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Milton and the English Revolution
Christopher
Hill
London:
Verso, 2020 Paperback.
xviii+541 p. ISBN 978-1788736831. £19.99
Reviewed by Warren Chernaik University of London
When Christopher
Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution was published in 1977, it
received mixed reviews, some highly complimentary and others, by revisionist
historians and traditional English scholars, outraged and indignant. Review
essays by Quentin Skinner and William Lamont, intellectual historians deeply familiar
with the historical context of Milton’s writing, though careful to point out
weaknesses in Hill’s central argument, both concluded that Milton and the
English Revolution was ‘a magisterial as well as exhilarating piece of
scholarship …a huge study crammed with fresh information and challenging
arguments’: ‘In a long and distinguished career … Christopher Hill has not
written a finer book’.(1) Hill’s aim in the book is quite straightforward: to
situate Milton firmly in his immediate historical context, as against those
‘neo-Christian’ traditionalists who ‘believed that they could annex Milton for “orthodoxy”’:
‘It is, in my view, quite wrong, to see Milton in relation to anything so vague
and generalized as “the Christian tradition”. He was a radical Christian
heretic’ [3]. In many ways, Milton and the English Revolution is an
extension of the argument of Hill’s earlier, equally controversial book, The
World Turned Upside Down (1972), subtitled Radical Ideas During
the English Revolution. That book includes a short final chapter, ‘Milton
and Bunyan : Dialogue with the Radicals’, and treats many of the figures
who appear in the later book in greater detail, with illustrative quotations.
In the Introduction, Hill states his thesis with great clarity: Milton was not just a
fine writer. He was the greatest English revolutionary who was also a poet, the
greatest English poet who was also a revolutionary. The poems will not speak
for themselves unless we understand his ideas in their context… I believe that
Milton’s ideas were more directly influenced than is usually recognized by the
events of the English Revolution in which he was an active participant; and
that the influences brought to bear on him were much more radical than has been
accepted. [4] Hostile critics poked
fun at an alleged claim that Milton spent his spare hours hobnobbing with
plebeian radicals in taverns or ale-houses, or accused Hill of ignoring
distinctions between Milton’s views on politics and religion and those of a mixed
assortment of sectaries and unorthodox thinkers of the 1640s and 1650s cited in
the book. But such blunderbuss attacks on Hill misrepresent the book, which
consistently argued for ‘affinities between his ideas and those of his radical
contemporaries, not … identity’:
Lest I be misunderstood, I repeat that I do not think that Milton was a Leveller, a
Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behmenist. Rather I suggest that we should see him
as living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views which he could
not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted him.. [113-115] Hill’s Milton is a
figure riven by conflict, aware at all times of ‘the dialectical interrelation
of apparent opposites’. In his reading of Milton, ‘recognizing Milton’s contradictions,
and placing them in their social context, is central to understanding the poet’
[258, 464]. The overall template of the book is Marxist, but never with the
reductive assumption that ideas do not matter and are simply products of a
material base. Here, as in The World Turned Upside Down, Hill finds
‘conflicting bodies of ideas’ expressed during the English Revolution, which he
sees as falling into three distinct categories. His particular concern is ‘a
third body of ideas, the popular heretical culture, which rejected the ideas
both of court and established church, and of orthodox Puritanism… I see Milton
as a man who moved uneasily between the second and the third cultures’ [69, 77].
As Marxist, Hill often characterizes the differences between his second and
third cultures in terms of class, and words like ‘popular’ or ‘plebeian’ and
‘bourgeois’ find their way into his narrative. Revisionist
historians, who have held sway in the years following the 1980s, rejected
Hill’s assumptions entirely. There was no such thing as an ‘English
Revolution’, there were no clearly divided sides in an era of ‘consensus’ and
local loyalties, and any attempt to find an overarching pattern in historical
events was suspect. Hill was denigrated for relying on printed sources rather
than working in the archives, and was accused of choosing evidence selectively,
ignoring anything that did not suit his partisan approach. But though some of
the attacks of revisionists seemed intemperate, one criticism of Hill’s
methodology was shared by more sympathetic reviewers: his frequent reliance on
undifferentiated lists or parallel quotations drawn from disparate sources,
which, it was claimed, obscured significant differences between them and was
insufficiently attentive to their individual historical contexts. As William
Lamont put it, ‘too often juxtaposition of persons and events becomes a
substitution for a causal explanation’.(2) A detailed analytical discussion of the relationship between the Leveller pamphleteer Richard Overton’s
heterodox Man’s Mortalitie and Milton’s theological and political
convictions, for example, might have been more useful than a miscellaneous list
including John Reeve the Muggletonian, John Bidle the Socianian, ‘Milton’s friend
Sir Henry Vane, Agricola Carpenter, Samuel Gott… John Brayne and Thomas Hobbes’
[319-320]. Milton and the
English Revolution, organized chronologically, begins with a
brief account of Milton’s ‘apprenticeship’ before the 1640s, followed by a somewhat
longer account of ‘the radical underground’, with chapters on ‘Milton and the
radicals’, and on ‘marriage, divorce and polygamy’. Part III on Milton’s
pamphlets in English and Latin ‘defending the Commonwealth’ is followed by a
Part IV, central to Hill’s overall argument, entitled ‘Defeat and After’. The
two longest sections, and in my opinion the most original and stimulating, are
headed ‘Milton’s Christian Doctrine’—ten chapters treating major areas where
Milton’s religious and political ideas could be described as radical and
