John Milton,
the son of a stockbroker, was born in London
in 1608. He was educated at St. Paul's School
and Christ's College, Cambridge
and while at university began writing poetry in Latin, Italian and
English. Over the next few years his fame grew with works such as
Ode Upon the Morning of Christ's Nativity
(1629), On Shakespeare (1632),
Lycidas (1637) and Epitaphium
Damonis (1639).
Milton
was touring Italy when he heard about the conflict between Charles
I and
Parliament. Milton, a Puritan,
returned to England to support the rebels. This included the publication
of several pamphlets attacking the Anglican
Church
such
as Of Reformation (1641), Of
Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), The
Reason of Church Government (1642) and Apology
for Smectymnuus (1642).
In 1642
Milton married Mary Powell. However, after six weeks, upset by his
political views, she returned to her Royalist family. This resulted
in him publishing The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce (1643), where he argued that an incompatibility
of mind and spirit was a better ground for divorce than adultery.
This was followed by On Education
(1644) and Areopagitica, A Speech for the
Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644), a passionate argument
for a free press.
Milton's
wife returned in 1645 and the couple had four children: Anne (1646),
Mary (1648), John (1651) and Deborah (1652). Soon after the birth
of Deborah, Milton's wife and son John died.
Milton,
a staunch republican, supported the trial and execution of Charles
I and
in 1649 published The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates. During the Commonwealth
Milton was
Latin Secretary to the Council of State. His assistant was his close
friend, Andrew Marvell.
Marvell's help became even more important after Milton lost his sight
in 1651. He
continued to write and published several pamphlets including Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio (1651), Defensio Secunda (1654) and Defence of
Himself (1655).
Milton
also wrote poems praising Oliver
Cromwell,
Thomas
Fairfax and Henry
Vane.
However, Milton grew increasingly concerned about the authoritarianism
of Cromwell's government. On Cromwell's death Milton published The
Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.
After the
Restoration
Milton's
work was burnt in public. Milton went briefly into hiding fearing
he would be executed as a Regicide.
Over the next few years he devoted himself to writing and during this
period published Paradise Lost
(1667), The History of Britain (1670), Paradise
Regained (1671), Samson Agonistes
(1671) and Of True Religion (1673).
John Milton
died of gout on 8th November, 1674.
(1)
John
Milton, Areopagitica,
A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644)
Lords and Commons of England,
consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the
governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and
piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse,
not beneath the reach of any point, the highest that human capacity
can soar to.
Behold now this vast City:
a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded
with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and
hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving
new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their
homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation: others as fast
reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.
What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone
to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant
soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a
Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies? We reckon more than
five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks; had we but
eyes to lift up, the fields are white already.
Where there is much desire
to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many
opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest
and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath
stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice
at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to re-assume
the ill-reputed care of their religion into their own hands again.
A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and
some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and
unite in one general and brotherly search after Truth; could we but
forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian
liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great
and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to discern the mould
and temper of a people, and how to govern it, observing the high hopes
and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings
in the pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out as
Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage: If such were
my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be
attempted, to make a Church or Kingdom happy.
Yet these are the men
cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as if, while the
temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble,
others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men
who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections
made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be
built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be
united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world;
neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather
the perfection consists in this, that, out of many moderate varieties
and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional,
arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole
pile and structure.
(2)
John Milton, General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester (1648)
Fairfax, whose name in
arms through Europe rings
Filling each mouth with
envy or with praise,
And all her jealous monarchs
with amaze
And rumours loud, that
daunt remotest kings;
Thy firm unshaken virtue
ever brings
Victory home, though new
rebellions raise
Their Hydra heads, and
the false North displays
Her broken league, to
imp their serpent wings.
O yet a nobler task awaits
thy hand;
For what can war but endless
war still breed,
Till truth and right from
violence be freed,
And public faith clear'd
from the shameful brand
Of public fraud? In vain
doth Valour bleed,
While Avarice and Rapine
share the land.
