In 1661, Milton, who had good reason to reside as far away from Petty France and the court end of town as possible, returned to the neighbourhood of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate, at the end of the street nearest St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, where his father lay buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. During the three years spent here, Vane was beheaded, two thousand clergy were ejected from their livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, starved on an income of only eight or ten pounds a year for a whole family; men of Milton’s way of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days in the week, and preached on the seventh with the police upon their track.
During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while “Paradise Lost” was growing apace, Milton had about him his motherless and ill-educated girls. The oldest, about seventeen years of age, was handsome, but lame, and had a defect of speech. It fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah to read, with scanty comprehension of the words, as their father required their services, from his Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian works. To them, and to a group of young men who felt it an honour to serve him, he dictated the sonorous lines of his great epic. No wonder that girls of a dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin Street dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily records of the doings of the hosts of heaven and hell abominably irksome. They served their father with grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and tricked him in his helpless sightlessness—small blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been by servants and governesses, but pitiable for the father of fifty years, who fought his daily battles with fate alone in the dark.
Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him out, and doubtless told him the latest literary news of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just appointed historiographer royal; of Samuel Butler, who had just gone with the Lady Alice of “Comus” to Ludlow Castle; of Richard Baxter, whose popular book, “The Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” Milton had doubtless read when it appeared five years before; of Pepys, now secretary to the Admiralty; of Izaak Walton, whose “Complete Angler” Milton may have read ten years before; of Evelyn and of the poet Cowley; of Bishop Jeremy Taylor; of George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philosophers, Hobbes, and John Locke, who was then at Oxford; and the budding poet, John Dryden.
We learn from Richardson that Milton usually dictated “leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it, though often when lying in bed in a morning.” Sometimes he would lie awake all night without composing a line, when a flow of verse would come with such an impetus that he would call Mary and dictate forty lines at once. During these days a newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, who was desirous of improving his Latin, and to see John Milton, who, he writes, “was a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world,” betook himself to the modest home on Jewin Street, got lodging hard by, and engaged to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, noticing that he used the English pronunciation, told him that if he wanted to speak with foreigners in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation. This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when Milton, seeing his earnestness, helped him greatly in translation. These happy hours were interrupted by Ellwood’s arrest for attending the Quaker meeting in Aldersgate Street. Three months were spent in Bridewell and Newgate, where he saw the bloody quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spectacle. One heavenly day in a quiet library reading of Dido and Æneas with Milton, the next in an English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty—a memorable experience for a young man of twenty-two, was it not?
Household affairs were going from bad to worse in Jewin Street, and the unhappy home needed a wife and mother. When the news came to the daughter Mary that her father was to marry again, she exclaimed that it was “no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that would be something.” The third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was twenty-four years old when Milton married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, a little south of his boyhood’s home near Cannon Street. She proved an excellent wife, and was of a “peaceful and agreeable humour.” There are traditions that the young stepmother had golden hair and could sing; her good sense and housewifely accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and thrift into the discordant household.
Soon after his marriage, the Milton family removed to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which is the southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was there a garden here, but the site of the present Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, Richard Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was then an open field; while, close at hand, was Artillery Ground, where trained bands occasionally paraded, as they have done from 1537 to the present time. Of the house we know little, except that it had four fireplaces. Near by was “Grub” Street, since changed to “Milton” Street, partly perhaps to commemorate the fact of the poet’s residence in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the Great Plague had begun its desolating course, Milton had completed the last lines of “Paradise Lost.” It was then that young Ellwood came to his assistance, and engaged for him “a pretty box in Giles-Chalfont,” whither he was driven with his wife and daughters.