Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

ideas also have many links with the Hermetic tradition, and especially with his Buckinghamshire neighbour Robert Fludd, the great synthesizer of this tradition.³ Milton seems to have possessed a copy of the Hermetic writings. He refers several times to ‘thrice-great Hermes’ – in the undergraduate De Idea Platonica, and in II Penseroso. Hermetic influences have been found in At a Vacation Exercise, and in the Third and Seventh Prolusions. Frances Yates suggests that the Hermetic trance is described at length in Il Penseroso.⁴ Milton twice refers to John Dee, and in Areopagitica there may be an echo of Giordano Bruno.⁵ More important perhaps is the parallelism of Milton’s thought with that of the Hermeticists. Though this body of ideas embraces magic, alchemy and astrology, it is completely devoid of ritualism or sacramentalism.⁶

      Milton’s daemons in II Penseroso and the Seventh Prolusion, and the Attendant Spirit in Comus (called Daemon in the manuscript – like Comus himself),⁷ may or may not be Hermetic: likewise the ‘millions of spiritual creatures’ who ‘walk the earth unseen’ in Paradise Lost (IV. 677–8) and the ‘demonian spirits’ of Paradise Regained.⁸ But the corporeality of angels links with this tradition, as Fludd himself tells us. The names of some of Milton’s angels come from Fludd who, like Milton, gave Satan’s name before the Fall as Lucifer. Milton’s phrases in Paradise Lost, ‘potable gold’ and ‘vegetable gold’ may refer to Fludd’s experiments. Messiah was armed in ‘radiant urim’, the stone that in Fludd’s philosophy mediates between God and the material world.¹ Like Milton, Fludd used mathematical arguments against the Trinity, and speculated on whether light was created or eternal.² Fludd has something very like Milton’s theory of creation. He referred directly to Hermes Trismegistus, and also drew on the related Paracelsan tradition.³ Milton later championed the Paracelsan view that like cures like, as against the Galenic theory, which he had earlier espoused, that contraries cure.⁴

      I shall have many occasions in the following pages to cite parallels between Milton’s thought and that of Hermeticism, particularly as mediated by Fludd.⁵ Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism and materialism, for instance, may be linked with this tradition, as well as with the ideas of radicals like the Leveller Richard Overton, or John Goodwin, a fellow defender of regicide, or the Socinians Paul Best and John Bidle. Maurice Kelley is right to emphasize that Milton was not a lone seeker in theology but rather ‘part of a small, unorganized but vigorous movement that manifested itself openly in the second half of the sixteen-forties’. He is equally right to argue that scholars should be looking for Milton’s sources among post-Reformation radicals rather than among Greek Fathers;⁶ though we may note that Milton’s favourite early Christian writer, Lactantius, was influenced by Hermes.⁷

      I tried once to list those sects and radical groups which shared any of Milton’s radical views: anti-clericalism, millenarianism, antinomianism, anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism, materialism, hell internal. I was a little startled by the result: the group closest to Milton was the Muggletonians, followers of John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, who in 1652 were commissioned by God as the Two Last Witnesses foretold in Revelation II. This was very salutary. I have in my time criticized other historians for treating the radicals of the English Revolution as a ‘lunatic fringe’. Yet I had always placed the Muggletonians outside my pale of sanity. I was wrong. A religious group which survived for three hundred years among solid London artisans cannot be dismissed as mad. Reeve and Muggleton moved in London radical circles, the circles from which Ranters, Quakers and such emerged: early London Quakers saw the Muggletonians as perhaps their most serious rivals. Muggletonians preserved, fossilized, many of the ideas of this Seeker milieu of the fifties, the milieu from which many of Milton’s ideas seem to derive.

      The curve of Milton’s political career quite surprisingly follows that of the Quakers: his support for Cromwell in 1649 and 1653, his growing disillusion under the Protectorate, his rejection of all organized churches, the traumatic effect on him of the Restoration, leading to apparent political quietism and withdrawal from politics whilst still hoping for ultimate divine revenge. Many others followed a similar course. Milton’s friend Roger Williams early denied ‘any true church in the world’. He ‘will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all’.¹ In 1648 the near-Socinian John Bidle asked ‘whether any public worship was justified, or a papal usurpation?’ Walwyn could not ‘associate in a church way, … not knowing any persons to be so qualified as ministers of the Gospel ought to be’, though in 1649 he still had hopes for the future.² Winstanley found rest ‘in no outward form of worship’. Ranters thought that men no longer needed ‘such lower helps from outward administrations’ once Christ had come into their hearts. Giles Randall and other Seekers, Clarkson and many Ranters, John Gratton in his pre-Quaker days, refused to go to any church.³

      ‘Better no ministry than a pretended ministry’, was the view attributed to William Erbery by John Webster. ‘In this darkness’ of the apostacy ‘he had rather sit down and wait in silence than be beholding to the pretended light and direction of deceivable guides.’ Erbery moves parallel to Milton in many respects. He was ‘ever entire to the interest of this Commonwealth’; he was accused of being a Socinian; he was a passionate foe to any state church, any intolerance. He expected to see God and his saints ruling on earth and judging the world. Like Milton, he rejected Fifth Monarchism; his attitude to the Ranters was – and was thought by contemporaries to be – ambiguous.⁴

      John Reeve was another who believed that all visible worship was done away with by Christ, ‘that the invisible worship of the invisible God may take place in the hearts of his people for ever.’ There had been no true worship since Constantine’s day. ‘Inward, spiritual silent praying and praising’ should now replace ‘outward praying, preaching, fasting … to be seen of men’.¹ When Lodowick Muggleton after the Restoration advised his followers to ‘keep all at home … as long as the powers of the nation doth forbid you to go to any meetings’, rather than attend the parish church, he added that there was no ‘necessity for any public meetings at all’.² Perhaps closest of all to Milton was Colonel Hutchinson, who when he was asked after the Restoration where he went to church replied, ‘Nowhere.’ To the question ‘How he then did for his soul’s comfort?’ he replied, ‘Sir, I hope you leave me that to account between God and my own soul.’³

      If Milton was known to and trusted by London radicals, this would help to explain Edward Phillips’s story that at one time his uncle was proposed as Adjutant-General to Sir William Waller’s army. Biographers since Masson have tended to dismiss this, perhaps because they related it to 1645, when Waller indeed had a vacancy for an Adjutant-General, but when he was an extinct volcano: there is no reason why Milton should want to be employed by him then. Masson suggested 1643, when London radicals were running Waller as a win-the-war leader against the conservative and dilatory Essex. Some of them may have approached Milton as a possible civilian aide, or commissar, for Waller’s army, which they were hoping completely to remodel. The fact that Waller’s star sank rapidly and that he later revealed himself as little less conservative than Essex himself would explain why the project fizzled out. If I am right, Milton was not interested in a military career as such; he might have been persuaded to undertake this particular job at this particular time. It was presumably City radicals who urged Milton to write Areopagitica. Hartlib for one knew Waller well.⁴

      Lest I be misunderstood, I repeat that I do not think Milton was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behmenist. Rather I suggest that we should see him living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views which he could not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted him.¹ In the De Doctrina Christiana Milton criticized those (Fludd, Richard Overton, Ranters, Diggers) who equate God and nature;² and those (Ranters, Behmenists) who attribute sin to God.³ He was prepared to allow the magistrate some restrictive power in religion which sectaries denied him.⁴ Unlike most radicals (except the Muggletonians) Milton had no objection to judicial oaths;⁵ unlike Lilburne and the Quakers he could see nothing wrong with hat honour.⁶ Bowing ‘to superior spirits is wont in heaven’, we are told in Paradise