John Milton
1608–1674

John Milton, after Shakespeare the greatest English poet, was born in Bread Street in Cheapside on 9 December 1608, the son of a prosperous scrivener, a Puritan and musical composer. At St Paul’s school he distinguished himself as a scholar and poet. In 1625 he entered Christ’s College Cambridge, where he seems to have been chastised by his tutor, and was certainly rusticated for a short time in 1626. After his return he went through the university course with credit, achieving his M.A. in 1632. Archbishop Laud’s rule deterred the young Puritan from taking orders; and at Horton in Buckinghamshire, to where his father had retired, he settled with the distinct purpose of making himself a poet by study and self-discipline. His poetical genius had already been attested by the noble Hymn on the Nativity and At a Solemn Music perhaps L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as well as much admirable Latin verse; and at Horton he produced if not L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, at least Comus and Lycidas.
Comus was written at the instance of the musician Henry Lawes to celebrate Lord Bridgewater’s assumption of the wardenship of the Welsh Marches, and was performed at Ludlow in 1634. Lycidas was evoked by the loss at sea of his friend Edward King in 1637. These four works were, of themselves, sufficient to place him in the first rank of English poets. In 1638–39 he paid a fifteen month visit to Italy, where he was cordially received by the Italian literati. His return was saddened by tidings of the death of his friend Diodati, whom he celebrated in Damon, the finest and the last of his Latin poems. He settled in St Bride’s churchyard, afterwards, in Aldersgate Street, and devoted himself to the education of his siste’s children, the two young Phillipses.
Paradise Lost as a mystery or miracle play gradually dawned upon his mind; but the Civil War long silenced Milton’s mind except for an occasional sonnet. The tracts which he now poured forth (three in 1641 and two in 1642, all on church government) are as truly lyrical inspirations as any of his poems.
In June 1642 he married Mary Powell, daughter of an Oxfordshire squire, a debtor of his father’s. After a trial of matrimony she went back to her friends, under promise to return at Michaelmas, but stayed away four years. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was published in 1643, and enlarged in 1643–44. He replied to his opponents, mainly the Presbyterians, in three supplementary pamphlets, and a threat of prosecution by a parliamentary committee occasioned in November 1644 his most famous prose–work, Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty if Unlicensed Printing.
In 1645 he was reported to be taking serious steps to carry out his views on divorce by paying his addresses to ‘a very handsome and witty gentlewoman’, when the absent wife thought it time to return; and by September his household was re-established in the Barbican. His wife’s parents and eight brothers and sisters took up their abode with Milton for a year. She bore him three daughters, and died in 1652. He lost his father in 1647. Meanwhile, other pupils, mostly sons of friends, had been added to his nephews, and to the world Milton seemed to be a schoolmaster; but his defence of the execution of Charles I. (January 1649), The Tenure of Kings, was followed by his appointment as ‘Secretary of Foreign Tongues’, whose duty it was to draft diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers, then carried on in Latin. His Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), made him famous all over Europe but cost him his eyesight. By 1652 the impaired vision had wholly failed. He married again (1656), and again lost his wife in 1658. The magnificent sonnet on the massacre of the Vaudois was written in 1655. Several controversial pamphlets against Alexnder Morus followed.
Milton had supported Cromwell in all his extra-legal measures, though his early republican hopes must have been bitterly disappointed. He remained secretary until the abdication of Richard Cromwell, when he again turned pamphleteer. His writings of this period are greatly inferior in splendour of diction, and are conclusive of his lack of practical statesmanship. The Restoration drove him into hiding, for few more had bitterly exasperated the Royalist party. The Defensio was burned by the hangman, and Milton was arrested but soon released. About the beginning of 1661 he was settled in Jewin Street, and afterwards in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. Paradise Lost was probably commenced some time before the Restoration, dictated to an amanuensis (usually a daughter) and completed about 1663. Plague and fire warred against the publication, which, after some difficulty on the licenser’s part, took place in August 1667. The sale of thirteen hundred copies within twenty months shows that Milton’s claim to a place among the great poets was admitted from the first. The year 1671 witnessed the publication of Paradise Regained, probably written in 1665–66, and of Samson Agonistes, written later still. Samson dramatic in form, is lyrical in substance, a splendid lament over the author’s forlorn old age and the apostasy, as he deemed it, of his nation. Meanwhile his daughters were unhappy and impatient at their tasks as readers and amanuenses that his house was one of sadness up to his marriage in 1663 to Elizabeth Minshull, the daughter of a Cheshire yeoman. She restored comfort to his house but failed to conciliate his daughters who, after being taught embroidery at their father’s expense, left to set up for themselves. Milton now addressed himself to other unfulfilled ideas of his youth, the early history of England and works, upon grammar and logic – of little value.
His Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine proves he was now an Arian, indifferent to all rites and ceremonies, as anti-Sabbatarian as Luther, and willing to tolerate polygamy. Reduced in means by the great fire in 1666, but still above want, execrated as a regicide, but acclaimed by the discerning as the first poet of his age, cheerful and joyous, singing even during fits of gout, he closed his chequered life on 8 November 1674. He was buried in St Gile’s Cripplegate.