The portrait of the ten-year-old Milton radiates candour, however. A large-eyed, delicate-faced boy, auburn-haired, closely cropped as a godly schoolboy should be, with rosy cheeks and full lips, he gazes directly at the viewer, smileless, with a trace of appeal, of anxiety in those huge eyes, so unwaveringly fixed on a distant vision. Commissioned by Milton’s father from one of the many Dutch portrait painters working in London, Cornelius Janssen, it also radiates the Miltons’ social ambitions. John is dressed in a black doublet trimmed with many lines of fine gold braid; he wears an immaculate collar, the lawn almost transparent, edged by a frill of fine lace.
Milton was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge on 12 February 1625, and once again he was middle-class, neither a poor sizar forced to wait on others to pay for tuition, nor a rich fellow-commoner, but a lesser-commoner. Milton disliked Cambridge. It may have been the first time John had left London. All his little worlds were lost to him. Christ’s was crowded, like Bread Street; most boys shared rooms and some even shared beds. The town was tiny, but it had churches and booksellers. The day was even more demanding than at Paul’s: it began at five, with chapel, then work took up the morning, while after lunch there was recreation, and then vespers and supper. The Elizabethan curriculum stressed rhetoric in the first year, logic in the second and third, and metaphysics in the fourth. Some maths and Greek had been added. Milton would often spend a whole afternoon, three or four hours, walking – walking, that is, in the opposite direction from the young blades called the tulips, who wore outrageously bright garments and led outrageously bright lives. They liked gambling and drinking and sexual excess, and some of them, following in the wake of Kit Marlowe, scoffed at religion and behaved badly in chapel, not an atmosphere congenial to serious John Milton.
Milton’s tutor was William Chappell, an erudite and godly man. And yet somehow, something went wrong between them. We don’t know exactly what. Years later, John’s brother Christopher told John Aubrey that Milton had received some unkindness from Mr Chappell; Aubrey adds that Chappell whipped him. Milton was rusticated, sent home briefly in 1626. George Orwell and Guy Burgess both claimed they had acquired a hatred of tyranny by passing through Eton. Milton’s tyrannophobia might have begun with resistance to the little tyrant that is an Oxbridge tutor.
He certainly reacted by borrowing the rhetoric of a Stoic philosopher exiled from the court. This was a dignified role. It let him explain himself to Charles Diodati, who had been extremely successful at Oxford. He explained over and over again how happy he was, walking in the suburbs, and reading, of course. He kept insisting that it was all for the best. But for all his stoicism there’s a note of real frustration. The world may be all before John, but he had to return to Cambridge – and try again to conform to a system he disliked. His father had requested a new tutor for his return, Nathaniel Tovey, and John worked hard to make amends. And yet he spent some of his vacation in 1628 composing a long, ostentatiously erudite poem to his former private tutor Thomas Young, who had just sent him a Hebrew Bible from Hamburg.
The plague outbreak in 1625 had increased the family’s sense of embattlement. When his two-year-old niece Anne Phillips died in January 1628, Milton produced his first poem in English, addressed to his unlearned sister and perhaps also to his mother. It was a complete dud, mixing pompous consolations with a stark lack of interest in the personality of the lost baby. It showed off shamelessly; the infant came garbed in the heavy, stiff robes of classical myth. And yet all this overdressing might have made the poem seem a valuable commodity to the Milton-Phillips clan; it certainly looked expensive. Wasn’t that the education they had been paying for?
His fellow-students at Cambridge were less accommodating. They just wouldn’t do things his way, wouldn’t admire him as he deserved. He himself confessed that he had ‘a certain niceness of nature, and honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was or what I might be’. And he was a pretty boy, with the luminously fair skin that often goes with auburn hair. He was called ‘The Lady’ at Christ’s. It stung. He was a little on the short side, too, as he himself recalled:
I admit that I am not tall, but my stature is closer to the medium than to the small. Yet what if it were small, as is the case with so many men of the highest worth in both peace and war? (although why is that stature called small which is great enough for virtue?) But neither am I especially feeble, having indeed such spirit and such strength that when my age and manner of life required it, I was not ignorant of how to handle or unsheathe a sword.
Milton begins by saying he is ‘not tall’, then amends this to ‘medium’, then adds that even if he were small (which he isn’t) there’s no reason to despise him, because why should anyone despise small men if they are virtuous? Defensive indeed. But at least his talents were recognized by someone; he was invited to act as Master of Ceremonies for the Vacation Exercise, an official known as ‘Father’, whose many ‘sons’ presented a licentious, uproarious impromptu entertainment. ‘Father’ had to begin with a Latin oration, and this may have been why John was given the part. It is interesting that he took it. He complained later that some ‘crabbed and surly’ fellows were against such jollities. Cambridge’s looser values were beginning to seep into London’s godly son, but they still ran against the grain of his nature. Milton’s surviving Vacation Exercise makes miserable reading; it’s like the attempt of every shy nerd to be liked by the school’s fast set. He makes joke after leaden joke, he flatters desperately. And all in a doomed bid to get them to listen and to like him. And he wanted them to listen to something particular, his first real burst of divine poetry: ‘Such where the deep transported mind may soar/ Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven’s door/ Look in, and see each blissful deity.’ ‘Even of theology’, he wrote, exasperated, of his fellows, ‘they are satisfied with a mere smattering, if it seems enough to help them patch together a little sermon out of other men’s scraps. It is so bad there is danger of our clergy gradually lapsing into the popish ignorance of bygone days.’ As he took his BA exams, which in his day were oral exams in disputation, which prized arcane inventiveness and knowledge of sophisticated rules above common sense, Charles’s Parliament was breaking; by the time Milton graduated in 1629, it had gone, and the king had vowed that it would not return.
