Counter-Reformation absolutist art favoured by the court clique.
There is an inevitable danger in history of falling for ‘the illusion of the epoch’, of accepting a ruling group at its own valuation whilst ignoring evidence from other sources. It is the criticism which Paine made of Burke on the French Revolution: he pitied the plumage but forgot the dying bird. We must not go to the opposite extreme and say that the aesthetic taste of Charles and his circle was a significant cause of the Civil War; that would be as absurd as to argue that the Civil War destroyed English art. What we can say is that the years in which Milton grew up were years of increasing national disillusionment, of a widening gap between the court and the more Protestant elements in the country. The golden age of the drama and of English literature generally was over; so was the golden age of English music, and of English miniature painting. The religion of court and universities was diverging from the Elizabethan consensus; the new scientific ideas were popular in London, and had won some advocates in both universities, but no official recognition. The censorship grew increasingly severe.1 The young gentlemen who went to the Inns of Court continued to be consumers and patrons of literature, but after the first decade of the seventeenth century ‘the energies which had previously been devoted to literature and scholarship were channelled instead towards political and theological concerns.’2
I quote Thomas again: ‘There were two warring cultures. But it is more accurate to talk of a breakdown of the national culture, an erosion through the sixteen-thirties of a middle ground that men of moderation and good will had once occupied.’ ‘The civil war was about the whole condition of a society threatened by a failure of the ruling caste to uphold traditional national aims and values, and to adapt itself to a rapidly changing world.’3 It is important to remember this cultural component in what we call ‘Puritanism’, as well as the political and religious tensions between court and country on which the books normally dwell. It was felt especially strongly by John Milton. It has been suggested, on the evidence of the Nativity Ode and Lycidas, that Milton’s ‘imagination of revolution as the supersession of one ground of values by another’ antedates the historical revolution in which the poet was to play a leading part.4
It is commonly seen that historians are suspected rather to make their hero what they would have him be than such as he really was.
John Toland, The Life of John Milton (1698), in Darbishire, p. 84
The family into which John Milton was born in December 1608 was Protestant, bourgeois and cultured. His father, John Milton the elder, had been turned out of his Oxfordshire home by his yeoman father, who adhered to the old religion whilst his son became a Bible-reading Protestant. John the elder came to London some twenty-five years before the poet was born, and pursued a very successful career as a scrivener. Scriveners performed functions for which to-day one would go to a solicitor or an investment adviser; but their main business, and certainly their most lucrative business, was money-lending. It was a time of rapidly rising prices, and of ostentatious expenditure among an aristocracy slow to adapt itself to new economic realities; it was also a time when merchants and business men often needed the sort of bridging loan for which they would to-day turn to a bank. The scrivener might be the go-between linking borrower and lender, as well as lending on his own account. Interest rates were high; by close attention to detail, good timing and firm use of legal processes, there were handsome profits to be made. John Milton senior did well. By 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, he had made enough money to retire. After setting up his younger son, Christopher, as a lawyer, and providing a good marriage portion for his daughter, he was still able to maintain his elder son in a leisure which included an expensive fifteen months’ continental tour.
So successful a career in such a profession suggests considerable toughness, not to say ruthlessness. In the last resort legal processes had to be used; the scrivener could not afford to be too squeamish when faced with the protestations of a garrulous widow who claimed that she had not understood what she had committed herself to. In 1625 the elder John Milton made an apprentice his partner, perhaps to look after the less agreeable aspects of the business. His retirement may even have been connected with the increasingly brash behaviour of this partner. We do not know. But even when John Milton senior had retired to rural Horton, he continued to assert himself. He built a pew in the parish church which exceeded the authorized height, and he was ordered to cut it down to size.1 The poet, growing up in London, in a street ‘wholly inhabited by rich merchants’,2 must have absorbed the ‘protestant ethic’ with the air he breathed. It would be taken for granted that hard work was a religious duty, that bargains were made to be kept, and enforced by law against those who could not or would not keep them, that the weakest went to the wall, that God helped those who helped themselves. A tough tenacity was one of the younger Milton’s lasting characteristics. He inherited some of his father’s property and – as we shall see – some problems of debt-collection. The poet frequently expressed dislike of the legal profession; but he never hesitated to use legal process to enforce what he believed to be his rights, and he had a remarkably extensive knowledge of the law. Unlike the elder John, the poet remained on excellent terms with both his parents until their death. He worried from time to time about the ethics of usury, but decided on balance that it was lawful.
But though it was a business-like bourgeois household, it was also a civilized household. The Mermaid Tavern was just round the corner. The scrivener loved music, and was himself no mean composer. In 1601 he participated in The Triumphs of Oriana, a tribute to Queen Elizabeth from the best composers in the country. In 1614 (twice), 1616 and 1621 he contributed to other collections, again in excellent company. He is said to have composed a 40- (or 80-) part song for a Polish (or German) prince in 1583 (and/or 1611).3 The elder Milton was also capable of turning a sonnet himself. So though he had hoped originally that his eldest son would go into the church, he was amenable to discussion when John decided otherwise. Father-like, the scrivener would have preferred his son to have entered some recognized profession – the law if not the church – rather than dedicating himself to poetry, which was even less likely to bring in a regular income in the seventeenth century than to-day. (Only after the publishing outburst of 1640–60 did the literary market develop sufficiently for the career even of hack-writer to become possible. Milton’s nephews, John and Edward Phillips, seem to have made a living of sorts this way. But aristocratic patronage was still desirable.) The discussions in the Milton family seem to have been fairly amicable, and the elder John financed his son’s expedition to Italy (with serving man) at a time when the future career of the thirty-year-old poet was still uncertain. John senior was clearly a patient, sensitive man, who remembered his difficulties with his own father. Posterity as well as his son should be grateful to the scrivener for his discernment. His biographer comments on the paradoxical combination in the elder Milton of Puritanism with a respect for the complex traditions of mediaeval church music; he set vernacular texts from the Geneva Bible to polyphonic music. His son was to experience similar fruitful tensions between the old and the new.1
The poet’s mother was the daughter of a London merchant taylor, and may have been a widow when she married the scrivener; perhaps she brought him a useful dowry. But we know very little about her. Mrs. Milton appears to have been related to the Bradshaws, though if there was any connection with the John Bradshaw who presided over the trial of Charles I in 1649, it was very distant. She had weak eyes, which John inherited; his father read without spectacles at the age of eighty-four. Otherwise all that history records is her son’s remark that she was very charitable. John’s later attitudes would suggest that Mrs. Milton accepted with docility the position of subordination expected of seventeenth-century wives. Yet the poet had an exceptionally
