton’s last performance in the house in High Holborn. The chiefs of the new republic could not but perceive the importance of securing the services of a distinguished man who had so opportunely and so powerfully spoken out in favor of their tremendous act. In March 1649, accordingly, Milton was offered, and accepted, the secretaryship for foreign tongues to the council of state of the new Commonwealth. The salary was to be £288 a year (worth about £Iooo a year now). To be near his new duties in attendance on the council, which held its daily sittings for the first few weeks in Derby House, close to Whitehall, but afterwards regularly in Whitehall itself, he removed at once to temporary lodgings at Charing Cross. In the very first meetings of council which Milton attended he must have made personal acquaintance with President Bradshaw, Fairfax, Cromwell himself, Sir Henry Vane, Whitelocke,

Henry Marten, ‘Haselrig, Sir Gilbert Pickering and the other chiefs of the council and the Commonwealth, if indeed he had not known some of them before. After a little while, for his greater convenience, official apartments were assigned him in Whitehall itself.

At the date of Milton’s appointment to the secretaryship he ‘was forty years of age. His special duty was the drafting in Latin of letters sent by the council of state, or sometimes by the Rump Parliament, to foreign states and princes, with the examination and translation of letters in reply, and with personal conferences, when necessary, with the agents of foreign powers in London, and with envoys and ambassadors. As Latin was the language employed in the written diplomatic documents, his post came to be known indifferently as the secretaryship for foreign tongues or the Latin secretaryship. In that post, however, his duties, more particularly at first, were very light in comparison with those of his official colleague, Walter Frost, the general secretary. Foreign powers held aloof from the English republic as much as they could; and, while Frost had to be present in every meeting of the council, keeping the minutes, and conducting all the general correspondence, Milton’s presence was required only when some piece of foreign business turned up. Hence, from the first, his employment in very miscellaneous work. Especially, the council looked to him for everything in the nature of literary vigilance and literary help in the interests of the struggling Commonwealth. 

He was employed in the examination of suspected papers, and in interviews with their authors and printers; and he executed several great literary commissions expressly entrusted to him by the council. The first of these was his pamphlet entitled Observations on the Articles of Peace (between Ormonde and the Irish). It was published in May 1649, and was in defense of the republic against a complication of Royalist intrigues and dangers in Ireland. A passage of remarkable interest in it is one of eloquent eulogy on Cromwell. More important still was the Eikonoklastes (which may be translated “Image-Smasher “), published by Milton in October 1649, by way of counterblast to the famous Eikon Basilike (“ Royal Image “), which had been in circulation in thousands of copies since the king’s death, and had become a kind of Bible in all Royalist households, on the supposition that it had been written by the royal martyr himself. In the end Os 1649 there appeared abroad, under the title of Defensio regia pro Carob I., a Latin vindication of the memory of Charles, with an attack on the English Commonwealth. As it had been written, at the instance of the exiled royal family, by Salmasius, or Claude de Saumaise, of Leiden, then of enormous celebrity over Europe as the greatest scholar of his age, it was regarded as a serious blow to the infant Commonwealth. Milton threw his whole strength into a reply through the year 1650, interrupting himself only by a new and enlarged edition of his Eikonoklastes. His Latin Pro popubo anglicano defensio (1651), ran at once over the British Islands and the Continent, and was received by scholars as an annihilation of Salmasius. Through the rest of 1651 the observation was that the two agencies which had co-operated most visibly in raising the reputation of the Commonwealth abroad were Milton’s books and Cromwell’s battles.

Through the eventful year 1651, in addition to the other duties of his secretaryship, Milton acted as licenser and superintending editor of the Mercurius politicus, a newspaper issued twice a week, of which Marchamont Nedham was the working editor and proprietor. Milton’s hand is discernable in some of the leading articles.

About the end of 1651 Milton left his official rooms in Whitehall for a "garden house" he had taken on the edge of St James’s Park in what was then called Petty France, Westminster, but is now York Street. The house, afterwards 19 York Street, was occupied by James Mill and William Hazlitt in succession, and was not pulled down till 1877. Milton had now more to do in the special work of his office, in consequence of the increase of correspondence with foreign powers. But he had for some time been in ailing health: and a dimness of eyesight which had been growing upon ‘him gradually for ten years had been settling rapidly, since his labor over the answer to Salmasius, into total blindness. Before or about May 1652, when he was but in his forty-fourth year, his blindness became total, and he could go about only with some one to lead him. Hence a rearrangement of his secretarial duties. Such of these duties as he could perform at home, or by occasional visits to the Council Office near, he continued to perform; but much of the routine work was done for him by an assistant, a well-known German, George Rudolph Weckherlin, succeeded later by Philip Meadows and, eventually, by Andrew Marvell. Precisely to this time of a lull in Milton’s secretaryship on account of his ill-health and blindness we have to refer his two great companion sonnets "To the Lord General Cromwell" and "To Sir Henry Vane the Younger."

