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Dating Milton's History of Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Austin Woolrych
Austin Woolrych
Affiliation:
university of Lancaster
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Extract

When I had the pleasure of reviewing Nicholas von Maltzahn's study of Milton's History of Britain, I had nothing but praise for the scholarship he brought to the whole intellectual background of the work, and for his judicious placing of it in the Miltonic canon. His book gives an excellent account of the state of British historiography in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows how Milton's essentially humanist and literary conception of what a history should be, and his exclusive interest in narrative sources, made him already out of date in his method at a time when Spelman and Selden were pioneering a recognizably modern form of historical scholarship. He carefully traces the development of Milton's ambition to write a great national history, explaining why his first conception of a verse epic, singing the heroic past, gave way to that of a lofty prose narrative that would culminate in a celebration of God's presence with his elect nation in the struggle for religious and civil liberty in his own time. He deals fully and learnedly with the influences upon the style and content of the History, from Sallust (Milton's favourite exemplar) and Tacítus through Bacon (possibly) to the preachers of the Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament. He is illuminating about the close association in Milton's mind between eloquence and virtue, and about the ways in which his beliefs about the operation of divine providence modified his predominantly classical approach to the writing of history. He is thoroughly informative about the textual history of the work, and especially about the fragment published in 1681 as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament, whose editor he convincingly identifies as the arch-Tory Roger L'Estrange.

Type
Debate
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 929 - 943
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 von Maltzahn, Nicholas, Milton's History of Britain: republican historiography in the English revolution (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar. My review appeared in TLS (27 March 1992). I am grateful to Gordon Campbell, John Morrill and Blair Worden for helpful comments on a draft of this article; their agreement with its arguments is not to be assumed.

2 Von Maltzahn, pp. 1–2.

3 ‘The date of the Digression in Milton's History of Britain’, in Ollard, R. and Tudor-Craig, P. (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood these: studies in seventeenth-century history (1986), pp. 217–46Google Scholar; hereafter ‘Date’.

4 The works of John Milton, gen. ed. Patterson, F. A., 18 vols. (Columbia U.P., New York, 1931–1938Google Scholar; hereafter CW), VIII, 136–9; ‘Having dispatched these things, and thinking that, for the future, I should now have abundance of leisure, I undertook a history of the nation…I had already finished four books, when lo! (Charles's kingdom being reduced to a commonwealth) the council of state…invited me to lend them my services in the department more particularly of foreign affairs’. For the date of the Tenure see Shawcross, J. T., ‘Milton's Tenure of kings and magistrates: date of composition, editions, and issues’, Publications of the bibliographical society of America, LX (1966), 1–8Google Scholar.

5 Sheffield University Library H50/31/22/21a, cited by von Maltzahn, p. 28 n. 20. For the view that Milton began writing the History in 1648 see Parker, William Riley, Milton: a biography (Oxford, 1968), pp. 326, 938–9Google Scholar; for a slightly earlier date see Fogle, French in Complete prose works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–1982: hereafter CP), V, xxxvii–xliGoogle Scholar. I lean slightly to Parker's view, but there can be no certainty.

6 CW, VII, 490–5; CP, IV, 510–11.

7 Von Maltzahn, p. 22.

8 Ibid. pp. 23–4.

9 Ibid. p. 27.

10 Ibid. pp. 106, 109.

11 CP, V, 41.

12 CP, V, 129–31.

13 E.g. a parallel between the Britons' succumbing to Pelagianism and Laudian Arminianism (CP, V, 140). Some bitter outpourings against the British clergy (esp. pp. 140, 174–5) were doubtless fuelled by Milton's own experience, and note the tone of disparagement with which he describes Ine's assumption of the crown (p. 172).

14 Von Maltzahn, p. 31.

15 Ibid. p. 2; repeated with minor variations on pp. 23, 132, 136 and 175; cf. p. 35.

16 Journal of the House of Commons, VI, 110–11, 132–3; Gardiner, S. R. (ed.), Constitutional documents of the puritan revolution 1625–1660 (3rd edn., 1906), pp. 381, 384Google Scholar.

17 Von Maltzahn, p. 32.

18 Taft, Barbara, ‘The council of officers' agreement of the people, 1648/9’, Historical Journal, XXVIII (1985), 169–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Text in Gardiner, , Constitutional documents, pp. 359–71Google Scholar.

20 Lilburne, J., Foundations of Freedom (1648)Google Scholar, reprinted in A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and liberty (1938, new edn 1974), p. 357.

