If I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-master’s eye.
III Hammersmith and Horton, 1632–8
The years from 1632 to 1638 are in one sense well documented, in another sense rather mysterious. From about 1635 we know in considerable detail what Milton was reading. In Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1638) and in his poem to his father we have indications of Milton’s intention to dedicate himself to poetry. A carefully planned programme of reading would fill the gaps which, he well knew, had been left by Cambridge. He aimed at something like universal knowledge. But at his internal development during this six-year period biographers have to guess.
This used to be spoken of as ‘the Horton period’, but we now know that the first three years were spent in the elder Milton’s country house in the suburban village of Hammersmith. Nor was Horton itself, in the Buckinghamshire woodlands, quite the escapist rural retreat which some romantics have depicted, on the false assumption that L’Allegro and II Penseroso were written there.1 As early as 1614 Michael Drayton noted that ‘the Chiltern country’ was ‘beginning… to want wood’ – deforested by James I despite the growing fuel famine. It was not in Horton that
the rude axe with heaved stroke
Was never heard the nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt.
(II Penseroso)
Horton was an industrial village. In the year the Miltons moved to Horton the owner of a paper-mill there was presented to the ecclesiastical court for working his mill on the Sabbath throughout the year. He paid wages so low that they had to be supplemented by poor relief to the extent of £7 5s od a week. Paper-making was an unpopular industry: it depended on rags, which were alleged to import the plague. In 1626 there had been 34 plague deaths at Horton; in 1637, the year in which Milton’s mother died, 14 out of 31 deaths there were ascribed to the plague.2
Horton was a large parish, which included the chapelry of Colnbrook a mile away from the village. Robert Fludd the Hermetic philosopher seems to have been living there in the sixteen-thirties or earlier.3 Colnbrook was something of a radical centre. In 1634 Joan Hoby was in trouble there for saying ‘that she did not care a pin nor a fart for my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury’; she hoped that she would live to see the Archbishop hanged. In the following year the town received a new charter – which meant that it was brought under closer government control. The first mayor died of a surfeit of drink. In 1646 Thomas Edwards described the heretic John Hall of Henley as ‘sometime of Colnbrook’. Colnbrook was one of the places visited by the Digger emissaries in 1650 in quest of financial and moral support for their communist colony on St. George’s Hill.1 The class divisions which the Lady in Milton’s Comus denounced so fiercely in 1634 would have been found in the parish of Horton as well as in the City of London.
The vast amount of reading, especially in history, that Milton got through at Hammersmith and Horton stood him in good stead for the rest of his life; he drew on it both for his prose pamphlets and for the great poems. His father observed, in a not entirely complimentary spirit, that he had kept John till the age of thirty. The poet admitted the justice of the charge; he referred later to the obligations incurred by living so long off the sweat of other men’s labours. Milton’s later rejection (in Areopagitica) of a fugitive and cloistered virtue may sound like a condemnation of the Hammersmith-Horton period. But we should not see these years, even in retrospect, as an escapist interlude. In 1629 Milton had been prepared to sign the three Articles of the Church of England, in order to take his degree. By so doing he accepted the royal supremacy, agreed that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the Word of God and declared that the Thirty-nine Articles were agreeable to the Word of God. But within three or four years he had decided that he could not take up a career as parson of the Church of England. It was no doubt out of pride as well as moral revulsion that he refused to ‘subscribe slave and take an oath withal’.2 In these years he was consciously and deliberately preparing himself to be the poet who would speak to and for the English nation.
So various influences combined to push Milton in a radical direction. From his father he learnt that authority – even parental authority – could be disobeyed. From his parents (probably), from Richard Stock and Thomas Young certainly, he learnt to be critical of the episcopal state church. In Young he admired the courage which led an opponent of the bishops to prefer exile and poverty to submission. From the younger Gil Milton heard a great deal of criticism of court and government. Milton was expressing hostility towards monarchy while still a schoolboy. From the elder Gil he learnt that reason had a place in religious discussion; he also acquired from him a keen linguistic patriotism and a respect for the ‘Puritan’ line of poets from Spenser to Wither. At Cambridge he came to feel a modern-style contempt for the old-fashioned curriculum and teaching methods: we may assume that he was already familiar with Bacon, Hakewill and Dorislaus as well as with Fludd and the Hermetic tradition. Milton was aware of a crisis in the universities, one form of which was the conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns. He was also aware of a crisis in literature and the arts, of a religious crisis caused by the Laudian régime. During the sixteen-thirties he may have come to see all these as one crisis.
I find it impossible for a prince to preserve the state in quiet unless he hath such an influence upon churchmen, and they such a dependence on him, as may best restrain the seditious exorbitances of ministers’ tongues.
J. Gauden, Eikon Bastlike (1649), pp. 147–8. Believed by contemporaries to be by Charles I
The conflict of cultures in England sprang from the appearance of new value systems. The rank and file of European Protestantism came from great cities – Strasbourg, Geneva, Amsterdam, La Rochelle, London – and from rural industrial areas like Essex, Somerset or the West Riding of Yorkshire. Great aristocrats used the movement; many gentlemen adhered to it from conviction or self-interest; but its mass support came from merchants and artisans, the middling sort. Economic developments – greater prosperity, better housing, more privacy – led to the household, the home emerging as the centre of a new middle-class culture. The recently invented craft of printing and Protestant translations of the Bible catered for the needs of this new culture: literacy, education and Protestantism expanded together. In England, Puritans especially concerned themselves with spreading London’s ways of thinking into the dark corners of the north, Wales and the south-west, the Catholic areas which were also to be Royalist areas during the Civil War. W. K. Jordan has studied the charitable foundations through which rich merchants tried to extend the civilization of London into the outlying areas – by providing schools and scholarships, preaching, apprenticeships for godly youths, marriage portions for virtuous spinsters, etc., etc. And William Haller has convincingly demonstrated the build-up by Puritan preachers over the fifty years before 1640 of a middle-class public convinced that God spoke directly to their consciences.1 Truth is in the inward parts: externals in religion were rejected, whether they took the form of sacred church buildings or of a mediating priesthood: all such things were forms of idolatry. Men brought up on Bible-reading reacted vehemently from anything that savoured of idol-worship, which distracts men and women from communion with God.2
The preachers were consciously organizing middle-class men and women against the concept of hierarchy, itself an import into Christianity that reflected the social realities of mediaeval agrarian society. For the middle-class Puritan God seemed a better lord than any peer of the realm; he spoke directly and familiarly to his dependants: the duty to obey