The antiquarian John Nelson states that the family lived at Newington Green, well known for its dissenting academies, where they kept a boarding school; Phoebe taught, because her husband was barred from doing so.
[2] After graduating he appears to have held chaplaincies to the English merchants at Hamburg and at St Mary's Church, Rotterdam.
[4] In order to demonstrate his own superiority, Milbourne supplemented criticisms by specimens of his own translation of the first and fourth Eclogues and the first Georgic.
Dryden replied that if he had fallen foul of the priesthood he had only to ask pardon of good priests, and was afraid Milbourne's 'part of the reparation would come to little.'
The morals of Milbourne, who, according to Dryden, had lost his living for libelling his parishioners, were severely handled in a poem entitled The Pacificator, 1699.