Читать книгу Milton and the English Revolution - Christopher Hill - Страница 18
ОглавлениеNothing can be more contemptible than to suppose public records to be true.
William Blake, p. 962
Historians have long recognized the existence of two conflicting bodies of ideas in the seventeenth century. But increasingly of late they have become aware of a third body of ideas, the popular heretical culture, which rejected the ideas both of court and established church, and of orthodox Puritanism. This third culture is difficult to identify, because its records are normally unwritten: our evidence comes from hostile accounts of church courts prosecuting heretics, of orthodox spokesmen denouncing them. What I say about it in this chapter is necessarily tentative.
Because there was no freedom for unorthodox men and women of the lower classes to print their views before 1640, still less to submit them to rational discussion, such views were often expressed crudely, jumbled up with magical and prophetical ideas: in attempting rational analysis we no doubt flatter the ideas actually held. Nevertheless, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries certain themes recur in lower-class heresy. Whether they have a continuous underground existence, or whether they crop up spontaneously from time to time, the evidence does not permit us to decide. My hunch is the former, but I could not prove it.
Readers of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs believed that they were heirs to a great popular tradition. To the sneering question, ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ they answered (as John Aylmer had done): Wyclif begat Hus, Hus begat Luther, Luther begat truth.1 Perhaps the continuities which certainly existed in some areas between fifteenth-century heresy and seventeenth-century radicalism (e.g. in Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire) relate to the traditional association of weaving with heresy. Domestic work in the clothing industry was spreading in these two centuries. In the revolutionary decades the radical elements in the Lollard tradition were emphasized by men like Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Dell. The point was regularly made from the other side – for example by Charles I,1 by Bishop Joseph Hall, by John Cleveland (‘Presbyter Wyclif’, ‘Tyler’s toleration’), and by John Collop.2 Cowley in 1643 repudiated not only ‘Wyclifians, Hussites and the Zwinglian crew’ but Luther and Calvin as well, preferring Rome to Calvinism.3
We should not with historical hindsight impose too much organizational coherence upon those who transmitted these ideas. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the orthodox spoke of ‘Lollards’; under Elizabeth of ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘Familists’. There were indeed Lollard and Anabaptist groups, and the Family of Love also had some sort of organization. We do not know much about any of them: more research is needed. But I suspect that clerical inquisitors imposed classifications, ‘-isms’, for their own convenience. They started with some idea of what ‘Lollards’, ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘Familists’ ought to believe, just as they started with assumptions about what ‘witches’ believed. Leading questions would no doubt encourage suspects to conform to the expected type.
So though there were ‘Lollard’, ‘Anabaptist’ and ‘Familist’ trends in popular thought, we should not postulate the existence of an organized underground. There are tantalizing hints. Elizabethan Familists are said to have been linked by itinerant weavers, basket-makers, musicians, bottle-makers, joiners. In 1555 servants and husbandmen came long distances for a secret meeting in Colchester. Sixty-seven years later, also in Essex, Thomas Shepard heard of the Grindletonian Familists, lurking in the obscurity of a Yorkshire Pennine valley.4 The clothing industry linked Essex and the West Riding. The Grindletonians were to be associated retrospectively with Coppinger and the Yorkshire gentleman Arthington, disciples of William Hacket who in the fifteen-nineties believed he was the Messiah.5
Familists – like Lollards before them – tended when challenged to recant, but to remain of the same opinion still. This unheroic attitude was related to their dislike of all established churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. Their refusal of martyrdom no doubt helped their beliefs to survive, but it increases the difficulty of identifying heretical groups with confidence. Only after the excitement of the reign of Edward VI were lower-class heretics for a brief period prepared to court martyrdom: after 1660 one suspects that many former Ranters and Baptists reverted to the ways of their Familist predecessors and returned formally and unbelievingly to the national church. The Ranters ‘would have said as we said and done as we commanded, and yet have kept their own principle still’, said Durant Hotham, stressing this Lollard and Familist reaction as the main difference between Ranters and Quakers.1
