The two Alexander Gils were successively High Masters of St. Paul’s School, the father during Milton’s years there. The elder Gil’s literary tastes, and particularly his devotion to Spenser and the Spenserians, may well have influenced Milton. He perhaps also imbibed at St. Paul’s Gil’s disparaging attitude towards ‘ploughmen, working-girls and river-men’ as contrasted with ‘learned and refined men’.1 Gil’s treatise on the Trinity, originally published in 1601, was reprinted in 1635. Milton may have been interested enough to read it, though there is no evidence of any connection between this and his own anti-Trinitarian speculations. The elder Gil’s Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (1635, reprinted 1651) was an attempt to make reason, ‘that especial and principal gift of God to mankind’, serviceable to ‘the principal and especial end for which man himself is created, that is his drawing near unto God by faith in him’.2 In this work Gil argued that there could be no clash between faith and reason, a view which Milton later found attractive.
The younger Gil’s influence was very different. He was an usher during Milton’s time at the school, ten or a dozen years older than the poet. Their friendship continued for many years after Milton left. Alexander was a brash, swaggering intellectual, who never seems quite to have recovered from being a very clever young man. He was ‘accounted one of the best Latin poets in the nation’. Milton admired his poems, and Gil succeeded Young as literary mentor to the young poet. Milton thought him ‘the keenest judge of poetry in general and the most honest judge of mine’. He never talked to him ‘without a visible increase and growth of knowledge’. But Gil also had political opinions. Ben Jonson, attacking the elder Gil in 1623, spoke of ‘licentious persons’ who ‘censured the Council’ of the King. ‘We do it in Paul’s, … yea and in all the taverns.’3 In October of that year, when Prince Charles delighted the nation by returning from Spain without the popish Infanta whom he had gone to woo, the 114th Psalm was sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral – ‘when Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among the barbarous people’. It was a political gesture. So was Milton’s paraphrase on this Psalm, ‘done by the author at fifteen years old’ – i.e. in 1623–4:
When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son
After long toil their liberty had won.
must certainly have shown it to the usher. Ten years later he sent Gil a Greek translation of the same Psalm. In Psalm 136, which Milton also translated about 1623–4, the neutral phrase ‘the Lord of Lords’ is expanded to (him) ‘who doth the wrathful tyrants quell’.1
In 1628, when the hated favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated by John Felton, the younger Gil was foolish enough to propose the assassin’s health. He had recently become a Bachelor of Divinity, and was visiting his old college, Trinity College, Oxford, where he no doubt thought he was among friends. Most of those present cheerfully joined in the toast. But one of them denounced him to the all-powerful Bishop Laud – almost certainly the famous William Chilling-worth, Laud’s protégé. Not only did Gil speak slightingly of Buckingham, and place him in hell; he also wrote of James and Charles as ‘the old fool and the young one’, in papers which were seized. Charles, Gil added, was ‘fitter to stand in a Cheapside shop with an apron before him and say “What lack ye?” than to govern a kingdom’. Under examination he did not improve matters by adding that drinking Felton’s health was common in London and elsewhere. He admitted saying that ‘he had oftentimes had in mind to do the same deed upon the Duke, but for fear of hanging’. He was explicit about Buckingham’s homosexual tendencies. A poem was found in which Gil called on God to save
My sovereign from a Ganymede
Whose whorish breath hath power to lead
His Majesty which way it list.
The song continued in denunciation of flatterers, court corruption, illegal taxes, papists and especially Jesuits.2
It was decided to make an example of Gil, who was certainly right in saying that he had only expressed what many felt.3 He was had up before Star Chamber, degraded from the ministry and from his degrees, fined £2,000, sentenced to the pillory and to lose both his ears. Under great pressure from his friends – his father no doubt had useful connections – the physical mutilation was remitted. But he stayed in prison for over two years before being pardoned, and the sentence was not just in terrorem. In the same year Alexander Leighton suffered the tortures which had been designed for Gil, and then languished in prison for ten years, for publishing Sions Plea against the Prelacie. This was the first of many savage sentences, including those on Prynne, Burton, Bastwick and Lilburne, for which Laud was usually held responsible.1 Milton’s revulsion against episcopacy and clerical interference in politics must have been intensified by the Gil case. The line in his sonnet on the new forcers of conscience, ‘Clip your phylacteries but baulk your ears’, may refer to Gil as well as to Prynne and the others.2
We can assume that Milton knew the political views of the loquacious and extrovert Gil: they had ‘almost constant conversations’ together. Two months before Gil’s attack on Buckingham and Charles, Milton confided to him his own fear lest ‘the priestly ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our clergy’. Two years later – probably writing to Gil in prison – Milton chose for special praise the latter’s poem celebrating a Dutch victory over the Spaniards, and hoped that Gil might have the opportunity of writing something even greater ‘if by chance our own affairs [become] at last more fortunate’. Already in his Sixth Prolusion Milton had sneered at Buckingham’s foreign policy. There is never the slightest suggestion in his letters to Gil of political disagreement or disapproval: whether or not he supported Gil’s seditious sentiments in 1628, he certainly did so later. In 1631–2 Gil published verses and pamphlets on behalf of the Protestant cause and Gustavus Adolphus. In 1639 a poem by him was prefixed to Henry Glapthorne’s The Tragedy of Albertus Wallenstein. This poem was dated 1634, but the date could refer to Wallenstein’s death rather than to Gil’s poem. Both in Glapthorne’s play and in Gil’s poem Wallenstein is referred to as ‘the Duke’, ‘traitor Duke’.3 Margot Heinemann suggests that Gil may have seen an analogy between Wallenstein, whose assassins claimed to be executing God’s sentence, and the Duke of Buckingham.4 Ultimately Gil turned round and won the favour of Laud and the King sufficiently to succeed his father as High Master of St. Paul’s in 1635. His friendship with Milton does not seem to have survived this volte face. Gil lived to tell Charles in 1641 that the sentence on Strafford was tragic but just.5 He was dismissed from St. Paul’s in 1640, and died soon after. He may have failed to trim his sails to the new political winds in time.
So two of the people who most impinged on the young Milton were relatively radical. Gil was perhaps not very stable, but eloquent, witty and outrageous in his political views: Young a dour, solid martyr for convictions which Milton would leave behind in the forties but which represented in the twenties and thirties a fundamental critique of the existing order. The third influence, the greatest of the three, is similar – Charles Diodati. Their friendship probably dates from Milton’s schooldays at St. Paul’s. The Diodatis were an immensely talented family, originally from Lucca. They found the religious and political atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Italy stifling, and in various exciting