Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

famous theologian – liberal by Genevan standards. He translated the Bible into Italian and attended the Synod of Dort in 1618–19 as Genevan representative. He was an important figure in international Protestant circles, secretly revisiting Italy several times and travelling to Holland and England. He collaborated closely with the English Ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, in attempts to win the republic for the Protestant cause in 1608. He was a patron of John Dury’s attempts at Protestant reunion.¹ Diodati’s Annotations on the Bible were translated into English in 1643, and were selling excellently in London by the following year. In 1645 Milton referred to Diodati as a theologian ‘of best note’, although by that time Diodati had expressed Royalist sympathies.²

      Another branch of the Diodatis settled in Paris: we shall meet them later.³ Charles Diodati’s father, Theodore, came to England about 1598, and for a refugee prospered remarkably. He became tutor to Sir John, second Lord Harington, an intimate friend of the heir to the throne, Prince Henry. When Harington died in 1612 Richard Stock preached his funeral sermon. Theodore then became physician to Henry’s sister Elizabeth, until she left England on marrying the Elector Palatine in 1613. With this flying start Diodati went on to a very successful medical career, claiming in 1621 to be as good a man as the President of the College of Physicians. His will was witnessed in 1649 by (probably) Major-General Skippon, a member of the Council of State which had just appointed Milton Secretary for Foreign Tongues.⁴

      The circle around Prince Henry included many internationally-minded radical Protestants, who were critical of James I’s pacific foreign policy. After Henry’s premature and much lamented death in 1612, the husband of his sister Elizabeth became the key figure in this international grouping. His acceptance of the throne of Bohemia in 1619 precipitated the Thirty Years War: throughout the sixteen-twenties and -thirties the Queen of Bohemia was the toast of the Parliamentarian and patriotic opposition, her exile and the defeat of her cause standing evidence of the ineffectiveness of the government. It is inconceivable that Milton did not discuss these matters with Charles Diodati as well as with Alexander Gil. Diodati’s family was almost a symbol of international Protestantism, and knowing them must have contributed to Milton’s bitter criticisms of the Stuarts’ failure to live up to the ideals of Protestant patriotism and internationalism. These ideals were accepted not only by the Parliamentary opposition but also by devotees of the Winter Queen of Bohemia like Sir Henry Wotton, a friend of Lord Harington. The international connections of the Diodatis must have been of great use to Milton in his careful preparations for his Italian journey.¹

      We can only speculate on Charles Diodati’s influence over Milton before his premature death in 1638. Milton clearly adored him more than he ever adored any human being except possibly his second wife. Diodati was slightly younger than the poet, but he went up to the university earlier and started a career earlier. He had all the ebullient charm of Alexander Gil and much more sense. Clearly he took the lead and Milton followed: the latter developed slowly as long as Diodati lived. His death during Milton’s absence in Italy was a terrible blow. The Epitaphium Damonis was the first poem Milton took the trouble to get separately printed. In Latin because of the continental connections of the Diodatis, it marks some sort of a turning point and re-dedication of Milton. One of the most extraordinary passages which Milton ever wrote is the conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis in which he envisaged the dead Charles enjoying Bacchic orgies in heaven.² Earlier lines suggest that he may have seen himself as married to Diodati (65 – ‘innube’). Psychologists may speculate on the significance for Milton of what looks like a platonic homosexual passion (cf. Milton’s sexual confidences to Diodati in Elegy I).³ What is its relation to the ideal of chastity in Comus? Is there any connection between Diodati’s death and Milton’s decision to marry at the age of thirty-three? What is the relation between Milton’s high standards of matrimonial compatibility and this earlier quasi-sexual relationship? Did the first Mrs. Milton suffer for her inability to fill Diodati’s place? We can neither answer these questions nor refrain from asking them. What we do know is that, unlike Young and Gil, Diodati did not live to get left behind as Milton grew more and more radical in the sixteen-forties: his memory remained sweet and pure.