Alongside Milton at Christ’s were men who would take opposite sides in the coming conflict. To take just one example, Charles Lucas would raise a regiment of horse for the king, fight at Marston Moor, and be among those hanged after the siege of Colchester in 1648. That he and Milton could amicably inhabit the same halls only fifteen years before seems remarkable. Yet Milton pressed on with his MA, and continued with his friendship with Diodati, who wrote him an account of feasting and drinking deep at Christmas. Milton’s first mature poem, produced in response, magnificently reshapes Christmas as a portent of angelic armies of the apocalypse. But it’s also defensive, armouring a godly, militant Christ against the crib-images of popery, and the incarnate Christ’s first act is to drive away pagan gods.
Milton’s politics weren’t yet formed, and he was willing to do odd literary jobs for aristocratic patrons, writing Arcades for the Dowager Countess of Derby and an epitaph for the Marchioness of Windsor. Since this lady was a Catholic, it might seem odd that Milton chose to mourn her, but fright may have outweighed politics: she was almost exactly his age when she died. Back at Cambridge, he marked his departure with a sizzling attack on the Cambridge system. He began, not especially winningly, by explaining that jobs like this are an unbearable interruption of his work. And after a high-minded and conventional defence of learning as a path to virtue, the nub is visible: ‘to be the oracle of many nations, to have one’s house become a shrine, to be a man whom kings and states invite to come to them, one whom men from far and near flock to see, while some consider it a point of pride if they but set eyes on him once’. The raw ambition here is startling. Milton doesn’t just want to abolish saints’ shrines; he wants to replace
them, personally. He graduated cum laude in 1632.
He couldn’t go back to Bread Street. His father had retired. His brother Christopher withdrew from Cambridge for the Inner Temple. Milton moved to Hammersmith with his father, then to Horton in Buckinghamshire. His father, however, didn’t really approve of poetry as a way of life. John set out to convince him in another long Latin poem. Let others gather wealth; he, John Milton, has been given far greater gifts by the Muses. Eventually, he would be among the great – and then his father, too, will be remembered for ever. It’s true that all this is conventional humanist praise of a patron, but its cheek is still astonishing. More audacious still was the brilliant, beautiful masque he composed for the Egerton family in September 1634. Milton had some trouble persuading his conscience that a masque was acceptable; to buttress his belief, he plied the audience with a fragile, lyrical but highly moral sermon against the dangers of excess. He was even less cautious when he had the masque printed in 1645. In that version, ‘If every just man that now pines with want/ Had but a moderate and beseeming share/ Of that which lewdlypampered luxury/ Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,/ Nature’s full blessings would be well-dispensed’, says the masque’s heroine, indignantly, looking very hard at James and Lucy Hay and their deliberately wasteful antefeasts, with perhaps a sidelong glance at Henrietta Maria and her four-hour-long masques succeeded by the same rituals. It is a powerful critique of the growing excesses of the rich, though the fact that William Prynne had recently lost the tips of his ears for a similar swipe at the excesses of the court may have made Milton less inclined to give voice to all his views.
Perhaps John’s repudiation of court extremes was violent because he sensed a faint, unwanted echo of them in himself. He was not so very different from the Hays in some respects. Himself ambitious, an excessive and desperate consumer of books and words, he channelled his urge to excel into learning. He set out to read the whole of ecclesiastical history; fairly early on, he found it very boring, speaking of the ‘innumerable and therefore unnecessary and unmerciful volumes’ of Athanasius, Basil and others. He gave up on comprehensiveness, and simply browsed. What he was looking for was the moment when the early Church lapsed from the purity God intended for it into the paganism of popery. He found the answer; it was, he thought, the fault of Constantine, who had taken ‘a homely and yeomanly religion’ and decorated it to excess, with ‘a deluge of ceremonies’. It was almost as if the Church had become corrupt as soon as it ceased to be persecuted. He could hardly help connecting this flawed ruler’s corruption of the early Church with the worrying activities of Charles and Laud in his own day. He also began to read Greek history, again searching for the moment of lapse: when did they cease to be the Greeks so admired by the humanists? As he read, he deepened his conviction that he alone knew, that Cambridge was full of ignorant fools, that most ‘prelates’ were ‘ravenous and savage wolves threatening inroads and bloody incursions upon the flock of Christ’. Milton began to feel unable to join them. Laud had administered an oath designed to keep godly people like him out. But that wasn’t his only reason. He had become convinced of the power of authorship as a way of ministry. When he came to write his extraordinary, brilliant and tense elegy for Edward King, Milton couldn’t help thinking that he had done relatively little; like King, he might be all promise and no fulfilment, all flower and no fruit.