In 1652 died his only son, who had been born at Whitehall in the March of the preceding year. His wife died in 16 53/4, just after she ‘had given birth to his third daughter, Deborah. With the three children thus left him—Anne, but six years old, Mary, not four, and the infant Deborah—the blind widower lived on in his house in Petty France in such desolation as can be imagined. He had recovered sufficiently to resume his secretarial duties; and the total number of his dictated state letters for the single year 1652 is equal to that of all the state letters of his preceding term of secretaryship put together. To the same year there belong also three of his Latin "Familiar Epistles."  In December 1652 there was published Joannis Pizilippi Angli responsio ad apobogiam anon ymi cujusdam tenebrionis, being a reply by Milton’s younger nephew, John Phillips, but touched up by Milton himself, to one of several pamphlets that had appeared against Milton for his slaughter of Salmasius.

Commonwealth’s’men as Bradshaw, Fairfax, Fleetwood, Lambert and Overton, together with a long panegyric on Cromwell himself and his career, which remains to this day unapproached for elaboration and grandeur by any estimate of Cromwell from any later pen. 

From about the date of the publication of the Defensio secunda to the beginning of 1655 the only specially literary relics of Milton’s life are his translations of Ps.. in different meters, done in August 1654, his translation of Horace’s Ode, i. 5, done probably about the same time, and two of his Latin “Familiar Epistles.” The most active time of his secretaryship for Oliver was from April 1655 onwards. In that month, in the course of a general revision of official salaries under the Protectorate, Milton’s salary of £288 a year hitherto was reduced to £200 a year, with a kind of redefinition of his office, recognizing it, we may say, as a Latin secretaryship extraordinary. Philip Meadows was to continue to do all the ordinary Foreign Office work, under Thurloe’s inspection; but Milton was to be called in on special occasions. Hardly was the arrangement made when a signal occasion did occur. In May 1655 all England was horrified by the news of the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants (Waldenses) by the troops of Emanuele II., duke of Savoy and prince of Piedmont, in consequence of their disobedience to an edict requiring them either to leave their native valleys or to conform to the Catholic religion. Cromwell and his council took the matter up with all their energy; and the burst of indignant letters on the subject dispatched in that month and the next to the duke of Savoy himself, Louis XIV. of France, Cardinal Mazarin, the Swiss cantons, the states-general of the United Provinces, and the kings of Sweden and Denmark, were all by Milton. His famous sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont “ was his more private expression of feeling on the same occasion. This sonnet was in circulation, and the case of the Vaudois Protestants was still occupying Cromwell, when, in August 1655, there appeared the last of Milton’s Latin pamphlets. It was his Pro Se defensio. . . in answer to an elaborate self-defense which More had put forth on the Continent since Milton’s attack on his character. In that year also appeared Milton’s Scriptum domini protectoris . . . contra his panos.

Through the rest of Cromwell’s Protectorate, Milton’s life was of comparatively calm tenor. He was in much better health than usual, bearing his blindness with courage and cheerfulness; he was steadily busy with important dispatches to foreign powers ‘on behalf of the Protector, then in the height of his great foreign policy; and his house in Petty France seems to have been, more than at any previous time since the beginning of his blindness, a meeting-place for friends and visitors, and a scene of pleasant hospitalities. The four sonnets now numbered xix.- xxii., one of them to young Lawrence, the son of the president of Cromwell’s council, and two of the others to Cyriack Skinner, once his pupil, belong to this time of domestic quiet, as do also no fewer than ten of his Latin “ Familiar Epistles.” His marriage with Katherine Woodcock on the 12th of November 1656 brought him a brief period of domestic happiness; but, after only fifteen months, he was again a widower, by her death in childbirth in February 165 7/8. The child dying with her, only the three daughters by the first marriage remained. The touching sonnet which closes the series of Milton’s Sonnets is his sacred tribute to the memory of his second marriage and to the virtues of the wife he had so soon lost. Even after that loss we find him still busy for Cromwell. Andrew Marvell, in September 1657 succeeded Meadows, much to Milton’s satisfaction, as his assistant secretary; but this had by no means relieved him from duty. Some of his greatest dispatches for Cromwell, including letters, of the highest importance, to Louis XIV., Mazarin and Charles Gustavus of Sweden, belong to the year 1658.

To his grand panegyric on Oliver in the Defensio secunda of 1654 he had ventured to append cautions against self-will, over-legislation and over-policing; and he cannot have thought that Oliver had been immaculate in these respects through the four subsequent years. The attempt to revive an aristocracy and a House of Lords, on which Cromwell was latterly bent, cannot have been to Milton’s taste. Above all, Milton dissented in toto from Cromwell’s church policy. It was Milton’s fixed idea, almost his deepest idea, that there should be no such thing as an Established Church, or state-paid clergy, of any sort or denomination or mixture of denominations, in any nation, and that, as it had been the connexion between church and state, begun by Constantine, that had vitiated Christianity in the world, and kept it vitiated, so Christianity would never flourish as it ought till there had been universal disestablishment and disendowment of the clergy, and the propagation of the gospel were left to the zeal of voluntary pastors, self-supported, or supported modestly by their flocks. He had at one time looked to Cromwell as the likeliest man to carry this great revolution in England. But Cromwell, after much meditation on the subject in 1652 and 1653, had come to the opposite conclusion. The conservation of the Established Church of England, in the form of a broad union ‘of all evangelical denominations of Christians, whether Presbyterians, or Independents, or Baptists, or moderate Old Anglicans, that would accept state-pay with state-control, had been the fundamental notion of his Protectorate, persevered in to the end. This must have been Milton’s’ deepest disappointment with Cromwell’s rule.