unorthodox—and ‘the great poems’, with particular attention to Paradise
Lost. One of Hill’s principal aims is to explore continuities between the
early and later Milton, the prose writings of the 1640s and 1650s, and Paradise
Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, rather than seeing
the political concerns of the prose as little more than an unfortunate
distraction from what really mattered. In Milton and in the contemporary
figures to which he calls our attention, religion and politics are
intertangled, inseparable: ‘Milton’s relevance can hardly be grasped without
some understanding of his theology, through which his initial radicalism and
his final synthesis were expressed’ [460]. Hill’s account of the
trajectory of Milton’s early career is relatively conventional. He finds
evidence of incipient radicalism in such works as Comus and Lycidas—a
view challenged, not entirely convincingly, in the recent, authoritative
biography by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton : Life,
Work, and Thought (2008). What is unusual in the excellent Part IV is not
so much the emphasis on the defeat of the ‘Good Old Cause’ (with chapter
headings ‘Losing hope’ and ‘Back to Egypt’) as the insistence that Milton after
1660, rather than abandoning politics, retreating from the world of action,
continued the struggle in other forms. The chapters on Paradise Lost again
and again seek to bring out ‘the political aspects of the Fall’, ways in
which ‘the Fall of Man … for Milton had symbolic significance, as an allegory
of man’s inability to live up to his own standards’, acquiring ‘a more direct
political relevance in the late fifties and early sixties’ [344, 351, 377]. The
account of Paradise Regained similarly emphasizes the political aspects
of the poem, placing it in the context of post-Restoration England. For Hill, Samson
Agonistes reflects ‘hope regained’—not so much personal regeneration as a
possible recovery from despair in the hope that even in the worst of times ‘liberation
is still possible … when God chooses, not when man wants it to come’ [440]. In his aim of
‘replacing Milton in history’ [7], Hill was challenging the prevailing
consensus of the 1970s, as expressed in such works as W.R. Parker’s massive two-volume
biography (1968, second edition 1996) and C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise
Lost (1942, second edition 1961). Since that time, historicism has become
the ‘default option’ in Milton studies.(3) Later historicist scholars have in
various ways built on the foundations suggested by Hill in this book and in The
World Turned Upside Down, The Experience of Defeat (1984), and his
Penguin edition of Winstanley (1973). David Norbrook’s influential Writing
the English Republic (1999) sees Milton as a central figure in a republican
tradition. Like Hill, who argues that the characterization of Satan ‘alludes to
some of the ways in which the Good Old Cause had gone wrong’ [366], Norbrook presents
Milton as deeply critical of Cromwell and his generals. The Campbell-Corns
biography and several studies of Cromwell and the politics of the Protectorate
offer a more nuanced view of Milton in the 1650s. The important studies of Sharon
Achinstein and David Loewenstein emphasize parallels and links between Milton
and religious and political dissent before and after the Restoration, with
particular attention to ‘the experience of defeat’ and its consequences. Nigel Smith
in his wide-ranging Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (1994),
explores interconnections between politics and literature during the Civil War
period, and his Perfection Proclaimed (1989) is a detailed treatment of aspects
of ‘radical religion’ in these years. Other scholars, like Stephen Fallon and
John Rogers, going beyond Hill, have explored the relationship between Milton’s
radical materialism and his politics, ‘the interdependence of natural and
political philosophy’ in Milton and some of his contemporaries.(4) In commenting on ‘the
revolution which never happened’ in the 17th century, Hill tells his readers
that ‘history has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the
past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of
the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of
the experiences of its predecessors’ [The World Turned Upside Down : 15]. Certainly Hill’s
writings on Milton and his radical contemporaries are products of their time,
the heady days of the later 1960s and 1970s, when youthful crowds were singing
‘We shall overcome’ and ‘Blowing in the wind’ in the hope of revolutionary
change. Colleagues have described the effect of reading Hill’s books as
postgraduates as ‘revelatory’, being ‘blown away’, and even now, juxtaposing
Milton with such figures as Winstanley, William Walwyn, Roger Williams, or John
Goodwin allows us to ask ‘new questions’ about Milton, even if we differ from
some of the conclusions Hill reached thirty or more years ago. In darker times,
Hill’s approach to the prophetic, politically engaged Milton may appear even
more relevant, in keeping with the Biblical notion of the ‘remnant’, a
recurrent theme in Paradise Lost as in the moving peroration to The
Readie and Easie Way: ‘Thus much I should perhaps have said, though I was
sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but
with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! To tell the very soil itself,
what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to’. _ (1) Quentin Skinner,‘Milton, Satan, and Subversion’, New York Review of Books (23 March 1978);
William Lamont, English Historical Review 93 (July 1978) : 621-626.
The back cover of the Verso edition quotes the historians John Kenyon and Hugh
Trevor-Roper, as well as the Economist and Guardian, praising the
book as ‘a remarkable work of scholarship’, ‘Christopher Hill’s magnum opus’,
‘fascinating’ and ‘indispensable’. (2) English Historical Review 93 (July
1978) : 622-623. (3) Thomas N. Corns, ‘Christopher Hill
on Milton, Bunyan, and Winstanley’, Prose Studies 36 (2014) : 209-218.
This issue of Prose Studies, based on a conference on Hill’s The
World Turned Upside Down at Sheffield in 2012, includes a strong
revisionist attack on Hill by John Morrill and other essays by historians
expressing reservations about Hill’s methodology. (4) John Rogers, The
Matter of Revolution : Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996 : xii.
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