John Milton and William Chappell

Abstract

1UBREY wrote of John Milton at Christ's College, His ist Tutor there was Mr Chapell, from whom receiving some unkindnesse he was afterwards (though it seemed contrary to the Rules of the Coll:) transferred to the Tuition of one Mr Tovell'I known to us to be Nathaniel Tovey. When Aubrey made this entry in his notes, he was basing it, as he states, on the testimony of Milton's brother Christopher and we may accept the evidence that there had been a serious quarrel between tutor and pupil and that Milton felt he was treated badly. The causes of this quarrel I shall endeavor to conjecture. When Aubrey added over unkindnesse' the phrase whip't him,' he introduced a romantic touch which has, I believe, tended to throw the episode out of focus. Whether Chappell did or did not chastise Milton with the boyish rod of correction is a question fraught with modern emotional prejudice against corporal punishment, a prejudice Milton did not share. He accepted flogging as an appropriate discipline for schoolboys. He had learned good morals and good literature under the ferular of a notorious flogging schoolmaster, Alexander Gil, and he applied the birch to his own nephews, John and Edward Phillips, when they were pupils in his own school.2 But it is extremely improbable that Chappell did whip him. That Aubrey inserted the words as an afterthought suggests that he was no longer following Christopher but, as Masson puts it, picked it up from gossip afterwards'3 Moreover Milton was no longer a schoolboy but an undergraduate nearing the statutory limits of eighteen years after which college men were exempt from whip-