nineteenth-century editors.
The scrivener’s son sneered at rank, and especially at lords, referred gratuitously to ‘Junius Brutus, that second founder of Rome and great avenger of the lusts of kings’, and criticized Charles I’s foreign policy.3 In Prolusion V, whose unpromising subject was ‘There are no partial Forms in an Animal in addition to the Whole’, Milton introduced a totally irrelevant passage about Roman history. This may have been intended to remind his audience of Isaac Dorislaus, the history lecturer recently silenced for using Roman history ‘to speak too much for the defence of the liberties of the people’, as Joseph Mede’s friend Samuel Ward put it on 16 May 1628.4 For Milton’s apparent irrelevance leads up to the conclusion: ‘You have been wondering long enough, my hearers, what can be my reason for enlarging on all this: I will tell you. Whenever I consider and reflect upon these events, I am reminded afresh of the mighty struggle which has been waged to save Truth, and of the universal eagerness and watchfulness with which men are striving to rescue Truth, already tottering and almost overthrown, from the outrages of her foes. Yet we are powerless to check the inroads which the vile horde of errors daily makes upon every branch of learning.’1
So he leads in to his subject, the scholastic nature of which he admitted to finding distasteful. In the Seventh Prolusion, references to Roman history and Turkish tyranny are followed by a complaint of ‘our bad methods of teaching the arts’. It was after he had gone down from Cambridge that Milton sought ‘to learn what was new in mathematics and music, then the objects of my special studies’. Like John Wallis at about the same time, he rightly expected to find better mathematics teaching in London than in Cambridge. Both Gils had been proficient mathematicians: the younger published on the subject. In the early sixteen-forties Milton taught his own pupils arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and mathematics played a prominent part in the scheme offered in Of Education.2
From ‘our Bacon’,3 whom he regarded as one of ‘the greatest and sublimest wits in sundry ages’, and perhaps from Hakewill, Milton acquired a belief in the possibility of an almost unlimited improvement in the conditions of material life – so great that it might undo the intellectual consequences of the Fall of Man. This should be the object of education, Milton declared in 1644; though full truth would not be known until Christ’s Second Coming. At Cambridge Milton foresaw a time when ‘the spirit of man, no longer confined within this dark prison house, will reach out till it fills the whole world and the space far beyond with the expansion of its divine greatness. Then at last most of the chances and changes of the world will be so quickly perceived that to him who holds this stronghold of wisdom hardly anything can happen in his life which is unforeseen or fortuitous. Earth, sea and stars, Mother Nature herself, will obey him.’4
Milton’s reaction against scholasticism and the Cambridge curriculum helps to explain his later attitude towards the universities. As a Baconian undergraduate he wanted to see less disputation, more science – just as a present-day student might call for fewer written examinations, more sociology, more psychology.1 After going down from Cambridge Milton undertook a strenuous course in world history as well as pursuing his mathematical interests. By 1641–2 (and no doubt earlier) he had decided that the universities were unsuitable places for training the clergy, and thought that any gifted craftsman could preach better than ungifted academics.2
Milton did not escape from his Cambridge training: he had become superlatively good at what he regarded as a tedious game. The structure of an academic disputation underlies L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus and Paradise Regained. And though Milton jeered at the atmosphere in which refusal to accept the authority of Aristotle was tantamount to heresy,3 his own thought – especially on politics – remained very Aristotelian. Probably at Cambridge he acquired an interest in astronomy and astrology. The natural concomitant of an interest in science for Milton’s generation was the Hermetic philosophy, to which he seems also to have been attracted at Cambridge. He may have read Robert Fludd at this time, the fashionable synthesizer of Hermeticism and modern science; he almost certainly did so later.4
In December 1631 Milton wrote
How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
The complaint anticipates Schiller’s
Drei und zwanzig Jahre
Und nichts fur die Unsterblichkeit getan!5
But Milton’s conclusion, unlike the romantic poet’s, was that time and the will of heaven were leading him to a significant future:
If I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-master’s eye.
III Hammersmith and Horton, 1632–8
The years from 1632 to 1638 are in one sense well documented, in another sense rather mysterious. From about 1635 we know in considerable detail what Milton was reading. In Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1638) and in his poem to his father we have indications of Milton’s intention to dedicate himself to poetry. A carefully planned programme of reading would fill the gaps which, he well knew, had been left by Cambridge. He aimed at something like universal knowledge. But at his internal development during this six-year period biographers have to guess.
This used to be spoken of as ‘the Horton period’, but we now know that the first three years were spent in the elder Milton’s country house in the suburban village of Hammersmith. Nor was Horton itself, in the Buckinghamshire woodlands, quite the escapist rural retreat which some romantics have depicted, on the false assumption that L’Allegro and II Penseroso were written there.1 As early as 1614 Michael Drayton noted that ‘the Chiltern country’ was ‘beginning… to want wood’ – deforested by James I despite the growing fuel famine. It was not in Horton that
the rude axe with heaved stroke
Was never heard the nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt.
(II Penseroso)
Horton was an industrial village. In the year the Miltons moved to Horton the owner of a paper-mill there was presented to the ecclesiastical court for working his mill on the Sabbath throughout the year. He paid wages so low that they had to be supplemented by poor relief to the extent of £7 5s od a week. Paper-making was an unpopular industry: it depended on rags, which were alleged to import the plague. In 1626 there had been 34 plague deaths at Horton; in 1637, the year in which Milton’s mother died, 14 out of 31 deaths there were ascribed to the plague.2
Horton was a large parish, which included the chapelry of Colnbrook a mile away from the village. Robert Fludd the Hermetic philosopher seems to have been living there in the sixteen-thirties or earlier.3 Colnbrook was something of a radical centre. In 1634 Joan Hoby was in trouble there for saying ‘that she did not care a pin nor a fart for my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury’; she hoped that she would live to see the Archbishop hanged. In the following year the town received a new charter – which meant that it was brought under closer government control. The first mayor died of a surfeit of drink. In 1646 Thomas Edwards described the heretic John Hall of Henley as ‘sometime of Colnbrook’. Colnbrook was one of the places visited by the Digger emissaries in 1650 in quest of financial and moral support for their communist colony on St. George’s Hill.1
