John Milton

John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, in 1608, the son of a scrivener who was also a composer of church music. He attended St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1629 and his MA in 1632, then read privately for about six years at his father's houses in Hammersmith and Horton. Between 1638 and 1639 he traveled in France and Italy, visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples, and called on Galileo, who was living under the sentence of the Inquisition.

Back in England as the conflict between king and Parliament opened, Milton wrote pamphlets against the bishops, four tracts arguing for divorce on grounds of incompatibility beginning with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643, and both Of Education and Areopagitica in 1644. In 1649 the Council of State appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues, the post responsible for the government's Latin correspondence, and he defended the execution of Charles I in A Defence of the People of England in 1651. His sight failed completely by 1652, and he worked thereafter through assistants and dictation.

At the Restoration in 1660 Milton was arrested and his political books were burned by the public hangman. He was released and lived out of office in Bunhill, London, and for a time at Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. Paradise Lost was published in ten books in 1667 and reissued in twelve in 1674; Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes appeared together in 1671. He died in London in November 1674 and was buried at St Giles Cripplegate.