Pandaemonium

Robert Graves loathed John Milton. In 1957, in an article published in the New Republic, he excoriated Milton’s poetry as “un-English”, “deformed” and “a dreadful muddle”. But it was not just Milton’s verses that were “dishonest”. The same could be said of Milton the man. In his 1943 historical novelWife to Mr Milton, Graves set out to portray Milton as not only a fortune-hunter, a misogynist and a hypocrite, but also (as he wrote in the foreword) an apologist for “undisguised Fascism”. The novel is narrated by Mary Powell – Milton’s first wife – trapped in a loveless marriage to her older husband. In a revealing vignette Mary relates how, as parliamentarian London anticipated a siege from an approaching royalist army in November 1642, “My husband yielded up his pike to a serving man … and he wrote a sonnet, which he pinned up as a protection on the door of his house”. The sonnet, she explains, was addressed to “whatever Cavalier captain or colonel … might happen upon his house”, and begged for protection against the “outrages of the rude soldiery”, promising in return “perpetual glory for this act of mercy”. In the event, she tells us, the “assault intended on London was not delivered and my husband took down his paper”.

The sonnet to which Mary was referring is “Sonnet VIII”, first printed in Poems of Mr. John Milton in 1645, though Milton may (however briefly) have indeed intended to display the poem on the door of his house on Lamb Alley, off Aldersgate Street, in the autumn of 1642:

Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
       Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease,
       If ever deed of honour did thee please,
       Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
       That call Fame on such gentle acts as these,
       And he can spred thy name o’re Lands and Seas,
       What ever clime the Suns bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre,
       The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare
       The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre
Went to the ground: And the repeated air
       Of sad Electra’s Poet had the power
       To save th’ Athenian Walls from ruine bare.

Milton’s sonnet hinges on two classical allusions. The “great Emathian Conqueror” is Alexander the Great, who, when he sacked Thebes, is said to have spared the “house” (meaning not only the dwelling but also the descendants) of the poet Pindar, out of reverence for his poetry. The redemptive power of poetry is evoked in the sonnet’s closing lines, as Milton reminds (or informs) the “Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms” of how the recitation of the chorus from Euripides’Electra helped to save Athens from devastation by a besieging Spartan army, whose leaders determined that it would be barbarous to destroy a city that had produced such verses.

“Sonnet VIII” has provoked puzzlement over the years. There is, after all, something faintly risible about Milton composing an advertisement for himself as a poet comparable to Pindar and Euripides at this early stage, when so little of his poetry had appeared in print. More than that, what led the author of fiercely anti-prelatical pamphlets, who would later defend regicide and republicanism, to propose such a seedy bargain: “Spare me and I’ll make you famous”? Milton’s Victorian biographer David Masson suggested the poem was not to be taken seriously. Rather, it should be understood as a whimsical joke. Or perhaps it was devised as an intellectual exercise – an abstract defence of poetry, rather than a personal response to impending catastrophe?

But then the biographical Milton is not really the “author” of “Sonnet VIII” in the first place. Strikingly, the sonnet is written in the third person – the only one of Milton’s surviving sonnets to adopt this grammatical form. So it is not John Milton who “speaks” the sonnet, but an unknown interlocutor who pleads on behalf of an anonymous “he” or “him” throughout: “him within protect … He can requite thee … he can spred thy name”. The poem, in other words, is couched in the form of an unsolicited testimonial, written on behalf of Milton rather than by him. It is as if he were embarrassed at the sentiments his sonnet was expressing – which of course raises the vexing question of why he was happy to see his apparently meretricious verses published in 1645.

Given what we know of Milton’s radical politics, his decision to write (and later publish) his sonnet becomes all the more astonishing when we recall the reality of life in London in those weeks of crisis. Waves of propaganda warned Londoners of the fate that would await them if royalist troops fought their way into the city. As the king’s armies continued to advance from the west, the parliamentarian authorities embarked on an enormous civil defence project. Throughout the autumn of 1642 and the spring of 1643 a vast ring of defences was constructed around the city, protecting not just the ancient core of London, but also the outer suburbs, together with Westminster and Southwark, south of the Thames. The eleven-mile defensive ring – the largest urban fortification system to have been constructed in seventeenth-century Europe – consisted of a network of earthwork forts or bastions linked together by a trench system, similar to the communication trenches built on the Western Front during the First World War. Hence the contemporary name for the city’s defences: the “Lines of Communication”.

