in Comus? Is there any connection between Diodati’s death and Milton’s decision to marry at the age of thirty-three? What is the relation between Milton’s high standards of matrimonial compatibility and this earlier quasi-sexual relationship? Did the first Mrs. Milton suffer for her inability to fill Diodati’s place? We can neither answer these questions nor refrain from asking them. What we do know is that, unlike Young and Gil, Diodati did not live to get left behind as Milton grew more and more radical in the sixteen-forties: his memory remained sweet and pure.
Milton went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625. It was an unhappy period in the university’s history. On the one hand government and bishops were trying to bring both universities and their colleges under tighter control. Since the universities trained parsons – the opinion-formers – and were also attended by many gentlemen – the ruling class – control seemed more and more necessary as tensions increased in church and state. On the other hand, the universities were failing to keep pace with intellectual developments in the country, and greater control from on top tended to make for conformity, playing safe, careerism, idleness. But among some younger dons and undergraduates hostility to traditional scholasticism was accompanied by receptivity to new ideas. Milton, as was to be expected, soon aligned himself with the reformers.
Milton’s allusions to Cambridge and its teaching are uniformly critical, in sharp contrast to his respectful references to Young and Gil. Not that Christ’s was an obscurantist college, as colleges went. It had a solid Puritan tradition. William Perkins (Fellow 1584–94), who died six years before Milton was born, was by general consent the leading English Puritan theologian, one of the few Englishmen with a continental reputation. Other distinguished theologians were William and Laurence Chaderton and Edward Dering in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; Hugh Broughton (Fellow 1572–8), Andrew Willett, the hammer of the papists (Fellow 1583–8), Arthur Hildersham (M.A. 1584), Francis Johnson the separatist (Fellow 1584 till his expulsion in 1589), George Downham the Ramist (Fellow 1585–1616), Samuel Ward (Scholar 1592–5), John Smyth the Se-Baptist, Francis Johnson’s pupil (Fellow – probably – 1594–8), Thomas Taylor (Fellow 1599–1604), Paul Baynes (Fellow 1600–4). This was a very radical collection of Puritans. Greatest of all Perkins’s successors was William Ames, undergraduate and Fellow of Christ’s (1602–10), who was suspended by the Vice-Chancellor for preaching against ‘licence’ in Cambridge colleges during the ten days’ Christmas saturnalia. His theology, acclaimed by Thomas Young in Dies Dominica, was to be one of the starting points for Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana.
Puritanism and poetry went together at Christ’s. Sir Philip Sidney was followed by Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto, both favourites of Milton’s headmaster, and by Francis Quarles, cup-bearer to Elizabeth of Bohemia (John Dively, Secretary to the Queen of Bohemia, was also a Christ’s man) and John Cleveland, 1627–32. Among Milton’s contemporaries were Humphrey Otway, father of the dramatist, Charles Hotham, translator of Boehme, and Luke Robinson, both of whom we shall meet again, and Samuel Torshell, Puritan divine, a friend of Stock’s who published and amplified his posthumous works. Torshell was the author of The Womans Glorie (1645), which Milton no doubt read. Of the Fellows in Milton’s time the most distinguished was Joseph Mede (Fellow 1614–38), who was thought at one time ‘to look too much to Geneva’.1 Mede studied mathematics as a preparation for divinity, and was a great chronological scholar of the school which extends from John Napier through Thomas Brightman to Isaac Newton. Mede’s Key of the Revelation (published in Latin in 1627) could not be translated into English under the Laudian censorship. But in 1643 a committee of the House of Commons ordered it to be printed in a translation made by a Member of Parliament, with Preface by William Twisse, Prolocutor of the Assembly of Divines. Mede believed that the Pope was Antichrist, and had a carefully worked-out chronological scheme of his decline and fall, from the Waldensians to the seventeenth century. Mede was cautious about giving precise dates for the end of the world, but he expected it between 1625 and 1716, with 1654 and 1670 as possibilities.2 His timetable was influential among Presbyterian and Independent divines, and almost certainly contributed to Milton’s belief that Christ’s coming was ‘shortly expected’, as well as to his interest in the Waldenses.3
