Milton Road, Salisbury

Milton Road is in the south of Salisbury, close to the Bournemouth Road. I’m not sure whether the area might be considered to be in Harnham or in Britford – perhaps it’s neither.

Milton Road, Salisbury is named after John Milton

I think that Burford Road, which is in the same area, is named after the developer of these roads, but I would be fairly sure that Milton Road is named after the 17th Century poet, John Milton, whose most famous work is Paradise Lost.

My reason for assuming that Milton Road is named after John Milton is that it adjoins Dryden Road and Butler Road. John Dryden ¹ and Samuel Butler ² were both also 17th Century poets.

John Milton – a controversial figure for the name of a road?

My personal view is that John Milton is one of the two most controversial people to have a road named after them in the Salisbury area. George Pullman is the other, although I feel that Pullman Drive is probably a reference to his railway carriages rather than the man.

Milton’s early religious views

Milton’s first polemical works were both radical and dangerous.

He published an anonymous work in 1641, ‘Of reformation touching church discipline in England and the causes that hitherto have hindered it’. In this tract, Milton attacks episcopacy – the existence of Bishops within the church.

Milton’s attack was strident – he called for the execution of all Bishops, and predicted that they would burn in hell.

There are three things that it might be worth pointing out here:

• this is somewhat more extreme than Karl Marx. Marx did write that the ‘religion is the opium of the people’, but followed this with ???
• there are many streets in Salisbury that would have different names if Milton had had his way!
• a few years earlier, three anti-episcopalians had been sentenced to ‘torture and mutilation on the scaffold and subsequent incarceration’ ³. Milton’s views were dangerous to express.

Milton was, then, a radical in his religious writings. He was to be radical too in his writings on censorship and on divorce. To a large extent, his views on these would now be more or less mainstream.

His role in the regicide, however, remains as radical and perhaps as shocking now as it was then.

John Milton and the regicide

Milton was not, in a technical sense, ‘a regicide’.

‘Regicide’ in general means the murder, or execution of a king or queen.

A ‘regicide’, in this context, is typically defined as somebody who either:

• signed King Charles I’s death warrant, for example John Carew or Cromwell himself or
• played some part in the execution, for example Daniel Axtell, who commanded the guards at the execution

Milton did neither of these things but he was an enthusiastic and important supporter of the execution of the King.

In February 1649, a book, purportedly written by the executed King was published called ‘Eikon Balilike‘ (‘image of the king’). The book was extremely popular, despite being banned by the Commonwealth.

Milton was commissioned to write a rebuttal. He called his book ‘Eikonklastes‘ (‘image breaker’ – I don’t know if this was the first use of the word which became ‘iconoclast’). It was published in October. In this book and in the later ‘Defensio prima‘, Milton explicitly defended the execution of King Charles.

He wrote:

it is lawful for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death

It’s probably fair to say that he was the chief propagandist in favour of the killing of the King.

Milton was deeply unpopular with the royalists. A typical royalist response to Milton’s propaganda at the time was that of the Earl of Bridgewater. He had a copy of the ‘First Defence, and in it he wrote:

‘this book is most deserving of burning, its author of the gallows’

After the restoration of the monarchy, in June 1660, the new government issued a warrant for Milton’s arrest. In August, an order was made that copies of his books should be handed in for burning. The public executioner then burned his books outside the Old Bailey.

Milton was imprisoned in the Tower of London, but he was eventually pardoned. It seems that he owed his pardon to the pleading of influential friends, including Andrew Marvell, and to his infirmity – he was by this time blind.

Milton does seem to have been lucky to escape the gallows. The restored monarchy executed the preacher Hugh Peter for proclaiming his support for the regicide, even though he played no active part.

John Milton and the American and French revolutionaries

Milton’s ideas were embraced by revolutionaries in both France and America. The French revolution led to its own regicide, of course. The American revolution, on the other hand, was a revolt against the British crown. This legacy isn’t one which would make the man an obvious choice to have roads in Britain named after him.

The French Revolution and Milton

In 1789, a French pamphlet was published called ‘Théorie de la royauté, d’après la doctrine de Milton. The book quoted Milton’s Defensio. It was re-published in 1792 with a preface calling for Louis XVI’s trial and execution ⁴

The American Revolution and Milton

John Adams compared the British ruling class to Milton’s Satan.

He also quoted Milton:

For myself, I must beg you to keep my name out of sight, for this feeble attempt, if it should be known to be mine, would oblige me to apply to myself those lines of the immortal John Milton, in one of his sonnets,

“I did but teach the age to quit their cloggs By the plain rules of ancient Liberty, When lo! a barbarous noise surrounded me, Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs.”⁵

Thomas Jefferson echoed Milton in his Inaugural Address.

In ‘Aeropagitica‘ Milton writes that

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do ingloriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?⁶

Jefferson declared

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.⁷

Jefferson wrote a ‘Commonplace Book’, which quoted Milton 48 times ⁸

Benjamin Franklin said that Britain’s system of taxation was reminiscent of Milton’s description of chaos ⁹

Franklin quoted Milton at length in his ‘Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion’¹⁰

Why name a road after John Milton?

