1
The City of London

William Shakespeare and John Milton are the two most important poets in English. Shakespeare's achievements are unchallengeable and secure. Milton can make a far more controversial claim to eminence. He wrote the only poem in English recognised as an epic, a poem moreover which challenged the beliefs and presuppositions of all of its readers. As a literary writer, his political and historical significance is unique; he was at the centre, involved in, the most traumatic period of modern British history, and this left an imprint on his writings.

The family into which John Milton was born on Friday, 9 December 1608 exemplified the mutations and uncertainties of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His paternal grandfather, Richard, had been a yeoman and worked a farm near Stanton St John, a village about four miles north of Oxford. Richard had initially occupied a position in the social hierarchy only just above that of the medieval serf but by means still undisclosed, 'probably a good marriage', he acquired an estate that in 1577 was recorded as providing the considerable income of £500 per year.

Milton never made reference to his grandfather in print, which is not entirely surprising given that Richard was also a recusant whose public allegiance to Roman Catholicism earned him excommunication from the Elizabethan Church of England in 1582 and in 1601 fines amounting to £120. Religious difference caused a feud between Richard and his son John, Milton's father. It is known that John senior attended Christ Church, Oxford, sometime during the 1570s, although there is no record of whether he did so as a chorister or a student: he did not receive a degree. In any event it is likely that in Oxford John witnessed the disputations that attended the new theology of Protestantism, then in England barely fifty years old. One day after John had returned to the family home, Richard discovered his son in his room reading that symbolic testament to Anglicanism, the Bible in English. Quarrels between father and son intensified, with the eventual result that in the early 1580s John was disinherited and left Oxfordshire for London, never to return, nor as far as is known to communicate again with Richard.

We do not know how John, then in his early twenties (b. 1562), kept himself when he first arrived in London, but in 1583 or thereabouts he was taken on as an apprentice by James Colbron, a scrivener, and by 1590 had become a successful and independent member of that profession. Scriveners combined the functions of contract lawyer, accountant, financial adviser, money lender and debt collector. They had serviced the guilds and middle-ranking professional classes of the metropolis since the early Middle Ages and by the turn of the sixteenth century they had become, perhaps more than any other profession, the financial beneficiaries of the growing status of London as one of the major trading and seafaring capitals of Europe. John Milton senior did well. By 1600 he felt financially secure enough to court Sara Jeffrey, a woman from a comfortably off family of merchant tailors, whom he married within a year. The marital home would be a five-storey house in Bread Street, near Cheapside, a region favoured by wealthy, upwardly mobile traders and merchants (see Figure 1.1). A street carrying the same name still exists in roughly the same location but all of the properties from the Milton family's time were destroyed in the Great Fire. Their first child died before it could be baptized in May 1601 but a few years later a daughter, christened Anne, survived. John junior later entered the exact details of his own birth in the family Bible: 'the 9th of December 1608 die Veneris [Friday] half an hour after 6 in the morning.' He was baptized in All Hallows parish church, Bread Street on 20 December 1608.

Figure 1.1 City of London and original St Paul's Cathedral before the Great Fire. Bread Street, where Milton grew up, would have been in the foreground between the Cathedral and the Thames.Source: Mayson Beeton Collection.

The London into which Milton was born and where he would spend most of his life was undergoing the most radical changes in its history. In 1608 it was effectively two different places. The City itself was an assembly of parishes crowded around the old Gothic St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower, a thriving centre for trade and finance and the obvious location for a scrivener such as Milton senior to base his home and business. Roughly three miles along the curve of the Thames to the west would bring one to Westminster and Whitehall. This was the nation's seat of government, where the monarch held court and the Lords and representatives of the commoners met. Between these two sites there were the Inns of Court, effectively England's third university and devoted entirely to the study of law. Milton's brother Christopher would begin his career as a lawyer at one of the Inns and during his youth Milton himself spent brief periods in residence there, without registering as a student. Fleet Street and the Strand made up the main highways between Westminster and the City, though our notion of them as urban thoroughfares bears no relation to their character in the early seventeenth century when they were surrounded by what amounted to small palaces and rural estates occupied by the aristocracy and the senior episcopy. To the north of these, the region that we now refer to as the West End, there was little more than lanes and open countryside. Throughout the 1620s and 1630s this area became a magnet for England's first wave of property speculators. In 1609 Robert Cecil, Early of Salisbury, received James's consent to develop a 'Close of fine houses near Leicester Fields' (what is now Leicester Square). Many other similar projects in this region followed and in 1631 Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, received permission to construct a number of even grander residences in the so-called Covent ('convent') Garden, again north of the Strand. The likely residents would either be members of a growing gentry and aristocracy - both James and Charles were profligate in their conferring of titles and privileges - or those who were amassing wealth from the growing import/export economy based on the river to the east of the City, in what would eventually become London's thriving docklands. Their employees, along with various tradesmen who serviced this expanding metropolis, created an overspill from the City and set themselves up in squalid residences adjacent to the ever expanding squares of the new West End.

The topography of the area altered year by year and it was symbolic of a deeper social and demographic tension. Bedford, for example, was not simply indulging his taste for luxury in his Covent Garden development. His move was tactical. He, like many others in the gentry and aristocracy, was becoming alienated from the Court of Charles I. Eventually, the alliance between disaffected gentry and those with interests in the City - individuals like John Milton senior - would make up the power base of the Civil War anti-monarchists. The Bread Street house, where Milton grew up, would have been a spacious, but shapeless, half-timbered structure, each storey being added at various points in its history by a worthy individual with ambitions for more space. The street would have been narrow, crowded and filthy. Drains, as we understand them, did not exist in seventeenth-century London and waste, domestic and human, would lie in these open thoroughfares awaiting heavy, scouring rain. Fresh water, supplied by elm pipes, came at cost shortly after Milton's birth and it is probable that his family would be able to afford this. Milton, from Cambridge onwards, cultivated an intense love for the peace and innate beauty of the natural countryside and his upbringing in the crowded dirty city must have played some part in this.

John senior planned for his son a conventional route to success via the educational channels that had been denied to himself. When Milton was ten his father hired for him a private tutor called Thomas Young, a graduate of St Andrews University. Two years later John was admitted to St Paul's School, an esteemed institution adjacent to the Cathedral and only a few minutes' walk from Bread Street. Five years after that, aged sixteen, he would matriculate as an undergraduate at Christ's College, Cambridge, and enjoy the decent status of a 'lesser pensioner', meaning that his father was wealthy enough to pay for modest privileges and accommodation in college.

The influence of these years upon John Milton the writer is a matter of speculation but what we know of them is more than suggestive of their effect. Milton, during the later seventeenth century, was to become the most esteemed and controversial living poet in England, and Paradise Lost would remain as the poem in English most deserving of the title of epic. His status and reputation were sustained partly by his mastery of language and verse form, but only partly. In his writing he addressed himself to fundamental issues - our relationship with God, our origins, our condition as a species and our fate. These are recurrent features of all Renaissance verse, but Milton had a special, almost unique perspective upon them. He was born into the cauldron of tensions and divisions that characterised English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a state which began with Henry VIII's break from the Roman Catholic Church in...