Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and delinquents under eighteen years old were not infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at Trinity College, “there was a regular service of corporal punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at seven in the presence of all the undergraduates.” Masson discredits the story that Milton was once subjected to corporal punishment.
In Milton’s day the old order was changing, and we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained that “they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every man in a several posture as he pleases; at the name of Jesus, few will bow, and when the Creed is repeated, many of the boys, by men’s directions, turn to the west door.”
Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying: “So many of the young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted and overacted among other young Scholars, I was a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Men and I thought them Fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I hist.”
It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and Burleigh were Cambridge men.
The Cambridge of Milton’s time was but a small town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then as now was King’s College Chapel—in fact, the most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cambridge, despite Mr Ruskin’s just criticism upon it. No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alternate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard to the Chapel of Henry VII., is here applicable. But its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich windows, its splendid organ-screen—old in Milton’s college days—must appeal to every lover of beauty. One loves to think of the young poet musing here upon those well-known lines in “Il Penseroso” which this stately building may have inspired.
“But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters pale,
And love the high, embowered roof,
With antick pillars massy proof,
And storied windows, richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full voiced Quire below,
In service high and anthem clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.”
In King’s Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended service several times, and listened with delight to a Latin sermon from the text “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” On the afternoon of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel and witnessed a play of Plautus.
Among many buildings which were very old even in Milton’s time must be mentioned the church of St. Benedict on Bene’t Street, which was once the chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest.
A generation before Milton’s time Robert Browne, the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and worldliness of the Church of his time, and he resolved to “satisfy his conscience without any regard to license or authority from a bishop.”
When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Separatists that they went to Holland. They sought a refuge where they might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without interference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne’s doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of Church and state, but also of the independence of each individual congregation, that laid the foundation of church government in New England. Presbyterianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the light that he had shown them; the generation of scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge were as familiar with Browne’s doctrine as the present generation is with that of Maurice and Martineau, and Milton must have been much influenced by it.