Student, 17, beaten at Cambridge University

 Does a report about a student being beaten at university count as traditional school discipline? Well it might if he was only 17 years old. Here’s an apparently ‘exclusive’ report about Paradise Lost author John Milton being ‘whipped’ by his Cambridge tutor – from the Daily Telegraph in October 2020.

When the 17th-century 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 suggestion that Milton was actually whipped, either ignoring it altogether or dismissing it as mere legend.

Now a forthcoming major biography [Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton, Princeton University Press] concludes that Milton was almost certainly whipped by his first tutor, William Chappell, and that the experience was shocking enough to have 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 told the Telegraph: “I think biographers have been rather embarrassed by the idea of a 17-year-old Milton being given a good beating by his tutor, and so have tended to cast doubt on it. 

“But I looked at various bits of evidence from the period and found that whipping was still on the Cambridge statute book. But it was only allowed for the most part to boys who were under 18. It may be that Chappell, then aged 36, felt it was within his rights to whip Milton because he was still under 18. But it was still very unusual.”

Milton has been described as the most significant English author after Shakespeare. His writings include Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, as well as prose defences of the execution of Charles I, which influenced the French and American revolutions.

But biographers have struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide, along with other radical ideas such as 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 or politically dangerous by the authorities.

He said: “In the 1630s, when Milton was building up his education, there were a number of incidents of Puritans who were publicly tortured by the State, had their ears cut off and were branded with the words ‘seditious libeller’. It was in retribution for the distribution of incendiary books…

“There seems to be a connection in Milton’s mind between the way you could be whipped and punished at university, and punishments that were being meted out by the state on Puritans and radicals. It culminates in Areopagitica, his great prose work of 1644 arguing against censorship.”

Having been educated at St Paul’s School in London, Milton was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625, and excelled academically. It was during his first or second year that he was temporarily expelled.

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

Words and picture extracted from the Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2020

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