We know little of Milton’s mother, except that she was a woman of a warm heart and generous hand, and had weak eyes which compelled her to wear spectacles before she was thirty, while her husband read without them at the age of eighty-four. Three of their six little ones died in babyhood, but the little John’s elder sister, Anne, and younger brother, Christopher, grew with him to middle life.
It was a musical household; an organ and other instruments were part of the possessions most highly prized in the Bread Street home. The little lad must have looked with pride at the gold chain and medal presented to his father by a Polish prince for a composition in forty parts which the former had written for him. Many chimes in country churches played the psalm tunes that he had harmonised. To this day a madrigal and other songs of his are known to music lovers. No wonder that the boy reared in this home was ever a lover of sweet sounds, and learned to evoke them with his own little fingers upon the organ keyboard.
The Bread Street of Milton’s day, though swept over by the Great Fire, was not obliterated, and still covers its old site. Just at the head of it, on Cheapside, stood the “Standard in Cheap”—an ancient monument in hexagonal shape, with sculptures on each side, and on the top the figure of a man blowing a horn. Here Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had beheaded prisoners. A little west was the Gothic Cross in Cheap, one of the nine crosses erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, somewhat similar to the modern one at Charing Cross.
Only a few steps from his father’s house the little John found himself in the thickest traffic and bustle of the city. Here were mercers’ and goldsmiths’ shops, and much coming and going of carts, and occasionally coaches, which, as the antiquarian Stow declared, “were running on wheels with many whose parents had been glad to go on foot,” for coaches were but newly come into fashion. As the little lad stood at the street corner looking east and west along Cheapside,—the ancient market-place,—his eye fell on well-built houses three and four stories high; they were turned gable end to the street, were built of timber, brick, and plaster, and had projecting upper stories of woodwork. Stow describes a row built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, of “fair large houses, for the most part possessed of mercers,” and westward, beginning at Bread Street, “the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London or elsewhere in England. It containeth in number ten fair dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one frame, uniformly builded, four stories high, beautified toward the street with the goldsmiths’ arms and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his name, riding on monstrous beasts; all of which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt.”
The modern visitor, as he turns from the jostling crowds of Cheapside into Bread Street, which is scarcely wider than a good sidewalk, will find no trace of aught that Milton saw. The present mercantile establishment, at numbers 58-63, that covers the site of his house, covers as well the whole Spread Eagle Court, in which it stood. It bears no inscription, but, if one enters, the courteous proprietor may conduct him to the second story where a bust of Milton is placed over the spot where he was born.
A little farther south, on the corner of Watling Street, is the site of All Hallows Church, where Milton was baptised, and which is marked by a gray stone bust of the poet and the inscription:
“Milton
Born in Bread Street
1608
Baptised in Church of All Hallows
Which Stood here Ante
1878.”
The register of his baptism referred to him as “John, sonne of John Mylton, Scrivener.”
Here the Milton family sat every Sunday and listened to the sermons of Reverend Richard Stocke, a zealous Puritan and most respected man, who is said to have had the gift of influencing young people.
Further south, on the same side as All Hallows, were “six almshouses builded for poor decayed brethren of the Salter’s Company,” and beyond this the church of St. Mildred, the Virgin. Upon crossing Basing Lane, Milton saw the most noted house upon the street, known as “Gerrard Hall.” This was an antique structure “built upon arched vaults and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen in Normandy,” as Stow relates. A giant is said to have lived here, and the large fir pole in the high hall, which reached to the roof, was said to have been his staff. Stow thought it worth while to measure it, and declares it was fifteen inches in circumference. Small boys in Bread Street may well have stood in awe of such a cane.