MILTON AT WHITEHALL.--SCOTLAND YARD.--PETTY FRANCE.--BARTHOLOMEW
CLOSE.--HIGH HOLBORN.--JEWIN STREET.--ARTILLERY WALK
Milton remained in Spring Gardens about seven months, when his new
apartments in the north end of Whitehall Palace were ready. These opened
from Scotland Yard, in which was the Guard House. The yeomen of the guard
wore red cloth roses on back and breast, and must have seemed very gay and
imposing personages to the little girls of the Milton family. Their rooms
were connected with the various courts and suites of apartments that
extended down to the Privy Garden. The palace in Cromwell's time probably
retained in residence a large portion of the small army of caterers,
butchers, brewers, confectioners, glaziers, etc., who provided for the
constant needs of the huge establishment. The Horse Guards, built for
gentlemen pensioners, was erected in 1641, and was still quite new. This
apparently was not on the site of the present Horse Guards, which was
built in 1753.
At Scotland Yard, Milton's only son, John, was born, and here his
protracted labours in his vehement controversy with Salmasius brought on
the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever
shut his world from view. For the next twenty years and more it is the
blind poet whose life we follow, during the period when his fiery spirit
was chastened not only by his own afflictions, but by the nation's also.
In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York Street, near the Bird Cage
Walk, which was so named from the king's aviary there. Here the next year
his little daughter Deborah was born, and soon after his wife, at the age
of twenty-six, after nine years of married life, died. After the first
estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, all had gone well. Her
little John, who had scarcely learned to speak his father's name, soon
followed her to the grave.
The household then consisted of the poet, his nephew and amanuensis John,
and his three motherless little girls. Masson describes the house as he
saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then No. 19 York Street, and
had a squalid shop in its lower part, and a recess on one side of it used
for stacking wood. On entering by a small door and passage at the side of
the shop, one groped up a dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in
the rooms that were once all Milton's. "The larger ones on the first floor
are not so bad, and what are now the back rooms of the house may have been
even pleasant and elegant when the house had a garden of its own behind
it, and that garden opened directly into the park."
Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was landlord of the house and
lived close by, placed a tablet on the rear wall inscribed "Sacred to
Milton, Prince of Poets." After 1811 Bentham's tenant was William Hazlitt;
before that his friend James Mill occupied the house.
Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an introduction to Grotius, was his
next-door neighbour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment house in
London stands upon the unmarked site of Milton's house. The frequent walk
which Milton took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, during his
eight years' residence here, led him half a mile across St. James's Park
from Queen Anne Gate to Spring Gardens or the Horse Guards. The ornamental
water was not then there, but there were ponds and trees and pleasant
stretches of green turf. Charles II. had it later all laid out by the
famous French landscape artist, Le Notre.
Occasional sonnets--those to Cromwell, Vane, "On his Blindness," and "On
the Late Massacre in Piedmont"--appeared in the increasing leisure of this
period, when his duties lessened, and he retired on a diminished salary.
But Milton was become a man who was sought out by foreigners of note and
persons of quality; among his friends, Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his
pupil, Cyriack Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming Lady
Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him to teach her little son, and
who he said had been to him in the place of kith and kin.
After four years of widowerhood, when his little girls were sadly in need
of a mother, Milton married Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain
Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, on November
12, 1656. Her coming into the home in Petty France brought serenity and
happiness to all its inmates. During the brief fifteen months of their
married life, a little daughter came, who followed her soon after to her
grave in St. Margaret's Church beside the Abbey, and the sorrowing husband
was again left in his blindness to bring up his three motherless little
daughters.
After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out in St. Bride's Churchyard,
was resumed, and in the lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of
"Paradise Lost" were dictated, just before the closing days of Cromwell's
life. Under Richard Cromwell, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with
the return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home in Petty France,
for he well knew the vengeance that might follow. His little girls were
sent no one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend's house in
Bartholomew Close, a passage which led from West Smithfield, through an
ancient arch. It was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor Caius,
the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, had lived, and also Le Soeur,
who had modelled the statue of Charles I., which, as has been stated, was
concealed during the Commonwealth, and was soon to be erected. Sixty-five
years later, young Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office
here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that he had left his garden
to be hemmed in by narrow walls. The labyrinth of little courts and
tortuous passages was his safeguard. During those days of arrests and
executions of his friends, Milton must have known that any day might bring
the hangman's summons for him. Many a time during the nearly four months
that he was hidden here must he in imagination have heard the shouts of
the fickle populace, and seen himself haled in a cart to Tyburn gallows.
Says Masson: "Absolutely no man could less expect to be pardoned at the
Restoration than Milton," and "there is no greater historical puzzle than
this complete escape." But his faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded
for him, and other powerful friends did their utmost in his behalf; the
brain that was to give birth to a great epic was spared to England.
