In literature we can trace a line of descent from Spenser (patronized by Leicester) through a group of poets patronized by Southampton, Bedford and Pembroke, ranging from Shakespeare, Drayton, the two Fletchers, William Browne and Samuel Daniel to George Wither. While drama was decaying under court influence, the third Earl of Pembroke encouraged Thomas Middleton’s attempt to produce an opposition drama in the anti-Spanish A Game at Chess.3 George Herbert, Pembroke’s kinsman and protégé, withdrew from court to write his great poetry in a country parsonage. In such an atmosphere ‘no free and splendid wit can flourish’, Milton was soon to say. For the concomitant of Charles I’s patronage of the arts was a savage censorship which, in George Wither’s words, brought ‘authors, yea, the whole commonwealth and all the liberal sciences into bondage’.4
The court culture, like court religion, came to be isolated from the mass of the population, and – a new feature – from many of the propertied class. The censorship and government pressures prevented many of the intelligentsia from expressing their point of view, or frightened them out of doing so. Art, like everything else at Charles’s court, was smeared with the trail of finance. The King’s most ambitious projects were paid for by abuses which contributed to bring about the Civil War. Thus the unrealized plan for reconstructing Whitehall as a single great palace, comparable with the Escorial or the Louvre, was a magnificent design which ‘reflects clearly enough the absolutist ideals of the King’. But it was also a megalomaniac idea. As Sir John Summerson says, it ‘would have been a grave and fitting backcloth for the bloodier revolution which it would most certainly have helped to precipitate’. There was ‘a close association between the arts of the court and those elements in Stuart policy which precipitated the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century.’1
As the narrow ruling circle became more and more isolated from public opinion, so it needed the flattery of artists and poets to buttress its morale. How different things had been under Elizabeth! When the monarchy was really popular, it did not need to be so repeatedly reassured that it enjoyed divine approval. All the masques allegorizing peace and concord imposed by royal authority, the apotheoses and descending goddesses, betray a deep insecurity and longing for help from outside.
There was then an abnormal cultural situation in the England in which Milton reached maturity. P. W. Thomas speaks of ‘two warring cultures’. With ‘the growing isolation, exclusiveness and repression of the Court’ he contrasts the earlier ‘literature that had been the authentic voice of patriotic high seriousness and protestant nationalism’. The Caroline court, ‘however refined, seemed to speak for narrow snobbery and effete indulgence’. ‘Royal patronage had failed to sustain … a culture … of unequivocal moral and intellectual vigour. It mistook … a governing clique for the nation. … It managed to create a mythology of itself that was deeply divisive.’ This was seen by the Puritan opposition as ‘the pollution of the high seriousness and moral earnestness of the mainstream of English humanism’. Ben Jonson represents the last attempt to infuse moral commitment into court art; and he was first absorbed into the court and then ultimately squeezed out. Milton was aware of ‘a decadent Court, its art an index to a deep malaise’. Thomas rejects the view which sees Cavalier humanism as ‘life-affirming’, by contrast with Puritan prudery. We shall find ample reason, at least so far as Milton is concerned, to confirm his opinion that ‘far from suppressing the sensual and sentimental element in sexual relationships, English Puritanism exposed it to the full force of its habit of scrupulous analysis.’2 As the unity of Elizabeth’s reign slowly dissolved, the Laudian innovations isolated bishops from the mass of the population. One may suspect that popular hostility extended to the new taste for Counter-Reformation absolutist art favoured by the court clique.
There is an inevitable danger in history of falling for ‘the illusion of the epoch’, of accepting a ruling group at its own valuation whilst ignoring evidence from other sources. It is the criticism which Paine made of Burke on the French Revolution: he pitied the plumage but forgot the dying bird. We must not go to the opposite extreme and say that the aesthetic taste of Charles and his circle was a significant cause of the Civil War; that would be as absurd as to argue that the Civil War destroyed English art. What we can say is that the years in which Milton grew up were years of increasing national disillusionment, of a widening gap between the court and the more Protestant elements in the country. The golden age of the drama and of English literature generally was over; so was the golden age of English music, and of English miniature painting. The religion of court and universities was diverging from the Elizabethan consensus; the new scientific ideas were popular in London, and had won some advocates in both universities, but no official recognition. The censorship grew increasingly severe.1 The young gentlemen who went to the Inns of Court continued to be consumers and patrons of literature, but after the first decade of the seventeenth century ‘the energies which had previously been devoted to literature and scholarship were channelled instead towards political and theological concerns.’2
I quote Thomas again: ‘There were two warring cultures. But it is more accurate to talk of a breakdown of the national culture, an erosion through the sixteen-thirties of a middle ground that men of moderation and good will had once occupied.’ ‘The civil war was about the whole condition of a society threatened by a failure of the ruling caste to uphold traditional national aims and values, and to adapt itself to a rapidly changing world.’3 It is important to remember this cultural component in what we call ‘Puritanism’, as well as the political and religious tensions between court and country on which the books normally dwell. It was felt especially strongly by John Milton. It has been suggested, on the evidence of the Nativity Ode and Lycidas, that Milton’s ‘imagination of revolution as the supersession of one ground of values by another’ antedates the historical revolution in which the poet was to play a leading part.4
It is commonly seen that historians are suspected rather to make their hero what they would have him be than such as he really was.
John Toland, The Life of John Milton (1698), in Darbishire, p. 84
The family into which John Milton was born in December 1608 was Protestant, bourgeois and cultured. His father, John Milton the elder, had been turned out of his Oxfordshire home by his yeoman father, who adhered to the old religion whilst his son became a Bible-reading Protestant. John the elder came to London some twenty-five years before the poet was born, and pursued a very successful career as a scrivener. Scriveners performed functions for which to-day one would go to a solicitor or an investment adviser; but their main business, and certainly their most lucrative business, was money-lending. It was a time of rapidly rising prices, and of ostentatious expenditure among an aristocracy slow to adapt itself to new economic realities; it was also a time when merchants and business men often needed the sort of bridging loan for which they would to-day turn to a bank. The scrivener might be the go-between linking borrower and lender, as well as lending on his own account. Interest rates were high; by close attention to detail, good timing and firm use of legal processes, there were handsome profits to be made. John Milton senior did well. By 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, he had made enough money to retire. After setting up his younger son, Christopher, as a lawyer, and providing a good marriage portion for his daughter, he was still able to maintain his elder