New objects of luxury began to be manufactured—fans, ladies’ wigs, fine knives, pins, needles, earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons, shoe-buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products from foreign lands were introduced and naturalised—among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots. Forks had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. Kissing was a universal custom, and a guest kissed his hostess and all ladies present.
Though in the time of Milton’s father the amenities of life had much increased, cruelty and severe punishments were more frequent than in an earlier age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at the stake in England suffered in those five years of the bloody queen who, with her Spanish husband at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy England. Many a time must the boy Milton have heard blood-curdling tales from aged men of these ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and John Rogers withered in the flames. His own father may have seen the later martyrdoms of Roman Catholics in Elizabeth’s reign, or of that Unitarian in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of the divinity of Christ—a theological view with which Milton himself is shown to have had much sympathy.
The historian tells us of men boiled and women burned for poisoning; of ears nailed to the pillory and sliced off for libellous and incendiary language. We read of frightful floggings through the streets and of an enormous number of men hanged. Many rogues escaped punishment altogether, for, though punishment when it came was terrifically out of proportion to the offence, and in its publicity incited by suggestion to more crime, the law was often laxly administered.
All periods are more or less transitional, but the England into which Milton came in the first years of the seventeenth century was peculiarly in a state of transformation and unsettlement. As in the beginning of the twentieth century, men’s minds were receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines of religious and political freedom were the dreams of prophets, and were yet to be conceived a possibility by the masses, who through dumb centuries had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched themselves in mother earth and slept among their fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in the days of Wiclif had sprung from the seed, small as a mustard seed, which he had planted, had grown. Birds now lodged among its branches. The time was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of Milton and his mighty compeers, some of its timbers should help rear a new structure for church and state; and others should be driven deep under the foundations of the temple which men of English blood should in the future rear to democracy.
CHAPTER II.
MILTON’S LIFE ON BREAD STREET
irectly under the shadow of St. Mary le Bow Church, and almost within bowshot of old St. Paul’s, in a little court off Bread Street, three doors from Cheapside, John Milton, the son of John Milton, scrivener, was born, December 9th in 1608. The house was marked by the sign of a spread eagle, probably adopted from the armorial bearings of the family, which appear on the original agreement for the publication of “Paradise Lost.” John Milton, scrivener, whose business was much like that of the modern attorney, was the son of a well-to-do Catholic yeoman of Oxfordshire, and is said to have studied for a time at Christ Church, Oxford. Certain it is that he turned Protestant, was cast off by his father, and in Elizabeth’s reign settled in London; by 1600, when he married his wife Sarah, the worldly goods with which he her endowed in the church of All Hallows, Bread Street, included two houses on that street, besides others elsewhere.