Cromwell’s death on the 3rd of September 1658 left the Protectorship to his son Richard. Milton and Marvell continued in their posts, and a number of the Foreign Office letters of the new Protectorate were of Milton’s composition. In October 1658 appeared a new edition of his Defensio prima, and, early in 1659, a new English pamphlet, entitled Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes showing that it is not lawful to compel in Matters of Religion, in which he advocated the separation of Church and State. To Richard’s Protectorate also belongs one of Milton’s Latin Familiar Epistles.

The last of his known official performances in his’ Latin secretaryship are tw6 letters in the name of William Lenthall, as the speaker of the restored Rump, one to the king of Sweden and one to the king of Denmark, both dated the 15th of May 1659. Under the restored Rump, if ever, he seemed to have a chance for his notion of church-disestablishment; and accordingly, in August 1659, he put forth, with a prefatory address to that body, a pamphlet entitled Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church. The restored Rump had no time to attend to such matters. They were in struggle for their own existence with the army chiefs; and to prevent the restoration of the monarchy, to argue against it and fight against it to the last, was the work to which Milton set himself; the preservation of the republic in any form, and by any compromise of differences within itself, had become his one thought, and the study of practical means to this end his most anxious occupation. In a Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in October 1659, he had propounded a scheme of a kind of dual government for reconciling the army chiefs with the Rump; through the following winter, marked only by two of his Latin “Familiar Epistles,” his anxiety over the signs of the growing enthusiasm throughout the country for the recall of Charles II. had risen to a passionate vehemence which found vent in a pamphlet entitled The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of readmitting Kingship to this Nation. An abridgment of this pamphlet was addressed by him to General Monk in a letter gentrified The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth (March 1660). Milton’s proposal was that the central governing apparatus of the British Islands for the future should consist of one indissoluble grand council or parliament, which should include all the political chiefs, while there should be a large number of provincial councils or assemblies sitting in the great towns for the management of local and county affairs.

Not even when the king’s cause was practically assured would Milton be silent. In Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, published in April 1660, in reply to a Royalist discourse by a Dr Matthew Griffith, he made another protest against the recall of the Stuarts, even hinting that it would be better that Monk should become king himself; and in the same month he sent forth a second edition of his Ready and Easy Way, more frantically earnest than even the first, and containing additional passages of the most violent denunciation of the royal family, and of prophecy of the degradation and disaster they would bring back with them. This was the dying effort. On the 25th of April the Convention Parliament met; on the 1st of May they resolved unanimously that the government by King, Lords and Commons should be restored; and on the 29th of May, Charles II. made his triumphal entry into London. The chief republicans had by that time scattered themselves, and Milton was hiding in an obscure part of the city.

How Milton escaped the scaffold at the Restoration is a mystery now, and was a mystery at the time. The Commons voted that he should be taken into custody for prosecution by the attorney-general on account of his Eikonoblastes and Defensio prima, and that all copies of those books should be called in and burnt by the hangman. There was a story that Milton had once protected Davenant and now owed his immunity to him; but it is more likely that he was protected by the influence of Marvell, by Arthur Annesley, afterwards earl of Anglesey, and by other friends who had influence at court. At all events, on the 29th of August 1660, when the Indemnity Bill did come out complete, with the king’s assent, Milton did not appear as one of the exceptions on any ground or in any of the grades. From that moment, therefore, he could emerge from his hiding, and go about as a free man. Not that he was yet absolutely safe. There were several public burnings by the hangman at the same time of Milton’s condemned pamphlets; and the appearance of the blind man himself in the streets, though he was legally free, would have caused him to be mobbed and assaulted. Though the special prosecution ordered against him by the Commons had been quashed by the subsequent Indemnity Bill, he had been taken into custody. Entries in the Commons journals of the 17th and 19th of December show that Milton complained of the exorbitant fees charged  for his release, and that the matter was referred to a committee at the instance of Andrew Marvell.

Milton did not return to Petty France. For the first months after he was free he lived as closely as possible in a house near what is now Red Lion Square, Holborn. Thence he removed, apparently early in 1661, to a house in Jewin Street, in his old Aldersgate Street and Barbican neighbourhood. In Jewin Street Milton remained for two or three years, or from 1661 to 1664. This is the time of which he says:

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude.

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poems: On Time | The Fifth Ode of Horace