Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

and more of underground heretical thought in England. There is also Leo Miller’s Milton among the Polygamophiles, which relates some of Milton’s views on marriage to previous history; but a wider study of Milton and preceding ideas about the relation of the sexes is needed. There are general histories of Unitarianism and of Socinianism in which Milton’s name occurs; but no study of his ideas in the light of this tradition, also strong in the English underground. There is no work on Milton and contemporary millenarianism, antinomianism, materialism or Hermeticism. Despite Saurat’s pioneer work, quite recently very respectable scholars could assume that the Milton who read Cicero and Virgil could not possibly ‘have given his serious attention to the naive and superstitious Robert Fludd’, or to ‘the vulgar astrological flimflam of Dr. John Dee’.¹ But John Selden was a great admirer of Fludd, and Sir Isaac Newton took very seriously thinkers who seem by twentieth-century standards to be no less irrational than Dee and Fludd. Our understanding of the seventeenth century has been greatly enriched of late by scholarly work which has restored Dee and Fludd to the predominance which contemporaries gave them.² There is a book to be written on ‘Milton and Fludd’ which will be far more important than any studies of Milton’s classical or patristic sources. But whoever writes it will need both more courage and more Latin than I possess.

      I believe that the historian’s approach can help by trying to explain how Milton came to hold the views he did at the time he held them; and perhaps to explain changes in his views over time. Milton was not an original thinker, in politics or theology. Almost every one of his ideas can be paralleled among his radical contemporaries. He is unique only in the way he combined their ideas and related them to the Bible. If we restore him to the seventeenth-century context we shall no longer see originality where none exists. For instance, Milton’s notorious ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ is one of the few of his statements which would have been totally acceptable to the orthodox among his contemporaries. Similarly, there is no need to make a pother about Milton’s climatic theories once we appreciate that the belief that northerners were stronger than but intellectually inferior to southerners was the stalest of chestnuts in the seventeenth century.¹ Where commentators have supposed that Milton was strikingly original he is often only fusing with the orthodox Puritan tradition ideas from the Familist/Hermeticist tradition which I shall be investigating.²

      Milton, wrote J. H. Hanford, ‘contemplated no activity as a poet which did not involve an intimate relation with the currents of life and thought in which he lived’.³ By replacing Milton in history we shall be able to catch in his writings echoes of discussions and controversies which meant much to him and to those for whom he wrote, but which lose this resonance when they are treated in isolation. Milton like many of us, combined traditional ideas unquestioningly accepted with others which were, by the standards of his day, highly unorthodox. That is why each critic can create his own Milton. C. S. Lewis, an old-fashioned authoritarian Christian surviving into the twentieth century, found some of the more traditional aspects of Milton’s thought congenial and expounded them very effectively for his time. Empson, a dashing modern atheist, has more sympathy for those aspects of Milton’s thought which were wildly heretical in the seventeenth century, though they were perhaps not quite so positively anti-Christian as Empson wished to think.

      But Milton was neither a twentieth-century authoritarian Christian nor a twentieth-century atheist. He has more in common with a Ranter like Laurence Clarkson than with Lewis and the neo-Christians; but he also has more in common with Lodowick Muggleton, who believed he was one of the two Last Witnesses, than with Empson.⁴ Whilst keeping Milton in the seventeenth century we must recognize that in the sixteen-forties and -fifties there was an outburst of radical thinking in England which transcended the orthodoxies of the day, and with which in some respects we still have not caught up.

      When the orthodox in the seventeenth century heard the ideas of the radical underground they called for the whip and the branding iron. When Milton heard them he said they reminded him of the early Christians, and that the way to truth was through fearless discussion. It was only the strength of the radical movement, and its vigorous defence by brave men like Milton, which gave the ideas a dozen or so years of uniquely free discussion before orthodoxy got the lid back on again. If a twentieth-century neo-Christian had met John Milton in the flesh he would not have liked him. The dislike, I suspect, would have been mutual.¹

      Milton scholarship, in my view, has been put on a wrong track by W. R. Parker’s Milton’s Contemporary Reputation of 1940. Parker argued that little notice was taken of Milton’s pamphlets of the sixteen-forties, and that he was virtually unknown until he was invited to undertake the defence of the English republic (in Latin for a continental audience) in 1649. Parker looked in the wrong places for Milton’s reputation. The orthodox, the good and the great, either ignored Milton’s ideas of the sixteen-forties, or dismissed them with a snide comment. But the radicals, I suspect, read them avidly, and commented on them more than Parker recognized. In the course of casual reading I have come across many references to Milton, and echoes of him among the radicals, that Parker missed; I am confident that a systematic search would produce many more. Thanks to the work of W. K. Jordan, D. W. Petegorsky, G. H. Sabine, H. J. McLachlan, C. Webster, B. S. Capp and above all A. L. Morton and K. V. Thomas, a great deal more is known about the radicals of the revolutionary decades than when Parker wrote.

      In a pioneering essay a generation ago Edgell Rickword said that ‘each successive book about him [Milton] tends to turn into a polemic with its predecessors.’² I do not expect in this book to put everybody right. Nor do I think everybody wrong whom I have mentioned above. C. S. Lewis, for instance, made invaluable contributions to our understanding of Milton; Empson’s insights are worthy to set beside those of the great Miltonists – Masson, Saurat, Tillyard, Hanford, Barker, Wolfe, Kelley. I want to look at Milton from a rather different angle, from the angle of his radical contemporaries. It was in the process of writing a book about these radicals – way-out characters like Diggers, Ranters and early Quakers – that it struck me that some of their ideas bore a curious relation to those of Milton.³ Yet many of them were politically well to the left of the Levellers, themselves to the left of Milton. I do not intend to suggest that Milton belonged to any of these groups, that he was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or an early Quaker. But he lived in the same world with them, they took the same side in a civil war which Milton believed to be a conflict of good versus evil; and Milton insisted on their right to be heard. Their ideas illuminate his and may well have influenced him, both positively and negatively.

      Milton himself is the worst enemy of Milton’s biographers. He prepared the record for posterity as carefully as to-day’s civil servant pruning his files with the thirty-year rule in mind. Most of us have been brought up to accept Milton’s own image of himself as an aloof, austere intellectual, an image all the more plausible because it fits the stereotype of the gloomy Puritan from which historians have with difficulty liberated themselves. I shall suggest later detailed arguments against accepting this picture of Milton, and reasons why everything he writes about himself should be checked carefully against the circumstances in which he wrote, and against everything else that we know about him.¹ None of us would accept one of our own acquaintances at his own propagandist valuation.

      That is what this book is about. In Part I I have high-lighted possible radical influences on the young Milton; I have argued that he was more sociable and clubbable than is often thought, less aloof and austere. In Parts II–IV I re-examine Milton’s political career and pamphleteering, proposing some revisions in our estimate of his standing among his contemporaries, indicating parallels between his ideas and those of the radicals, and suggesting points at which he disagreed with them. This prepares for a more thorough-going reconsideration of Milton’s heresies in Part V, in which I again try to relate his views to those of his contemporaries. This finally leads me in Part VI to suggest a greater ‘political’ content in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes