Milton’s views on punishment may have been shaped by whipping

WHEN the biographer John Aubrey wrote about John Milton shortly after the great poet’s death in 1674, he mentioned his temporary expulsion from Cambridge University after an argument with his tutor.

He described it as “some un-kindnesse”, later inserting the words “whip’t him” into the manuscript.

But modern scholars have rejected the notion that Milton was literally whipped, either ignoring it or dismissing it as legend. Now a major biography concludes that Milton was almost certainly whipped by his first tutor, William Chappell, and that the experience shaped his views of state punishment and censorship. The research has been conducted by Nicholas McDowell, professor of early modern literature and thought at Exeter University.

He said: “Biographers have been rather embarrassed by the idea of a 17-year-old Milton being given a good beating. But I looked at various evidence and found that whipping was still on the Cambridge statute book ... for the most part to boys under 18. It may be that Chappell, 36, felt within his rights to whip Milton because he was still under 18. But it was still unusual.”

Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, is seen as the most significant English author after Shakespeare. But biographers have struggled to explain how the young poet became a defender of regicide despite also believing in freedom of the press and religious toleration.

Professor McDowell said that corporal punishment would have been “a formative early episode”, affecting his views on, for example, the punishment suffered by those who published books considered blasphemous.

He said: “There seems to be a connection in Milton’s mind between the way you could be whipped and punished at university and punishments meted out by the state on Puritans and radicals.’’

While one 19th century biographer suggested that Aubrey’s account of being whipped was “picked up from gossip”, another scholar concluded in 1955: “It is extremely improbable.”

Prof McDowell said: “Biographers have tended to shy away from the episode or deny it. So I had a much closer look.”

His book, is published by Princeton University Press on Oct 27.