“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632“frater verendus,” refer, as most critics suppose, to the deaths, respectively, of Chris-
tian of Brunswick (June 6, 1626) and Count Ernest of Mansfeld (November 29,
1626). It was followed shortly by an obsequy for Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely (d.
October 6, 1626) whose death Milton claims to have heard about while his cheeks
were “still wet and stained with tears” from paying his “sad respects” to the bier of
Andrewes (his funeral was November 11). Both poems register Milton’s reformist
concerns. Felton had spoken at Cambridge a few months earlier in support of Berk-
shire over Buckingham. And into the Andrewes elegy Milton introduced what seems
an extraneous lament for the lost Protestant heroes in the Thirty Years War: “Then
I remembered that glorious duke and his brother, whose bones were burned on
untimely pyres; and I remembered the Heroes whom Belgia saw rapt into the skies
- the lost leaders whom the whole nation mourned.”^34 The lines pass oblique judg-
ment on those unheroic English leaders – James I and Charles I – who have kept
England from joining the continental Protestants in arms against Rome.
Elegy III, “In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis” (68 lines), the most accomplished
of Milton’s early funeral poems, opens with a generalized but personal lament for
the senseless, indiscriminate ravages of Libitina, goddess of corpses, linking the plague
in London with the untimely loss of the Protestant heroes. “Pitiless Death” destroys
all nature and also exceptional spirits like Andrewes and the heroes. The consola-
tion is an ecstatic dream-vision in which the speaker sees angels welcoming Andrewes
to a sensuous garden filled with light, flowers, silver streams, and gentle winds – a
fusion of Elysium with the Christian heaven. But upon waking the speaker some-
what disconcertingly quotes Ovid (Amores I.v), referring to a dream of blissful love-
making with Corinna: “May dreams like these often befall me.” “In obitum Praesulis
Eliensis” for Bishop Felton employs iambics (68 lines, alternating trimeter and
dimeter) – an appropriate choice for this poem’s long and fierce invective against
Death. The consolation here is provided by Felton’s voice from beyond the grave - a forecast of St Peter’s interpolation in Lycidas – redefining Death as God’s ap-
pointed guide to the afterlife and describing his own journey through the heavens
to the “gleaming gate of Olympus.” The poem concludes abruptly with Felton’s
refusal to describe the blissful place – “For me it is enough to enjoy it eternally.”
Here the speaker has no dream-vision, and makes no response.
Milton also assigned to 1626 his longest and most ambitious Latin poem to date,
“In quintum Novembris,” a miniature epic on the thwarting of the Guy Fawkes
Gunpowder Plot (1605), the design by a cabal of Roman Catholics to blow up king
and parliament.^35 The poem registers Milton’s sympathy with reformist Protestant-
ism; it exudes Protestant zeal and Virgilian aspiration. The immediate occasion may
have been a university celebration of Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1626; but the
near collapse of Protestant military hopes in Europe after the loss of many Protes-
tant leaders and the defeat at Breda (June, 1625) may have prompted Milton to treat
at this time that earlier miraculous rescue of English Protestantism, as an incitement
to greater English militancy in the Thirty Years War. The poem’s 226 hexameter