With all these reservations, let me suggest some continuing ideas of the lower-class heretical culture which burst into the open in the sixteen-forties. First comes anti-clericalism, the view that a layman is as good as a parson. It may extend to seeing the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy as anti-christian, to rejection of tithes and a state church, to hostility towards universities as training centres for the clergy, to advocacy of ‘mechanic preachers’ who enjoy the spirit of God, so much more important than academic education. All these views are familiar, from Wyclif and the Lollards through Anabaptists and Familists to Levellers and sectaries in the sixteen-forties and -fifties; full documentation would be superfluous. The Familists’ ministers were itinerant craftsmen, and indeed the conditions of underground sectarianism forced the emergence of mechanic preachers. Anti-sacerdotalism was a necessity as well as an ideology. Some Lollards, and a reformer like William Tyndale, even thought that women might preach.2
Secondly comes strong emphasis on study of the Bible, and use of its texts – as interpreted by the individual conscience – to criticize the ceremonies and sacraments of the church. Worship of images, for instance, was denounced as idolatry. Sacredness was denied to church buildings: worship and prayer could take place anywhere.3 Such criticism could be extended to secular institutions. Wyclif thought that the exercise of civil jurisdiction by the church, and in particular the use of force, was anti-christian. The rhyme ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?’, which played its part among the ‘pure Levellers’ (the words are Fuller’s) of 1381, was repeated under Edward VI; this ‘Levelling lewd text’ (Cleveland’s words) was often quoted in the sixteen-forties.1 Sir Thomas Aston in 1641 referred to ‘the old seditious argument, that we are all the sons of Adam, born free; some of them say, the Gospel hath made them free. … They will plead Scripture for it, that we should all live by the sweat of our brows.’2 John Ball and later Lollards said that property should be held in common; the idea reappeared from time to time, culminating in the Diggers of 1649–50.3
Some specific heretical doctrines have an uncanny persistence. Here I am not attempting to be inclusive: I have picked out those only which have some relevance to Milton. From the later Lollards onwards they include the millenarianism frequently met with in lower-class underground movements; it reappeared in England in the fifteen-nineties and sixteen-forties.4 Many English popular heretics rejected predestination, attached greater value to works than to faith, and emphasized human freedom and effort – a sort of pre-Arminianism. This can be found among Lollards and Familists, as well as among continental Anabaptists, from whom it was taken over by the English General Baptists. A Kentish heretic, Henry Hart, ‘a froward freewill man’, wrote a treatise against predestination in Edward VI’s reign. He anticipated Milton in saying that human freedom to choose between good and evil was essential if God was to be absolved of responsibility for evil. Groups of ‘free-willers’ were to be found in Essex as well as in Kent under Edward and Mary.5 An Essex heretic in 1592 thought that ‘all the world shall be saved’; Thomas Edwards in 1646 attributed the idea of universal salvation to believers in the Everlasting Gospel, who included Familists, Behmenists and other radicals.6 Thomas Shepard’s interest in the Yorkshire Grindletonians led him to ask ‘whether that glorious state of perfection might not be the truth?’ The belief that perfection could be attained in this life had been held by London tradesmen in 1549 and 1631 and by many Familists in between. Under Elizabeth men claimed to be Christ.7
