The young Milton was a sturdy Protestant, but we find him writing epitaphs on the high-flying Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and praising the sage and serious doctrine of virginity. Perhaps we should think of him at this stage not in association with a ‘Puritan’ opposition but with those like George Herbert, who left the court for a country living, or Nicholas Ferrar, who withdrew from the City to his Anglican nunnery at Little Gidding. Ferrar believed the Pope to be Antichrist no less than did Milton: George Herbert spoke of religion under Archbishop Laud as
on tiptoe in our land
Ready to pass to the American strand.
A man like Peter Sterry, later associated with Milton, resigned his Cambridge fellowship some time in the sixteen-thirties in order to take refuge in a private chaplainship to Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, soon to emerge as one of the leaders of the Parliamentarian radicals, much admired by Milton.3 Others emigrated to the Netherlands or to New England. At least one of the latter did so only after ‘having preached much’; but ‘seeing the danger of the times he changed his profession of divinity into physic’. Milton4 in retrospect spoke of himself as ‘church-outed by the prelates’, and biographers have recognized that he could never have ‘subscribed slave’ to the Laudian régime.5 But the depth of his revulsion calls for emphasis. It perhaps needed the crisis of the sixteen-forties to convince Milton that directly political solutions were both necessary and possible. Yet in the later thirties his Commonplace Book shows him aware of a religious, political and cultural crisis. It was already, its editor tells us, ‘pointedly anticipating’ the ‘revolutionary ideas of Areopagitica, the divorce pamphlets and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’.1
The court for Milton from the late sixteen-twenties suggested ‘the lusts of Kings’, the homosexual relationship of James I to Buckingham, to which the younger Gil had openly referred in the poem which got him into trouble.2 Buckingham continued to be a favourite of Charles I, although his family had papist associations. A major scandal of the early thirties concerned Lord Castlehaven, who was executed for buggery, for conniving at the rape of his wife by a servant who was also his lover, and for the prostitution of his daughter-in-law to another servant. Castlehaven was reputed to be a papist. Milton would certainly be aware of this cause célèbre; but it was brought forcibly to his notice when he was asked to write a masque for the Earl of Bridgwater, whose wife was Lady Castlehaven’s sister.
Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle, his most ambitious work so far, was produced in 1634, published in 1637. The occasion celebrated the reunion of the Egerton family at Ludlow, whither the head of the family, the Earl of Bridgwater, had in 1633 proceeded as President of the Council in the Marches of Wales. Lady Alice Egerton and her two brothers were already enthusiastic masquers. Why Milton was asked to write the script for the masque we do not know. He was an unknown young man of twenty-five, with no experience of writing in the genre. The occasion would seem to call for someone better known. But the Egertons had Puritan leanings, and were patrons of the Spenserian line of poets. Relations of the family borrowed money from the elder Milton, who seems to have known the Earl. In 1613 the scrivener had signed a presentation epistle to Bridgwater, prefixed to Sir William Leighton’s The Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule, and twenty-two years later he may have rented his house in Horton from the Earl.3 Other clients of the elder Milton’s were related to the Countess of Derby, who married the Earl of Bridgwater’s father. She too patronized the Spenserians. It was for her that the younger John wrote Arcades, performed (perhaps in 1633) at Harefield, only ten miles from Horton. The Egertons resided at Ashridge, Hertfordshire, a further fifteen miles north of Harefield. Alternatively, Milton may have received his invitation through Henry Lawes, who composed the music for the masque. Lawes was music teacher to Lady Alice Egerton, and would certainly have been known to the elder John Milton. Or the connection may have been made through the Diodatis.1
The masque is a simple fairy story. The Lady Alice gets separated from her two brothers in a ‘drear wood’ on the way to Ludlow. She is vainly tempted by the magician Comus, rescued, and the family is reunited. It is likely that the theme of the masque would either be given to Milton, or would be worked out by him in consultation with the family and Lawes. Even Ben Jonson did not have it all his own way when he wrote a masque: the young Milton certainly would not. In a fascinating article Barbara Breasted has suggested some reasons why the theme of resistance to temptation by a lady might have been chosen. The Castlehaven scandal of 1631–2 was still fresh in everyone’s memory. Lady Alice, who acted the Lady in Milton’s masque, was the niece of the raped Lady Castlehaven and cousin of the prostituted daughter. The theme of chastity, of virtue resisting temptation, may well have been suggested to Milton: one object of the masque would be to proclaim the spotless virtue of the Egerton ladies, unlike their too notorious relatives.2
But how much more than the general theme was suggested, how free a hand Milton was given, how far the Lady in Comus speaks for him, we do not know. In his Sixth Elegy he recommended chastity for a young epic poet. But at Cambridge he was on one occasion assigned the task of defending learning against ignorance when he would have preferred the other side: a scholar could argue either way.
One ingenious suggestion is that Milton was drawing on the imagery of Revelation 12, of the lady wandering in the wilderness, who figured in many mediaeval and early Protestant plays down to John Foxe.3 In these plays the Lady, who regularly has two attendants, personifies the true church, a virgin but a virgin destined for marriage to Christ.4 On this interpretation Comus represents Antichrist, who in Foxe’s Christus Triumphans seduces the whole world with his ‘Circean cups of luxury’.1 Circe, ‘daughter of the sun’, was Comus’s mother.2 Her chalice turned men into beasts: Antichrist put the mark of the Beast on the foreheads of his followers. The brothers, A.-L. Scoufos suggests, personify the clergy, who have neglected their duty of protecting the church. When mobilized by the good daemon their militant action secures a partial victory, but Comus escapes and the Lady remains immobilized (though her mind is free) until Sabrina releases her. Sabrina, who was deified after committing suicide in order to avoid rape, is a final rejection of the Castlehaven connection. She may, if we wish to stress the specifically Christian content of the masque, represent divine grace or the water of baptism, though the later Milton would not have wished to attach too much significance to the outward ceremony of baptism. Sabrina is also a necessary piece of machinery to bring the masque to a close by reuniting the children with their parents in the precise geographical location of Ludlow Castle by the Severn.
A masque appears at first sight rather a surprising thing for a Puritan to write – if we can properly call Milton a Puritan at this time. Masques were associated with the court, where they were costly and extravagant spectacles, the machinery often as important as the verse. And the expenditure was for one or very few performances: conspicuous waste was essential to a masque. So was social snobbery: the object of a masque was to flatter the great personages who deigned to participate. Ben Jonson tried to write masques with significant content, but he failed to educate his courtly audience.3 We recall his onslaught on Inigo Jones for killing poetry in the interests of spectacle:
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque!
Pack with your piddling poetry to the stage!
This is the money-get mechanic age!4
We can guess where Milton would stand in that controversy. He may have intended in Comus to succeed where Johnson had failed. He never wrote another masque, and the genre itself did not survive the court which had brought it into existence.
There is another mystery about the poem. The masque was performed in 1634. In 1637 it was published by Henry Lawes, with no mention of Milton, though with some additions to his text, clearly made by him. Milton did not own the poem until 1645. He was not usually backward