So, as I’ve hopefully outlined, John Milton was:

• a man of controversial, even extreme, religious views
• a chief proponent of the killing of King Charles I
• a writer who influenced the regicides of the French Revolution and the American revolt against Britain

So why name a residential road in a Salisbury suburb after him?

The work

The first answer to this question is obvious – his poetry.

The Dictionary of National Biography says that

Paradise Lost is widely and rightly regarded as the supreme poetic achievement in the English language, fit to sit alongside the poems of Homer, Virgil, and Dante ¹¹;20 Aug 2009]

I’ve got a ‘tin ear’ for poetry, but I was impressed by some lines that I heard quoted by Anna Beer in a podcast about Milton, in particular the way the last line switches to curt monosyllables. ¹²

Milton wrote a sonnet about his dead wife. By this time he was totally blind, although he has been sighted for much of their marriage. He writes about seeing her in a dream. She:

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

The last line describing Milton waking from his sighted dream into his reality of blindness.

The reconciliation after the Civil War – some anecdotal comparisons

The second answer to the question of why a road is named after a regicide is, I think, that the divisions and strife of the English Civil War seem to me to have been left behind fairly quickly.

I should say here that I am speaking of a period of history that I know little about – please take this with several pinches of salt.

American Civil War

My first moderately interesting point of comparison is with the American Civil War. I’m not an expert at all, but I *think* that there are still traces of the conflict today in America.

It’s been argued that the Ku Klux Klan had it’s roots in the defeat and perceived humiliation of the American South. Margaret Mitchell memorably makes this case in ‘Gone With the Wind’. As far as I’m aware there was no comparable anti-royalist movement after the restoration.

At a more civilized level, the Confederate flag is still flown in the Southern states. The comparison here is worthwhile – I don’t know if the parliamentarians had a flag, and if they did I would be surprised if one person in ten would recognize it.

Ireland

My second point of comparison is with Ireland, where Cromwell is still justifiably viewed with bitterness. I’ll quote one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands, ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ by the Pogues

A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell
You who raped our Motherland
I hope you’re rotting down in hell
For the horrors that you sent
To our misfortunate forefathers
Whom you robbed of their birthright
“To hell or Connaught” may you burn in hell tonight ¹³

England

My third point of comparison is a newspaper article I came across ‘google-ing’ Milton.

It’s about the unveiling of a statue of John Milton in the town of Milton, Delaware. The article, and a picture of the statue, are on Delaware Online”.

Speaking at the ceremony, British Consul Oliver St. Clair Franklin said he recently dined with Prince Andrew. When the young royal asked him, “What’s going on in your patch?” Franklin told him of the coming statue dedication in Delaware. “Milton, Delaware?” the prince asked. “They have a city named after John Milton in America?” Over after-dinner port, as the pair talked of Miltons — the poet and the town — Franklin said he was to relay the queen’s greetings at the statue dedication. But the prince asked, “Why don’t you bring greetings from me?” ¹⁴

This is a member of the royal family talking about a man involved with the execution of a king.

You could argue that the regicide was a long time ago, and of course, Charles I isn’t a direct ancestor of Prince Andrew. However having read through some of the literature on Milton and the execution, the account of Prince Andrew’s sending ‘greetings’ for the dedication of the statue does seem quite striking.

My point

I’m not making any sort of claim about ‘the English character’ here, and I’m certainly not saying that English people are any more civilized or conciliatory than either the Irish or the Americans. It is just that for a variety of reasons, the Civil War, monarchy and the regicide aren’t issues which much excite the English imagination.

If the monarchy and the regicide were still ‘live issues’, then I suspect the road would not be named after Milton, no matter how important a literary figure he was.

What do you think?

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Visiting Salisbury?

For accommodation, see the Hotels in Salisbury page.

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Footnotes

1. John Dryden – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
2. Samuel Butler (poet) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
3. Oxford DNB article: Milton, John [↩]
4. The life of John Milton: a critical biography By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski [↩]
5. The Founders’ Constitution Volume 1, Chapter 4, Document 5 The University of Chicago Press Papers of John Adams. Edited by Robert J. Taylor et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–. [↩]
6. John Milton Quotes [↩]
7. John Milton Quotes [↩]
8. The life of John Milton: a critical biography By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski [↩]
9. The life of John Milton: a critical biography By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski [↩]
10. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Volume II: Philadelphia, 1726 – 1757 — Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion [↩]
11. Gordon Campbell, Milton, John (1608-1674), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18800, accessed document.write(printCitationDate( [↩]
12. Books podcast: Anna Beer on her new biography of Milton | Books | guardian.co.uk [↩]
13. Young Ned of the Hill. By the way, if you’ve come here because of the Pogues reference, then I’d recommend the Dub Version of ‘Young Ned of The Hill’ on the Pogues’ box set [↩]
14. Delaware Online” [↩]