Dr. C.’s Learning Web

PROLOGUE—A.N. Wilson (from The Life of John Milton, 1983)

There is not much left of Milton’s London. Bread Street, where he was born, and spent his boyhood, was destroyed in the Great Fire; and, having been rebuilt, it survived another 250 years only to be bombarded in the Second World War. Today it is a soulless, windy, straight thoroughfare; less a street than a gap between banks and office-blocks which are tall enough to disguise its proximity, at the one end to St Paul’s Cathedral, and at the other, to the River Thames. To imagine what it was like in Milton’s boyhood one must look at Vischer’s engravings or read Stow’s Survey of London.

In those days, Bread Street was a narrow row of predominantly wooden houses which ran down the very centre of a hugely over­crowded, fast-expanding Gothic town. In 1500 there had been a popula­tion of some 75,000 Londoners. In i6oo there were 220,000. By 1650 the population had swollen to 450,000. One has to think of a town like Bruges or Salisbury suddenly trying to accommodate the population of modern Birmingham or Brussels. Squashed about Bread Street on every side there were tenements and windmills, trees, theatres, brothels, bridges, and alleys; mansions and hovels. And every few yards, a church spire pointed its spindly cross to the sky. Month by month, more and more people flooded into the already overcrowded lanes and roads. For the most part, they were Englishmen from the provinces — like the Miltons themselves — who had come to the city to make their fortunes. Since the accession of James I, there were also more than a few Scots. There were European refugees, too, victims of religious wars, Protes­tants from France, the Low Countries, and Italy.

There were more people than the city could adequately feed or house; and there were strict rules against unauthorized or speculative building, so that the old houses burst at the seams. Food was in short supply. Drainage, and anything approximating to lavatories, were woefully inadequate. Stow, in his survey, describes St Katharine’s-by-the­ Tower as ‘enclosed or pestered with small tenements and homely cottages, having inhabitants, English and strangers, more in number than some cities in England’.’ There was never enough water. The place stank.

All around, the very skyline was changing, in that town where Milton grew up. Old men would have been able to remember when Hog Lane which stretched ‘north toward St Mary Spital had once stood secluded in green fields where the citizens used to walk for recreation’. There were no fields there in 1616, the year that Shakespeare died. Patches of green survived on the city’s edges, which would be unimaginable in today’s London. Clerkenwell was dotted with gardens and expanses of meadowland. Bunhill Fields, north-east of the Barbican, were still spacious and country-like. But encroachments were steadily being made on the green. Shadwell, Limehouse, and Wapping, outlying villages, had already been linked by continuous building by the time Milton was eight or nine. Even St Paul’s Cathedral, a vast Noah’s ark on the top of Ludgate Hill, one of the most splendid Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe, was changing its shape. Men feared ‘its near approaching ruin, by the corroding quality of the coal smoke, especially in moist weather, whereunto it had been long subject’. Inigo Jones had been commissioned to reface the exterior of the nave and the transepts with new stonework. The mysteriously dark interior (the numinous shadows increased by the thick layers of soot on the huge east window) was about to be radically altered. The pointed nave windows were to become rounded. The little church of St Faith’s-under-St-Paul’s, which clustered against the east of the Norman apse of the cathedral, was already being demolished, in preparation for the building of a new choir. Another church, St Gregory’s, which nestled on the south side of the cathedral, was pulled down during Milton’s school-days.

The last vestiges of Falstaff’s London, bit by bit, were being crowded out or tidied away. But there were churches enough to spare. The Mermaid Tavern, at the top of Bread Street, where Shakespeare had been an habitué, and where the tribe of Ben still drank and roared and held their meetings of the Apollo Club, was surrounded by churches on every side. There were two in Bread Street alone: St Mildred’s and All Hallows. Round the corner, there were St Augustine’s and St Antholin’s. And the churches teemed with people.

