have lost, the just vengeance does not sleep.’1 The strength of Lycidas comes from its fusion of the cultural and the personal. Until the land has ‘enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish,’ Milton could find no outlet for the creative powers which he felt within him. Neither liberty nor a voluntary self-discipline was possible: Milton lived under chaos tempered by arbitrary suppression – of a kind with which he had become familiar in the Italy which had silenced Galileo. A break-through to a different political order was needed if the frustrations of the poet and his country were to be remedied. He wanted to live in a society in which ‘adoptive and cheerful boldness’ would replace ‘servile crouchings’,2 in which human dignity was possible, in which gifted laymen might preach if they wished and poets had inspiring subjects and a welcoming audience.3
But ‘adoptive and cheerful boldness’ was the consequence of ‘our new alliance with God’.4 The political upsurge of the sixteen-forties gave Milton his vision of Christ as ‘shortly-expected King’, of a just society to be produced by political reformation, a society in which God’s Englishmen will at last realize their destiny and the poet will find his fit audience for celebrating God’s ‘divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages’. The forties gave Milton a new vision, but he had long held an exalted view of the poet’s role, ‘to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility’. This he contrasted with ‘the corruption and bane which [our youth and gentry] suck in daily from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant poetasters’.5
Here we come back to the cultural crisis. Milton’s problem was to break through to his public. Spenser had written for a relatively unified audience, in which court and country were not widely separated. But since his time things had changed. ‘Drayton’s difficulty was that he tried to find a public not centred on the court. Ben Jonson, whose view of poetry was as public [as] and perhaps more professional than that of Spenser, created a form of poetry which was more courtly and aristocratic, less national, but which was socially and ethically directed none the less.’ Milton’s early poems revealed him as a son of Ben; but by the sixteen-thirties national unity no longer existed. ‘Social and ethical’ considerations necessitated parting company with Henrietta Maria and the court poets.1
Ben Jonson had spoken of his dead son as ‘Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’. Milton went one better by claiming that the true poet ‘ought himself to be a true poem; … not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy’. None but good men can either be truly eloquent or love freedom.2 Poetry and liberty are always closely linked in Milton’s thinking: so are poetry and God.
But there is another aspect of Milton’s thought which impelled him towards the radicals. The cultural crisis was also a social crisis. Historians are becoming increasingly aware of the threat of popular revolt which underlay the apparent stability of Charles I’s reign. The Tudor consensus among the ruling class had long been breaking up. All over England class bitterness was fierce. Many thought that the lower orders were ripe for revolt. The moderate Simonds D’Ewes in 1622 spoke of ‘a hoped-for rebellion’. Such hopes or anxieties were outspoken in the depression of the early sixteen-twenties.3 In the south-western counties between 1628 and 1631 there were sporadic uprisings against enclosure, and revolt was endemic there throughout the thirties. The temptation to members of the propertied class to give a lead – with all the risks that this would involve – increased with the shame of England’s non-intervention in the Thirty Years War.
In 1628 Sir Robert Cotton circulated a paper entitled The Danger wherein the Kingdome now standeth, whose object was to warn that if Parliament pushed its case against the Duke of Buckingham too hard it might unleash a revolt by ‘the loose and needy multitude,… with a glorious pretence of religion and public safety, when their true end will be only rapine of the rich’. This could be used as an argument to persuade Buckingham to come to terms with Parliament; but the bluff must not be carried too far.4 Such considerations may explain the collapse of the opposition when its bluff was in fact called in 1628–9. Wentworth and Noy joined the government; Eliot and Chambers were left in jail. In 1628 the London populace did indeed get out of hand, lynching the Duke of Buckingham’s astrologer, Dr. Lambe. No one was ever called to account for his death, though a heavy fine was levied on the City. Later in the year Buckingham himself was assassinated, to the joy of many more than the younger Alexander Gil. In 1630, in a funeral sermon on the Earl of Pembroke, T. Chaffinge warned of the danger of civil war between country and City, from which Spain alone would benefit.1 This is the background to those flattering court masques in which all the problems of a divided nation are solved by the descent of a royal deity in the last scene. Twenty years later some despairing radicals turned to Fifth Monarchism in a similar spirit; the direct intervention of Jesus Christ was necessary because there seemed to be no other way of winning the reforms which they desired.
There was intense class feeling then – not only a hatred of gentry and aristocracy on the part of the lower classes, but a reciprocal contempt. Abraham Cowley, himself a merchant’s son, saw the Civil War in historical perspective as an uprising of ‘the base rout’, of ‘Kets and Cades and Tylers’.2 He was quoting Charles I, who in his answer of 18 June 1642 to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions warned that, if opposition to him continued, ‘at last the common people … [will] set up for themselves, call parity and independence liberty, … destroy all rights and properties, all distinctions of families and merit’, so that eventually government would ‘end in a dark, equal chaos of confusion, and the long line of our many noble ancestors in a Jack Cade or a Wat Tyler’.3 A later Royalist song contrasted ‘the loyal gentry’ with ‘the perfidious clown’, and said of the latter
Let them, like treacherous slaves, be always bound
To pay rack rents, and only till the ground.
Another song depicted the people saying to one another
We’ll teach the nobles how to stoop
And keep the gentry down.4
The scrivener’s son aligned himself with the poor and middling sort against wealthy courtiers. The Lady in Comus observed that
courtesy
… oft is sooner found in lowly sheds
With smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls
And courts of princes, where it first was named
And yet is most pretended.
(321–4)
From his Cambridge days Milton had shown a good deal of contempt for mere hereditary aristocracy. High social rank was a hindrance to virtue, he thought, ‘in respect of the wealth, ease and flattery which accompanies a nice and tender education’.1 The Lady’s socially conscious retort to Comus’s magnificent invocation of the plenitude of nature,2 and the virulent attack on the established church in Lycidas, suggest that Milton, well before the Civil War, was prepared to look for allies outside his own social milieu. Like Oliver Cromwell, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, he saw ‘plain men’ who had ‘the root of the matter in them’ where his adversaries saw ‘the very beasts of the people’.3 ‘The old Puritans observed hierarchy and rank’, John Bastwick complained in 1646; not so the upstart new sectaries.4
In the sixteen-twenties and early -thirties many of Charles I’s most passionately sincere opponents chose emigration because they despaired of change – though no doubt most of them hoped, like the Marian exiles eighty years earlier, to return to
