constituency of radical Protestantism. Laud, Charles I’s notoriously conservative Archbishop of Canterbury was an advocate of Arminianisn but this was more a political tactic than a genuine conviction. He wished to alienate the Presbyterians.
Like many codes of belief, religious and secular, which treat the relation between the conscience of the individual and institutionalised structure in a dialectical, potentially ambiguous manner, Arminianism was attractive to otherwise radically opposed parties. In essence, however, it promoted free choice and singularity, and for this reason in much of his later writing Milton supported it (see ‘The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a free Commonwealth’, 1660, WJM, p. 366 and Of True Religion …, 1673, WJM, p. 168). His two most radical and controversial works, the prose tract De Doctrina Christiana and the poem Paradise Lost are treated by all commentators as sympathetic to Arminianism: the latter foregrounds the tension between free will and doctrinal obligation by situating it in the lives, thoughts and actions of the two original human beings.
It is certain that even as a child Milton would have become aware of the tensions and polarities of belief that informed all aspects of English politics and religious affiliation. Young, his pre-school tutor, had come to London in the wake of James I’s succession to the English throne and would in 1620 take up the post of Pastor of the English church in Hamburg. Young’s life in Scotland and his move to Hamburg reflected his Calvinist convictions, and his pupil’s lessons in Greek, Latin and Hebrew would have been invested with rather more than a disinterested respect for classical scholarship. Richard Stock, the rector of Milton’s parish church, All Hallows, was a Puritan whose Sunday sermons regularly involved the lambasting of Jesuits as the army of Satan and the Pope as their general. Stock had already attained a degree of public notoriety by writing a book in which he claimed that the lax, indulgent nature of the reign of James I had encouraged the return of subversive Papist activists to English life (A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, 1609). It was licensed for publication two days before John Milton was born. The high master of St Paul’s School, Alexander Gill, the surmaster, William Sound and under usher, Alexander Gill junior, all belonged to the more radical wing of the Church of England, and while St Paul’s was famous for its emphasis upon classical literature as the bedrock of learning, the writings of Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Homer and Juvenal would all have been examined through the lens of contemporaneous religious doctrine. At St Paul’s Milton met Charles Diodati, a boy of his own age who would remain one of his closest friends, and Diodati would have informed him of his family history: his father, a physician, had first been exiled from his native Italy because of his Protestantism, had lived for a while in Geneva, the home of Calvinism, and then moved north to practise his profession in a city, London, in which his religious beliefs would be sympathetically treated: his uncle, Giovanni, had stayed in Geneva to become an influential and controversial theologian, of the Calvinist persuasion.
We cannot be certain of the way the young Milton responded to his early encounters with the prevailing conflicts of the period, but if the writings of the adult are an extension of the inclinations of the child he did not submit to indoctrination. He would throughout his life remain a radical Protestant, but Milton’s radicalism was of the non-peremptory, undogmatic kind. The features of Calvinism that corresponded most with his temperament were the concepts of individualism and free will, God’s generous allocation to his fallen species of the opportunity to speculate on the nature of absolute truth before accepting a pre-formed actuality.
At St Paul’s an attainment of competence in Greek and Latin was regarded as of equal importance as a pupil’s mastery of his native English, and a knowledge of the poetic conventions of all three languages was ranked almost as highly as a command of their grammar. Pupils were asked to write poems, not as vehicles for expressive creativity but as exercises of self-discipline; a practical awareness of metre and figurative devices inculcated a greater understanding of linguistic operations per se. This ranking of poetry as an intrinsic feature of language, rather than as a self-conscious excursion from its ordinary uses, reflects its broader status within Renaissance culture. Gill senior was a quintessential Renaissance schoolteacher in that he treated Greek, Latin and English as living languages whose interrelationships were mutually productive. He informed his pupils of the relative qualities of contemporary English poets, of how they had adapted, transformed and extended the precedents set by their classical precursors: Spenser was ‘our Homer’, Sidney was the English Anacreon, Samuel Daniel the modern Lucan and John Harington the Elizabethan Martial (Shakespeare, as a playwright, was in Gill’s opinion a little too populist for serious scrutiny; see Parker, 1968, p. 14).
At home poetry was treated as a necessary feature of the civilised household. His father, despite lacking a formal education, was an enthusiastic poet. He was a close friend of John Lane, an editor and publisher of verse and himself a writer, albeit of questionable competence. Milton senior set a number of psalms to music and contributed poems to several of Lane’s collections (see Parker, 1968, p. 16). Milton’s father’s verse reminds one of William McGonagall’s late-nineteenth-century combination of disarming sincerity and embarrassing ineptitude. Milton’s opinions upon his father’s poems are a matter for speculation but one is tempted to wonder if they encouraged an early regard for stylistic probity. Milton himself certainly wrote verse during this period. Undated epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot survive, along with exercises in Latin elegiac verse, but they might have been produced by anyone; Milton the poet would not find his individual voice, at least in English, until he was in his twenties.
2 Cambridge
Milton, just sixteen, arrived in Christ’s College, Cambridge on 12 February 1625 and he matriculated on 9 April (Figure 2.1). It is more than likely that Milton was conveyed between Cambridge and London by Thames Hobson who made the journey with his own carriage once a week and rented horses or drawn carriages to students when they required more urgent transportation. Milton certainly remembered him. Shortly after Hobson’s death in 1631 he wrote a poem called ‘On the University Carrier’. It is a mock-heroic piece which does not exactly satirise Hobson but it treats him more as a subject for amused curiosity than with respect.
Figure 2.1 Milton at Cambridge, c. 1629. Source: National Portrait Gallery.
Merely to drive the time away he sickened,Fainted, and died, nor would with ale be quickened,Nay, quoth he, on his swooning be outstretched,If I may not carry, sure I’ll ne’er be fetched.
(16–18)
We tend to date the quintessentially English tendency toward class consciousness and snobbery to the nineteenth century but Milton’s patronising tribute to Hobson causes us to question that. Perhaps Milton’s time at Christ’s encouraged a feeling of superiority. The college itself was not the grandest in Cambridge – Trinity and King’s paraded their wealth and eminence with ostentatiously expensive buildings – but it carried an air of the modest country house. Its buildings were distributed across what were once open fields which had by Milton’s arrival become mature, planned gardens, now known as Christ’s Piece. The gardens also included an orchard and an enclosed tennis court, and to the West of the college its members could walk along the banks of the Cam. Its buildings were shared, on average, by 250 students and more than 20 fellows all of whom lodged in generously spaced rooms in the two-storey quadrangles. The day at Christ’s began at five with morning service in the college chapel. Breakfast would follow in Hall between six and seven and the rest of the morning involved disputations between students and their tutors, the origin of the modern-day tutorial, and lectures either in the Public Schools or in college. Dinner, the main meal of the day, was taken at noon and during the afternoon students, unless required for specific disputations, were left largely to themselves. Recreation during these hours took the form of games of tennis, fencing, bathing in the Cam or wrestling. Some, if from wealthy enough backgrounds, would stable horses in the town and ride during their spare time. Regulations
