Milton's England

To every well-read man whose mother tongue is English, whether he be born in America or Australia or within sound of Bow Bells, the little dot upon the map, marked "London," has an interest which surpasses that of any spot on earth. Though in his school-days he was taught nothing of the city's topography and little of its local history, while he has laboriously learned outlandish names on every continent, nevertheless, in his mind's eye, Westminster Abbey looms larger than Chimborazo, and a half-dozen miles of the tidal Thames have more of meaning to him than as many thousand of the Amazon, the Oxus, and the Ganges. To know London--its mighty, historic past and its complex, stupendous present--is to know the religion, the art, the science, the politics,--the development, in short, of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Perhaps there is no better method of coming to know what is most interesting in this centre of all English life than studying one of the supremely important periods of its long history, when it was touched by the spiritual genius of one of England's most noble sons.

Three periods of a hundred years each stand out above all others since the Christian era in their significance and richness of accomplishment.

The third period began about 1790 with the birth of the American Republic and the outbreak of the French Revolution. The first was that one hundred years which from 1450 to 1550 included the beginning of the general use of gunpowder, which made the pigmy with a pistol more than the match for giant with spear and battleaxe. Then it was that

"Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite And stretched electric wires from mind to mind."

In this period Italian art made its most splendid achievements, and Luther, Calvin, and Columbus gave man new freedom and new possibilities.

The middle period--the one in which England made her greatest contribution to human advancement--is the one that we are to consider. Milton's life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and included the brilliant period of exploration and adventure just before Milton's birth, in which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other ambitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers sought, like Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, and renown.

It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. It included all of Milton's great Puritan contemporaries, who, fighting for the rights of Englishmen, fought the world's battle for freedom. It ended in 1688 with the downfall of the house of Stuart and the final triumph of those principles for which Vane and Milton had struggled and died without seeing the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch has sat upon the English throne by any outworn theory of "divine right of kings," but only, explicitly and emphatically, by the will of the English people.

For all believers in the people, for all who honour Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the century that knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, John Winthrop and William Bradford must, more than most others, have significance.

John Milton was born in London in 1608; and it is chiefly the London of the twenty years that intervened between the Spanish Armada and his birth which we are to consider in this chapter.