And there was another reminder of mortality. On 3 April 1637, his mother Sara Milton died. John wrote no elegy for her. But in that he did write for Edward King, ‘Lycidas’, mothers fail repeatedly to stand between their sons and premature death. The muse, John complains, can’t save King, and couldn’t save her beloved son Orpheus either. Instead, Orpheus is torn apart by the wild women who cannot understand or appreciate his song, and his severed head floats down to the shore alone. Elsewhere in the same poem Milton connects the maenads’ silencing of Orpheus with the Laudian clergy, preying like wolves on the sheep entrusted to their care. If being a poet looked futile, being a cleric looked fatal.
He went abroad, to think. He passed quickly through France, which held few attractions for him. He wanted to get on to Italy. But in Paris he did meet the erudite Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius, Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden’s ambassador to the French court. And then he rushed on to Nice, hastened to Genoa and took a small packetboat to Leghorn. At last, his feet touched the ground in Tuscany.
And an astounding encounter took place. We don’t know if Milton had read Galileo’s banned book, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, which asserted his brilliant theory of planetary movement which the Vatican had been on the point of accepting until Galileo tactlessly insisted on putting a papal pronouncement into the mouth of an idiot. The pope, who shared Milton’s own sense of enemies around every corner, took childish umbrage and turned his back on all Copernican discovery. Galileo, who had been forced to retract his views by an Inquisitorial court, must have seemed to John Milton a living symbol of the power of popes to deny the liberty of thought. Milton was to see the coming war as a fight for the greatness of the Renaissance, for curiosity and truth themselves.
We don’t know what they talked about. Milton said later that ‘there I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought’. For Milton, Galileo seemed largely a symbol. And yet there was something uncanny about the meeting. It was as if in Galileo John Milton unknowingly glimpsed the self he too would become; revered, but also alone, blind, virtually imprisoned, exiled from power and influence, a victim of a war against powers too mighty for the lone intellect to withstand.
John’s views hardened in the warm Italian sun. He saw Siena and Rome and Naples. And in Naples he heard, at last, the news from England: that a war was beginning, initially against the Scots, and that his friend Charles Diodati was dead. He had been about to set sail for Sicily and Greece, but now he abruptly abandoned classical learning for present politics. He set out for home. By March 1639, Milton was back in Florence, and then he visited Geneva, capital of Protestant theology, centre of godly republicanism. Here was the border between the world God had meant and the corruptions of man.
But Milton was also still preoccupied with the border between life and death. Diodati’s grave awaited him in England, and he mourned. However, it’s hard to read the result of his mourning without a smile. Since Milton’s relationship with Diodati naturally expressed itself in Latin and Greek, it was natural for him to mourn his friend in elegant Latin. But it may have been Milton’s unspoken competition with his gifted friend that fettered him to a very strict use of Greek pastoral form, using a refrain which repeats a command to the sheep to go away and let the poet mourn. The sheep have to be thus dispersed no fewer than seventeen times. The poem betrays guilt, and there is also something anxious about it: was Diodati for ever the victor now, cut off in his prime? Guilt and dread can only be staved off by grand claims that Diodati was terribly lucky to have a gifted poet as a friend, who will ensure he is remembered for ever. The claim is no less irritating for being entirely justified. Humanist learning had always claimed to be a way to get on in society, but no one ever took this more literally or seriously than Milton.
He knew what he had to do: write a British epic – on King Arthur. But somehow he couldn’t get on with it. Or he might write a tragedy, on Brutus. Or what about a Biblical subject? The Flood, perhaps? Or John the Baptist? He was indecisive, but he felt sure he was called upon to do it; he found an anecdote in Bede about Caedmon, called by God and ‘suddenly made a poet by divine providence’. Meanwhile, in 1640 he moved back to central London, just beyond the old crowded city, to lodgings in Aldersgate Street. It was a quiet house, by London standards, set back from the road, with a garden. His nephews came to live with him, and were instructed by him.
But the peace was soon a victim of the developing conflict between the king and Parliament. He began to write anti-episcopa
l tracts, five of them, beginning with Of Reformation, composed between April and the first half of May 1641, which argued very learnedly against bishops and prelates in general, reserving particular criticism for social climbers like Laud. ‘Coming from a mean and plebeian life, on a sudden to be lords of stately palaces, rich furniture, delicious fare, and princely attendance, thought the plain and homespun fare of Christ’s gospel unfit any longer to hold their Lordships’ acquaintance, unless the poor threadbare matron were put into better clothes.’ There was something really personal at stake here, despite the pamphlet’s scholarliness; what, after all, were bishops but functionaries who interfered, intolerably, with the rights of John Milton? They were like his Cambridge tutor; they cut across his proud, passionate, desperate ambition to invent his own glory. Salvation was personal and interior, plain and blank and unvarnished; it could not be managed by authorities outside the passionate self. Sincere as all this was, it was also risky for the poet. He had found a release outside art.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 38