the contemplative, unseeing state is now an obligation, not a choice, and it seems to suit his temperament. More significantly, in the so-called ‘Address to Light’ at the beginning of Book II of Paradise Lost, Milton revisits ‘Il Penseroso’. He is about to bring God into the poem and the lines on how darkness might ‘bring all heaven before mine eyes’ written thirty years before must surely have registered for the now blind poet.
Shortly before Milton’s departure from Cambridge his father was responsible for our first record of his adult appearance and demeanour. John senior, prompted perhaps by his son’s growing reputation as a poet, commissioned a portrait of him which he sat for during the weeks after his twenty-first birthday. The Puritan fashion for short pudding-bowl haircuts was not in 1630 quite as widespread as it would be during the Civil War but it was already worn by many as a sign of allegiance. Milton’s wavy brown hair falls to his collar. His black doublet and white falling ruff is the unashamed costume of a gentleman. Toland, who based his biography on accounts from Milton’s friends and family, describes him in a manner that complements the portrait well: ‘he made a considerable figure … He was middlesiz’d and well proportion’d, his Deportment erect and manly, his Hair of a light brown, his Features exactly regular, his Complexion wonderfully fair as a Youth, and ruddy to the last.’ (Darbishire, 1932, pp. 193–4) This description of the young man as almost feminine in appearance should not mislead us into assuming that Milton used Cambridge to protect himself from the harshness of the real world. He had during his undergraduate years been involved in the ritual known as ‘salting’ where new students would be subjected to a vile form of initiation. Each was asked to give a speech on a topic chosen by their seniors and judged by the latter on their performance. The best were rewarded with wine and beer and the worst be obliged to drink ale to which a barely endurable amount of salt had been added. Particularly bad speakers would have their cheeks scratched with iron nails. On several occasions Milton was appointed ‘Father’ of this activity, the man who ensured that rewards and punishments were fairly distributed. If this calls to mind a seventeenth-century version of more recent and very nasty public schools then the parallels deserve further scrutiny. Public school cruelty and bullying reflect the culture of governance and privilege fed by these institutions. Similarly, the horrible nature of ‘salting’ served undergraduates – essentially the gentry – as an introduction to the society that was equally remorselessly brutal and which they would dominate after Cambridge. Milton had remained in contact with his St Paul’s tutor Gill and in 1628 heard of the horrible punishments visited on him. Between 1627 and 1628 the Duke of Buckingham, on the instructions of Charles I, led 7,000 men in support of the Huguenot Protestants who were defending the west coast French city of La Rochelle against the Royalist/Catholic army of Cardinal Richelieu. On the face of things Buckingham should have been treated as a defender of the Protestant cause but his manifest incompetence as a military commander and his shift of allegiance during the campaign from the Huguenots to Richelieu caused many in England to suspect that he was corrupt, secretly allied to Catholic powers, and that the English king was similarly disposed. Gill’s letters to Milton ceased before the former was arrested but Milton would have learned of what had occurred. In August 1628 Buckingham was assassinated, stabbed to death, in London by one John Felton who openly confessed to the killing of, in his opinion, a traitor who sympathised with the Catholic states of mainland Europe. Felton was executed and soon afterwards Gill voiced his opinions on the affair while drinking with friends in the cellar of Trinity College, Oxford. Gill stated that Charles I was ‘fitter to stand in a Cheapside shop’ then govern ‘this kingdom’, that Buckingham had ‘gone down to hell to meet King James there’ and that he was sorry that Felton had deprived him of doing the ‘brave act’ of killing Buckingham himself. A pro-Carolingian overheard and informed on him; he was removed from his religious ministries, his university degrees were revoked, he was fined £2,000 (a gigantic amount which left him bankrupt) and sentenced to have both of his ears cut off. Eventually this last penalty was revoked but nonetheless Gill’s life was ruined; he spent more than two years in jail.
The poems written by Milton at Cambridge are complex existential pieces, sometimes indicating uncertainties regarding religious doctrine, but we should recognise that behind them Milton was aware of a society, a world, in a state that fluctuated between tyranny and chaos. Eventually the gap between the writing and the experience would narrow. He would become personally involved in a war and a new form of government unlike any in the history of Christian Europe and afterwards he would write a poem about the relationship between God and man.
3 Preparation
After seven years at Cambridge (1625–32), there were several career paths open to Milton. In 1631, his younger brother Christopher had been admitted to the Inner Temple in London to study for the profession of lawyer, but it had been assumed that John would make use of his considerable academic achievements and enter the more respectable sphere of the Church. Instead he chose an existence that some might regard as self-indulgent. He would spend the next seven years reading, thinking, writing and travelling.
In the autumn of 1631 Milton’s father retired from business, gave up the house in Bread Street and moved with his wife Sara to Hammersmith, now part of Greater London but then a quiet country village some seven miles from the City. Less than a year later his son took up residence with him to begin what amounted to an extended period of self-education. As he would later reflect, ‘At my father’s house in the country, to which he had gone to pass his old age, I gave myself up with the most complete leisure to reading through the Greek and Latin writers; with the proviso, however, that I occasionally exchanged the country for the town, for the sake of buying books or of learning something new in mathematics or music, in which I then delighted’ (WJM, VII, p. 120). There is a sense here of Milton attending at once to the orthodoxies of intellectual endeavour, particularly classical learning, while calculatedly removing himself from the demands and opportunities of the contemporary world. He seemed set upon an objective, but its exact nature and the manner of its realisation remained undisclosed. There were, however, indications.
The most revealing account of what Milton was attempting to achieve during those years of retirement came from the man himself in a 1633 letter to an unidentified correspondent (the fact that the letter is in English, rather than Latin, and that its manner is formal rather than intimate, discount Diodati as the recipient). He confesses that the ‘sin of curiosity …’ was causing him to become ‘the most helplesse, pusilanimous and unweapon’d creature.’ He reflects upon the various options of an active life – marriage, the routine professions of the moneyed classes – and by his tone betrays a disinclination towards any of them, bordering upon fecklessness.
There is against yt [his supposed inclination to the retired life] a much more potent inclination imbred which about this tyme of a mans life solicits most, the desire of house & family of his owne to which nothing is esteemed more helpefull then the early entering into credible employment … and though this were anough yet there is to this another act if not of pure, yet of refined nature no lesse available to dissuade prolonged obscurity, a desire of honour & repute, & immortall fame seated in the brest of every true scholar which all make hast to by the readiest ways of publishing & divulging conceived merits as well those that shall as those that never shall obtaine it.
(CPW, I, pp. 319–20)
Regarding the ministry, he refers to the parable of the talents,
from due & timely obedience to that command in the gospell set out by the terrible seasing of him that hid the talent. It is more probable therefore that not the endless delight of speculation but this very consideration of that great commandment does not presse forward as soone as may be to underg[o] but keeps off with a sacred reverence & religious advisement how best to undergoe[,] not taking thought of being late so it give advantage to be more fit.
(CPW, I, p. 320)
He appears here to be ransacking the Gospels for some pretext that would justify his decision to remain in a state of
