Dating Milton's History of Britain

Abstract

When I had the pleasure of reviewing Nicholas von Maltzahn's study of Milton's History of Britain, I had nothing but praise for the scholarship he brought to the whole intellectual background of the work, and for his judicious placing of it in the Miltonic canon. His book gives an excellent account of the state of British historiography in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows how Milton's essentially humanist and literary conception of what a history should be, and his exclusive interest in narrative sources, made him already out of date in his method at a time when Spelman and Selden were pioneering a recognizably modern form of historical scholarship. He carefully traces the development of Milton's ambition to write a great national history, explaining why his first conception of a verse epic, singing the heroic past, gave way to that of a lofty prose narrative that would culminate in a celebration of God's presence with his elect nation in the struggle for religious and civil liberty in his own time. He deals fully and learnedly with the influences upon the style and content of the History, from Sallust (Milton's favourite exemplar) and Tacítus through Bacon (possibly) to the preachers of the Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament. He is illuminating about the close association in Milton's mind between eloquence and virtue, and about the ways in which his beliefs about the operation of divine providence modified his predominantly classical approach to the writing of history. He is thoroughly informative about the textual history of the work, and especially about the fragment published in 1681 as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament, whose editor he convincingly identifies as the arch-Tory Roger L'Estrange.