denounced so fiercely in 1634 would have been found in the parish of Horton as well as in the City of London.
The vast amount of reading, especially in history, that Milton got through at Hammersmith and Horton stood him in good stead for the rest of his life; he drew on it both for his prose pamphlets and for the great poems. His father observed, in a not entirely complimentary spirit, that he had kept John till the age of thirty. The poet admitted the justice of the charge; he referred later to the obligations incurred by living so long off the sweat of other men’s labours. Milton’s later rejection (in Areopagitica) of a fugitive and cloistered virtue may sound like a condemnation of the Hammersmith-Horton period. But we should not see these years, even in retrospect, as an escapist interlude. In 1629 Milton had been prepared to sign the three Articles of the Church of England, in order to take his degree. By so doing he accepted the royal supremacy, agreed that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the Word of God and declared that the Thirty-nine Articles were agreeable to the Word of God. But within three or four years he had decided that he could not take up a career as parson of the Church of England. It was no doubt out of pride as well as moral revulsion that he refused to ‘subscribe slave and take an oath withal’.2 In these years he was consciously and deliberately preparing himself to be the poet who would speak to and for the English nation.
So various influences combined to push Milton in a radical direction. From his father he learnt that authority – even parental authority – could be disobeyed. From his parents (probably), from Richard Stock and Thomas Young certainly, he learnt to be critical of the episcopal state church. In Young he admired the courage which led an opponent of the bishops to prefer exile and poverty to submission. From the younger Gil Milton heard a great deal of criticism of court and government. Milton was expressing hostility towards monarchy while still a schoolboy. From the elder Gil he learnt that reason had a place in religious discussion; he also acquired from him a keen linguistic patriotism and a respect for the ‘Puritan’ line of poets from Spenser to Wither. At Cambridge he came to feel a modern-style contempt for the old-fashioned curriculum and teaching methods: we may assume that he was already familiar with Bacon, Hakewill and Dorislaus as well as with Fludd and the Hermetic tradition. Milton was aware of a crisis in the universities, one form of which was the conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns. He was also aware of a crisis in literature and the arts, of a religious crisis caused by the Laudian régime. During the sixteen-thirties he may have come to see all these as one crisis.
I find it impossible for a prince to preserve the state in quiet unless he hath such an influence upon churchmen, and they such a dependence on him, as may best restrain the seditious exorbitances of ministers’ tongues.
J. Gauden, Eikon Bastlike (1649), pp. 147–8. Believed by contemporaries to be by Charles I
The conflict of cultures in England sprang from the appearance of new value systems. The rank and file of European Protestantism came from great cities – Strasbourg, Geneva, Amsterdam, La Rochelle, London – and from rural industrial areas like Essex, Somerset or the West Riding of Yorkshire. Great aristocrats used the movement; many gentlemen adhered to it from conviction or self-interest; but its mass support came from merchants and artisans, the middling sort. Economic developments – greater prosperity, better housing, more privacy – led to the household, the home emerging as the centre of a new middle-class culture. The recently invented craft of printing and Protestant translations of the Bible catered for the needs of this new culture: literacy, education and Protestantism expanded together. In England, Puritans especially concerned themselves with spreading London’s ways of thinking into the dark corners of the north, Wales and the south-west, the Catholic areas which were also to be Royalist areas during the Civil War. W. K. Jordan has studied the charitable foundations through which rich merchants tried to extend the civilization of London into the outlying areas – by providing schools and scholarships, preaching, apprenticeships for godly youths, marriage portions for virtuous spinsters, etc., etc. And William Haller has convincingly demonstrated the build-up by Puritan preachers over the fifty years before 1640 of a middle-class public convinced that God spoke directly to their consciences.1 Truth is in the inward parts: externals in religion were rejected, whether they took the form of sacred church buildings or of a mediating priesthood: all such things were forms of idolatry. Men brought up on Bible-reading reacted vehemently from anything that savoured of idol-worship, which distracts men and women from communion with God.2
The preachers were consciously organizing middle-class men and women against the concept of hierarchy, itself an import into Christianity that reflected the social realities of mediaeval agrarian society. For the middle-class Puritan God seemed a better lord than any peer of the realm; he spoke directly and familiarly to his dependants: the duty to obey God was greater than any traditional social obligation. The vehemence with which Elizabethan exponents of orthodoxy defend hierarchy shows that it is already under attack: as the vehemence with which gold is denounced shows that money is beginning to talk a newly authoritative language.
The young Milton was a sturdy Protestant, but we find him writing epitaphs on the high-flying Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and praising the sage and serious doctrine of virginity. Perhaps we should think of him at this stage not in association with a ‘Puritan’ opposition but with those like George Herbert, who left the court for a country living, or Nicholas Ferrar, who withdrew from the City to his Anglican nunnery at Little Gidding. Ferrar believed the Pope to be Antichrist no less than did Milton: George Herbert spoke of religion under Archbishop Laud as
on tiptoe in our land
Ready to pass to the American strand.
A man like Peter Sterry, later associated with Milton, resigned his Cambridge fellowship some time in the sixteen-thirties in order to take refuge in a private chaplainship to Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, soon to emerge as one of the leaders of the Parliamentarian radicals, much admired by Milton.3 Others emigrated to the Netherlands or to New England. At least one of the latter did so only after ‘having preached much’; but ‘seeing the danger of the times he changed his profession of divinity into physic’. Milton4 in retrospect spoke of himself as ‘church-outed by the prelates’, and biographers have recognized that he could never have ‘subscribed slave’ to the Laudian régime.5 But the depth of his revulsion calls for emphasis. It perhaps needed the crisis of the sixteen-forties to convince Milton that directly political solutions were both necessary and possible. Yet in the later thirties his Commonplace Book shows him aware of a religious, political and cultural crisis. It was already, its editor tells us, ‘pointedly anticipating’ the ‘revolutionary ideas of Areopagitica, the divorce pamphlets and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’.1
The court for Milton from the late sixteen-twenties suggested ‘the lusts of Kings’, the homosexual relationship of James I to Buckingham, to which the younger Gil had openly referred in the poem which got him into trouble.2 Buckingham continued to be a favourite of Charles I, although his family had papist associations. A major scandal of the early thirties concerned Lord Castlehaven, who was executed for buggery, for conniving at the rape of his wife by a servant who was also his lover, and for the prostitution of his daughter-in-law to another servant. Castlehaven was reputed to be a papist. Milton would certainly be aware of this cause célèbre; but it was brought forcibly to his notice when he was asked to write a masque for the