Preachers were now as popular as players had been in a previous generation. The bells of St Antholin’s now clattered daily at five in the morning to summon the faithful to lectures: the latest thing. Ben Jonson and his cronies can only have staggered home a few hours before the din started up. Very tiresome it must have been for his namesake, William Johnson, the landlord of the Mermaid, to be woken so soon by the insistent chiming of the steeples, and by the crowds, flocking at dawn to hear the rector of St Antholin’s, Charles Offspring, expounding the epistles of St Paul.

Less of a cult figure than Offspring, but nearer the Mermaid, was the rector of All Hallows, Richard Stock. He had his following; he preached the new doctrines. He was a man who looked for the finishing of the Reformation in England, the purging of the last odours of popery which still clung to the Established Church and which the new King had done so disappointingly little to abolish. Stock wanted the new generation to be in no doubt of God’s truth. He catechized the children of Bread Street every day for an hour before school: boys and girls on alternate mornings. His sermons were of an angry, woeful colouring. Above all, he was angered by his congregation when they showed ignorance of the Scriptures. For the first time in 1600 years, Christians were expected to be literate. Their salvation apparently depended upon it. ‘Your books are seldom in hand but when you go to church; they lie in your houses covered with dust.’ Thus Stock ranted.

By books, he did not mean what the tribe of Ben would have understood by the word. Stock was not thinking of England’s Helicon, or Harington’s Ariosto, or of The Faerie Queene or of the recent History of the World by Sir Walter Ralegh. Still less was he thinking of Terence, or Aristotle, or Ovid. He was thinking of one book only. A new version of the book had appeared in 1611, but it was merely a revision and collation of a century or more of translations. Some of Stock’s congregation would possess copies. But most of them were letting dust settle not on newly printed ‘Authorized Versions’, but on the old Geneva Bibles that their parents had forgotten to read.

Yet now, more and more, the dust was being blown off the old book, and it was being read. The vintner and landlord of the Mermaid had seen some strange changes since his tenancy began there. He had watched Jack Donne, the drinking companion of Beaumont and Fletcher, turn parson. His sermons were probably of a different order from ranters like Stock. But his ordination pointed to the strange way things were going.

When the revellers had departed, one can imagine this William Johnson shutting his inn for the night, and walking down to the river, a short stroll before returning to bed. Most of the houses in Bread Street would be plunged into darkness, for men rose in those days at dawn. But, night after night, as he ambled down that fetid, narrow little street, the innkeeper who had served ale (in his day) to Shakespeare and Donne and Ben Jonson, would have seen a light burning in an upstairs window above the sign of the Spread Eagle. Every evening, defiant amid the surrounding blackness of London, the candles flickered at that window until midnight struck. It was not some learned divine, preparing a lecture for the morning; nor an advocate working late on a case; nor an alchemist dabbling in forbidden knowledge, though any passer-by might have guessed it to be one of these things.

It was a little boy, the eldest child of somewhat aged parents, a scrivener and his wife. There were three children now: John, Anne, and a baby, Christopher. The parents had lost their first infant, who was buried, unbaptized, in All Hallows in 1601, and it was perhaps this which made them cosset and pamper their eldest, John, who had been born on 9 December 1608. Private tutoring was arranged. The inhabitants of Bread Street must have been struck by the cherubic beauty of the boy, and by his expensive clothes as he flitted, a fey little creature, through the stinking alleys of the neighbourhood. Already, he led a studiously eccentric life. The maids who sat up late with him complained that it would do no good to his eyes. But still, night after night, a passer-by could see the candles flickering at his window.

In the very wet April of 1616, the month they heard at the Mermaid that Shakespeare was dead, perhaps the innkeeper and his customers, stirred by such spectacles of mortality, followed the bells to church. The prescribed lectionary of Old Testament readings in the month of April would have filled their heads with stories from the Book of Judges, and from the first Book of Samuel. Walking back to the Mermaid at night, and looking with puzzlement at the lights burning late in the Milton household, the innkeeper might well have found himself thinking of singular Israelite infants, set apart for the Lord’s service; of the child Samuel, dwelling with Eli in the Temple; and of Samson, who was ‘a Nazarite unto God from the womb’.