Back in 2019, I used this blog to raise the possibility that a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, held in the Free Library of Philadelphia, might bear annotations in the hand of the poet John Milton. The tantalising notes, often taking the form of tiny textual corrections and scratchy brackets in the margins, had just been analysed in detail for the first time by a scholar at Penn State, Claire M. L. Bourne, and her dating and description made it look as if a Miltonic provenance was a distinct possibility. Thanks to digital technology and in particular social media, you can now get instant responses to even the wildest propositions, and within a few hours I made contact with Claire and floated the idea with the wider academic community. I received rapid confirmation that this was more than just a viable idea–it was actually true. Claire and I spent the Covid lockdown giving online talks about the volume, and last year we published an article describing it in detail, in the journal Milton Quarterly.

Fast forward to 2024 and another book from Milton’s library has resurfaced, which I’ve not yet had time to discuss here. At the end of March, scholars from Arizona State University hosted a Research Forum at the public library in Phoenix, with the aim of exploring a collection of books bequeathed to the library in 1958 by Alfred Knight, a real estate magnate and philanthropist. Among Knight’s books was a copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a gargantuan work that charted the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland from their mythical origins through to the present day. And among the scholars present were Aaron T. Pratt (curator at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin), and the aforementioned Claire M. L. Bourne. Aaron spotted some marginalia that roused his suspicions; Claire took a look and confirmed those suspicions; and then Claire sent me some images to see if I agreed. The identification was relatively easy for us to authenticate, not just because of the handwriting, but also because Milton took detailed notes from his reading of Holinshed in his Commonplace Book (Add. MS 36354), now in the British Library. It was immediately clear that there were strong connections between the marks in the book and the notes. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the Commonplace Book, in which Milton collects evidence that kings of England (unlike American Presidents?) are not above the law. A few lines down he reports that the Empress Maud, failing to revoke the laws of the Norman invaders, lost the support of Londoners and with it her claim to the crown. And beneath that is the section of Holinshed from which he gleans this information, marked with a marginal bracket.

The match is by no means 1:1, but there are so many cases where the Holinshed ties up with the Commonplace Book evidence in this way that there can be no doubt that the annotator is Milton.

That said, there are so many annotations in this enormous book that it is going to take some time for us to process them and to work out they have to tell us about Milton’s reading practices. We published a preliminary account in the Times Literary Supplement in May; in that piece, the star exhibit was a photograph which shows Milton censoring his Holinshed by running a line across a passage which described how Arlete/Herleva, the mother of William the Conqueror, behaved when she was summoned to the bed of the Duke of Normandy. In the margins, he added a critical note: ‘An unbecoming tale for a history and as pedlerly expresst’ (or something like that–his words were cropped when the book was rebound). ‘John Milton was a prude‘ was how the story was covered in the online Daily Mail, offering news that may not have come as a huge shock to readers of Comus and Paradise Lost. Other images that we used in the article showed Milton citing other texts he had read, including Edmund Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland and ‘the booke of Provenzall poets’, i.e. Jean de Nostredame’s Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (1575), a book that was not previously known to be on his shelves.

We thought we had found the juiciest images to illustrate our article, but we missed one that might just turn out to be the juiciest of all. This is the woodcut initial ‘I’ that kicks off the Preface to the second bound volume of the Chronicles. As you can see, it depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the newly-created world all around them. But what is being covered up by that big black mark up in the sky to the left?

The answer is, of course, that it is God, as you can see by contrasting this version of the same letter, from a copy of the 1587 Chronicles at the Harry Ransom:

So what exactly is that black splodge doing, covering up God? The answer is, almost certainly, that this is another act of censorship. Protestants objected to the visual depiction of God, viewing it as an incitement to idolatry, and from the early sixteenth century (in a process documented by the historian Margaret Aston), pictorial representations were frequently replaced with the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters for the God of Israel: YHWH. Holinshed’s image offended against a widespread prohibition; hence its vigorous correction in this copy.

The next question is: so who did the correcting, and was it Milton? In a recent article entitled ‘Milton among the Iconoclasts’ (in Depledge et al., eds, Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives [2021]), Antoinina Bevan Zlatar surveys the poet’s lifelong engagement with iconoclasm (at its most conspicuous in his prose work attacking the veneration of the executed Charles I, Eikonoklastes), but suggests that Milton did not adopt the extreme puritan position on the depiction of the deity. In Paradise Lost, Milton permits his God to have the kind of human features that he given in Scripture; this is a God who can be said to sit on a throne, and to have an eye that he can bend down to view his works. That said, Zlatar also reminds us that Milton casts God the Father as invisible, ‘throned inaccessible’ in a blaze of glory, and presents the Son as the visible form of the Father. So perhaps he did have difficulties with too defined and delimited an image of God, as ‘an old man sitting in heaven on a throne with a sceptre in his hand’ (to quote the contemptuous description of the puritan William Perkins). Determining the date and the origins of that smudge of black ink in the Holinshed will be tricky, perhaps requiring non-invasive pigment analysis. At this stage we can only say: it could be Milton.

