04 July 2025
A Newly Discovered Lease by John Milton in the Portland Papers
John Kuhn describes the unexpected discovery of a rental agreement made by John Milton in 1663 among the Portland Papers.
In the summer of 2022, I was hunting intently through the 17th-century papers of the Harleys, a gentry family originally from Herefordshire. I had hoped to find more information about the English author Aphra Behn, who had—perhaps—stayed at Robert Harley’s plantation in Suriname in the 1660s. While flicking through a box (Add MS 70067) of hundreds of miscellaneous bills and receipts, a name jumped out at me from a postcard-sized piece of paper: John Milton. Sitting in the Manuscripts Reading Room, my first instinct was to think that it surely couldn’t be the famous poet and polemicist (it was); my second instinct was to think that even were it him, scholars must already know about it (they didn’t). Much due diligence later, it turned out that I had, completely by accident, stumbled across an unknown John Milton document!
The document records an agreement to sublease a property on Petty France, a street in Westminster; it certifies that Robert Harley had been renting from John Milton, but needed to shift the lease onto a woman named Mrs Dickenson. The sublease transfer, settled by a family agent working in London, became agglomerated into the Harley financial papers. This collection descended through various aristocratic marriages into, eventually, the hands of the seventh Earl of Portland, who surrendered family archival material to the British Museum in the mid 20th century in lieu of paying taxes. It’s no surprise scholars have never come across the lease, given that it sat quietly in a box simply labelled “miscellaneous financial papers,” alongside hundreds of miscellaneous, worn, irregularly-shaped receipts, many in nearly illegible handwriting, that mostly record quotidian transactions like hat-buying and trips to the apothecary.
Alas, the document is just a sublease, not a diary or a lost variant draft of Paradise Lost; nonetheless, it does shed interesting new light on a key period of the poet’s life. In 1652, Milton had moved into a “pretty garden-house” on Petty France in Westminster, close to Parliament, where he would write The Readie and Easie Way and begin Paradise Lost. After the Restoration, Milton, who had justified the execution of Charles I in Eikonklastes (1649), found himself on the wrong side of a re-empowered and vengeful Stuart monarchy. Many of his republican colleagues were hunted down, imprisoned, and executed. Milton (who had been fully blind for almost a decade, at this point) fled his house, only to be jailed and later, for somewhat unclear reasons, spared from execution and released. He never returned to the address in Westminster and this document now shows us why: he was renting it out while—understandably—putting more physical and psychic distance between himself and the new government by decamping to other parts of London.
In addition to showing us more about the why and how of Milton’s movements and living arrangements, the document also reveals interesting new details about his financial/social connections in the 1660s. The renter Robert Harley and Milton were connected by the fact that they both knew Milton’s next-door neighbor in Westminster, John Scudamore, who, like the Harleys, was also from Herefordshire. Robert Harley, whose personal library contained at least one work by Milton, seems to have been using the house very briefly before taking ship to Barbados, where he would serve for a brief and very calamitous stint as Lieutenant Governor: an interesting Atlantic world connection in Milton’s immediate circle.
The Harleys had sort of played multiple angles during the war: though they initially sided with Parliament, they supported a settlement with Charles I in 1648 and Robert, his father, and his brother had consequently been briefly jailed (an event called Pride’s Purge). Cromwell subsequently viewed the family with suspicion, and after the war, they were able to cash in this (somewhat tepid?) royalism for favors from Charles II. Even so, Robert Harley nonetheless seems simultaneously to have fallen under political suspicion for his previous connections to Parliament at, perhaps not coincidentally!, the exact moment he would have been negotiating renting from Milton. Mrs Dickenson/Dickinson is interesting, too; she seems to have been Frances Dickenson, a woman with long family connections to Westminster. She was married to a man named Lym[e]ing Dickenson; he may have been dead by 1660, which would explain the lease being taken out in her own name. Francis Dickenson remains a bit of an enigma, and I hope people will follow the leads I sketch out and find out more about her.
If you are interested in reading more about these figures and the Milton lease, you can find a full write-up of the discovery in a recent issue of the journal Milton Quarterly. Finally, a quick thank you is in order: this publication would not have been possible without the help of Catherine Angerson, Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts, and the very patient and tireless staff in the Manuscripts Reading Room, who helped me repackage the messy Harley boxes dozens of times.
Written by John Kuhn, Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University, New York
Add MS 70067 is currently undergoing conservation treatment. The documents have been arranged into date order and the Milton lease is now numbered folio 113. Many thanks to John for bringing this to the attention of the Modern Archives and Manuscripts team.