Barbican Living
The life of John Milton (1608 - 1674)
Milton's family gave their name to Milton, near Thame in Oxfordshire, where they had estates in the era of the Wars of the Roses. They must have picked the wrong side, because they were driven out. The family continued to have some standing and John Milton's grandfather was Keeper of the Forest of Shotover near Oxford. John Milton is famous for his support of the Puritan cause in the Civil War, but his family had in fact been Roman Catholic for generations. It was his father, also John Milton, who gave up on the faith, and he was disinherited by his father as a result. John Milton's father became a scrivener. A scrivener was a person employed to make written copies of documents and manuscripts. In an age where few people could read or write and printing was rare, this was a well-thought of profession. In fact, Milton senior achieved a reputation as a composer of music, made a fair amount of money and retired a rich man. He married a Welsh girl, whose surname was Caton, and had two sons, John and Christopher. In the Civil War, Christopher sided with the Royalists, while John sided with the Parliamentarians. Christopher survived and became a knight and a judge after the Restoration. They had a sister, Anne, who had two sons, John and Edward, who were later educated by John Milton.
John Milton was born on the 9th of December 1608, between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. in the morning. The family lived in Bread Street, just off Cheapside. This is where the father carried on his business as scrivener. Many businesses, not just public houses, had signs and emblems over their doors, and his was the sign of an eagle with outstretched wings, so the house was known as "the Spread Eagle". There used to be a little court on the east side of Bread Street, a few doors back from Cheapside, which was apparently called Spread Eagle Court until recent times. That is probably where John Milton was born and raised. The house itself was almost certainly burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. Milton was christened at the church of All Hallows in Honey Lane, near Cheapside (West of King Street as it is today, and just on the other side of the road from Bow Churchyard). Cheapside had traditionally been a market area since the time of Edward I and streets off it, such as Milk Street, Wood Street, Bridge Street and Hosier Lane, took their names from the specific commodities traded there. Bread Street was also the home of the Mermaid Tavern, frequented in earlier times by Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson Beaumont, Fletcher and John Donne.
John Milton went to St Paul's School until the age of 16. This was a school founded by John Colet, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, in the cathedral grounds. The original school, along with the original cathedral, was destroyed in the Great Fire. The school took precisely 153 pupils. 153 was believed to be the number of fish caught in the miracle of the draught of fishes recorded in St. John's Gospel, and the school boys wore the emblem of a silver fish. There were no fees, but parents had to provide their children with their own wax candles.
Milton went on to Christ's College Cambridge in 1625, where he studied for 7 years. He was dedicated to hard work and study. He studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French Spanish and Italian, and he tutored the future founder of Providence, Rhode Island, in Hebrew, in exchange for lessons in Dutch, of all things. In later life, he blamed his early blindness on all the reading he did at this time, no doubt using up a great many of his father's wax candles late into the night. Milton was probably the most learned of all English poets.
From 1632, when he left university, he spent the next six years at home studying just about every known subject as preparation for his intended career in poetry. His father was at that time living at Horton in Bucks. It is hard to imagine why such study would be necessary. It doesn't seem to modern eyes a particularly good plan; however optimistically you begin Paradise Lost, you may very well give up after the first page of condensed allusions to various minor Greek mythological and biblical figures.
In 1638, he set off on a tour of France and Italy, but you can be certain this was not done for fun. He met Galileo, who was by then an old man under house arrest by the Inquisition for suggesting the earth revolved around the sun. Milton travelled all over Italy, meeting learned professors, and composing poetry in Latin, but his anti-papal views - and possibly also his visit to Galileo - made him persona non grata with the authorities, so when he heard of growing conflict between Parliament and Charles I, he returned home.
He took rooms in a house owned by a tailor in St Bride's churchyard. (St Bride's was a church in Fleet Street near Ludgate Circus.) Then he found a house with a garden in Aldersgate Street. He had a small allowance from his father, but to supplement his income he set up a school there. His first students were his nephews, John and Edward Phillips, but he then took in other boys.
From 1641 to 1665 Milton gave up poetry and devoted himself to the cause of the Puritans and the Commonwealth. A war of words was waged between the Puritans in England and the papists on the Continent. Milton became a political activist, writing books and pamphlets for the Commonwealth and Cromwell, in support of religious and civil liberty. Puritans were not seeking to be outside the Church of England. Their objection was that the Church of England had not gone far enough merely by rejecting the Pope and Catholicism. They argued that the Church must also reject all the pomp and ceremony which the Catholic church had invented over the centuries. That meant rejecting the idea of bishops, prayer books, and ritual of all kinds. Milton urged the rejection of these things and a return to the democratic simplicity and purity of the early church under the apostles. Samuel Johnson who wrote a biography of Milton summed up (his view of) Milton's religion and politics this way: "He had determined rather what to condemn than what to approve. He has not associated himself with any denomination of Protestants: we know rather what he was not, than what he was. He was not of the church of Rome; he was not of the church of England."