We do not know that Milton was ever taught by Mede. We do know that Mede’s pupils were introduced to authors like the mathematicians Recorde, Digges and Hariot, to Sidney, to Sir Thomas Smith (whose Commonwealth of England was a favourite of Milton’s), to Ramus (whose Logic – dominant at Cambridge in his day – Milton adapted and amplified in his own Art of Logic), to Purchas (briefly rector of All Hallows in 1626, whose writings form the basis of Milton’s Brief History of Moscovia), to Bacon and Alsted; and that Mede put a special emphasis on cosmography. We also know from Mede’s correspondence that in the sixteen-twenties he warmly supported Parliament against the Duke of Buckingham. In the next decade he was wary about committing himself to any views of which the government and in particular Laud were likely to disapprove.1
Another Fellow of Christ’s in Milton’s time was Robert Gell (1623–39), who probably married Milton to his third wife in 1663. Like Mede, like Milton, Gell anticipated the Second Coming in the near future. He was well known later as a patron of astrology, a Familist who was critical of Ranters, a defender of liberty of the press who in the dangerous year 1661 petitioned the House of Lords in favour of toleration.2 Gell’s name reminds us of another tradition at Christ’s: it was a great centre of Cabbalistic studies. Henry Broughton, Joseph Mede and Henry More (one of the Fellows of Christ’s College who accepted Parliamentary rule in 1644) were experts in the Kabbalah. Milton may already have become acquainted with such studies at St. Paul’s, since the elder Alexander Gill was interested. So were Du Bartas and Robert Fludd, both of whom Milton almost certainly read at one stage or another; so was Samuel Hartlib, later Milton’s friend, who was a correspondent of Mede’s.3
Early in his Cambridge career Milton had some trouble with the college authorities, the exact nature of which has never been explained. It apparently led to his being rusticated for a short period, and when he came back he changed tutors. He was taken over by Nathaniel Tovey, Ramist son of a friend of the Diodatis.4 The man with whom Milton had been unable to get on was William Chappell, later made an Irish bishop by Laud’s favour. We do not know whether this was an ideological or a personal quarrel. By 1628 Milton had taken a firm stand as a Baconian, a supporter of George Hakewill’s defence of the Moderns against the Ancients, a critic of scholasticism and an advocate of more science and more history in the university. ‘This unseemly battle of words tends neither to the general good nor to the honour and profit of our country.’5 Milton was defending the thesis of George Hakewill’s book within a year of its first publication in 1627. If for no other reason he is likely to have read Hakewill because the latter cited Charles Diodati’s father as a physician who had put the Ancients to shame. Some of Milton’s earliest Latin poems adopt a political stance, following that of his schoolboy translations of the Psalms. No less than five poems are about Gunpowder Plot, one of them denouncing the papal Antichrist. Although at the age of seventeen Milton wrote conventional Latin elegies on two bishops, the Vice-Chancellor and the university bedel, he never composed poems to royalty. Edward King, his junior contemporary, between 1631 and 1637 contributed to six collections of Latin verse celebrating royal births, marriages, etc.1
Some of Milton’s undergraduate orations which he printed many years later are difficult to interpret, full of inside jokes and allusions which cannot now be fully understood. Scholars have made very heavy weather of some of Milton’s remarks which they take to imply that he was, or had been, unpopular with his contemporaries. I think they are better interpreted as audience-baiting of a kind that fitted the rather rough humour of the occasion.2 If Milton was called ‘the Lady of Christ’s’, this was not necessarily an unfriendly nickname for a slight, blond and handsome young man: he seems to have remembered it with some satisfaction. More to the point is that Milton’s contemporaries called on him
