Abstract
Milton’s time in the secretariat of the Council of State is an element in the genesis of Paradise Lost, not merely a biographical note. In the poem, Milton explores the move from patrimonial to rational-legal legitimacy, and the challenge posed by charisma to a godly institution. His experience of the duties of public service prompts him to imagine what working practices might emerge, when one is serving a rational-legal God.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
M. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–46
M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. T. Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 153–194.
C. Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961)
R. Stewart, The English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Woodbridge: Boydell and the Royal Historical Society, 1996)
A. G. R. Smith, Servant of the Cecils: The Life of Sir Michael Hickes, 1543–1612 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977)
Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 11–22. The committee was seen as a structure peculiarly responsive to public opinion, S. Kelsey, ‘The Foundation of the Council of State’, in Parliamentat Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power, and Public Access in Early Modern England, eds. C. Kyle and J. Peacey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), ch. 7, pp. 129–148.
J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 7
Bodleian MS Bankes 5/139 (dated 1641) discusses types of remuneration for office holders. G. Campbell and T. N. Corns note that Milton and his colleagues accepted only minor gifts, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 244.
Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1911), 2.213–2.216.
17 May 1649, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1649–50, p. 145; The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow… 1625–1672, ed. C. H. Firth, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1.222–1.223.
L. C. Hector, The Handwriting of English Documents (London: Edward Arnold, 1958), pp. 63–64
F. Taylor, ‘The Books and Manuscripts of Scipio Le Squyer, Deputy Chamberlain of the Exchequer (1620–1659)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester 25 (1941), pp. 137–164.
S. Saunders, ‘Public Administration and the Library of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’, Libraries and Culture 26.2 (1991), pp. 283–300.
F. Palgrave, ed., The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury of his Majesty’s Exchequer, 3 vols (London: Commissioners of the Public Records, 1836), 2.311–2.312
R. B. Wemham, ‘The Public Records in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. L. Fox (London: Oxford University Press and the Dugdale Society, 1956), pp. 11–30.
P. Slack, ‘Government and Information in Seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present 184 (2004), pp. 33–68.
P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)
J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 1–24
E. Barker, The Development of Public Services in Western Europe, 1660–1930 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944)
Condren, Argument and Authority, p. 74; S. Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-books, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 243–244.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 339–343; King’s Servants, pp. 455 and 459–463. Even after the Restoration the efficiency gains were not wholly lost, Crown’s Servants, pp. 69–138 and 269–279; G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State, and Society, 1680–1730 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982)
S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970–1983), pp. 1.xxii–xxxiv.
Wilkes’s work is in BL MS Stowe 296, ff7r-20r, described in P. Brewerton, ‘Paper Trails: Re-reading Robert Beale as Clerk to the Elizabethan Privy Council’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1998), pp. 208–229; R. Cecil, ‘The State and Dignity of a Secretary of State’s Place’ in The Harleian Miscellany, ed. W. Oldys, 8 vols (1642; 1744–1746), 2.265–2.269.
C. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison: Associated University Presses, 2002).
J. Robertson, The Art of Letter-writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Liverpool University Press, 1942).
Cecil, ‘A Secretary of State’s Place’, p. 266. In 1640 the pedagogue Simon Daines ranked secretaries above gentlemen ushers, and clerks below them, M. T. Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 2.
A. Day, The English Secretary (1599), ed. R. O. Evans (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), pp. 101–133.
Sir John Glanville, The Voyage to Cadiz in 1625, ed. A. B. Grosart, Camden Society Publications, second series, vol 32 (London: Camden Society, 1883), pp. vi–viii
F. Bracher, ‘The Letterbooks of Sir George Etherege’, Harvard Library Bulletin 15.3 (1967), pp. 238–245
L. Knafla, ‘Mr. Secretary Donne: The Years with Sir Thomas Egerton’, in John Donne’s Professional Lives, ed. D. Colclough (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003)
H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 97–99.
J. Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)
R. Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
D. L. Miller, ‘Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career’, English Literary History 50 (1983), pp. 197–232.
A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986)
Printed as an appendix in C. Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 1.423–1.443
F. Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. M. Kieman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 33–36
Bacon, Essayes, pp. xix-xxxi; J. Marwil, The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976), pp. 87–91
Condren, Argument and Authority, ch. 4. On the formation of a ‘public conscience’, see K. Thomas, ‘Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-century England’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, eds. J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
W. Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, or, Callings of Men, in The Works (Cambridge, 1603), pp. 903 and 915; R. K. Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-century England (1938; New York: Howard Fertig, 1970)
Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory… Directing Christians how… to Perform all Duties (London, 1673), 1.128, pp. 131, 134, 450 and 133. Challenging the idea that hard work was either a necessary evil or a punishment for sin, some held that labour was one of the ends of man, expressing his true nature, K. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
De officiis was still important in the curriculum in the third half of the seventeenth century, T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2.589
H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956–1961), 2.582
Cicero, De officiis, trans. W. Miller (1913; London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 17–18
Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: the Mackenzie-Evelyn Debate, ed. B. Vickers (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1986).
