John Milton Ducks Charles II, 1660

John Milton was born in London in 1608, which makes him a contemporary of Charles II, Samuel Rutherford, John Owen, Oliver Cromwell, and the men of the Westminster Assembly that produced the famous Confession of Faith. His father had abandoned the Roman Catholic religion of the Milton family and had prospered greatly as a scrivener in London. Young John’s education came from a Scottish private tutor who proved his worth and John’s native genius by qualifying him to enter Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1625, to prepare for ministry in the Church of England. He befriended Roger Williams, later of Rhode Island fame, who taught him Dutch in exchange for lessons in Hebrew.

Milton’s first publications date from this period, mostly poetry. Of serious demeanor, he also was unafraid of criticizing the curriculum of the college and would later serve as an educational reformer. From 1635-41 Milton’s autodidactic nature enabled him to conduct intensive study on his own at his father’s home, mastering at least six languages as well as history and philosophy, making him, perhaps, the most knowledgeable poet in history. He spent more than a year travelling across Europe, conversing with and learning from intellectuals, linguists, poets, and artists. He met Galileo, at the time under house arrest in Italy. He studied Roman Catholicism in practice, toured the Vatican library, and spent time in Geneva, Switzerland. The peripatetic genius was now providentially ready for his life’s work and literary immortality during the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, Interregnum and Restoration of the Stuart monarchy.

Milton’s Puritan convictions took immediate wings with written tracts against prelacy and Erastianism, and he taught in a school. The thirty-five-year-old poet and pamphleteer married a sixteen-year-old bride, who deserted him within thirty days. They reconciled and had four children together, although Milton published several controversial pamphlets arguing that divorce was biblical, a position for which he was roundly condemned. Among his most admired works was Areopagitica, a treatise on liberty which identified him with the views of Parliament in the ongoing controversy with King Charles I. Milton supported the Commonwealth and republican ideals regarding the King’s accountability to the people. Milton also agreed with and justified the regicide of Charles, in disagreement with his Scottish brethren. Parliament hired him in 1649 as a propagandist and correspondence secretary to foreign powers.

As a supporter of the regicide, Milton would become a target of the new king, whose refusal to pardon anyone who had played any role in the execution of his father placed the blind poet in mortal jeopardy. His friends forced him into hiding when Charles arrived in England. They held a mock funeral for Milton on August 27, 1660. Charles II commented that he “applauded his [Milton’s] policy in escaping the punishment of death by a reasonable show of dying,” but insisted on a public spectacle nonetheless by having Milton’s writings burned by the public hangman.

The Puritan poet reemerged after a general pardon, was imprisoned, and released, likely due to political friends in high places. He died, aged sixty-four in 1674. His theological views were sometimes considered heterodox by the best Puritans and his political views came close to getting him executed. His poetry, however, has endured as some of the greatest works in the English language, especially Paradise Lost; much of his greatest work was written during his twenty-two years of blindness.