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������ɫ Associate Professor of English John Kuhn likes to be thorough, which is how he ended up leafing through a few boxes in the British Library.

He was on the hunt for evidence connecting English author Aphra Behn with Suriname. That led him to Robert Harley, the lieutenant governor of Barbados, who owned a plantation she may have visited in the 1660s. Then the clues led him to the British Library, which has several boxes of the Harley family’s 17th-century financial papers.

“They are basically just a big pile of unsorted small documents like receipts that have never been catalogued,” he explained.

But one of the documents — a run-of-the-mill sublease agreement — bore an unexpected signature: John Milton, of Paradise Lost fame. Kuhn published an account of his discovery in the 2024 Milton Quarterly, titled “New Light on John Milton as Landowner and Landowner: A Previously Unknown Manuscript Lease from 1663 in the Portland Papers.”

Milton is, of course, among the most well-known writers of his age, and Kuhn assumed that other scholars knew about the document. He decided to check his assumption against the poet’s biographies — and found that he was the first to find this particular text.

“At the end of the day, it’s just a little thing, a sublease; it’s not a diary or a lost poem. But nonetheless, it shows us some interesting stuff,” Kuhn said. “It fleshes out Milton’s choices at this really difficult moment in his life.”

The ‘pretty garden-house’

During the English Civil War in the 1640s and ‘50s, Milton became an important part of the parliamentary government that deposed and then executed King Charles I. He authored political pamphlets and propaganda, including the influential Eikonoklastes in 1649, which justified the regicide. Perhaps owing to his close contact with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s government, he purchased a house in an area of Westminster known as Petty France.

Described by his contemporaries as a “pretty garden-house,” the edifice — which no longer exists — was around a 10-minute walk from the Halls of Parliament. It had eight hearths, making it one of the larger houses on the street, but not nearly the size of the two largest, which had 19 and 21 fireplaces.

“He starts Paradise Lost and writes other important political prose while he’s living there, including The Readie and Easie Way, which is this very brave — and ultimately failed — last-ditch attempt right before the Restoration to convince people they should not bring the monarchy back,” Kuhn said.

When the monarchy is restored, Milton’s life takes a dark turn. His second wife died in 1658, after giving birth to a daughter who also died, and leaving the widower to provide for three remaining daughters ages 8 to 14.

Republicanism, the political cause that he supported for most of his adult life, collapsed. The poet was completely blind at this point — he composed Paradise Lost and his other works via dictation — and many of his colleagues faced imprisonment or exile. Ultimately, he was caught, jailed and nearly executed himself.

“After his release, we know he was living elsewhere in London, but nobody had really thought to ask what had happened to the Westminster house. This document shows us what happened: Milton kept it and started renting it out to other people while he himself was living somewhere else in London,” Kuhn said. “It’s not hard to imagine why you wouldn’t want to live right next to the government that had just almost executed you!”

Enter renter Robert Harley, who owned at least one book by Milton and was friends with Milton’s neighbor, which may have been how they met. Harley is an interesting figure; his family played both sides of the civil war and landed government positions during the early years of the Restoration, Kuhn said.

Harley left the Petty France house after his appointment to Barbados, which had been colonized by the English for several decades at this point. His tenure on the island turned out to be a total disaster.

“He gets fired and almost jailed and has to flee, but that’s another story,” Kuhn said.

In the document, Harley passed the lease on to a “Mrs. Dickenson,” a little-known figure whose family has ties to Westminster. While the document is signed with his name, the blind Milton would have dictated it to a secretary or family member. Interestingly, the handwriting doesn’t match any of his known transcribers — a mystery for a future scholar to solve, Kuhn said.

Something as mundane as a rental agreement offers a glimpse into a distant world: London in the aftermath of a civil war, tentatively feeling its way toward the future.

“The monarchy is literally mandating that Milton’s work be burned at this point, and yet he’s simultaneously renting his house out to someone who Charles II is giving political favors to,” Kuhn said. “It’s this weird moment where people who had been on different sides in the war are figuring out a new status quo afterward.”