“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658
On March 24, 1657 Milton answered a letter (now lost) from a French scholar
and book collector, Emery Bigot, who had called on Milton during a recent visit to
England and now wrote for help on a scholarly project. He wanted some doubtful
passages checked in his copy of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, a late medieval
treatise about Saxon laws and customs, and asked if the original was in the Tower.
Milton had cited that work in the Defensio and it was a staple in republican argu-
ments for the sovereignty of parliament.^104 Milton attended to the commission with
exemplary thoroughness, calling on his network of scholar friends. He wrote that
he had the passages checked against manuscripts owned by John Bradshaw and
John Cotton, and that William Ryley, “with whom I am on familiar terms,” con-
firms that there is no copy among the Tower documents in his charge (CPW VII,
497–8). Milton also rose quickly to Bigot’s offer to obtain books for him. He asks
for six histories: three volumes just published in an ongoing edition of the Byzan-
tine historians, one of them a metrical chronicle of the world from the Creation to
AD 1081.^105 These requests suggest that Milton was giving serious thought to history
and to his epic. Amusingly, frugal Milton managed to indicate his hope to have the
books “as cheaply as you can” even as he declined to make that request directly,
since the books would have had a fixed price. To Bigot’s expressions of admiration
for his wise conversation and his courage in bearing his affliction, he responds by
restating his belief in the interconnection of life and art, relating it here to issues of
authorial originality and inner vision as well as to his continued study of books:
If I can succeed so that I seem in mind and manners as I seem in my best writings, I
shall myself both have added weight to the writings and received greater fame, no
matter how small, from them in return, since I shall seem less to have taken what is
honest and laudable from the most distinguished authors than to have brought it
forth, pure and unalloyed, from the depths of my minds and spirit. I am glad therefore
that you are convinced of my peace of mind in this severe loss of sight and in my
willingness and eagerness to receive foreign guests. Why should I not quietly bear a
loss of light which I expect is not so much lost and recalled as drawn inward to
sharpen rather than dull the eye of the mind? For that reason I am not angry at written
words nor do I entirely cease studying them, severely though they have punished me.
(CPW VII, 497)
In the interval between parliament’s adjournment on June 26, 1657, the day after
Cromwell’s investiture, and its return on September 29, Cromwell set about
remodeling the council and creating the Other House. Milton prepared only a few
letters for him: five concerning the usual private cases – captured ships, goods, and
prisoners^106 – and a few others arising from Denmark’s declaration of war on Swe-
den in May, 1657. Milton prepared a credentialling letter (August 20, 1657) for
William Jephson, sent by Cromwell as envoy to Sweden to express his dismay and
offer his services as mediator, “to avert those calamities, which will necessarily be
inflicted out of this war upon the common cause of religion” (CPW V.2, 793–4).^107