“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639Scudamore, Viscount of Sligo, to English merchants along his route, requesting
their assistance to him.^3
Milton probably arrived in Paris in early May but remained only “some days”
(CPW IV.1, 615). Cyriack Skinner explains his rapid transit through France by the
fact that he had “no admiration” for this kingdom’s “manners & Genius.”^4 In Of
Education (1644) Milton projects as one benefit of English educational reform that
we will not then need “the Mounsieurs of Paris to take our hopefull youth into thir
slight and prodigall custodies and send them over back again transform’d into mim-
ics, apes & Kicshoes” (CPW II, 414). The France Milton encountered was the
absolutist France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu had allied France
with the Protestant powers in the Thirty Years War to counter the threatened
hegemony of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, but at home he relentlessly
suppressed Huguenot political power. His destruction of La Rochelle (1628), which
the Huguenots had defended long and courageously, had gone into the annals of
Protestant martyrology. Still, even a few days would allow Milton to vist some
Parisian sights – the Louvre, Notre Dame, the newly built palace of the Luxem-
bourg, the Palais Royal, the Jardin des Plantes. While in Paris he might have heard
about the recently founded Académie Française (1635) and the recent production
of Corneille’s The Cid at the Théâtre Français.
He mentions only two contacts in Paris, neither of them French: the first, Lord
Scudamore, introduced him “of his own initiative” to the second, Hugo Grotius,
“a most learned man... whom I ardently desired to meet” (CPW IV.1, 615).
Grotius, the famed Dutch international jurist, was then in exile from his native
Holland as an Arminian opponent to that state’s Calvinist orthodoxy and a strong
supporter of religious toleration; from 1635 he had served as ambassador to the
French king from Queen Christina of Sweden. Milton would have had several
reasons for his “ardent” interest in Grotius. He was perhaps already thinking his
way toward positions that he would later hold and that Grotius had already de-
fended in various writings: natural law theory, the basis of government in social
contract, broad religious toleration for Protestants, an Arminian concept of free
will, and aristocratic republicanism.^5 Already something of an antimonarchist, Milton
would find a good deal to discuss with Grotius, who had written in De Jure belli ac
pacis that monarchy and liberty are as incompatible as slavery and freedom: “As then
personal Liberty excludes the Dominion of a Master, so does civil Liberty exclude
Royalty, and all manner of Sovereignty properly so called [i.e. arbitrary rule]” –
though people might freely choose these unfree conditions of life.^6 Milton may
already have read, or then learned about, Grotius’s important dramatic works –
Adamus Exul (1601) and Christus Patiens (1617) – on subjects he himself would later
treat.^7 Upon leaving Paris Milton made for Nice (rather than Marseilles as Wotton
had suggested), probably traveling to Orléans, then along the Loire to Lyons and
through Provence. That journey took perhaps two weeks.
Much of the Italy Milton visited was directly or indirectly controlled by Spain.