Another recurrent doctrine is anti-Trinitarianism, heretical emphasis on the humanity of Christ. Some Lollards denied the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost.1 The rapid spread of anti-Trinitarianism both in the liberty of Edward VI’s reign and in prisons under Mary gave rise to great alarm among the orthodox. In 1555 the divinity of Christ was the subject of discussions in an underground meeting in a Colchester tavern.2 Between 1548 and 1612 at least eight persons were burnt in England for heresies concerning the Trinity, including Marlowe’s friend Francis Kett, grandson of the leader of the Norfolk rebels of 1549.3 Bishop Jewell at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign spoke of a ‘large and inauspicious crop of Arians and Anabaptists’ in England.4 One of the few avowed disciples of Servetus was minister of the Spanish Protestant congregation in London for the first five years of Elizabeth’s reign, and there were anti-Trinitarians in other foreign churches in England.5
The heresy was especially associated with Familists. H.N. (Henry Niklaes, the Familist leader), Samuel Rutherford assured his readers, denied Christ to be God. Christopher Vittels, the itinerant joiner who linked Familist groups in Elizabethan England, had to recant anti-Trinitarian views.6 The defence of the Trinity written by the elder Alexander Gil was directed against an Anabaptist who said Christ ‘was but man only’. Written in 1597, published in 1601, it was still worth reprinting in 1635.7 In his Apology for the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in 1607 Thomas Rogers defended the Trinity against Servetus and H.N.8 Legate and Wightman, the last two heretics to be burnt in England, were both anti-Trinitarians. In 1614 a Latin edition of the Socinian Racovian Catechism was also burnt in London.9 Familists rejected the theology of the Atonement, the sacrifice of the cross, and some abandoned the idea of the existence of Christ. For them the word ‘Christ’ was a metaphor for the divine spark which exists in every man.10
Another heresy which recurs among underground groups was mortalism, the doctrine that the soul either sleeps from death until the general resurrection or dies with the body. N. T. Burns has so thoroughly demonstrated the continuous existence of Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton that readers may be referred to him for evidence, though with a caution that mortalism existed in England well before the Reformation, among ‘Lollards’.1 It was a native heresy.
Tyndale as well as Luther was a mortalist, not least because the doctrine disproved the existence of Purgatory. Calvin opposed the doctrine, and it came to be associated with Anabaptists, radicals beyond the pale. For them it was a commonplace. Servetus was accused of mortalism, and the doctrine was taken up by Socinians. Joseph Mede, attributing mortalism to Socinians in 1638, admitted to Hartlib that it was a powerful argument against Purgatory. In England the Forty-two Articles of 1552 condemned mortalism, though the condemnation was omitted in the Thirty-nine Articles of 1562. Under Elizabeth mortalism was proclaimed by heretics who thought the resurrection occurred in this life: some believed that the soul was annihilated at death. The anti-Trinitarians Francis Kett and Edward Wightman, burnt respectively in 1589 and 1612, believed that the soul was mortal.2
Mortalism then, like anti-Trinitarianism, was a subject of popular controversy in England at least from Edward VI’s reign onwards. A theologically unsophisticated musician like Thomas Whythorne had heard of the doctrine.3 Spenser and his friend Lodowick Bryskett were both deeply interested in the mortalist controversy.4 In 1599 Sir John Davies wrote a poem against the heresy, Nosce Teipsum; Microcosmos (1603), by John Davies of Hereford, also attacked it. The elder Alexander Gil, in his Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (1635), denounced the heresy, which suggests that it was widespread. It travelled to New England, where Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton were accused in the sixteen-thirties of being mortalists as well as Familists.5
Mortalism could be accompanied by, or lead to, a species of materialism. The Lollard Margery Backster in 1428 anticipated Milton in a crude reference to the ultimate physical fate of bread eaten in the Eucharist, in order to show that it could hardly be the body of Christ. William Senes in 1537 declared that ‘God is here upon my hand, in my body, in this stulpe [pillar] and everywhere’ – a doctrine which Familists and Ranters were to echo.1 Some early heretics also believed – again like the later Ranters – that ‘all comes by nature’, that matter is good in itself. Such doctrines by a natural progression can lead to anti-asceticism, glorification of the body, a belief that life is to be enjoyed here and now. This may be expressed as an antinomian libertinism: the elect are exempt from the moral law since God is in them, they partake of Christ’s nature. Such doctrines were denounced by Thomas Rogers in 1607.2
