3
“Studious Retirement”:
Hammersmith and Horton
1632–1638
When Milton graduated from Cambridge in July, 1632, he went to live with his
parents in the London suburb of Hammersmith. About three years later he moved
with them further into the country, to the village of Horton in Buckinghamshire.
We have few records of his quotidian activities in these years, nor do we know the
dates and sequence of much that he wrote. But he began two remarkable note-
books that provide an invaluable record of his poetic development and his self-
directed studies: the Trinity manuscript, chiefly poems and largely autograph; and a
Commonplace Book that excerpts and organizes some of his reading. Several ques-
tions remain unresolved: When did Milton decide against the ministry and for
poetry?^1 Why did he take so long to prepare himself? And why was there a three-
year hiatus in which (so far as we know) he wrote no poetry (1635–7)? In these
years the issue of vocation appears to impinge on all Milton’s other concerns: his
relationships with friends and with his father, the demands of chastity, the threat of
death.
In the Hammersmith and Horton years Milton committed himself more and more
earnestly to poetry and to learning without resolving the nagging question, what
work was he called to do in the world? No seventeenth-century gentleman could
imagine making a career, much less a living, as a poet. Milton rejoiced in his escape
from business and the law, and the ministry seemed less and less viable to him as the
Laudian takeover of the church accelerated. If he did not overtly reject a clerical
role, neither did he imagine himself undertaking it. In accepting commissions for
two aristocratic entertainments – Arcades and A Maske, popularly known as Comus –
he may have hoped to attract some settled patronage, perhaps as tutor or secretary in
a noble, soundly Protestant household like that of Bridgewater or the Countess of
Derby. These were years of considerable anxiety and self-doubt. Milton was pain-
fully conscious that by comparison with his peers and by outside measures of success
he had been slow to mature: he had no profession, no independent household, and