Notes to Chapter 1Protestant circle. His father was chaplain in the Harington household and he and Charles
Diodati’s father served as tutors to the hopeful reformist Protestant scion, John Harington,
close friend of Prince Henry. Tovey’s father was said to have been poisoned by the
Jesuits in Rome – a story that may have led Milton when on his travels in Rome to
credit warnings of such danger to himself (see chapter 4, pp. 98–9). Tovey later identi-
fied himself with the royalist and Laudian position, but at this stage his reformist affili-
ations were most in evidence. See Donald C. Dorian, The English Diodatis (New York,
1939), 43–6; Peile, Biographical Register, I, 289; and Gordon Campbell, “Milton’s Sec-
ond Tutor,” MQ 21 (1987), 81–90.
29 Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (London, 1625), 71–2.
30 See Mullinger, University of Cambridge, III, 25–64; Masson, I, 157–9; and Twigg, Uni-
versity of Cambridge, 19–24.
31 Joseph Mede reported only a three-vote majority in a letter to Stuteville, Harleian Ms
390, f. 68v.
32 Leo Miller, “Dating Milton’s 1626 Obituaries,” Notes and Queries 27 (225), 323–4,
supplies the date of Ridding’s death from an unpublished letter from Mede to Stuteville.
33 Ibid. For Diodati’s poem, see chapter 1, n. 36. Dorian, English Diodatis, 108–9, points
to resemblances between the two works: similar stanzaic form, similar opening theme,
similar reference to Proserpine and the thread of life.
34 Ll. 9–12, trans. Hughes. Besides Brunswick and Mansfield, the lines allude to such lost
Protestant leaders as Prince Maurice of Orange and several noble English volunteers
killed in the fighting around Breda (spring, 1625), e.g. Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford
and Sir Walter Devereux. See Variorum I, 65–9.
35 See Richard F. Hardin, “The Early Poetry of the Gunpowder Plot,” English Literary
Renaissance 21 (1992), 62–79, for the tradition of poems on this topic. The best-known
of them, Phineas Fletcher’s Latin Locustae, a mini-epic of over 800 lines, was written in
1611 when Fletcher was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, but published only in
1627, in Latin and English. The few parallels are readily explained by the well-estab-
lished conventions of subject and genre.
36 See Macon Cheek, “Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris’: An Epic Foreshadowing,”
Studies in Philology 54 (1957), 172–84. Other likely influences include George Buchanan’s
anti-Catholic satires and Alexander Gil’s In ruinam Camerae Papisticae, written in 1623.
See chapter 1, pp. 8–9 and notes 31 and 32.
37 “Te tamen interea belli circumsonat horror, / Vivis & ignoto solus inopsque solo; / Et,
tibi quam patrii non exhibuere penates / Sede peregrina quaeris egenus opem. / Patria
dura parens, & saxis saevior albis / Spumea quae pulsat littoris unda tui, / Siccine te
decet innocuos exponere faetus.” Ll. 83–9 (translation, Carey).
38 “Et tu (quod superest miseris) sperare memento, / Et tua magnanimo pectore vince
mala. / Nec dubites quandoque frui melioribus annis, / Atque iterum patrios posse
videre lares.” (Translation, Carey.)
39 CPW I, 311. The letter is misdated in the 1674 Epistolarum Familiarium as March 26, 1625,
but it almost certainly accompanied the 1627 Elegy IV. See William Riley Parker, “Milton
and Thomas Young, 1620–1628,” Modern Language Notes 53 (1938), 399–407. A later letter
(July 21, 1628) accepting Young’s invitation to visit praises him as another Zeno or Cicero.
40 The loan was for £500; Powell paid the interest regularly until June 12, 1644, when he
defaulted. See Chronology, 31–2.
Notes to Chapter 2