If at death the body returns into its elements, as a drop of water taken out of the ocean returns to it again, mortalism can also lead to scepticism about the physical existence of heaven and hell. Some Lollards denied their existence, and placed Purgatory in this world. The devil, too, was internalized. This could combine with allegorical interpretations of the Bible to make the whole Christian myth describe conflicts which take place only within the believer. Familists were said to believe that Christ and Antichrist were not real persons, heaven and hell not real places: all were states of mind. The Grindletonians, like Thomas Münzer before them and Gerrard Winstanley after them, emphasized the spirit as against the letter of the Bible, a doctrine not unknown to Milton.3 Lollards objected to church marriage, thinking that it should be a civil ceremony. ‘Marriage is superfluous’, the Venetian Ambassador reported heretics as saying in 1499.4 Familists married and divorced by simple declaration before the congregation. Through them the attitude passed to Ranters and Quakers. Some Lollards may have advocated polygamy, though the evidence is doubtful. It was defended by Kentish heretics in 1572.5
Another complex of ideas that interwove with the Lollard-Familist tradition was Hermeticism. The rediscovery and translation of the Hermetic texts in the fifteenth century was of great intellectual significance all over Europe. These writings almost certainly date from the third century A.D., but they were widely believed to be of much greater antiquity. The original Hermetic philosophers appear to have fused Platonic and Stoic ideas, adding some Jewish and Egyptian concepts.6 Through them many tenets of the ancient world were given fresh life in renaissance Europe. The belief that there was a primitive theology which antedated but anticipated Christianity was attractive to many intellectuals, including Francis Bacon, as was the idea of a secret, esoteric wisdom known only to initiates. Hermetic doctrine stressed the original unity of all mankind. But at a lower level Hermeticist ideas fitted in with the magical practices of the peasantry, and were taken up by ‘cunning men’ who catered for the needs of ordinary people, especially in Protestant countries where Catholic magic was frowned on, and also by astrologers.1
The fact that Hermeticist ideas could appeal both to élitist intellectuals keeping their secret wisdom from the vulgar and to lower-class magicians makes their place in the great melting-pot of ideas in the sixteen-forties and -fifties difficult to assess. They contributed to the thinking of medical radicals like Culpeper, of political and social radicals like Winstanley and the Ranters – and of Milton. Not all Hermeticists were radicals, by a long way; but most radicals were Hermeticists.
There were other sixteenth-century influences from the Continent – not only German and Dutch Anabaptism, which historians have stressed perhaps too much, but also the more elusive influence of anti-Trinitarians like Servetus and Ochino, and of the Dutch Familist Henry Niklaes.2 In this book I deal principally with Milton’s relation to the English underground tradition: I say little about continental influences, such as that of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), many of whose works were translated into English in the liberty of the sixteen-forties and -fifties. They had probably circulated in manuscript earlier: they were certainly widely influential among the radicals.3 There are problems in this area with which I am not competent to deal. What is the relationship of plebeian English Familism to the intellectual Familism of the Netherlands and Spain?4 And to ‘libertine’ trends among advanced intellectuals from Elizabeth’s reign onwards? Frances Yates has postulated the existence of a European intellectual underground extending from Bruno to the Rosicrucians, with important English links.5 This hypothesis might explain, for example, how Milton so easily gained his entry into Italian academies, and how he obtained his early knowledge of Familism.6 There is room for detailed research in this area.
Before 1640 the traditions I have been describing circulated verbally. Historians, themselves the products of a literary culture, relying so much on written or printed evidence, are always likely to under-estimate verbal transmission of ideas. Men did not need to read books to become acquainted with heresy: indeed censored books were the last place in which they would expect to find it. Again and again the great heresiarchs deny being influenced by their predecessors. Luther was astonished to find that he was reproducing Hus’s heresies; Milton was astonished and delighted to find that many Protestant divines had anticipated his views on divorce.
