Who was John Milton?
John Milton (1608-74) was born to a prosperous London family and enjoyed a good schooling. He became a civil servant, writer and poet. He was a radical republican, serving in Cromwell’s government, and held religious views thought heretical by many. Milton’s lasting fame has come from his epic poem Paradise Lost, and his polemical pamphlet Areopagitica. Published in 1644, Areopagitica was a protest against John Lilburne’s treatment, and was the first great impassioned plea for free speech, reminding Parliament that when God created Adam He gave him ‘the freedom to choose’. Milton added: ‘Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the truth, unlesse ye first make your selves, that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true liberty’. In 1645 Lilburne wrote his own anti-censorship pamphlet, England’s Birthright Justified, while he was in prison for denouncing MPs for not taking their part in the Civil War. He attacked the state control
While we know that Joseph Hoyland Fox was one of the people whose names appeared on an onion, and we can see that his promotion of temperance in the neighbourhood would have caused problems for a pub landlord, it is unclear what he had against John Milton, whose name is written on the tag on the only surviving onion. We do know a little about Milton as he was occasionally called before the magistrates of Wellington. Milton first appeared before the court on April 29th 1869 when he was charged with deserting his three children. They had been left at the Wellington workhouse in November 1866, when it had been believed that Milton had gone to Australia. He had been found and arrested in Cardiff where he was working as a shoemaker. Milton promised that he would take his children from the workhouse and leave them with his sister in Wiveliscombe until he could look after them and so escaped being charged. By September 1869 when Milton was again called before the magistrate, two of his childr