Though Milton lay in some prison for a little time, during which his
"infamous" books "were solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old
Bailey by the hand of the common hangman," he was soon a free man, though
many of his companions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or like Goffe
and Whalley fled beyond seas and even there scarcely escaped the king's
swift avengers.
In December, Milton emerged from prison and moved temporarily into a
little house on the north side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was
behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his former residence upon the
street. Close by was the Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the
anniversary of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, amidst a
howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which
had been disinterred and were on their way to Tyburn to be swung upon the
gallows. It was well for Milton to sit behind barred doors in silence in
those days, while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold Algernon
Sidney was in exile, and the England that he loved seemed in eclipse.
In 1661, Milton, who had good reason to reside as far away from Petty
France and the court end of town as possible, returned to the
neighbourhood of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin Street,
off Aldersgate, at the end of the street nearest St. Giles's, Cripplegate,
where his father lay buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in
Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. During the three
years spent here, Vane was beheaded, two thousand clergy were ejected from
their livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, starved on an income
of only eight or ten pounds a year for a whole family; men of Milton's way
of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days in the week, and
preached on the seventh with the police upon their track.
During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while "Paradise Lost" was
growing apace, Milton had about him his motherless and ill-educated girls.
The oldest, about seventeen years of age, was handsome, but lame, and had
a defect of speech. It fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah to
read, with scanty comprehension of the words, as their father required
their services, from his Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and
Italian works. To them, and to a group of young men who felt it an honour
to serve him, he dictated the sonorous lines of his great epic. No wonder
that girls of a dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin Street
dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily records of the doings of the
hosts of heaven and hell abominably irksome. They served their father with
grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and tricked him in his helpless
sightlessness--small blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been by
servants and governesses, but pitiable for the father of fifty years, who
fought his daily battles with fate alone in the dark.
Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him out, and doubtless told him
the latest literary news of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just
appointed historiographer royal; of Samuel Butler, who had just gone with
the Lady Alice of "Comus" to Ludlow Castle; of Richard Baxter, whose
popular book, "The Saints' Everlasting Rest," Milton had doubtless read
when it appeared five years before; of Pepys, now secretary to the
Admiralty; of Izaak Walton, whose "Complete Angler" Milton may have read
ten years before; of Evelyn and of the poet Cowley; of Bishop Jeremy
Taylor; of George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philosophers, Hobbes,
and John Locke, who was then at Oxford; and the budding poet, John Dryden.
We learn from Richardson that Milton usually dictated "leaning backward
obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it,
though often when lying in bed in a morning." Sometimes he would lie awake
all night without composing a line, when a flow of verse would come with
such an impetus that he would call Mary and dictate forty lines at once.
During these days a newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, who was
desirous of improving his Latin, and to see John Milton, who, he writes,
"was a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world,"
betook himself to the modest home on Jewin Street, got lodging hard by,
and engaged to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, noticing
that he used the English pronunciation, told him that if he wanted to
speak with foreigners in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation.
This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when Milton, seeing his
earnestness, helped him greatly in translation. These happy hours were
interrupted by Ellwood's arrest for attending the Quaker meeting in
Aldersgate Street. Three months were spent in Bridewell and Newgate,
where he saw the bloody quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and
wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spectacle. One heavenly day
in a quiet library reading of Dido and AEneas with Milton, the next in an
English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty--a memorable experience for
a young man of twenty-two, was it not?
Household affairs were going from bad to worse in Jewin Street, and the
unhappy home needed a wife and mother. When the news came to the daughter
Mary that her father was to marry again, she exclaimed that it was "no
news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that
would be something." The third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was twenty-four
years old when Milton married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, a
little south of his boyhood's home near Cannon Street. She proved an
excellent wife, and was of a "peaceful and agreeable humour." There are
traditions that the young stepmother had golden hair and could sing; her
good sense and housewifely accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and
thrift into the discordant household.
Soon after his marriage, the Milton family removed to a house in Artillery
Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which is the
southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was there a garden here, but the
site of the present Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, Richard
Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was then an open field; while, close
at hand, was Artillery Ground, where trained bands occasionally paraded,
as they have done from 1537 to the present time. Of the house we know
little, except that it had four fireplaces. Near by was "Grub" Street,
since changed to "Milton" Street, partly perhaps to commemorate the fact
of the poet's residence in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the
Great Plague had begun its desolating course, Milton had completed the
last lines of "Paradise Lost." It was then that young Ellwood came to his
assistance, and engaged for him "a pretty box in Giles-Chalfont," whither
he was driven with his wife and daughters.