Fifteen Eighty Four

The English author John Milton, who never set foot in Ireland, has long been a consequential presence there nonetheless.  Since 1890, for example, visitors to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin have entered through a semicircular lobby in which a beatific face of John Milton shone down on them as they arrived.  In order to notice him, though, entering visitors would need to stop, turn around, look up, peer into the light coming through stained glass windows, and then determine which of the twelve arches contains a representation of Milton.  If a visitor were to do all that, they would see that Milton is beside Homer and surrounded by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Corneille, Virgil, and Thomas Moore.

Framed by Greek, Roman, and Italian Classics and alongside early modern Continental and English standard-bearers, the Milton placed above visitors to the National Library of Ireland is a figure from literary history, the author of an epic, just like Homer, Virgil, and Dante (in whose prestigious company Milton predicted he would find himself).  Milton does not hover over readers only as they come to and from the famous dome of the library’s reading room: he is also threaded through twentieth-century Irish literature and education, cited by W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Patrick Pearse, Maura Laverty, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and others (as I trace in the Afterword to my new book, Milton’s Ireland).

Finding Milton upon entering the National Library of Ireland is a metaphor for Milton in Ireland more generally: he’s there, once you start looking for him, but it may require looking in places you did not expect.  Usually, Milton is received as a poet, the author, most famously, of Paradise Lost.  In the 1640s, though, decades earlier Milton emerged first as a prose political pamphleteer, and royalist Ireland had a formative impact on Milton’s developing republican politics.  In Milton’s Ireland I focus largely on the pivotal, political fifteen years of Milton’s mid-life and mid-career.  As I review in illustrated chapters, the 1641 Ulster Rising is one of several developments in Ireland—e.g., the Catholic Confederacy, and Ormond’s 1649 treaty—that develop Milton’s political imagination.

Ireland powerfully informs Milton’s shift from writing a court masque in the mid 1630s to accepting a position in the republican government of Oliver Cromwell in 1649.  In this new position, Milton was commissioned to explain English government policies, publicly.  In the autumn of 1649, then, as Cromwell went north and then south along the eastern coast of Ireland–with massacres at Drogheda and Wexford–John Milton, in London, published numerous pamphlets explaining current English policy in Ireland.

Initially, Milton’s Ireland is a place within the English polity unfairly filled with Catholics, and, relatedly to his mind, bishops, even in the Church of Ireland.  Later, Milton sees the Ulster Rising as responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of English protestants in Ireland (an inflated number, which varies in Milton’s own accounting).  At the end of the 1640s, when he contributes to a commissioned collection on the 1649 Articles of Peace, Milton is looking at a multipolar, multi-sectarian Ireland.  Apparently what most upsets Milton about Ireland is the fact that English-speaking Royalists, Scots Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Parliamentary supporters can all be found in one place, staking their claim to a shared autonomy and co-existing in a tense pluralism.  Indeed, at the time, Ireland was the only single landmass in the archipelago on which all these populations co-existed without formal political divisions.

Milton objects to the variety he sees in Ireland on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion.  In short, Milton supports Irish unification–under English control.  In the process, Milton contributes to the polarization of Ireland, a place divided between newly landed Protestant arrivals and newly dispossessed Catholic Irish.  The polarized Ireland of subsequent history, manifested in the island’s unequal partition, was an Ireland Milton helped to create, Milton’s Ireland in that sense.  At the same time, though, Milton’s complaints nonetheless record the variety extant in the Ireland of Milton’s day, an important and powerful resource with which to reimagine the history and future of Ireland.  The declaration of a republic in the tricentennial year of Cromwell’s republican invasion is quite likely the subsequent development in Ireland that Milton would have found the most surprising.  Part of the island became Milton’s Ireland in that republican sense, too.  And, as I trace in the book, part of the Republic’s emergence can be seen in the subterranean influence of Milton’s republican political philosophy over the centuries, including on the United Ireland movement of the 1790s.

At least since the conversion of the Free State to a Republic, this complicated, paradox-filled story has been there, waiting to be told.  In Milton’s Ireland, I have offered a first draft of Ireland’s impact on Milton, and Milton’s impact on Ireland.  The story, though, continues, and new details of it might be found in yet more unexpected places, now that we know to look for it actively.

Milton’s Ireland by Lee Morrissey