I see Milton as a man who moved uneasily between the second and third cultures. In this he is not unique. John Foxe had claimed Lollards and Marian martyrs as predecessors of the Elizabethan church, though many of them would have been persecuted only slightly less ferociously by the authorities of that church. The preaching brethren whom Haller studied hoped in the first four decades of the seventeenth century by Bible-teaching and by discipline to control and organize the powerful forces of the third culture: Oliver Cromwell and others like him decided that toleration of spokesmen for this culture was necessary if popular energies were to be harnessed to defeat the Royalists. Milton’s belief that God reveals truths ‘first to his Englishmen’ drew on this popular heretical tradition.1
In speaking of two cultures, I refer to two bodies of ideas, not to groups of individuals. When we analyse the ultimate logic of these blocks of ideas we can see that they are antagonistic. Some men in the seventeenth century consistently adhered to the full logic of one or other ideological position: some were aware of political consequences. Others pursued a course of action which led steadily in one direction – Lilburne, Wither, Milton. Ideas are not, however, a reflex of economics. Once a body of ideas is in existence, individuals can take up some or all of it for the most diverse and personal reasons. But the fact that individuals hedge, fudge, are inconsistent, seek a quiet life, does not preclude the possibility of differentiating between the bodies of ideas which they muddle. On the whole, Puritans supported Parliament in the Civil War; but some whose ideas at least contain elements of Puritanism supported the King. Richard Baxter moved one way, Francis Quarles and Richard Holdsworth the other. Many like George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar straddle the gap untidily. Such exceptions prove nothing. In our day some millionaires subscribe to Labour Party funds, and there are Tory working men. This does not invalidate the generalization that on the whole the Labour Party is a working-class party, the Conservative Party the party of men of property.
This consideration applies especially to what I have called the third culture. Ideas tend to be expressed by intellectuals: that is what intellectuals are for. Before 1640 authentic expressions of well-thought-out ideas of the third culture are hard to come by. Intellectuals of lower-class origin, if they were to get on in the world, had to adopt (and mostly no doubt conscientiously did adopt) ruling-class ideas, or at least the ‘respectable’ alternative ideas of Puritanism. Those intellectuals who played with the third culture were often arrogant and irresponsible aristocrats and their hangers-on – like Sir Walter Ralegh and his dependants who were accused of atheism in the fifteen-nineties. Ralegh patronized a group which runs across classes, from intellectuals of plebeian origin like Marlowe and Hariot down to the shoemaker in Sherborne who said that men in his locality believed that hell was poverty in this world.1 Hariot had doubts about the existence of heaven and hell, but he insisted on the social necessity of maintaining popular belief in them, since ‘this opinion worketh so much in many of the common and simple sort of people that it maketh them have great respect to their governors, and also great care what they do to avoid torment after death and to enjoy bliss.’2
Such men drew on the European libertine tradition as well as on the body of ideas which I have called Familist. The two are strangely intermingled.3 Upper-class intellectuals who played about with libertine or Familist ideas were perhaps not always wholly serious. Often a desire to shock, to épater, entered in – as with Inns of Court poets who glorified the supposed promiscuity and communism of the Golden Age. Conversely, we should not look for a coherent body of ideas among lower-class Familists. Rather there was a confused remembrance of ideas floating down from various systems of thought, some obsolete;4 a great deal of popular magic and naive belief in direct divine intervention were mixed up with what in the free discussion of the sixteen-forties were to emerge as serious and coherent rational ideas. But so far as the evidence goes, it suggests much more frequent recurrence of the heretical ideas in one form or another among the lower classes than among their betters. In nineteenth-century Russia it was the intellectuals of Narodnaya Volya and Marxism who imposed order and coherence on ideas that had long circulated among the peasantry and working class.
My attempt to survey in this chapter the underground traditions which existed before 1640 is, I am well aware, incomplete; when more work has been done on the subject it may also turn out to be unsatisfactory. But I am sure that the ideas which surfaced in the forties had a long pre-history, and are important for our understanding of Milton’s thinking (and not only of his). The rest of this book will try to demonstrate the latter point.1
