Another Fellow of Christ’s in Milton’s time was Robert Gell (1623–39), who probably married Milton to his third wife in 1663. Like Mede, like Milton, Gell anticipated the Second Coming in the near future. He was well known later as a patron of astrology, a Familist who was critical of Ranters, a defender of liberty of the press who in the dangerous year 1661 petitioned the House of Lords in favour of toleration.2 Gell’s name reminds us of another tradition at Christ’s: it was a great centre of Cabbalistic studies. Henry Broughton, Joseph Mede and Henry More (one of the Fellows of Christ’s College who accepted Parliamentary rule in 1644) were experts in the Kabbalah. Milton may already have become acquainted with such studies at St. Paul’s, since the elder Alexander Gill was interested. So were Du Bartas and Robert Fludd, both of whom Milton almost certainly read at one stage or another; so was Samuel Hartlib, later Milton’s friend, who was a correspondent of Mede’s.3
Early in his Cambridge career Milton had some trouble with the college authorities, the exact nature of which has never been explained. It apparently led to his being rusticated for a short period, and when he came back he changed tutors. He was taken over by Nathaniel Tovey, Ramist son of a friend of the Diodatis.4 The man with whom Milton had been unable to get on was William Chappell, later made an Irish bishop by Laud’s favour. We do not know whether this was an ideological or a personal quarrel. By 1628 Milton had taken a firm stand as a Baconian, a supporter of George Hakewill’s defence of the Moderns against the Ancients, a critic of scholasticism and an advocate of more science and more history in the university. ‘This unseemly battle of words tends neither to the general good nor to the honour and profit of our country.’5 Milton was defending the thesis of George Hakewill’s book within a year of its first publication in 1627. If for no other reason he is likely to have read Hakewill because the latter cited Charles Diodati’s father as a physician who had put the Ancients to shame. Some of Milton’s earliest Latin poems adopt a political stance, following that of his schoolboy translations of the Psalms. No less than five poems are about Gunpowder Plot, one of them denouncing the papal Antichrist. Although at the age of seventeen Milton wrote conventional Latin elegies on two bishops, the Vice-Chancellor and the university bedel, he never composed poems to royalty. Edward King, his junior contemporary, between 1631 and 1637 contributed to six collections of Latin verse celebrating royal births, marriages, etc.1
Some of Milton’s undergraduate orations which he printed many years later are difficult to interpret, full of inside jokes and allusions which cannot now be fully understood. Scholars have made very heavy weather of some of Milton’s remarks which they take to imply that he was, or had been, unpopular with his contemporaries. I think they are better interpreted as audience-baiting of a kind that fitted the rather rough humour of the occasion.2 If Milton was called ‘the Lady of Christ’s’, this was not necessarily an unfriendly nickname for a slight, blond and handsome young man: he seems to have remembered it with some satisfaction. More to the point is that Milton’s contemporaries called on him to speak at their more riotous functions and that he rose to the occasion with a freedom of vocabulary that shocked nineteenth-century editors.
The scrivener’s son sneered at rank, and especially at lords, referred gratuitously to ‘Junius Brutus, that second founder of Rome and great avenger of the lusts of kings’, and criticized Charles I’s foreign policy.3 In Prolusion V, whose unpromising subject was ‘There are no partial Forms in an Animal in addition to the Whole’, Milton introduced a totally irrelevant passage about Roman history. This may have been intended to remind his audience of Isaac Dorislaus, the history lecturer recently silenced for using Roman history ‘to speak too much for the defence of the liberties of the people’, as Joseph Mede’s friend Samuel Ward put it on 16 May 1628.4 For Milton’s apparent irrelevance leads up to the conclusion: ‘You have been wondering long enough, my hearers, what can be my reason for enlarging on all this: I will tell you. Whenever I consider and reflect upon these events, I am reminded afresh of the mighty struggle which has been waged to save Truth, and of the universal eagerness and watchfulness with which men are striving to rescue Truth, already tottering and almost overthrown, from the outrages of her foes. Yet we are powerless to check the inroads which the vile horde of errors daily makes upon every branch of learning.’1
So he leads in to his subject, the scholastic nature of which he admitted to finding distasteful. In the Seventh Prolusion, references to Roman history and Turkish tyranny are followed by a complaint of ‘our bad methods of teaching the arts’. It was after he had gone down from Cambridge that Milton sought ‘to learn what was new in mathematics and music, then the objects of my special studies’. Like John Wallis at about the same time, he rightly expected to find better mathematics teaching in London than in Cambridge. Both Gils had been proficient mathematicians: the younger published on the subject. In the early sixteen-forties Milton taught his own pupils arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and mathematics played a prominent part in the scheme offered in Of Education.2
From ‘our Bacon’,3 whom he regarded as one of ‘the greatest and sublimest wits in sundry ages’, and perhaps from Hakewill, Milton acquired a belief in the possibility of an almost unlimited improvement in the conditions of material life – so great that it might undo the intellectual consequences of the Fall of Man. This should be the object of education, Milton declared in 1644; though full truth would not be known until Christ’s Second Coming. At Cambridge Milton foresaw a time when ‘the spirit of man, no longer confined within this dark prison house, will reach out till it fills the whole world and the space far beyond with the expansion of its divine greatness. Then at last most of the chances and changes of the world will be so quickly perceived that to him who holds this stronghold of wisdom hardly anything can happen in his life which is unforeseen or fortuitous. Earth, sea and stars, Mother Nature herself, will obey him.’4
Milton’s reaction against scholasticism and the Cambridge curriculum helps to explain his later attitude towards the universities. As a Baconian undergraduate he wanted to see less disputation, more science – just as a present-day student might call for fewer written examinations, more sociology, more psychology.1 After going down from Cambridge Milton undertook a strenuous course in world history as well as pursuing his mathematical interests. By 1641–2 (and no doubt earlier) he had decided that the universities were unsuitable places for training the clergy, and thought that any gifted craftsman could preach better than ungifted academics.2
Milton did not escape from his Cambridge training: he had become superlatively good at what he regarded as a tedious game. The structure of an academic disputation underlies L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus and Paradise Regained. And though Milton jeered at the atmosphere in which refusal to accept the authority of Aristotle was tantamount to heresy,3 his own thought – especially on politics – remained very Aristotelian. Probably at Cambridge he acquired an interest in astronomy and astrology. The natural concomitant of an interest in science for Milton’s generation was the Hermetic philosophy, to which he seems also to have been attracted at Cambridge. He may have read Robert Fludd at this time, the fashionable synthesizer of Hermeticism and modern science; he almost certainly did so later.4
In December 1631 Milton wrote
How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
The complaint anticipates Schiller’s
Drei und zwanzig Jahre
Und nichts fur die Unsterblichkeit getan!5
But Milton’s conclusion, unlike the romantic