In the seventeenth century, constructing just twenty feet of artillery-proof banking required the movement of perhaps 5,000 cubic feet of earth, so London’s civilian population was mobilized to work on the defences. Each dayas many as 30,000 people, drawn from all social classes, laboured on building the defensive system. As the Venetian ambassador to London wrote in the early summer of 1643: “Although they only give them their bare food, without any pay, there has been an enormous rush of people, even of some rank, who believe they are serving God by assisting in this pious work, as they deem it”. One parliamentarian newssheet reported how “women of good fashion and others, as also children, labour hard at the worke”. To buttress the outer ring of defences, strong points were built inside the city, not only to act as redoubts in the event of street fighting, but also to discourage royalist fifth columnists. The ambassador reported that even the most insignificant lanes and back alleys were barricaded with chains, while squads of the Trained Bands – London’s citizen-soldiers – patrolled the streets, keeping watch at night for fires set by “papists” or the “disaffected”.

The construction of these defences involved large-scale property destruction. Most of the trees in London were felled to provide timber. Orchards, meadows and valuable grazing land in the suburbs were ruined. Windmills were rendered inoperable. Houses in Bloomsbury, Bermondsey, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End were pulled down to provide clear fields of fire for the defenders. In the early spring of 1643 attention began to be paid to the fragile medieval city walls, close to where Milton was living, when the powerful parliamentarian Fortifications Committee issued instructions to destroy houses abutting the exterior of the ancient walls.

Despite the apparently voluntary enthusiasm with which Londoners worked on the fortification of their city, property destruction on this scale caused widespread resentment. Ever-increasing taxes, disguised as compulsory “loans”, that were raised to fund the work, allied to growing food scarcity and rising fuel costs during the winter months, prompted violent opposition to the parliamentarian authorities. In late December 1642 and January 1643 rioting was reported in the less politically reliable suburban wards – including Milton’s ward, Aldersgate – as property was confiscated from those deemed to be in default of money owed to fund the defensive work.

Did the gentlemanly Milton wield a mattock or spade in those frenzied weeks? If he did, he has left us no record of his efforts, just as there is no record of any military service on his part in the Trained Bands. But it would have been impossible for him to have been unaware of the preparations for a royalist siege. His house at the end of Lamb Alley was well within the northern sector of the Lines of Communication. Although Milton’s “dores” may have been “defenceless”, he was nevertheless living within one of the most strongly fortified neighbourhoods of the city. Each day gangs of labourers – men, women, and children – would have marched past the entrance to Lamb Alley as they worked on the complex of bastions at Mount Mill Fort, a five-minute walk from Milton’s home.

Ever since the mid-eighteenth century it has been assumed that Milton’s sonnet addresses a royalist officer. (Graves, too, makes this assumption.) But what if this apparently self-protective poem were aimed not at a rapacious cavalier, but rather at a parliamentarian officer charged with ordering the destruction of property or the arrest of financial defaulters? In 2008 the Milton biographers Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns tentatively made just this suggestion. Their speculation has not, so far, been endorsed by Milton scholarship. But there is every reason to conclude that it is correct.

The sonnet begins by addressing a “Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms”. That “Knight in Arms” seems like a deliberate archaism on Milton’s part, since the armoured medieval knight had long since vanished from European battlefields. In fact, he was being topical. Each of the six regiments of the parliamentarian Trained Bands in 1642 recruited from specific groups of wards. The Aldersgate ward, where Milton lived, provided officers and men to the Yellow Regiment, two of the companies of which mustered in Aldersgate Street. The Yellow Regiment was commanded by a goldsmith, Colonel Sir John Wollaston, a powerful political figure in London and the only commanding officer of the Trained Bands in 1642–3 who was also a knight. The sonnet’s tone is polite, even friendly, deploying the familiar “thee/thy”, as if Milton knew who might come knocking. And this was probably the case. Growing up as the son of a well-to-do scrivener on Bread Street, in the parish of All Hallows, Milton knew many of the sons of the prosperous merchants who would later form the officer corps of the Trained Bands. The second-in-command of the Yellow Regiment in the spring of 1642, for example, was Lieutenant-Colonel John Venn, a trader in wool and silk who would later achieve notoriety as one of the regicides. Milton had known Venn since his boyhood.