(3)
John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)
Surely they that shall
boast, as we do, to be a free nation, and not have in themselves the
power to remove or to abolish any governor supreme, or subordinate,
with the government itself upon urgent causes, may please their fancy
with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen babies; but are
indeed under tyranny and servitude, as wanting that power which is
the root and source of all liberty, to dispose and economise in the
land which God hath given them, as masters of family in their own
house and free inheritance. Without which natural and essential power
of a free nation, though bearing high their heads, they can in due
esteem be thought no better than slaves and vassals born, in the tenure
and occupation of another inheriting lord, whose government, though
not illegal or intolerable, hangs over them as a lordly scourge, not
as a free government - and therefore to be abrogated.
Though perhaps till now
no protestant state or kingdom can be alleged to have openly put to
death their king, which lately some have written and imputed to their
great glory, much mistaking the matter, it is not, neither ought to
be, the glory of a Protestant state never to have put their king to
death; it is the glory of a Protestant king never to have deserved
death. And if the parliament and military council do what they do
without precedent, if it appear their duty, it argues the more wisdom,
virtue, and magnanimity, that they know themselves able to be a precedent
to others; who perhaps in future ages, if they prove not too degenerate,
will look up with honour and aspire towards these exemplary and matchless
deeds of their ancestors, as to the highest top of their civil glory
and emulation; which heretofore, in the pursuance of fame and foreign
dominion, spent itself vaingloriously abroad, but henceforth may learn
a better fortitude - to
dare execute highest justice on them that shall by force of arms endeavour
the oppressing and bereaving of religion and their liberty at home:
that no unbridled potentate or tyrant, but to his sorrow, for the
future may presume such high and irresponsible licence over mankind,
to havoc and turn upside down whole kingdoms of men, as though they
were no more in respect of his perverse will than a nation of pismires.
(4)
John Milton, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth
(1660)
If we prefer a free government,
though for the present not obtained, yet all those suggested fears
and difficulties, as the event will prove, easily overcome, we remain
finally secure from the exasperated regal power, and out of snares;
shall retain the best part of our liberty, which is our religion,
and the civil part will be from these who defer us, much more easily
recovered, being neither so subtle nor so awful as a king reinthroned.
Nor were their actions less both at home and abroad, than might become
the hopes of a glorious rising commonwealth: nor were the expressions
both of army and people, whether in their public declarations or several
writings, other than such as testified a spirit in this nation, no
less noble and well-fitted to the liberty of a commonwealth, than
in the ancient Greeks or Romans. Nor was the heroic cause unsuccessfully
defended to all Christendom, against the tongue of a famous and thought
invincible adversary; nor the constancy and fortitude, that so nobly
vindicated our liberty, our victory at once against two the most prevailing
usurpers over mankind, superstition and tyranny, unpraised or uncelebrated
in a written monument, likely to outlive detraction, as it hath hitherto
convinced or silenced not a few of our detractors, especially in part
abroad.
After our liberty and
religion thus prosperously fought for, gained, and many years possessed,
except in those unhappy interruptions, which God hath removed; now
that nothing remains, but in all reason the certain hopes of a speedy
and immediate settlement for ever in a firm and Besides this, if we
return to kingship, and soon repent (as undoubtedly
we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachment coming on by
little and little upon our consciences, which must necessarily proceed
from king and bishop united inseparably in one interest), we may be
forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend
over again all that we have spent, but are never like to attain thus
far as we are now advanced to the recovery of our freedom, never to
have it in possession as we now have it, never to be vouchsafed hereafter
the like mercies and signal assistances from Heaven in our cause,
if by our ungraceful backsliding we make these fruitless; flying now
to regal concessions from his divine condescensions and gracious answers
to our once importuning prayers against the tyranny which we then
groaned under; making vain and viler than dirt the blood of so many
thousand faithful and valiant Englishmen, who left us this liberty,
bought with their lives; losing by a strange after-game of folly all
the battles we have won, together with all Scotland as to our conquest,
hereby lost, which never any of our kings could conquer, all the treasure
we have spent, not that corruptible treasure only, but that far more
precious of all our late miraculous deliverances; treading back again
with lost labour all our happy steps in the progress of reformation,
and most pitifully depriving ourselves the instant fruition of that
free government, which we have so dearly purchased, a free commonwealth.
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