“Between Private Walls” 1645–16497
“Service... Between Private Walls”
1645–1649
During 1645–9 Milton attended chiefly to his concerns as poet, schoolmaster, scholar,
and head of a growing family. Reporting on this period in his Defensio Secunda
(1654), he claims that, until the king’s trial, he felt no need to address the issue of
civil liberty as a complement to his treatises on ecclesiastical and domestic liberty,
since “it was being adequately dealt with by the magistrates” (CPW IV.1, 626).
That retrospective account elides his mounting disillusion with the course of re-
form and with the Long Parliament. He does, however, implicitly criticize that
parliament’s failure to honor and make use of his gifts and his counsel, observing
that he gained nothing from his former services to church and state save the enjoy-
ment of “a good conscience, good repute among good men, and this honorable
freedom of speech” (627). He states also that his finances were strained by wartime
taxes and withheld revenues:
Other men gained for themselves advantages, other men secured offices at no cost to
themselves. As for me, no man has ever seen me seeking office, no man has ever seen
me soliciting aught through my friends, clinging with suppliant expression to the
doors of Parliament, or loitering in the hallways of the lower assemblies. I kept myself
at home for the most part, and from my own revenues, though often they were in
large part withheld because of the civil disturbance [probably the continued legal
controversies over the Powell properties], I endured the tax – by no means entirely
just – that was laid on me and maintained my frugal way of life. (627)During these years of withdrawal from the arena of polemic combat, Milton
collected and published his early poems and brought several scholarly enterprises to
partial or substantial completion: a manual on grammar and another on logic, a
geographical and historical account of Russia, and a history of early Britain. When
he published his early poems late in 1645, he evidently supposed, now that the
fortunes of war had shifted to parliament’s side and the end of armed conflict was in