the course of casual reading I have come across many references to Milton, and echoes of him among the radicals, that Parker missed; I am confident that a systematic search would produce many more. Thanks to the work of W. K. Jordan, D. W. Petegorsky, G. H. Sabine, H. J. McLachlan, C. Webster, B. S. Capp and above all A. L. Morton and K. V. Thomas, a great deal more is known about the radicals of the revolutionary decades than when Parker wrote.
In a pioneering essay a generation ago Edgell Rickword said that ‘each successive book about him [Milton] tends to turn into a polemic with its predecessors.’2 I do not expect in this book to put everybody right. Nor do I think everybody wrong whom I have mentioned above. C. S. Lewis, for instance, made invaluable contributions to our understanding of Milton; Empson’s insights are worthy to set beside those of the great Miltonists – Masson, Saurat, Tillyard, Hanford, Barker, Wolfe, Kelley. I want to look at Milton from a rather different angle, from the angle of his radical contemporaries. It was in the process of writing a book about these radicals – way-out characters like Diggers, Ranters and early Quakers – that it struck me that some of their ideas bore a curious relation to those of Milton.3 Yet many of them were politically well to the left of the Levellers, themselves to the left of Milton. I do not intend to suggest that Milton belonged to any of these groups, that he was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or an early Quaker. But he lived in the same world with them, they took the same side in a civil war which Milton believed to be a conflict of good versus evil; and Milton insisted on their right to be heard. Their ideas illuminate his and may well have influenced him, both positively and negatively.
Milton himself is the worst enemy of Milton’s biographers. He prepared the record for posterity as carefully as to-day’s civil servant pruning his files with the thirty-year rule in mind. Most of us have been brought up to accept Milton’s own image of himself as an aloof, austere intellectual, an image all the more plausible because it fits the stereotype of the gloomy Puritan from which historians have with difficulty liberated themselves. I shall suggest later detailed arguments against accepting this picture of Milton, and reasons why everything he writes about himself should be checked carefully against the circumstances in which he wrote, and against everything else that we know about him.1 None of us would accept one of our own acquaintances at his own propagandist valuation.
That is what this book is about. In Part I I have high-lighted possible radical influences on the young Milton; I have argued that he was more sociable and clubbable than is often thought, less aloof and austere. In Parts II–IV I re-examine Milton’s political career and pamphleteering, proposing some revisions in our estimate of his standing among his contemporaries, indicating parallels between his ideas and those of the radicals, and suggesting points at which he disagreed with them. This prepares for a more thorough-going reconsideration of Milton’s heresies in Part V, in which I again try to relate his views to those of his contemporaries. This finally leads me in Part VI to suggest a greater ‘political’ content in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes than is normally recognized.
I should like to see the vast energy at present devoted to Milton studies redirected – away from the classics and the Christian Fathers to Milton’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors. If this book helps to redirect this energy, it will have served its purpose – and will soon be superseded by more learned and better books. One of the very real pleasures of writing it has been to make the acquaintance, personally or through the printed word, of many younger Milton scholars in England and elsewhere who are impatient of the traditional stereotypes and who do not limit their seventeenth-century reading to Milton and other ‘classics’.2 I have drawn gratefully on their work.
I have tried to make acknowledgments when I am conscious of taking over other people’s ideas, but so many people have written well about Milton that this is impossible. Among those whom I have listed as the great Miltonists, David Masson must come first. For many years I have known that, whenever I think I have had an original idea about seventeenth-century England, I am apt to find it tucked away in one of S. R. Gardiner’s footnotes. So it is with Masson on Milton. Saurat had remarkable insights, and Don Wolfe’s Milton in the Puritan Revolution placed Milton in relation to his radical contemporaries.1 I must also pay tribute to Douglas Bush, Northrop Frye, Earl Miner, Christopher Ricks, John Carey and Alastair Fowler, with whom I do not always agree but from whom I have learnt much; and to J. M. French, whose monumental Life Records of John Milton is indispensable to anyone who writes about Milton. Finally there is W. R. Parker. In some respects this book is a polemic against his Milton’s Contemporary Reputation, and I reject his dating of Samson Agonistes. Yet I am well aware of my debt to his massive biography, which not only gives almost every known fact about Milton’s life but also, on the many occasions when Parker was not mounted on one of his hobby-horses, contains a great deal of shrewd reflection. His index, as Thomas Hobbes might have said, is rare. The next generation will I trust come to see further than Parker; but it will do so by standing on his shoulders.2
Si recte calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.
Petronius Arbiter
(If you estimate it correctly, there is shipwreck everywhere.)
Title-page of the memorial volume to Edward King
in which Milton’s Lycidas first appeared (1638)
God may leave a nation that is but in outward covenant with him, and why not England? … Our God is going, and do you sit still on your beds ?
Thomas Hooker, The Danger of Desertion (1641): a farewell sermon ‘preached immediately before his departure out of old England’ in the early sixteen-thirties.
Milton was born in December 1608, and was self-consciously slow in maturing. The years before 1640 we can regard as the period of his apprenticeship. The world in which he grew up was changing rapidly. Under the pressures of expanding population, economic crisis and ideological rivalry, the consensus which had held Elizabethan society together was breaking down. All thought about economics and politics at this time took religious forms; men saw the national crisis primarily as a religious crisis, though Milton (I shall suggest) came to see it also as a cultural crisis.
National sentiment in England had been intimately associated with Protestantism ever since Henry VIII declared England’s independence of the papacy. Under Elizabeth, when the great Catholic power of Spain emerged as the national enemy, the connection of Protestantism and nationalism was sedulously emphasized. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was used as government propaganda. A legend was carefully built up, of Catholic cruelty and treachery. Evidence in plenty could be found to support it: Alva’s Council of Blood in the Netherlands, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, innumerable Roman Catholic plots in England culminating in that of Guy Fawkes in 1605, on which
