The Plague of 1625-26, Apocalyptic Anticipation, and Milton's Elegy III

Abstract

The Plague of 1625-26, Apocalyptic Anticipation, and Milton's Elegy III Ryan J. Hackenbracht John Milton wrote "Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis" during his first term at Christ's College in the fall or winter of 1626. 1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous "trailer epidemics" in 1626 drove the numbers still higher. 2 Studying at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification amid widespread distress through an encounter with England's favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes. 3 While Brown's reading of Elegy III is generally accurate, it lacks consideration of both the poem's local historical context and its engagement with contemporary apocalyptic discourses. My intention, therefore, is to situate Milton's Elegy III within the context of the 1625-26 plague, an event that—with the possible exception of Charles's accession to the throne—larger [End Page 403] in English consciousness than any other. Once we understand the cultural conditions of the poem's composition, we can then loomed ask, how does Elegy III correspond to other writings on the plague? In what ways does Milton differ from his contemporaries on the proper spiritual response? What can Elegy III show us of what John Rumrich calls Milton's "apocalyptic consciousness" as a young man once we assume that many Londoners believed the plague was the Black Horseman of the Apocalypse descending upon them? 4 And perhaps most importantly, what does Milton's participation in eschatological discourse allow him to accomplish literarily as well as religiously? Milton was clearly haunted by the social implications of messianic anticipation, particularly later in life as he reflected on the coming of Christ's thousand-year reign. As Barbara Lewalski notes, Milton "appealed from beginning to end to the idea of the millennium to urge personal, ecclesiastical, social, and political reformation." 5 Though Milton's millenarianism may indeed have extended from the "beginning to [the] end" of his life, Lewalski speaks apropos of his primary works such as Lycidas (1638), Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and the political treatises, all of which were written in his later years. Lewalski and other critics harbor two assumptions here regarding Milton's apocalypticism. First, they assume that Milton "never refers to specific contemporary events—wars, plagues, fires, apostasies, blasphemies—as signs of impending apocalypse" but instead defers the Apocalypse and the millennial rule of Christ to an indeterminate point in the future. 6 Second, they insist that the vagueness of the few references to doomsday in the juvenilia indicates that Milton was unconcerned with the end times in his youth. Stella Revard asserts that "the early poetry does not speak unequivocally of Christ's coming to rule on earth. It apparently took the events of the 1640s to awaken Milton's millenarian expectations fully." 7 Revard is only partially correct: millenarianism is indeed absent from Elegy III and the other juvenilia, but this does not mean that young Milton lacked convictions about eschatology in general. In addition, she conflates Milton's belief in the chiliast doctrine of the millennium with his apocalypticism; as John Shawcross has demonstrated, the two terms [End Page 404] are hardly interchangeable. 8 Moreover, it is precisely the generality and doctrinal ambiguity of Elegy III that make it so fascinating as a case study in the apocalypticism of the 1620s and in the eschatology of a generation of Englishmen raised in the shadow of the Thirty Years' War. Elegy III is exemplary of the apocalyptic consciousness of that period—a consciousness that was far more concerned with cautious speculation than with establishing dogma. Evident in works as prestigious as Joseph Mede's Clauis Apocalyptica (1627) and even in poems scribbled by idealistic teenage boys, the period's dominant attitude toward the end times was to adopt a hermeneutic of hesitation—of imaginative exploration that facilitated further...