The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (59 page)

Returning to England in July 1639, a newly self-conscious Englishman, he imagined fulfilling his literary destiny by an epic poem about the legendary King Arthur. But King Arthur, too, had become politically controversial. For King James I (reigned, 1603–25), by claiming descent from King Arthur, had tried to legitimize himself as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. Milton would have to find his epic theme elsewhere.

Even before leaving England he would have merited a place in a select anthology of English poetry. He had already written
Comus
(1634) and the elegy “Lycidas” (1637), some of his best short poems, sonnets, and the lyrics “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” with their counterpoint themes. In “L’Allegro,” the haunting lines call out:

“Il Penseroso” gloomily admonishes:

His tribute to Shakespeare had been included in the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1632). But for the next twenty years (1640–60) he would spend his literary energies on prose.

The polemic arising out of Milton’s own unlucky marriage first brought him public notice. His pamphlet on divorce, too, was in substance a plea for the freedom to choose. His early Latin elegies and sonnets at Cambridge had idealized the love of man and woman, and he boasted that he had successfully resisted the sexual seductions of Paris. But he proved inept at living out his ideal. In 1642, still unmarried at thirty-three, he met Mary Powell,
the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist Oxfordshire businessman to whom Milton’s father had lent a substantial sum. Milton instantly fell in love. The senior Powell not only paid the twelve pounds of interest due on the loan but also a dowry of one thousand pounds, and offered his daughter too. Married after only a month’s acquaintance, Milton took his young bride back to his modest house in London and the quiet life of a private tutor.

For young Mary it was a shocking change from her family’s large country house near convivial Oxford. She could not bear hearing the pupils whipped for disobeying, and, a stranger to the world of books, Mary felt bored and homesick. In mid-August the new bride left to “visit” her parents. Meanwhile the brewing Civil War had embittered her hasty marriage by violent antagonism between the ardent royalist Powells and the passionate Parliamentarian John Milton. Three years passed before Mary was persuaded to return to her husband.

Though staggered by the desertion of his idealized bride of a month, Milton never wrote about these personal feelings. Instead he published his first pamphlet—
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: restored to the good of both sexes, from the bondage of Canon Law, and other mistakes, to Christian freedom, guided by the rule of Charity
. English law at the time admitted adultery as the only ground for divorce. Milton might have covered his own case by urging the addition of desertion as a legal cause. Instead he took off from the grand proposition “That Man is the occasion of his own miseries, in most of those evils which he imputes to God’s inflicting.” Without a spiritual compatibility, “instead of being one flesh, they will be rather two carcasses unnaturally chained together.” Milton addressed Parliament to make incompatibility a cause for divorce. Of course, he admitted, liberty of divorce could be abused in England as it had been by the ancient Jews. But always “honest liberty” is “the greatest foe to dishonest license.” Indissoluble marriage had become “the Papists’ Sacrament and unfit marriage the Protestants’ Idol.” A marriage contrary to the desire of the partners was only bondage. Milton’s crusade would continue into the twentieth century, when the witty English lawyer A. P. Herbert attacked this “Holy Deadlock” (1934), which another wit defined as “Monagony—the state of being married to one person.”

Milton’s little tract on divorce sold twelve hundred copies within six months and brought him notoriety as author of a lewd book. Despite the large sale, few would confess to reading it, which led Milton to introduce the second edition with a motto from Proverbs (18:13), “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.”

While the Mary Powell debacle left its mark on Milton, it never soured him on marriage. She died a few days after the birth of their daughter in
1652. In 1656 Milton married Katherine Woodcock, who also died in childbirth two years later. His third marriage in 1663, when he was fifty-five, to the attractive twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Minshull of “a peaceful and agreeable humour,” proved idyllic.

But Milton’s relation to his daughters was a misery. The eldest, Anne, crippled and with a speech defect, never learned to write her own name. Instead of sending her sisters Mary and Deborah to school, Milton hired private tutors. For reasons of his own he taught them to pronounce Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew. Though they never understood these languages, in their teens they could pronounce the words well enough to read aloud to their father. Mary so detested her father that when she heard the news of his impending third marriage she regretted it was not news of his death. Milton’s notorious quip—“One tongue is enough for a woman”—was his way of shrugging off his daughters’ pains. While he was daily exploiting the unhappy obedience of his daughters, he was at the same time writing his tragedy “of man’s first disobedience.”

Since Milton’s thesis on the liberty of divorce has become commonplace, his little book has ceased to be read. But twentieth-century totalitarianism has made his eloquent fifty-page pamphlet,
Areopagitica
(1644), on freedom of the press newly relevant.

The vulgar reaction to his English-language book on divorce made Milton wish he had written it in Latin, and he gave Greek titles to his next pamphlets. The meaning of
Areopagitica
would be clear enough to the readers he wanted to reach. Named after Areopagus, the hill near the Acropolis where the governing council of ancient Athens met, it was cast as an oration. “Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England,” it recalled the successful plea of Isocrates to reform the system of government. Milton pleaded for reform in England to liberate the book.

