Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

should like to see the vast energy at present devoted to Milton studies redirected – away from the classics and the Christian Fathers to Milton’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors. If this book helps to redirect this energy, it will have served its purpose – and will soon be superseded by more learned and better books. One of the very real pleasures of writing it has been to make the acquaintance, personally or through the printed word, of many younger Milton scholars in England and elsewhere who are impatient of the traditional stereotypes and who do not limit their seventeenth-century reading to Milton and other ‘classics’.² I have drawn gratefully on their work.

      I have tried to make acknowledgments when I am conscious of taking over other people’s ideas, but so many people have written well about Milton that this is impossible. Among those whom I have listed as the great Miltonists, David Masson must come first. For many years I have known that, whenever I think I have had an original idea about seventeenth-century England, I am apt to find it tucked away in one of S. R. Gardiner’s footnotes. So it is with Masson on Milton. Saurat had remarkable insights, and Don Wolfe’s Milton in the Puritan Revolution placed Milton in relation to his radical contemporaries.¹ I must also pay tribute to Douglas Bush, Northrop Frye, Earl Miner, Christopher Ricks, John Carey and Alastair Fowler, with whom I do not always agree but from whom I have learnt much; and to J. M. French, whose monumental Life Records of John Milton is indispensable to anyone who writes about Milton. Finally there is W. R. Parker. In some respects this book is a polemic against his Milton’s Contemporary Reputation, and I reject his dating of Samson Agonistes. Yet I am well aware of my debt to his massive biography, which not only gives almost every known fact about Milton’s life but also, on the many occasions when Parker was not mounted on one of his hobby-horses, contains a great deal of shrewd reflection. His index, as Thomas Hobbes might have said, is rare. The next generation will I trust come to see further than Parker; but it will do so by standing on his shoulders.²

PART I

       SHIPWRECK EVERYWHERE

      Si recte calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.

      Petronius Arbiter

      (If you estimate it correctly, there is shipwreck everywhere.)

      Title-page of the memorial volume to Edward King

      in which Milton’s Lycidas first appeared (1638)

Chapter 2

       Pre-revolutionary England

      God may leave a nation that is but in outward covenant with him, and why not England? … Our God is going, and do you sit still on your beds ?

      Thomas Hooker, The Danger of Desertion (1641): a farewell sermon ‘preached immediately before his departure out of old England’ in the early sixteen-thirties.

I Political background

      Milton was born in December 1608, and was self-consciously slow in maturing. The years before 1640 we can regard as the period of his apprenticeship. The world in which he grew up was changing rapidly. Under the pressures of expanding population, economic crisis and ideological rivalry, the consensus which had held Elizabethan society together was breaking down. All thought about economics and politics at this time took religious forms; men saw the national crisis primarily as a religious crisis, though Milton (I shall suggest) came to see it also as a cultural crisis.

      National sentiment in England had been intimately associated with Protestantism ever since Henry VIII declared England’s independence of the papacy. Under Elizabeth, when the great Catholic power of Spain emerged as the national enemy, the connection of Protestantism and nationalism was sedulously emphasized. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was used as government propaganda. A legend was carefully built up, of Catholic cruelty and treachery. Evidence in plenty could be found to support it: Alva’s Council of Blood in the Netherlands, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, innumerable Roman Catholic plots in England culminating in that of Guy Fawkes in 1605, on which Milton in his teens wrote five Latin poems. England’s victory in 1588 over the Spanish Armada – allegedly full of whips and instruments of torture for use on Protestant Englishmen – was attributed to direct divine intervention, and played a big part in building up the conception, which Milton adopted, of Protestant England as a chosen nation.

      James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, five years before Milton’s birth. James had many disadvantages. He was a foreigner, married to a papist, and son of Mary Queen of Scots who had been the Spanish and papal candidate to replace Elizabeth on the throne. But Gunpowder Plot gave James a good start, and he might have continued to exploit the patriotic anti-Catholic legend, since he was certainly a more convinced Protestant than Elizabeth. For a variety of reasons, however, good, bad and indifferent, James hankered after the role of peace-maker in Europe, of mediator between Protestant and Catholic extremists. But he was short of cash, for which he depended on the vote of M.Ps. most of whom accepted the full Protestant legend and had no use for James’s pacific schemes. He suffered the normal fate of the would-be mediator who lacks the wherewithal to intervene effectively. Spain was interested only in preventing Parliament from driving James into the Protestant camp as Europe lined up for the Thirty Years War.

      When war started in 1618 James failed – despite prodding from Parliament whenever it met – to give effective military aid to his son-in-law the Elector Palatine, who had been ignominiously ejected not only from the Bohemian throne to which he had aspired but also from his hereditary dominions in the Palatinate. Instead, James sent his favourite the Duke of Buckingham with Prince Charles to Madrid to woo the daughter of the King of Spain. It looked in the early twenties as though all continental Europe was going to fall before the Catholic sword. Church lands were being resumed in Germany, and it seemed only a matter of time before England’s national independence and the property of the inheritors of monastic lands fell too. When John Rushworth began to publish his documented history of the English Revolution in 1659, he found it necessary to go back to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, though he had originally intended to start in November 1640.¹

      Charles I, who succeeded in 1625, did not share his father’s illusions of European grandeur; but he too suffered from lack of money. He abandoned the unpopular scheme for a Spanish marriage alliance: instead he married the daughter of the King of France. In terms of Realpolitik this was sound: France was as hostile to Spain as could be wished. But Queen Henrietta Maria was no less Catholic than the Infanta of Spain; the marriage involved concessions to English Catholics, seen by many as a potential fifth column in England. Buckingham continued to be influential under Charles as under James, and many of his relations were Catholics. After Buckingham’s assassination in 1628 the influence of Henrietta Maria over her husband grew; conversions to Catholicism became fashionable; and in 1637 a papal agent was admitted to England, for the first time since the reign of Bloody Mary. Contemporary fears of an international Catholic plot against English independence appeared to be confirmed when eight years later a papal nuncio arrived in Ireland to head a full-scale Catholic revolt against English rule. Two generations earlier Nicholas Sander had been papal legate to the Irish rebels who rose in 1579.

      The French alliance involved Charles in what Milton was to call a ‘treacherous and antichristian war against the poor protestants of La Rochelle’.¹ The Protestant cause in Europe was finally saved not by England but by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who in 1630 marched into Germany to win spectacular victories. Court sentiment was expressed by Carew:

      What though the German drum

      Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise

      Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys.²

      That