At Scotland Yard, Milton’s only son, John, was born, and here his protracted labours in his vehement controversy with Salmasius brought on the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever shut his world from view. For the next twenty years and more it is the blind poet whose life we follow, during the period when his fiery spirit was chastened not only by his own afflictions, but by the nation’s also.
In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York Street, near the Bird Cage Walk, which was so named from the king’s aviary there. Here the next year his little daughter Deborah was born, and soon after his wife, at the age of twenty-six, after nine years of married life, died. After the first estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, all had gone well. Her little John, who had scarcely learned to speak his father’s name, soon followed her to the grave.
The household then consisted of the poet, his nephew and amanuensis John, and his three motherless little girls. Masson describes the house as he saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then No. 19 York Street, and had a squalid shop in its lower part, and a recess on one side of it used for stacking wood. On entering by a small door and passage at the side of the shop, one groped up a dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in the rooms that were once all Milton’s. “The larger ones on the first floor are not so bad, and what are now the back rooms of the house may have been even pleasant and elegant when the house had a garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened directly into the park.”
Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was landlord of the house and lived close by, placed a tablet on the rear wall inscribed “Sacred to Milton, Prince of Poets.” After 1811 Bentham’s tenant was William Hazlitt; before that his friend James Mill occupied the house.
Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an introduction to Grotius, was his next-door neighbour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment house in London stands upon the unmarked site of Milton’s house. The frequent walk which Milton took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, during his eight years’ residence here, led him half a mile across St. James’s Park from Queen Anne Gate to Spring Gardens or the Horse Guards. The ornamental water was not then there, but there were ponds and trees and pleasant stretches of green turf. Charles II. had it later all laid out by the famous French landscape artist, Le Nôtre.
Occasional sonnets—those to Cromwell, Vane, “On his Blindness,” and “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”—appeared in the increasing leisure of this period, when his duties lessened, and he retired on a diminished salary. But Milton was become a man who was sought out by foreigners of note and persons of quality; among his friends, Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his pupil, Cyriack Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming Lady Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him to teach her little son, and who he said had been to him in the place of kith and kin.
After four years of widowerhood, when his little girls were sadly in need of a mother, Milton married Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, on November 12, 1656. Her coming into the home in Petty France brought serenity and happiness to all its inmates. During the brief fifteen months of their married life, a little daughter came, who followed her soon after to her grave in St. Margaret’s Church beside the Abbey, and the sorrowing husband was again left in his blindness to bring up his three motherless little daughters.
After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out in St. Bride’s Churchyard, was resumed, and in the lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of “Paradise Lost” were dictated, just before the closing days of Cromwell’s life. Under Richard Cromwell, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with the return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home in Petty France, for he well knew the vengeance that might follow. His little girls were sent no one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close, a passage which led from West Smithfield, through an ancient arch. It was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, had lived, and also Le Sœur, who had modelled the statue of Charles I., which, as has been stated, was concealed during the Commonwealth, and was soon to be erected. Sixty-five years later, young Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that he had left his garden to be hemmed in by narrow walls. The labyrinth of little courts and tortuous passages was his safeguard. During those days of arrests and executions of his friends, Milton must have known that any day might bring the hangman’s summons for him. Many a time during the nearly four months that he was hidden here must he in imagination have heard the shouts of the fickle populace, and seen himself haled in a cart to Tyburn gallows. Says Masson: “Absolutely no man could less expect to be pardoned at the Restoration than Milton,” and “there is no greater historical puzzle than this complete escape.” But his faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded for him, and other powerful friends did their utmost in his behalf; the brain that was to give birth to a great epic was spared to England.
Though Milton lay in some prison for a little time, during which his “infamous” books “were solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old Bailey by the hand of the common hangman,” he was soon a free man, though many of his companions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or like Goffe and Whalley fled beyond seas and even there scarcely escaped the king’s swift avengers.
In December, Milton emerged from prison and moved temporarily into a little house on the north side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his former residence upon the street. Close by was the Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, amidst a howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which had been disinterred and were on their way to Tyburn to be swung upon the gallows. It was well for Milton to sit behind barred doors in silence in those days, while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold Algernon Sidney was in exile, and the England that he loved seemed in eclipse.