Any demolition squad charged with destroying the property of Milton and his neighbours in the Aldersgate ward, or with arresting defaulters, would have been composed of officers and men from the Yellow Regiment. Punningly, the sonnet alludes to the requisition and forced sale of property in the line “Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre”. In the seventeenth century confiscated property, sold at a public auction, was said to be sold sub hasta, meaning at or beneath the spear – a punitive version of our modern phrase “to come under the hammer”. This meaning has survived in the now obscure legal term “subhastation”. And the sonnet also contains a threat. For if a poet has the power to “spred” the name of the “Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms” “o’re Lands and Seas”, then he might also choose to broadcast that person’s notoriety – a hint expressed in the phrase “He can requite thee”, where “requite” has the seventeenth-century sense of taking revenge as well as repaying a favour. Far from cringing behind his door, Milton, it seems, was following the advice of Robert Burton, who in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) had observed that it is wise to “stand in awe of poets, for they are terrible fellowes” who can “praise & dispraise as they see fit”.

Milton’s poem emerges, then, as a guarded protest against the erosion of the freedoms of London’s citizens under the threat of a royalist siege. Parliamentarian propaganda, at the outset of the war in 1642, was drenched in the language of civil liberty. But as fighting spread throughout the kingdom most of those ideals were rapidly abandoned. Milton came to see the ring of fortifications encircling London as being akin to a noose slowly tightening around the necks of the city’s population. In June 1643 the Venetian ambassador sardonically observed that in labouring with such apparent enthusiasm, Londoners had constructed their own prison, “being shut up in this city which no one can leave or enter save by four ways, all well-guarded”. By late 1645, when Milton’s sonnet first appeared in print, the Lines of Communication had begun to function not just as a defensive circuit, but also as the boundaries of a zone within which Londoners were subjected to martial law: as well as property destruction or confiscation, they were liable to house arrest, arbitrary demands for money, religious inquisition, house searches, imprisonment, forced removal from the city and even summary execution if they were convicted of visiting the encircling forts and bastions without written authority. For those defences, built in anticipation of a royalist attack, had been designed so that they could be made to point inwards at the city’s population should it become hostile to the parliamentarian war effort.

Milton shared the ambassador’s scepticism. In an easily overlooked brief entry in his Commonplace Book, he noted a chapter in the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Description of England (1587) entitled “Of Castles and Holds”, in which the author, William Harrison, questioned whether fortifications had any use other than to terrorize a city’s population. The construction of “towers, walles … bullworkes”, Harrison argued, “tended to shew themselves either cruell or covetous towards the people”. Many years later, in Book One of Paradise Lost (1667), Milton would recall the building of London’s defences as he described the misdirected satanic energy involved in the construction of Pandae–monium, the fallen angels’ new residence in hell, which is compared to the work of “bands / Of pioneers with spade and pickaxe armed”, who set out to “trench a field / Or cast a rampart” in order to “forerun” (anticipate and forestall) the “royal camp” of a besieger.

We can see Milton’s sonnet, then, not as an exercise in timidity and cowardice, but as a veiled defence of the liberty of the individual, oppressed by an arbitrary military authority. And this in turn helps to explain why Milton was perfectly happy to see his poem published in his first collection of poetry in 1645, where it was placed first in a trio of sonnets addressed to individuals with whom Milton was on familiar terms.

Today, the Lines of Communication survive only in a handful of London street names: Rampart Street in Whitechapel, Mount Street in Mayfair. But gradually, in a project sponsored by Historic England, the huge scope (and the accurate location and structure) of the seventeenth-century defences of London is being revealed by archaeologists. Milton’s poem, written in response to those calamitous weeks, has not been forgotten so much as misunderstood. Graves, too, misunderstood it. He of course was writing a novel, not a biography. Nevertheless, when it was first published, Wife to Mr Milton was equipped with an “epilogue” consisting of seventeen pages of historical documentation, as the author sought to anchor his “conjectural reconstruction” to the historical facts as he understood them. Unfortunately in a poet of such distinction, blinded by his animus towards Milton, the one fact that Graves ignored was the slippery evidence of poetry itself.

Jonathan Sawday is the Walter J. Ong, S. J., Professor in the Humanities at Saint Louis University, in St Louis, Missouri. This essay is based on an article that will shortly be published in The Review of English Studies

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