II Cambridge

      Milton went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625. It was an unhappy period in the university’s history. On the one hand government and bishops were trying to bring both universities and their colleges under tighter control. Since the universities trained parsons – the opinion-formers – and were also attended by many gentlemen – the ruling class – control seemed more and more necessary as tensions increased in church and state. On the other hand, the universities were failing to keep pace with intellectual developments in the country, and greater control from on top tended to make for conformity, playing safe, careerism, idleness. But among some younger dons and undergraduates hostility to traditional scholasticism was accompanied by receptivity to new ideas. Milton, as was to be expected, soon aligned himself with the reformers.

      Milton’s allusions to Cambridge and its teaching are uniformly critical, in sharp contrast to his respectful references to Young and Gil. Not that Christ’s was an obscurantist college, as colleges went. It had a solid Puritan tradition. William Perkins (Fellow 1584–94), who died six years before Milton was born, was by general consent the leading English Puritan theologian, one of the few Englishmen with a continental reputation. Other distinguished theologians were William and Laurence Chaderton and Edward Dering in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; Hugh Broughton (Fellow 1572–8), Andrew Willett, the hammer of the papists (Fellow 1583–8), Arthur Hildersham (M.A. 1584), Francis Johnson the separatist (Fellow 1584 till his expulsion in 1589), George Downham the Ramist (Fellow 1585–1616), Samuel Ward (Scholar 1592–5), John Smyth the Se-Baptist, Francis Johnson’s pupil (Fellow – probably – 1594–8), Thomas Taylor (Fellow 1599–1604), Paul Baynes (Fellow 1600–4). This was a very radical collection of Puritans. Greatest of all Perkins’s successors was William Ames, undergraduate and Fellow of Christ’s (1602–10), who was suspended by the Vice-Chancellor for preaching against ‘licence’ in Cambridge colleges during the ten days’ Christmas saturnalia. His theology, acclaimed by Thomas Young in Dies Dominica, was to be one of the starting points for Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana.

      Puritanism and poetry went together at Christ’s. Sir Philip Sidney was followed by Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto, both favourites of Milton’s headmaster, and by Francis Quarles, cup-bearer to Elizabeth of Bohemia (John Dively, Secretary to the Queen of Bohemia, was also a Christ’s man) and John Cleveland, 1627–32. Among Milton’s contemporaries were Humphrey Otway, father of the dramatist, Charles Hotham, translator of Boehme, and Luke Robinson, both of whom we shall meet again, and Samuel Torshell, Puritan divine, a friend of Stock’s who published and amplified his posthumous works. Torshell was the author of The Womans Glorie (1645), which Milton no doubt read. Of the Fellows in Milton’s time the most distinguished was Joseph Mede (Fellow 1614–38), who was thought at one time ‘to look too much to Geneva’.¹ Mede studied mathematics as a preparation for divinity, and was a great chronological scholar of the school which extends from John Napier through Thomas Brightman to Isaac Newton. Mede’s Key of the Revelation (published in Latin in 1627) could not be translated into English under the Laudian censorship. But in 1643 a committee of the House of Commons ordered it to be printed in a translation made by a Member of Parliament, with Preface by William Twisse, Prolocutor of the Assembly of Divines. Mede believed that the Pope was Antichrist, and had a carefully worked-out chronological scheme of his decline and fall, from the Waldensians to the seventeenth century. Mede was cautious about giving precise dates for the end of the world, but he expected it between 1625 and 1716, with 1654 and 1670 as possibilities.² His timetable was influential among Presbyterian and Independent divines, and almost certainly contributed to Milton’s belief that Christ’s coming was ‘shortly expected’, as well as to his interest in the Waldenses.³

      We do not know that Milton was ever taught by Mede. We do know that Mede’s pupils were introduced to authors like the mathematicians Recorde, Digges and Hariot, to Sidney, to Sir Thomas Smith (whose Commonwealth of England was a favourite of Milton’s), to Ramus (whose