In 1643, he married Mary Powell, the daughter of Richard Powell of Forest Hill in Oxfordshire. It seems Powell had owed Milton money for several years. Powell was a typical fun-loving country cavalier of his day. Mary was a 17 years old brought up in that environment. In her new home in Aldersgate Street, she put up with the crying of the nephews, who were regularly beaten, and Milton's dour Puritan lifestyle for just one month before she fled back to her family. When Milton wrote demanding her return, the family sent a rude reply. At that time, the Royalists seemed to be winning the Civil War and they regretted the association with a Puritan. But soon fortunes changed and by 1645 they had lost their estates. They knew that Milton visited a mutual friend named Bleckborough each year, who lived in St Martin's-le-Grand (between the Barbican and St Pauls) so on his next visit, Milton found that Mary was also there. She begged him to take her back. He agreed. In fact, in 1645 he took in the entire Powell family, including Mary's parents and seven sisters. It must have been hell. They had very different attitudes to life. Mrs Powell called him "a harsh and choleric man". John and Mary Milton had four children. Mary died in 1652 after the birth of her third daughter.
Milton's father died in 1646 and was buried in the Chancel of St Giles Church in the Barbican. Milton may have inherited some wealth from his father, because he gave up taking pupils and moved his family to a smaller house in High Holborn, which opened onto Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Two weeks after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton published "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates", in which he argued that power always resides in the people; that they only delegate it to a sovereign; and if he abuses it they can take it back and depose or even execute the tyrant. On the strength of that he was invited to become secretary for foreign languages to Cromwell and his Council of State. What this meant was that he had the task of translating dispatches to foreign countries into dignified Latin (the language of international diplomacy). This was an important role in the Government. In later years, when a treaty with Sweden was suspended, the delay was put down to Milton being off work sick. The Swedish ambassador remarked that it was astonishing that there was apparently only one man in England who could write Latin, and that man was blind.
Milton's eyesight it had been failing for years, and he went completely blind in the winter of 1651-52. Milton was only 43. Blindness caused him to reduce his duties, but he continued through 1659 as a translator of state letters. In 1656 he married Catherine, the daughter of a captain Woodcock of Hackney, but she died in child birth in 1657.
The Commonwealth fell and the Restoration of Charles II took place in 1660 - a terrible disappointment to Milton, who had given his eyesight and devoted two decades to the Commonwealth cause. The Restoration government executed Commonwealth leaders. Cromwell's body was exhumed and hanged at Tyburn. Milton himself, as a noted defender of the regicides, was in real danger. In the summer of 1660, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he went into hiding in a friend's house in Bartholomew's Close, West Smithfield in the Barbican area. But in August, an Act of Oblivion, granting pardon to most Commonwealth supporters, was proposed. Milton was initially excluded from protection by it and he was taken into custody. According to various stories, his life was spared through the influence of the poet Andrew Marvell, or of the royalist playwright Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had himself saved from execution during the Commonwealth. Milton was released on 15th December. It may have been decided that the blind writer was now harmless.
Milton returned to live in Cripplegate, first in Jewin Street (now part of the Barbican estate) and finally in Artillery Walk (now Bunhill Row just north of the Barbican). In 1662, Milton remarried, for the third time, to Elizabeth Minshull. But in 1665, when the Great Plague broke out in the City of London, the family moved to Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. Next year, when the danger of infection had ceased, he returned to Bunhill Row.
A visitor described him as "neatly enough dressed in black clothes, sitting in a room hung with rusty green; pale but not cadaverous, with chalkstones in his hands. He said, that if it were not for the gout, his blindness would be tolerable." Milton apparently liked to remain in bed till mid-afternoon, where he read from a Hebrew version of the Bible and studied. Then he went for a walk, played the organ, sang, studied some more, entertained visitors till about 8.00 p.m. and then ate dinner. His luxuries were a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water before he finally retired to bed for the night.
During 1655-58, after a twenty year interlude, Milton had returned to poetry and began work on Paradise Lost, which was finished by 1665. The story goes that he would go to sleep and awake with large chunks fully composed in his head. When he was ready "to be milked", as he called it, he would dictate to his daughters.
This long suffering daughters were also compelled to read aloud to Milton in various languages, such as Hebrew, which they did not understand, because he did not believe in educating daughters. As Samuel Johnson described it: "He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion." It was not a happy family. When Milton remarried, one of his daughter's commented that "a wedding was no news, but if she could hear of her father's death, that would be something!".
The family was now running short of money so in 1667 Milton sold the rights to Paradise Lost to a publisher, Samuel Simmons, for an immediate payment of £5, with a further £5 for every additional 1,300 copies sold. Milton is assumed to have received £10 in all. This was even in those days a relatively small sum. Paradise Lost was far from being an overnight success. Literary taste had changed. I have to agree with Samuel Johnson - based on my own experience of having to study Paradise Lost for A level. "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure." The fact is that after you have waded through page after page of fire and brimstone, at least as a schoolboy, you definitely emerge on the side of Lucifer. On a purely personal note, the only bit which I particularly relished was the description of Sin and Death getting their comeuppance: "till crammed and gorged nigh burst with sucked and glutted offal" - a quote which tended not to get me re-invited to dinner parties.
On 10th November 1674 at the age of 66, Milton died of gout at his house in Bunhill Row and was buried next to his father in the church of St Giles Without Cripplegate (the church beside the lake in the Barbican estate). In his will, he left most of his estate to his wife, rather than to his "undutiful children".
Milton had children only by his first wife: Anne, Mary, and Deborah. Anne married a master-builder, and died of her first child. Mary died single. Deborah married Abraham Clark, a weaver in Spitalfields, and lived 76 years, and died in 1727.
Milton's grave was opened in 1793. The officials who were present at this solemn event knocked his teeth out with lumps of stone and took a rib and some hair as souvenirs. Then the caretaker propped the coffin up and charged visitors a few pence to see what remained of the nation's second greatest poet.
