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. During this period Milton went to visit him, sent him letters and poems from time to time, and clearly valued both his friendship and his literary judgment. In 1639 Young published (anonymously) a Sabbatarian tract, Dies Dominica, which was not translated into English until 1672. If Milton read it – as is probable – he may have noticed a statement of the progressive evolution of truth: ‘Men of every age, studiously following after the known truth, … are blessed with a new light of knowledge not observed by their predecessors. It sometimes also falleth out that some things may be revealed to men of inferior condition, which are hid to others of greater name and authority.’2 In the long run Milton was to reject the Presbyterianism and sabbatarianism which meant so much to Young. But the poet’s attitudes in the early forties owe a good deal to the previous influence of his tutor, who almost certainly instigated Milton’s participation in the attack on episcopacy in 1641–2. Milton’s emphasis on the Bible as the source of all truth may also derive from Young. But after the mid-forties the two drifted apart, as Young became two things Milton now heartily disliked – a Presbyterian pluralist and the head of a Cambridge college.3
The two Alexander Gils were successively High Masters of St. Paul’s School, the father during Milton’s years there. The elder Gil’s literary tastes, and particularly his devotion to Spenser and the Spenserians, may well have influenced Milton. He perhaps also imbibed at St. Paul’s Gil’s disparaging attitude towards ‘ploughmen, working-girls and river-men’ as contrasted with ‘learned and refined men’.1 Gil’s treatise on the Trinity, originally published in 1601, was reprinted in 1635. Milton may have been interested enough to read it, though there is no evidence of any connection between this and his own anti-Trinitarian speculations. The elder Gil’s Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (1635, reprinted 1651) was an attempt to make reason, ‘that especial and principal gift of God to mankind’, serviceable to ‘the principal and especial end for which man himself is created, that is his drawing near unto God by faith in him’.2 In this work Gil argued that there could be no clash between faith and reason, a view which Milton later found attractive.
The younger Gil’s influence was very different. He was an usher during Milton’s time at the school, ten or a dozen years older than the poet. Their friendship continued for many years after Milton left. Alexander was a brash, swaggering intellectual, who never seems quite to have recovered from being a very clever young man. He was ‘accounted one of the best Latin poets in the nation’. Milton admired his poems, and Gil succeeded Young as literary mentor to the young poet. Milton thought him ‘the keenest judge of poetry in general and the most honest judge of mine’. He never talked to him ‘without a visible increase and growth of knowledge’. But Gil also had political opinions. Ben Jonson, attacking the elder Gil in 1623, spoke of ‘licentious persons’ who ‘censured the Council’ of the King. ‘We do it in Paul’s, … yea and in all the taverns.’3 In October of that year, when Prince Charles delighted the nation by returning from Spain without the popish Infanta whom he had gone to woo, the 114th Psalm was sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral – ‘when Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among the barbarous people’. It was a political gesture. So was Milton’s paraphrase on this Psalm, ‘done by the author at fifteen years old’ – i.e. in 1623–4:
When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son
After long toil their liberty had won.
must certainly have shown it to the usher. Ten years later he sent Gil a Greek translation of the same Psalm. In Psalm 136, which Milton also translated about 1623–4, the neutral phrase ‘the Lord of Lords’ is expanded to (him) ‘who doth the wrathful tyrants quell’.1
In 1628, when the hated favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated by John Felton, the younger Gil was foolish enough to propose the assassin’s health. He had recently become a Bachelor of Divinity,
