Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

Gustavus Adolphus. On that occasion John Bradshaw, later President of the court that tried Charles I, perhaps Milton’s kinsman, wrote that ‘more sad or heavy tidings hath not in this age been brought since Prince Harry’s death to the true-hearted English.’³ At the time of Gustavus’s intervention the English government was actually negotiating with Spain for an alliance against Sweden and the Netherlands. Those patriotic Englishmen who were bitterly ashamed that Sweden and not England had saved the day for Protestantism did not know of these negotiations. But plainly the English court was less than enthusiastic about the Protestant cause. In 1632 a financial deal with Spain helped the latter to pay her armies in the Netherlands; in 1639 Dutch and Spanish fleets fought a battle in English territorial waters, with the English fleet passively looking on.

      Nor was it only a question of foreign policy. There were alarming developments in England itself. William Laud, in effect head of the church from 1628 onwards, introduced innovations which to many Englishmen seemed steps in the direction of popery. Transference of the communion table from the centre of the church to the east end, where it was railed off, seemed to imply the Catholic doctrine of the real presence. ‘A table of separation’, Milton was to call it. It elevated the priest above the congregation, thus undoing what for many had been one of the Reformation’s most important achievements. There was a deliberate re-introduction of Catholic motifs into ecclesiastical architecture and sculpture. Laud was also effective Prime Minister of England. He made the Bishop of London Lord Treasurer – the first cleric to hold that office since the Reformation, Laud proudly noted in his Diary. Laud attempted to increase tithe payments from the laity to the clergy; to recover for the church tithes which had passed to laymen at the dissolution of the monasteries. His partisans dominated the two universities, and got the best preferments in the church; their opponents were silenced or driven into exile. In the eleven years without Parliament, 1629–40, Laud and his dependants ruled through the prerogative courts, Star Chamber and High Commission, which fiercely enforced government policy, regardless of the social rank of those who opposed it. ‘Lordly prelates raised from the dunghill’, ‘equal commonly in birth to the meanest peasants’, as their opponents elegantly called them, inflicted corporal punishments on gentlemen with the same ferocity as the latter flogged and branded the lower orders;¹ as soon as a Parliament met they were certain to be called to account.

      Parliament ultimately had to meet because of Scotland. The English government had imposed bishops on the Scottish Kirk, and under Laud their power was enhanced. There had been dangerous talk of a resumption of Scottish church lands. When a new prayer book was brought in, with changes which weakened Protestant doctrine, the Scottish gentry and aristocracy encouraged a resistance which soon reached national proportions. Most patriotic Englishmen sympathized with the old but now Protestant enemy against their own government. When Charles sent an army north, the rank and file were more hostile to their papist officers than to the Scots, better at pulling down altar rails than at fighting. National disaster and bankruptcy could be avoided only by calling a Parliament.

      By now the idea had taken root in England that the government, under the baleful influence of Henrietta Maria and Laud, was involved in a vast international Catholic plot against the liberties of Protestant Englishmen. Laud of course was no papist. We know, as contemporaries did not, that he refused the offer of a cardinal’s hat. But if they had known, the fact that the Pope thought the offer worth making might have seemed more significant than Laud’s refusal. Events in Scotland seemed to fit into this international conspiracy. So did events in Ireland.

      There, in natural resentment at the oppressions of English colonizers, Catholicism had become equated with nationalism just as Protestantism had in England, and as Presbyterianism had in Scotland. In 1598 a Spanish landing in Ireland had been beaten off with difficulty: the possibility of its recurrence was a perpetual nightmare. The appointment of Sir Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 increased anxiety. Went-worth was a Protestant, but he was also a renegade leader of the opposition in the English Parliament. He made what many Englishmen thought excessive concessions to the Catholic majority in Ireland, and started building up an army there composed largely of papists. What for? Wentworth himself suggested using it against the Scottish Covenanters; for most Protestant Englishmen this was equivalent to using it against England, for the subversion of their liberties, religion and property.

II Court versus country

      This is the background against which we must set court/country rivalries in the early seventeenth century. Under Elizabeth, the danger from Spain and from the Pope, and perhaps from the English lower classes, had forced unity on the ruling class. Every man, as Fulke Greville put it, believed that ‘his private fish-ponds could not be safe whilst the public state of the kingdom stood in danger of present or expectant extremities’.¹ But after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, political attitudes, especially attitudes to foreign affairs, began to diverge. Gradually what had been healthy tensions between different groupings on Elizabeth’s Privy Council became ruthless faction feuds. Ultimately two sides lined up to fight a civil war. A deep breach opened up between the early Stuart court and the main body of respectable opinion in the country. In so far as this opinion was expressed in any organized way, ‘Puritanism’ in a very wide and loose definition of that over-worked word can serve to describe it. But the roots of hostility to the court were not merely theological but political, moral and cultural as well.

      The divergences showed up more clearly under James I. Neither Elizabeth’s own behaviour nor the conduct of her courtiers had always been impeccable. Yet certain standards of decorum had been maintained, not least because of the prudent parsimony of the Virgin Queen. But there were many things about James I which shocked country squires and London merchants – the drunken orgies which marked the visit of the King of Denmark in 1606 for instance. James’s public fondling and slobbering over his male favourites might have been forgiven, but not the fact that he allowed them to influence policy. This was utterly foreign to the Elizabethan tradition. When the Earl of Somerset, a Scottish favourite, wanted the Earl of Essex’s wife, James egged on a bevy of bishops to declare the marriage annulled on the grounds of Essex’s impotence and his Countess’s intact virginity. Some were prepared to believe the former, none the latter. When civil war came, Essex was Lord General of the Parliamentary army.

      An even greater scandal broke in 1615, when Somerset and his new Countess were convicted of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury because he knew too much about their affairs. The only way in which the anti-Spanish party at court could think of ending James’s subservience to the Spanish Ambassador was by getting the Archbishop of Canterbury to introduce him to a new boy-friend. The ruse was successful; but as the new minion was the future Duke of Buckingham, the remedy proved worse than the disease. There were scandals of a more conventional sort: two Lord Treasurers and a Lord Chancellor were convicted of taking bribes. With more money about, corruption either increased or was believed to have increased. The price of a peerage, of a baronetcy, and of most court offices was publicly known. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, writing in cipher for his own eye only, accused James of ‘the sin of sodomy’, and added ‘all his actions did tend to an absolute monarchy.’¹

      Lucy Hutchinson sums up the Puritan view, though she has her own heightened and telling way of putting things. ‘The court of this king [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance. … The generality of the gentry of the land soon learnt the court fashion, and every great house in the country became a stew of uncleanness.’ When James died, ‘the face of the court’, Mrs. Hutchinson admits, ‘was much changed … for King Charles was temperate and chaste and serious.’² Gross errors of taste and probity were eliminated. Charles was a better judge of men than his father, and his personal fastidiousness offered a more acceptable public image. But the charge of lack of Protestant patriotism ultimately proved fatal. Charles was too devoted to his French wife, too dependent on unpopular bishops. Nor did it do the Church of England any good that the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore had the misfortune to be convicted of whoredom and sodomy in the autumn of 1640.¹

      The growing court/country rivalries came to include attitudes towards patronage of the arts. Under Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, the first great English art-collector, led the party which favoured an active pro-Protestant