Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

successful a career in such a profession suggests considerable toughness, not to say ruthlessness. In the last resort legal processes had to be used; the scrivener could not afford to be too squeamish when faced with the protestations of a garrulous widow who claimed that she had not understood what she had committed herself to. In 1625 the elder John Milton made an apprentice his partner, perhaps to look after the less agreeable aspects of the business. His retirement may even have been connected with the increasingly brash behaviour of this partner. We do not know. But even when John Milton senior had retired to rural Horton, he continued to assert himself. He built a pew in the parish church which exceeded the authorized height, and he was ordered to cut it down to size.¹ The poet, growing up in London, in a street ‘wholly inhabited by rich merchants’,² must have absorbed the ‘protestant ethic’ with the air he breathed. It would be taken for granted that hard work was a religious duty, that bargains were made to be kept, and enforced by law against those who could not or would not keep them, that the weakest went to the wall, that God helped those who helped themselves. A tough tenacity was one of the younger Milton’s lasting characteristics. He inherited some of his father’s property and – as we shall see – some problems of debt-collection. The poet frequently expressed dislike of the legal profession; but he never hesitated to use legal process to enforce what he believed to be his rights, and he had a remarkably extensive knowledge of the law. Unlike the elder John, the poet remained on excellent terms with both his parents until their death. He worried from time to time about the ethics of usury, but decided on balance that it was lawful.

      But though it was a business-like bourgeois household, it was also a civilized household. The Mermaid Tavern was just round the corner. The scrivener loved music, and was himself no mean composer. In 1601 he participated in The Triumphs of Oriana, a tribute to Queen Elizabeth from the best composers in the country. In 1614 (twice), 1616 and 1621 he contributed to other collections, again in excellent company. He is said to have composed a 40- (or 80-) part song for a Polish (or German) prince in 1583 (and/or 1611).³ The elder Milton was also capable of turning a sonnet himself. So though he had hoped originally that his eldest son would go into the church, he was amenable to discussion when John decided otherwise. Father-like, the scrivener would have preferred his son to have entered some recognized profession – the law if not the church – rather than dedicating himself to poetry, which was even less likely to bring in a regular income in the seventeenth century than to-day. (Only after the publishing outburst of 1640–60 did the literary market develop sufficiently for the career even of hack-writer to become possible. Milton’s nephews, John and Edward Phillips, seem to have made a living of sorts this way. But aristocratic patronage was still desirable.) The discussions in the Milton family seem to have been fairly amicable, and the elder John financed his son’s expedition to Italy (with serving man) at a time when the future career of the thirty-year-old poet was still uncertain. John senior was clearly a patient, sensitive man, who remembered his difficulties with his own father. Posterity as well as his son should be grateful to the scrivener for his discernment. His biographer comments on the paradoxical combination in the elder Milton of Puritanism with a respect for the complex traditions of mediaeval church music; he set vernacular texts from the Geneva Bible to polyphonic music. His son was to experience similar fruitful tensions between the old and the new.¹

      The poet’s mother was the daughter of a London merchant taylor, and may have been a widow when she married the scrivener; perhaps she brought him a useful dowry. But we know very little about her. Mrs. Milton appears to have been related to the Bradshaws, though if there was any connection with the John Bradshaw who presided over the trial of Charles I in 1649, it was very distant. She had weak eyes, which John inherited; his father read without spectacles at the age of eighty-four. Otherwise all that history records is her son’s remark that she was very charitable. John’s later attitudes would suggest that Mrs. Milton accepted with docility the position of subordination expected of seventeenth-century wives. Yet the poet had an exceptionally high ideal of married love, and he believed that a sexual union was a true marriage only if mutual compatibility created a genuine oneness. It is difficult not to suppose that these views are somehow related to the music-loving sociable home in which he grew up, and to the mother whose generosity was the characteristic which he most remembered.

      Among early influences on the young Milton we must notice the rector of his parish, Richard Stock (1569?-1626). All Hallows was one of those rare parishes where the congregation had the right to elect their own minister: another was St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, whose minister in the sixteen-forties was John Goodwin. We shall often encounter his name in association with Milton. Stock was naturally a Puritan. He was one of the Feoffees for buying in impropriations – a Puritan attempt to reconstruct the church from within.² Three of the five ministers involved in this scheme were incumbents of parishes where the minister was elected. As befitted the rector of a parish of rich business men, Stock was a well-known sabbatarian, with strong views about the duties of servants. Milton was to repudiate many of Stock’s ideas – his firm defence of tithes, his decisive rejection of polygamy and of divorce for any reason other than adultery, his insistence that the principal object of marriage was the propagation of children, his surprisingly sharp condemnation of usury and his frequent citation of the early Fathers of the church.¹ But Stock’s preaching may have started Milton thinking on some of these topics; so may his anti-papal sermons on November 5. Milton’s poems on Gunpowder Plot were all written in Stock’s lifetime. Others of Stock’s views proved more acceptable to the poet – for instance that a man should be charitable to himself and his family as well as to others.²

      Stock had a strong sense of social justice. He denounced usurers whose ostentatious charity restored only a fraction of their ill-gotten gains; and the landlord or employer who oppressed his inferiors, confident that ‘there is no civil law against him, or if there be, either his greatness or purse will carry it out well enough’. In 1606 Stock had been rebuked as a ‘greenhead’ for criticizing the system of assessing rates by which they fell especially heavily on the poor. Stock repeated his charge when he could describe himself as a ‘greyhead’. This is testimony to his consistency and social sympathy, but does not suggest great influence on the financial conduct of citizens. One wonders whether Milton’s phrase in The Reason of Church Government, ‘now while green years are upon my head’ was consciously echoing Stock; an author should be judged by the validity of his arguments, not by his age, Milton added. Stock gave much thought to justifying the ways of God to men. ‘The Lord ofttimes destroys the wicked, enemies of God and his church, by the hands of his church and by their means’ was his enigmatical gloss on Malachi 4:3. Among his flock was Captain John Venn of the City militia, future M.P. in the Long Parliament and regicide, as well as John Milton, future defender of regicide.³

      Other important early influences on Milton were teachers and friends at St. Paul’s School. None of his Cambridge tutors or contemporaries seems to have won anything like the confidence which he gave to Thomas Young, the younger Alexander Gil and Charles Diodati. Young was a Scottish minister who came south some time before 1612, when episcopacy was being imposed on Scotland. We cannot say definitely that Young decided to emigrate because of Presbyterian convictions, but in 1606 his father had protested against the introduction of episcopacy, and the rest of Young’s career makes it a likely assumption. As a refugee in London Young assisted the Puritan Thomas Gataker in his ‘private seminary for divers young gentlemen’. He presumably got the job of tutor to Milton through Richard Stock, a friend of Gataker’s.¹ We do not know exactly when Young taught Milton. It may have been before he went to St. Paul’s. (We do not know the date of that either.) Or Young may have given him extra tuition whilst at school. What we do know is that he won John’s affection and respect, in a way that few of the poet’s seniors were to do. We know too little about Young’s personality to account for his hold over his pupil: but we may guess that Milton was impressed by Young’s austere courage in refusing to ‘subscribe slave’, preferring the hazards of an exile’s life in a foreign land.

      Young’s subsequent career fits the pattern. By 1620, Milton tells us, England was becoming too hot to hold Young, and he accepted a post in Hamburg as chaplain to a company of English merchants. He returned in 1628, to a living in Stowmarket worth £300 a year, where for ten years he managed to avoid wearing the surplice.