Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, acquired a cottage in Chalfont St Giles as a refuge for John Milton. In London, the plague was a serious threat and, as a high profile supporter of the republican cause, Milton’s liberty was also at risk following the Restoration. It was during the short time that he lived here that he completed his epic poem
Paradise Lost and was inspired (by a question from Ellwood) to begin
Paradise Regained. The cottage was probably built in the late sixteenth century, and has an interesting history – it is now a museum, containing the first edition of
Paradise Lost.
Thomas Ellwood may well have been a friend of Milton's but, Christopher Hill in his book Milton and the English Revolution (1977) suggests that Milton was not an enthusiast of Quaker ideas;
"I do not intend to suggest that Milton belonged to any ofthese groups, that he was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or an early [i.e. pre-pacifist] Quaker. But . . . .their ideas illuminatehis and may well have influenced him, both positively and negatively."
"By 1660 Milton would have criticized . . . Quakers, on these grounds: they ignored the world as it really is, in all its brutality: they were fundamentally unserious, as self-regarding as a modern 'hippie'."
"The picture of Milton subsiding into a genial and pacifist old age,in which all conflicts are mental only, is a piece of twentieth-century sentimentalism which the seventeenth century texts donot justify."
No comments:
Post a Comment