I first learnt the name of William Herle thanks to this website–I posted an image of an illegible signature I’d found a sixteenth-century book and got a response (from Arnold Hunt at the BL) telling me that it was Herle’s. Then I came across the online edition of Herle’s letters, created by Robyn Adams, Alison Wiggins and their team at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. And then I started to get interested in Herle himself, as a couple of vivid letters took me into the Elizabethan underworld, which turned out also to be a literary underworld, a place where people forged books as readily as they forged coins.

Herle was an intelligencer–a news-gatherer and secret agent–working for Elizabeth’s spymasters William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham. His main area of expertise was the Low Countries, which he visited on several occasions, sometimes on his own, sometimes with official delegations (accompanying the duke of Alençon in 1582, following the earl of Leicester’s army in 1585). Despite his evident value to the authorities, he spent much of his life in crippling debt, and his letters mingle their nuggets of ‘intelligence’ with petitions for financial support. But, as David Lewis Jones puts it in the new DNB, ‘his many requests for a permanent position were ignored by his powerful friends and this suggests that they considered him useful but not entirely trustworthy’. Such was the allotted destiny of a double-agent who hung around with the dodgiest of characters in order to keep Elizabeth’s brutal regime on the tracks.

While we have a mine of information about Herle’s activities from the 1560s through to his death in 1588/9, we have no idea when he was born, and know nothing about his early life, save that he was born in the Welsh Marches, the son of Thomas Herle of Montgomery. He seems to have kept up his ties to the borders (an illegitimate daughter was baptized at Guilsfield, near Welshpool, in 1576). We also know that, somewhere along the way, he acquired many tongues. DNB says that ‘he was well educated with a good knowledge of languages, including Latin, Flemish, and Italian, and probably also French and Spanish’.

Recently a book has surfaced that might shed some light on Herle’s language-learning, and thanks to the generosity of its current owner I’ve had the privilege of spending some time poring over it. It’s a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in the edition printed by Filippo Giunta in Florence in 1516. The title-page is signed ‘Guilielm[us] herleus’, alongside a cynical epigraph: ‘If honest & good thinges were as hard to be preised as don, I think it [sic] shold be as littill praised as now folowed. Q[uo]d W. Herle.’ The book bears various other Herle signatures, no two of which are alike. And strikingly, offsetting the cynicism, there are also a couple of lovey-dovey marginal inscriptions in which Herle celebrates his relationship with an ‘Elizabeth’. ‘E.H. / W.H. / two hearts in one Body joined as Elisabeth & William’, runs one of them. Who the lady was, we don’t know (there is no evidence that Herle ever married).

Besides these signatures, the book contains quite a serious scattering of notes to the text, the majority of which are in Italian. Some analyse the structure of the stories or pick out striking details (the number of people killed by the 1348 plague that provides the spur for the narrative cycle; the ladies’ claim that ‘men are women’s leaders’; a proverb dropped by a crafty abbot, ‘peccato celato mezo perdonato’–‘a sin hidden is half forgiven’; or a range of bogus relics including the finger of the Holy Spirit and the forelock of a seraph). Other bits of marginalia note particular words and phrases (‘paliscalmo’, a little boat; ‘muratore’, bricklayer; ‘inimicheuol tempo’, a terrible time). Some of these may have been penned by other readers, possibly Italian readers–with such tiny samples it’s hard to say how many annotators were involved. But a few of the notes are in English, or they translate Italian terms into English–as when ‘sopra la stangha’ is glossed (correctly, it seems) as ‘a perche for a ha[w]ke’. And one of the tales–a charming narrative which sets out to prove part of the wisdom of Solomon to the effect that women need to be beaten to be kept in line–is marked (in English) ‘to be tra[n]slatyd’. This strongly suggests some kind of language-learning context, in which translation exercises are being set for the students.

Perhaps the most delicious feature of the book is that it lets you see Herle in the process of turning Italian. In one of the margins, apropos of nothing in the text, he writes in tiny, precise letters: ‘Io vorrei [I would like] / Giugl[ielm]o herl’. Having already Latinized himself on the title-page, Herle here turns his name into an Italian equivalent, and produces it in an unusual hand that looks as if it might itself be aspiring to southern European elegance.

Although they have some features in common, it’s not easy to match the writing in these notes with the later writing of the spy William Herle. But then there is a bewildering variety of styles on display even in his signatures–suggesting this is an identity under construction, playing with different hands and tongues (the perfect training for a spy?) It can only be an educated guess, but my strong suspicion is that these notes are indeed evidence for the early life of the intelligencer. More guesses: it’s the 1540s, we’re in a schoolroom, somewhere in Italy, and Herle is immersing himself in one of the greatest of storytellers.

[Thanks to Guyda Armstrong and Elisabeth Leedham-Green for discussing aspects of this book with me. An exhibition commemorating the 700th anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth is currently taking place at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester].

A postscript: this book has now been purchased by the Cambridge University Library, and can be called up in the Rare Books Room: classmark 5000.c.73