Poet of Revolution: the Making of John Milton

"The mid-17th century is my period. I’m writing a book at the moment, which is looking at the fortunes of those who survived the Civil War and the Protectorate and their relationship with the Restoration. Milton is absolutely central to that. Milton’s life is well known. There have been quite a few biographies of Milton over the years, many of them very good, but I think this new book by Nicholas McDowell is superior to anything that I’ve yet read—and it’s only the first volume of two. It’s about the young Milton and this hothouse atmosphere in which he pursued his intellectual interests. “This new book by Nicholas McDowell is superior to anything that I’ve yet read” Milton was a quite formidable scholar from a very young age. At St Paul’s School, he mastered Greek and Latin very early. He spoke French, Italian and Spanish . He was a really brilliant linguist, but he was also absolutely on top of scholarship about writers such as Dante and Petrarch. From these very early years, he saw himself as an English Dante. He recognised that he was put on this earth—there’s a providential aspect to this—to write the great epic of the English nation, which of course he did, as an older, blind figure who had been ostracised by the political class after the Restoration. He had supported the regicide and came very close to being executed during the early days of Charles II. Thank God he wasn’t. He was left relatively alone and wrote his masterpiece, Paradise Lost . This book doesn’t go that far. It really ends with the Civil Wars and Milton taking sides in that. He became a great polemicist for Parliament and for republicanism, actually. Although he worked for Oliver Cromwell , he was very much at odds with Cromwell, who was not really a republican in the sense that Milton was. There’s also this fascinating account of the way he embraces chastity as a young man, as though nothing can intrude on his intellectual pursuits. He’s quite an extraordinary figure. There’s also really illuminating stuff about the political and religious background against which he operates, which is that the root causes of the divisions that emerged in English society, British society and Irish society were the actions of Archbishop Laud, who becomes this incredibly divisive figure—he eventually became Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury and was ultimately executed by Parliament. As a result of his actions, the division that already existed in English Protestantism between the high episcopalian wing of the church and the puritan wing, which had always been there since the beginning, suddenly became a fissure because of the utter lack of any kind of compromise that Laud allowed. It’s almost as though the via media of Elizabeth and, to a certain extent, James I just disappears overnight. Milton inhabits that world and he’s forged by that world. He was always interested in the Renaissance humanist tradition and some of that takes place in a republican milieu. He’s very interested in Venice, for example, which a lot of classical republicans around him are. He’s very interested in the work of Paolo Sarpi, who is a Venetian priest, who had been the propagandist for the Venetian Republic, similar to the way Milton becomes the propagandist for the English Republic. Sarpi served the Venetian Republic in its battles with the papacy around the time when Venice was excommunicated in the early 17th century. Sarpi wrote a history of the Council of Trent, with which Milton was very familiar. That’s already forming his ideas but, like many English people at that time, I think he only makes the choice that he has to make relatively late in the day, because that’s when he has to. Yes, he was. He was in Rome, in the Vatican. His life was often threatened because he was so outspoken in his anti-Catholicism and yet at the same time he’s there with learned Catholic priests, to whom he’s very close, in the Vatican, in Rome. He’s obviously such an impressive intellectual figure that they give him a lot of time in the pursuit of their interests, particularly Neoplatonism and the intellectual end of the Counter-Reformation. They very much saw Milton as an equal, even though he was a relatively young man—he wasn’t even 30 at that point. He was obviously someone of tremendous intellectual stature and people commented on how his Italian was absolutely fluent, like a native speaker, even though that was the first time he’d been there. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But he wouldn’t compromise at all in his views. This book shows that a lot of his early writings were published anonymously and only towards the end of the book does he start to become this public figure who’s willing to put his views out there on the record. Yes. It’s very very good. I highly recommend it."