Licensing had been used by popes and the hated Inquisition, while Moses, Daniel, Saint Paul, and the Church Fathers had preached the free pursuit
of learning. “Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good.” “Promiscuous” reading was actually necessary for the discovery of virtue. “As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasure, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.” Without that freedom there could be no increase of knowledge. Since, as Francis Bacon noted, “authorized books are but the language of the times,” the censor’s task is “to let pass nothing but what is vulgarly received already.”

Despite Milton’s eloquence the licensing act was not repealed. But the issue remained alive and Milton’s plea became an endless refrain. Jefferson made Milton one of his heroes and always put the
Areopagitica
on his reading list for young disciples. Mirabeau echoed it in his pamphlet on freedom of the press in 1788.

Milton’s next classic tract appealed for the freedom of people to choose their rulers. Prepared during the trial of King Charles I, it was published only two weeks after the king’s execution on January 30, 1649. “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, proving That it is Lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked King, and after due conviction, to depose, and to put him to death; if the ordinary magistrate have neglected, or denied to do so.” Forceful but not strikingly original, he compounded ancient and modern political theorists with the Bible and prophets of the Reformation. In a calm, reasoned, and scriptural defense of the regicides, he addressed a first and second
Defence of the English People
to readers on the Continent. These works all lived on in the arsenal of free government.

While Milton saw himself as champion of “the freedom to choose,” Cromwell’s Council of State saw him as spokesman of their new republican orthodoxy. In 1649 they rewarded him for services rendered and engaged him as their secretary for foreign tongues. Milton’s first commission was to reply to the sentimental and vastly popular
Eikon Basilike
, which purported to be King Charles I’s own record of his inward thoughts during his last suffering days and hours. That book, speeding through sixty editions in a year, threatened the survival of the new government founded on the beheading of the king. Milton’s lengthy
Eikonoklastes
attacked the sanctimonious king. For this Milton was rewarded with new lodgings and an apartment in Whitehall with the government’s inner circle.

Milton’s personal limitations appeared in his scheme
Of Education
(1644), one of the last manifestos of Renaissance humanism. Leaving the pupil little freedom of choice, he proposed to train gentlemen to be scholar-leaders and “to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices
both private and public of peace and war.” After the Greek and Latin classics came Italian “easily learnt at any odd hour” supplemented by Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac. His plan for the years from twelve to twenty-one did not include the university. But it did include fencing, “the solemn and divine harmonies of Musick,” and regular walks in the country. “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” Unfortunately, when Milton applied his “system” to educating his two nephews, the result was not impressive.

“Ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye,” Milton remained the defender of liberty until the very last moment, and at great risk. After the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, England fell into anarchy amid clamor to restore the monarchy. By 1660 the restoration of the executed king’s son, Charles II, seemed inevitable. And only a month before the Parliament’s invitation to Charles II to return to the throne, Milton published a revised edition of his
Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth and the Excellence thereof, with the Inconvenience and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in this Nation
. This might have been his own death warrant, for the Restoration would surely bring revenge against all Commonwealth men. The bodies of Cromwell, of John Bradshaw, the judge who pronounced sentence on Charles I, and Henry Ireton who had signed the execution warrant were disinterred and hanged at Tyburn. The Commonwealth leader Henry Vane was executed for treason, and in a paroxysm of royalist enthusiasm, the Parliament condemned thirty-two persons to death, and twenty-seven to lesser punishments. What would be Milton’s fate?

Milton went into hiding, but was found and confined in the Bedford county jail. Another inmate, twenty years younger than Milton, was John Bunyan, the unschooled son of a tinker, imprisoned for preaching without a license. Bunyan would remain there for twelve years because he would not agree to stop preaching. During this time Bunyan wrote his autobiographical
Grace Abounding
and eight other books. Milton, rescued by his friends, and more fortunate or more compromising, was soon released. Parliament granted him an official pardon for all his past offenses. But Milton’s books were to be burned by the hangman, and all further sale or publication of them was prohibited.

By 1651 Milton was totally blind from the affliction that had been creeping on him since his youth. And his affliction helped save him from punishment by the royalist Parliament. Now his pious enemies were willing to “leave him under the rod of correction, wherewith God hath evidenced His particular judgment by striking him blind.”

The Restoration proved a blessing for English literature. It gave Milton, only forty-two and in full talent, the opportunity to fulfill the epic ambition
that he had been nursing since his grand tour. If the great issues of the constitution and of toleration had not been settled, if the caldron of vituperation had not stopped boiling while Milton was mature and productive, he might have spent himself in more pamphleteering polemics. But the Restoration removed Milton from the arena into which he had descended with such enthusiasm.

Long before the Restoration, Milton had suspected that his blindness might have been the divine punishment for his libertine and heterodox beliefs. Some of the “ancientest and wisest” poets and philosophers also had been blind. Yet he could not find the sin that would justify this punishment. “I call upon Thee, my God, who knowest my inmost mind and all my thoughts, to witness that.… I am conscious of nothing, or of no deed, either recent or remote, whose wickedness could justly occasion or invite upon me this supreme misfortune.”

“Not blindness,” Milton said, “but the inability to endure blindness is a source of misery.” As he concludes his reflective sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent”: