Lycidas and Laud

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between John Milton’s Lycidas and the ecclesiastical policies of William Laud. It is generally thought that Milton’s poem represents a radical critique of the Laudian Church. While Lycidas does contain some potential criticism of Laud, it more often exhibits a moderate conservativism. The following pages locate this conservativism in the poem’s depiction of St Peter, offering alternative explanations for the radicalism ascribed to him. The St Peter verse paragraph contains attitudes towards the apostolic succession of episcopacy, Petrine sovereignty, sermonic style, and church hierarchy that reveal some receptiveness towards the Church of England under Laud. The work of Lancelot Andrewes, and how it was subject to appropriation by rival religious factions, supplies a suggestive parallel for how Milton recasts the moderate conservativism of Lycidas 1637 as radical anti-prelacy in 1645.