I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 14–18
The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. T.N. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
The new edition of Bacon’s Of the Advancement of Learning in 1640 was described by the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib in ethical terms: ‘the tyme drawes neere [when Bacon’s aims] shall be fullfilled for some noble ends which Gods providence aymes at’, W. T. Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), ch. 1, especially p. 15.
The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Together with the Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, More Probably by Captain John Gaunt, ed. C. H. Hull (1899), 2 vols (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1997), especially 1.244
P. Buck, ‘Seventeenth-century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics’, Isis 68.1 (1977), pp. 67–84.
T. Porter discusses the democratic aspect of relying on quantitative facts, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 4–8
E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–97.
P. Seaver, ‘The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited’, Journal of British Studies 19.2 (1980), pp. 35–53
C. J. Sommerville, ‘The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic’, Journal of British Studies 20.2 (1981), pp. 70–81.
One of the most well-known instances is that of Nehemiah Wallington, who noted his inner lights in some twenty thousand pages between 1618 and 1654, P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 2–5
G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (1957; Weston Rhyn: Quinta, 2001)
J. Craig, The History of Red Tape: An Account of the Origin and Development of the Civil Service (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1955)
J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–1909), pp. 1.xxvii–xxxvi.
Milton, Of Education (1644), in The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. A. Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1938) (hereafter WJM), 4.277, pp. 281–287.
H. Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable, 1932), pp. 69
Parker enjoys the Mylius-Milton story as a ‘hauntingly familiar tale of red tape, frustrating delays, and almost morbid suspicion and distrust’, W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2.954
L. Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York: Lowenthal Press, 1985)
R. Fallon, Milton in Government (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
B. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 236–237.
J. S. Diekhoff, ed., Milton on Himself: Milton’s Utterances upon Himself and His Works (1939; London: Cohen and West, 1965), p. 248.
J. M. French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (1949–1958; New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 2.234 ff.
Love, Scribal Publication, ch. 3; F. W. Steer, A History of the Worshipful Company of Scriveners (London: Phillimore, 1973), pp. 16–43
F. W. Steer, ed., Scriveners’ Company Common Paper, 1357–1628, with a Continuation to 1678 (London: London Record Society, 1968), pp. 105–106.
J. A. Abbott, ‘Robert Abbott, City Money Scrivener, and His Account Book, 1646–1652’, The Guildhall Miscellany 7 (1956), pp. 31–39.
D. C. Coleman, ‘London Scriveners and the Estate Market in the Later Seventeenth Century’, Economic History Review 4.2 (1951), pp. 221–230.
See, for instance, WJM, 3.421; pp. 4.63, 127, 129 and 295; 5.91, p. 202; 6.106, pp. 120 and 136; 7.363, p. 459; 8.75, pp. 159, 221 and 247; 9.221; 12.29-12.30. The second edition of Eikonoklastes adds that a free commonwealth is never dependent on one man’s whims (which is not, Corns points out, a positive endorsement of republicanism), T. Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, in Milton and Republicanism, eds. D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
W. Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), pp. 109
A. Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan Press, 1981)
L. L. Knoppers, ‘Rewriting the Protestant Ethic: Discipline and Love in Paradise Lost’, English Literary History 58 (1991), pp. 545–559.
D. Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
D. Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 124–127.
C. G. Martin, ‘Self-raised Sinners and the Spirit of Capitalism: Paradise Lost and the Critique of Protestant Meliorism’, Milton Studies 30 (1993), pp. 109–133.
G. Roth, ‘Charisma and the Counterculture’, in Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, eds. G. Roth and W. Schluchter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), ch. 3, especially p. 134.
Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity, pp. 46–49; W. T. MacCaffery, ‘Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics’, in Elizabethan Government and Society, eds. S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield and C. H. Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1961), pp. 95–126.
D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 445.
B. Lewalski analyses this heroic register, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)
On Satan as an entrepreneur, see B. Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
J. S. Bennett says Satan later persuades Eve that the positive command of God is an administrative nicety, to be overlooked for the greater good, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 77–78.
The usual criticisms are compared by M. Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004)
J. Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 9–15
M. M. Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
F. Burton and P. Carlen, Official Discourse: On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications, Ideology and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 44.
J. Shawcross, ed., Milton: The Critical Heritage: 1628–1731 (1970; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), p. 101.
V. Charrow, ‘Language in the Bureaucracy’, in Linguistics and the Professions, ed. R. J. Di Pietro (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982), pp. 173–188
S. Sarangi and S. Slembrouck, Language, Bureaucracy, and Social Control (London: Longman, 1996)
D. Burden, The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument of ‘Paradise Lost’ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967)
M. Lieb, ‘Reading God: Milton and the Anthropopathetic Tradition’, Milton Studies 25 (1989), pp. 213–243.
E. Goffman, ‘On the Characteristics of Total Institutions’, in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)
N. H. Keeble talks of Milton’s ‘authentically puritan opposition between the hollowness of habitual compliance with external forms and the integrity of inner commitment’, ‘Milton and Puritanism’, in A Companion to Milton, ed. T. N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 129.
Copyright information
© 2013 Ceri Sullivan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sullivan, C. (2013). The 1650s: Milton and the Beginning of Civil Service. In: Literature in the Public Service. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137287427_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137287427_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44970-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28742-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)