For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 left his legacy in a precarious position. Denied a place in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, he was instead interred in the humbler environs of St. Giles Cripplegate. Then, to make matters worse, a little over a century later his corpse was exhumed and mutilated.
Likely inspired by the anti-republican wave that followed the French Revolution, Milton’s resurrectionists tore away pieces of his jawbone, his teeth, and his remaining locks of hair, possibly selling them on as souvenirs. The poet William Cowper was so outraged that he wrote “Stanzas on the late indecent liberties taken with the remains of the great Milton”. To say that these vandals were “taking liberties” is something of an understatement.
St Giles Cripplegate is a small gothic church, one of the few medieval churches lucky enough to survive both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. It is located at the heart of the Barbican, whose charmless brutalist architecture makes for quite the incongruous backdrop. Few people visit the church today, even though John Bunyan was a parishioner, Oliver Cromwell was married here, and Shakespeare lived just around the corner. It is one of the city’s many overlooked gems.
When I was teaching English Literature at the City of London School for Girls, one of the key texts was Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Given its author was buried less than 30 metres from my classroom, I would take my students to the church as part of their course. They would be able to see the nondescript plaque on the floor by the altar which simply reads: “Near this spot was buried John Milton author of Paradise Lost born 1608 — died 1674”. This is quite the contrast to the elaborate marble memorial in Westminster Abbey erected in 1737, with a likeness of the poet sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack.
That the author of the most significant epic poem in the English language should have been condemned to such an ignominious end is a reminder that the fate of heretics is rarely pleasant. Milton was a free-thinker whose worldview was grounded in reason. At a time when the divine right of kings was rarely contested, Milton considered it unreasonable that a man should be king on the basis of an accident of birth. He believed in meritocracy, which is partly what drew him to Cromwell.
Milton had his inconsistencies. He was a profoundly religious man, but nonetheless wrote extensively about the right to divorce. Most remarkably, his puritanical strain was at odds with his eschewal of the Calvinist notion of predestination. For Milton, free will was an essential aspect of our humanity. The fall of man depicted in Paradise Lost is meaningless unless Adam and Eve have chosen freely to partake of the forbidden fruit.
But Milton’s commitment to individual liberty is most keenly expressed in his Areopagitica (1644), a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643, which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. Often cited as a defence of press freedom, the text carries resonance for us at a time when liberalism and free speech is increasingly under threat. Rarely has the case been made with greater elegance and clarity. “Give me the liberty,” he writes, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.
Of course, Milton’s conceptualisation of “liberty” differs significantly from ours. His was a specifically Christian notion of liberty, predicated on this idea of virtuous self-regulation. He was at pains to distinguish between what he called “licence”, the freedom to do whatever one desires, and “liberty”, by which the faithful man is called to purge those passions and temptations that enslave the soul. “Licence”, Milton contends, is no freedom at all, but an indulgence that amounts to a form of self-imposed tyranny.
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