Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost

That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete.

It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost.

Tumultuous times

John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics.

The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy.

In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an interest payment from a landowner to whom his father had lent money years earlier. By the time he returned to London, he had tied the knot with the debtor’s daughter. This marriage to Mary Powell – at 17, half his age – lasted just a few weeks. It’s long been assumed that Milton must have been difficult to live with.

A more obvious cause of the rift was politics: the first rumblings of the Civil War were growing, and the Powell family’s strong royalist views were incompatible with Milton’s staunch republicanism. In any case, when Mary abandoned him and returned to her family, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to addressing the topic of divorce.

The law of the time offered a separation agreement “from bed and board” that didn’t go as far as terminating the marriage. Dissolution “from the bond of marriage” was valid only on grounds of adultery. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published as an anonymous and unlicensed pamphlet, made the radical argument that a breakdown due to “indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind” should be sufficient grounds.

Milton alluded to poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace

Milton was well ahead of his time. It was another three centuries before parliament passed the Divorce Reform Act 1969, legalising no-fault divorce on the grounds of an “irretrievable breakdown”. To his contemporaries, however, Milton’s justifications for divorce were likely the most controversial of all his opinions.

They led to open attacks that reached parliament (by now his name was associated publicly with the book), where he was condemned and where members pushed for state control over unregistered books, including Milton’s contentious tract.

Under the Licensing Order of 1643, every book produced had to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton penned a strong and impassioned case opposing the policy. In Areopagitica, which became his most famous polemic, he defended freedom of expression and compared suppressing books to killing humans – in fact, he wrote, it might be even more deplorable, because it “slays an immortality rather than a life”.

Republican ideals

Milton was most prolific when expounding his diehard republican beliefs. During the 1640s, he spent much of his time writing poetry and prose that supported the militant anti-monarchical movement. When the republican army’s commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, besieged Colchester in 1648, Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”.

That poem also suggested that the job of opposing the tyranny of inherited power remained unfinished: “O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; / For what can war, but endless war still breed, / Till truth, and right from violence be freed.”

Early the next year, parliament indicted Charles I. Fairfax, meanwhile, was overshadowed by a subordinate commander, Oliver Cromwell, who became the island’s most influential statesman – and in whom Milton placed high hopes.

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Charles I’s trial lasted eight days in January 1649. During that time, Milton quickly put together the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, its title page boasting “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death”.

On 30 January, the king was decapitated by a single axe blow and his head held up, blood dripping from the neck, to the cheering crowd. The monarchy and the House of Lords were swiftly abolished. Some years later, Cromwell became head of state, taking the (unmistakably regal) title of lord protector.

Speaking in tongues

Within six weeks of Charles I’s execution, Milton was called upon to serve the republican government in the role of secretary for foreign tongues. Tasked with translating official communications, largely from the period’s international language of Latin, Milton received a handsome annual salary of £288, 13 shillings and 6½d (around £45,000 today).

Foreign governments were still wary of the new regime in Britain, so Milton’s talents were mainly channelled into writings in defence of the revolution.

His Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), published in October 1649, attempted to justify the regicide. It was written in response to Eikon Basilike (The Royal Image), subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published shortly after the execution and purportedly written by the king himself before he died.

Held in high regard by royalists, the title page of Eikon Basilike featured an allegorical image depicting Charles as a saintly martyr, engraved by William Marshall. That artist had earlier drawn Milton for his 1645 poetry collection – a depiction that the author hated.

In retribution, Milton instructed Marshall to engrave a caption in Greek, describing the latter as “a rank beginner” and “a good-for-nothing artist” – barbs which, not speaking that language, he would have been unable to understand.

Milton and Mary Powell had reconciled in 1645, but different problems soon arose. For one thing, the writer’s eyesight was weakening: by 1648, he’d lost all vision in one eye, and in 1652 he became permanently blind. In that same devastating year, Mary died from complications during the birth of their third daughter, Deborah.

Milton’s second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock in 1656, appears to have been more amicable. Like his first wife, though, Katherine died in 1658 following childbirth. In one of his most emotive pieces, Milton writes about encountering his late beloved, whom he met only after losing his sight, during his vivid sleep: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

Perhaps tellingly, it was around this time that Milton – a blind man left to raise his three daughters alone – began to work on Paradise Lost.

Despite the overthrow of the monarchy, on Oliver’s death in September 1658 the Cromwellian government reverted to dynastic succession. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as lord protector, but lacked the qualities that had prompted Milton to describe his father as “chief of men… Guided by faith and matchless fortitude”.

Parliament soon retook control, much to Milton’s delight. Within a few months, however, the army had dissolved parliament – something that Milton condemned in no uncertain terms. As the royalists regained power, and with the restoration of the monarchy looking inevitable, Milton remained outspoken in opposition.

The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth proposed the formation of a permanent republican federation, or at the very least an elected sovereign. Yet such a scheme was, by 1660, hopelessly utopian.

