During these days the post brought daily news of the horrors of the insurrection in Ireland; Milton read “of two and twenty Protestants put into a thatched house and burnt alive” in the parish of Kilmore; of naked men and pregnant women drowned; of “eighteen Scotch infants hanged on clothiers’ tenterhooks;” of an Englishman, wife, and five children hanged, and buried when half alive; of eighty forced to go on the ice “till they brake the ice and were drowned.” These, and the hideous tortures upon thousands, which history relates, may explain, if they do not palliate the cruelties a few years later which Cromwell committed, and which have made his name synonymous with “monster” to this day throughout this much tormented and turbulent Irish people.
Americans who sharply condemn the devastation which old Oliver wrought will also do well to cry out no less loudly at the like barbaric slaughter in the island of Samar, which was ordered two hundred and fifty years later by some of their own officers.
War opened. There were doubtless anxious days in the house on Aldersgate Street, for brother Christopher, who stood with the royal party, had moved with his father from Horton to Reading, which was besieged. But war was not the sole cause for anxiety. When old Mr. Milton arrived safely in London late in the summer he found his son John married and already parted from his bride of seventeen, who had lived with him but one short month. Of the brief courting of Mary Powell at her father’s house at Forest Hill, near Oxford, we know little. But one day in May, when King Charles I. had driven her brothers and all other students out of Christ Church, and had taken up temporary residence there himself, the venturesome lover came into the enemy’s country and called on her. The family was well known to him; their comfortable mansion housed ten or eleven children and had fourteen rooms. We read of their “stilling-house,” “cheese-press house,” “wool-house,” of their two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly goods.
Whether the girl was deeply enamoured of the grave, handsome man, twice her age, who asked her hand, is doubtful, but they were soon married, and in the Aldersgate house, the nephew relates, there was “feasting held for some days in celebration of the nuptials, and for entertainment of the bride’s friends.” Then the relatives bade the bride goodbye. But the young wife, having been brought up and lived “where there was a great deal of company and merriment, dancing, etc., when she came to live with her husband found it very solitary; no company came to her;” consequently at the end of a month her preoccupied husband gave consent to the girl’s request to pay a visit home, with the promise of returning in September.
Some sons of intimate friends joined the nephews as pupils, and the elder Milton was added to the household. But the bride declined to answer her husband’s letters or to return; during the following months the irate man, thus deserted, wrote his pamphlets on “Divorce,” while all England was astir with the meeting of the famous Westminster Assembly, the spread of Independency, and the king’s defeat at Marston Moor. During these days also Milton wrote his remarkable scheme for the education of gentlemen’s sons, in which he showed himself as radical and original and as ready to make learning a delightful and not an odious process as did Rousseau and Froebel a century or more later. Marvellous was the work accomplished by Milton’s young pupils at Aldersgate Street. We read of these boys of fourteen and sixteen, though even their learned teacher knew not yet of the microscope and the law of gravitation, studying not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Italian.
Milton’s noble “Areopagitica”—a plea for freedom of the press—was written during these melancholy, wifeless months, while the din of civil war was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness over his country’s miseries and his own.
The fortunes of the Powell family had waned with the king’s cause. One day, when Milton called on a relative who lived near by his home, on the site of the present post-office, “he was surprised,” writes his nephew, “to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him.” A reconciliation was effected, and, with the wife of nineteen now two years older and wiser than since their first attempt at matrimony, they began housekeeping in the Barbican.
This was a larger house than the one in Aldersgate Street, and only a three minutes’ walk from it. It remained until Masson’s lifetime and had, he says, “the appearance of having been a commodious enough house in the old fashion.” “And I have been informed,” he adds, “that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of glass lozenged in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as a schoolroom, where Milton had used to teach his pupils.” The visitor to the noisy, bustling Barbican to-day, close to old London wall, will find nothing that Milton saw.
Here he published the first edition of his collected poems. The title-page tells us that the songs were set to music by the same musician, Henry Lawes, “Gentleman of the King’s Chapell,” who had engaged him to write the “Arcades” and “Comus.” It was to be “sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Paul’s Churchyard, 1645.” The wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines:
“That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You’d say at once, seeing the living face;
But finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching-artist’s mis-attempt.”