21 The first blast in this campaign, Lilburne's Englands Mew Chains Discovered, was presented by him to the Rump on 26 February and published soon afterwards. It exposed what he saw as the deficiencies in the officers' Agreement, but it was mild compared with what was to follow some weeks later, and it is unlikely that Milton was immediately aware of it. The leading Levellers were not arrested until 28 March, when Milton was already in the service of the Council of State.

22 Von Maltzahn, p. 34.

23 Stevenson, David, Revolution and counter-revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (1977), pp. 129–34Google Scholar.

24 Von Maltzahn, pp. 31–2.

25 Underdown, David, Pride's purge (Oxford, 1971), pp. 213–16Google Scholar. Nominally there were 507 seats in the Commons; effectively the membership before the Purge was 471: ibid. pp. 209–10.

26 CP, III, 233, 312; IV, 458, 671–4.

27 ‘Sidney’ in Milton's text, and wrongly identified as Algernon in CP, IV, 667 n. 524.

28 Worden, , Rump parliament, pp. 41–4, 61–70Google Scholar. ‘Revolutionary’ and ‘conformist’ are convenient labels employed by Underdown in his categorization of the membership in Pride's purge, ch. VIII.

29 Adding together Underdown's categories of ‘imprisoned’ and ‘secluded’: Pride's purge, p. 212.

30 E.g. pp. 32, 37, 145.

31 Underdown, , Pride's purge, pp. 216–18, esp. n. 19Google Scholar.

32 Gardiner, , Constitutional documents, pp. 386–7Google Scholar.

33 Harrington, J., Oceana (1656)Google Scholar, in The political works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Cambridge, 1977), p. 205Google Scholar. Milton's desperate constitutional proposals in The Readie and Easie Way of 1660, when the Commonwealth was in its last throes, cannot be taken as evidence of his thinking in 1649.

34 CP, III, 194.

35 CP, III, 236; pp. 237–9 continue in the same heroic vein.

36 CP, V, 441.

37 Ibid. p. 443.

38 Ibid. pp. 446–7.

39 Calendar of state papers, domestic series 1649–60, p. 52.

40 CP, III, 311.

41 Worden, , Rump parliament, pp. 206–7Google Scholar.

42 Gardiner, S. R., History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 3 vols. (1894–1901), I, 193Google Scholar.

43 CP, III, 338: my italics.

44 E.g. ibid. pp. 398–404, 408–11, 415, 457–8, 461–2, 524–5, 530, 578–9, 592.

45 Ibid. p. 344.

46 Ibid. p. 585.

47 Ibid. p. 576.

48 Ibid. p. 599.

49 From the Digression: CP, V, 449.

50 CW, VII, 28–9 (CP, IV, 316–17).

51 CW, VII, 50–1, 356–7 (CP, IV, 329–30, 457–8).

52 CW, VII, 392–3; cf. 186–7 (cp, IV, 471; cf. 389–90).

53 CW, VII, 553: translation by Samuel Lee Wolff (CP. IV, 535).

54 CW, VII, 554–7 (CP, IV, 536–7). Von Maltzah n also quotes this (p. 72), as part of his evidence of Milton's continuing pride in the Defensio, on which we agree. M y purpose in citing some of the same passages is to document the continuity of Milton's faith in the capacity of the committed minority to sustain the cause of liberty. Unlike von Maltzahn, I suppose this faith to have remained essentially consistent from the Tenure until the autumn of 1659, with no brief but drastic lapse in February 1649.

55 Woolrych, Austin, ‘Milton and Cromwell: “a short but scandalous night of interruption”?’, in Lieb, M. and Shawcross, J. T. (eds.), Achievements of the left hand: essays on the prose of John Milton (Amherst, Mass., 1974), pp. 192–7Google Scholar.

56 Von Maltzahn, p. 180.

57 CP, VII, 239–40, 274–6; see also pp. 46–7, 83–5.

58 CP, V, 144.

59 Von Maltzahn, p. 45.

60 Above, pp. 937–940.

61 ‘Date’, p. 223.

62 ‘Date’, pp. 236–8.

63 ‘Date’, pp. 239–41. Another reason why the Westminster Assembly was fresh in his mind was that he had been wrestling with the proof texts of the Westminster Confession just over a year earlier, in A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes.

64 ‘Date’, pp. 233–5, 240.

65 Von Maltzahn, p. 45.