“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645of some experience, had the advantage over parliament’s troops – militia and vol-
unteers – led by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as commander-in-chief. Parlia-
ment’s strength was chiefly in the eastern and midland counties, the king’s in the
north and west, including Wales. Soon after the indecisive Battle of Edgehill (War-
wickshire) on October 23, 1642, the king’s forces took Reading and Horton, Milton’s
old residence. Londoners feared an attack on the City with the attendant horrors of
sacking, pillage, and devastation, but on November 13, in the suburb of Turnham
Green, Essex’s army and the London trained bands turned back the king’s army
with no shots fired. Milton later explained, somewhat defensively, that he did not
join the trained bands or army because he thought he could better serve his country
with his mind and pen.^11
The threatened attack on the City prompted Milton’s Sonnet VIII, “On his dore
when ye Citty expected an assault.” It was first conceived as a paper so placed,
urging the royalist soldiers to spare the poet’s house.^12 Apparently, Milton wrote
only three poems in these years, but in taking up the sonnet genre after a ten-year
hiatus he marked out new territory for it. Sonnet VIII inaugurates the political
sonnet in the English tradition.^13 Fusing personal experience and historical event, it
treats a public military crisis in lyric terms. Joining the epigram-inscription with the
Petrarchan sonnet, this tonally complex poem addresses a potentially threatening
royalist officer, some “Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms.” The Miltonic
speaker is a propertied London poet who offers to strike a bargain: poetic fame for
the officer if he spares the poet and his house, the “Muses Bowre.” Milton reads
this situation through two famous classical stories: Alexander the Great spared Pindar’s
house in the sack of Thebes; and the Spartan Lysander spared Athens from destruc-
tion, moved by verses from Euripides’s Electra. Milton’s allusion presents London as
a new Athens, cradle of democratic culture, which royalists are invited to recognize
as superior to their Oxford/Sparta.^14 But Milton’s hope is tempered by anxiety and
self-irony: he is no Pindar or Euripides – at least not yet; and the royalist officer is
no Alexander. Unspoken, troubling questions abide: How vulnerable are poetry
and the poet in wartime? Can an unknown Milton be a spokesman for poetry’s
power? Could poetry, in modern times, save the poet, his house, and his city?
Milton wrote two other sonnets in the years 1642–5. Sonnets IX and X are
praises of women in terms wholly outside the Petrarchan ethos and conventions
that governed Milton’s Sonnets II–VI as they did most sonnets to women.^15 They
present two very different female ideals, both embodying qualities apparently lack-
ing in Mary Powell. Sonnet IX, “Lady that in the prime of earliest youth,” is
untitled and its subject unknown: she may be someone known to Milton, or en-
tirely fictional.^16 The sonnet describes her in quasi-allegorical terms as a young
virgin who has given herself to religious study and who is seen to embody biblical
metaphors and reprise biblical roles. She has shunned the “broad way and the green”
(Matthew 7:13–14) to labor with the few “up the Hill of heav’nly Truth,” and, in
her devotion to spiritual truth, she has chosen “The better part with Mary, and with