Writer on the run

The monarchy was restored that May, when Charles II returned from exile and succeeded his father. Like his fellow republicans, Milton had to either run or hide. With an arrest warrant issued, and in real danger of assassination, he went into hiding. A proclamation was issued ordering that all of his books should be collected for burning, and Milton’s writings were consigned to the flames at the Old Bailey.

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Execution loomed, and many of his friends were put to death. A general pardon issued later in the summer of 1660 exempted Milton from suffering the same fate, but it didn’t mean that he was safe. By autumn, Milton had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

It’s not known why he was pardoned, around three months later; it may have been because of his visual impairment, or thanks to support from his friend Andrew Marvell, a poet who was also an influential MP. Still, Milton emerged from prison having lost many of his acquaintances, and in financial difficulty; he’d paid £150 – a large sum – to be released, and £2,000 of his savings had been seized.

More detrimentally still, his dream of a republic – one in which he had believed, that he’d promoted and that had, for a short while, lived – had all but vanished.

The Restoration complete, plague arrived to ravage England, driving Milton to take refuge in Buckinghamshire in July 1665. When that epidemic abated, he made his way back to London early the following year – only to be met by another disaster: the Great Fire of London. Though his house survived, the majority of his city was razed.

Milton had spent the first half of the 1660s focusing on Paradise Lost, with an inevitably different outlook on life. “I now must change / Those notes to tragic,” laments the poem’s narrator. Milton was by then blind, lonely and essentially under house arrest, the powers he had challenged now restored: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.”

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The well-read Milton alluded to the scriptures, poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace. The result is a dramatic, imaginative take on Satan’s rebellion against God, and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve.

Set at the beginning of human history, it boasts an expansive setting, with Heaven at the top and Earth dangling from it, Hell at the bottom and a dark Chaos in between. Its story is one of ambition and rebellion, questioning the extent of free will and divine justice. Its characters – even God the Father and Son – are complicated and imperfect.

And no Miltonic character is more famous than the deeply intense Satan, who rallies the fallen angels with populist rhetoric but also contemplates his condition with psychological rigour: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”

It’s difficult not to read Milton’s politics into his great epic. In the preface, entitled ‘The Verse’, he explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers, he thought.

By opposing rhyme and writing freely, Milton’s style was inherently nonconformist. Even more surprising is Satan’s often justified, if overambitious, opposition to the omnipotent but stubborn and out-of-touch God. It’s no surprise that this has long been interpreted as a metaphor for brave opposition against the seemingly immovable monarchy.

Milton explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming'. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers

In 1667, publisher Samuel Simmons paid Milton £5 for the rights to Paradise Lost; according to his contract, he received a further £5 once sales reached an agreed figure. In 1674, he republished the most authoritative version of Paradise Lost, in 12 books – like the classic epics with which he may have felt it was on a par.

A few weeks later, Milton prepared his will, in which he mentioned the money still owed by his first wife’s father. He died in November that year.

All is not lost

It’s both intriguing and telling that Milton didn’t venture to North America. As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation.

In an alternative universe, he might have been America’s greatest poet. Yet though Milton was a radical, he was also an idealist who stayed put, believing that he could change the system.

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He had seen some of the world beyond England, travelling to Italy, Geneva and France in 1638. He appears to have had no trouble mastering Italian, claiming that it’s “easily learned at any odd hour”. It’s even said that Milton rolled his letter R when he spoke in Europe, in an effort to differentiate himself from other embarrassing compatriots on the continent.

That trip had a formative effect on Milton, evident in Paradise Lost. When Satan ventures from Hell to Eden with the intention of taking down Adam and Eve, his shield, “massy, large and round… Hung on his shoulders like the moon”. Satan is essentially carrying his shield like a big backpack: it looks like the moon only if “through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” it.

As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation

That artist was the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who’d championed the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. This view was officially deemed “foolish and absurd… formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of holy scripture”.

By the time Milton met him, the Italian was elderly and blind. He had challenged authority but been forced to retract his beliefs, and was under house arrest – just as Milton was when writing Paradise Lost. No wonder Milton also challenged authority.

Never to yield

Yet there is much to suggest that a spark of idealism lived on. Adam, Eve and Satan seemingly all lose in Paradise Lost. But its ending sees the human couple locking hands as they step into a new world, free from Eden’s baggage – a world in which they can explore themselves and engage their free will.

Even Satan, “in dubious battle… shook his (God’s) throne”. Here, Milton holds on to the thought that, for a short while, he played a part in shaking the establishment. “What though the field be lost?” Satan asks himself, before continuing to declare that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.”

Milton’s influence on the English language is as profound as his views on politics and religion were radical. It’s claimed that he invented almost three times as many words as William Shakespeare did. Throughout his career, too, he conceived phrases, many of which speak to the enduring necessity of optimism.

In his masque Comus, the character of the Lady spots a “cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”. And in the elegy Lycidas, Milton ends by confirming the temporary nature of grieving – that life must go on: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine