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Chapter 7

Ecrasez l’infâme!

As if the womb of teeming truth were to be closed up, if she presume to bring forth aught that sorts not with their unchewed notions and suppositions.

Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), C.P.W., H, p. 224

I tried to suggest in Chapter 4 some reasons for Milton’s violent reaction against the Laudian régime. It outraged him as poet and intellectual no less than as Puritan and led him, once his pen was liberated, to say things about bishops which seem exaggerated to those who are acquainted only with their harmless twentieth-century successors. Take Charles I’s Book of Sports, for instance, which encouraged the traditional rural games on Sundays. Sentimentalists have deplored Puritan vehemence against this; but the frolics which occurred at wakes and church ales could end in murder, and more often did end in illegitimate conception.¹ The attempt to suppress these pagan survivals should be seen as part of a move to spread a new ethos to the dark corners of the countryside. In Milton’s Nativity Ode Christ drives out demons just as Protestants were striving to drive out saints and fertility gods. The Book of Sports symbolizes the difference between the two cultures.²

It is in this context that we should see Milton’s participation in the attack on episcopacy which followed the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640. The old régime collapsed at once: Strafford was tried and executed, Laud was imprisoned, episcopacy itself was challenged. The manifesto of the anti-episcopal party was An Answer to An Humble Remonstrance by Joseph Hall (March 1641). The name on the title-page was Smectymnuus, composed from the initials of the authors (Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen and William Spurstowe), the clerical leaders of the Presbyterian party. The Smectymnuan controversy led to Milton’s five anti-episcopal pamphlets. Of Reformation appeared in the month of Strafford’s execution, May 1641, Of Prelatical Episcopacy and Animadversions upon The Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus within the next two months, the longer The Reason of Church Government at the beginning of 1642 and An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions in April.

Parker plausibly suggested that Milton was invited to intervene in the controversy because he was known from his Cambridge days as the master of a boisterous and flippant manner which sober divines like the Smectymnuans could hardly use themselves. Spurstowe and Newcomen had been undergraduates when Milton delivered his Speech at a Vacation Exercise. There are interesting parallels between the Sixth Prolusion and some passages in Animadversions.’¹ Milton no doubt learnt some tricks from the Marprelate Tracts of 1589, which were reprinted in the early sixteen-forties and whose slashing irreverence would appeal to him.

In the anti-episcopal pamphlets, alongside much routine propaganda, we can trace Milton’s special interest in the cultural and moral consequences, as he saw them, of episcopacy. He believed, or said he believed, that the bishops’ intention in plucking men ‘from their soberest and saddest thoughts, and instigating them by public edict to gaming, jigging, wassailling and mixed dancing’ on Sundays was to ‘prepare and supple us either for a foreign invasion or domestic oppression’. ‘To make men governable’, the prelates’ ‘precepts mainly tend to break a national spirit and courage by countenancing upon riot, luxury and ignorance.’ The ‘tympany of Spaniolized bishops’ have ‘hamstrung the valour of the subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home’. The communion table ‘stands like an exalted platform upon the brow of the choir, fortified with bulwark and barricado, to keep off the profane touch of the laics, whilst the obscene and surfeited priest scruples not to paw and mammock the sacramental bread as familiarly as his tavern biscuit. And thus the people, vilified and rejected by them, give over the earnest study of virtue’, and commit ‘the whole managing of our salvation’ to the priests. A ‘servile and thrall-like fear’ has replaced ‘the adoptive and cheerful boldness which our new alliance with God requires’.²

The bishops have become the praetorian guard of tyranny; ‘faithful and freeborn Englishmen’ emigrate to New England. Instead of imposing the sort of discipline which would make men industrious and conscientious, bishops use church courts for exploitation. ‘Their ceremonies and their courts’ are ‘two leeches … that still suck and suck the kingdom.’ It was not only that the lowest classes liked ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’ and hated true discipline; the courts were undertaking functions which were not their business. Excommunication was prostituted ‘to prog and pander for fees, or to display their pride and sharpen their revenge, debarring men the protection of the law’. Antichrist, as Milton put it, was Mammon’s son. ‘Jurisdictive power in the church,’ he concluded, ‘there ought to be none at all’. John Selden agreed with him. So does the modern world.¹

In his Commonplace Book Milton had already been noting the dangers ‘to both King and country’ of clerical flatterers, and the desirability of separating church and state. He noted the uses of religion to rebels: and that their enemies unjustly charged reformers with sedition, ‘as happens to-day’. What he found quite intolerable was the contempt with which the bishops treated the common people whom they had endeavoured to keep in ignorance. ‘While none think the people so void of knowledge as the prelates think them, none are so backward and malignant as they to bestow knowledge upon them’, as witness their suppression of sermons and of marginally annotated Bibles. Pluralism left many ‘waste places’ in darkness. If ‘the poor mechanic’ had difficulty in distinguishing ‘between faithful teachers and false’, it was because ‘his ear was unaccustomed to good teaching.’ And ‘now with a most inhuman cruelty they who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.’²

The Laudian ceremonies infuriated Milton, and many others, to an extent with which it is difficult to sympathize emotionally in our Laodicean age, so much less passionate about symbolism. The crucial phrase for understanding is Milton’s reference to the Laudian altar as a ‘table of separation’. For the radicals Holy Communion was not a sacrifice mediated by a priest whose magic alone could turn bread and wine into body and blood; it was the shared celebration of a congregation of equal believers, symbolized by their sitting around a table. If the minister (the word means servant) had any role at all, it was to serve bread and wine to the congregation. The Laudian insistence on railing off the altar was thought to imply the Catholic doctrine of the real presence, and (like the surplice and other vestments) to mark the priest as a being superior to the congregation. Thus under apparently trivial disputes over communion rails and the ‘piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies’ there lurked disputes about human (or Christian) equality. Milton was criticizing the withdrawal of the church from the people.¹

Milton and those who felt like him feared that Laudian rule was taking England back to Catholicism. This seemed to be true in ceremonies. It seemed also to be true in Laud’s determined attempt to elevate the status of the clergy, bringing bishops into the government, making clergymen J.P.s, trying to recover alienated church property and to increase the emoluments, political influence and prestige of the clergy as a whole.² Censorship and the prerogative courts were used to silence radical Protestant criticism. Meanwhile Laud was trying to extend the authority of bishops over Presbyterian Scotland, and was severing long-standing connections with continental Protestants, in the Palatinate, the Netherlands and France, regarding them as ‘no better than a sort of sacrilegious and puritanical rebels, preferring the Spaniard our deadly enemy before them’. This threatened ‘to leave us naked of our firmest and faithfullest neighbours abroad’.³

To think well of the reformed religion is cause enough to make Laud one’s enemy, the Earl of Northumberland told the Earl of Leicester in December 1639.⁴ Government policy seemed to make sense only on the analysis put before the House of Commons in September 1642 by John Pym. It was the consequence of the undue influence of the ‘Jesuitical and prelatical faction’ which ‘threatened ruin … to all … the reformed churches’.⁵ In what seemed to many men to be a universal struggle between international popery and international Protestantism, Laud’s little Englandism looked hopelessly provincial: a step on the way to surrender to the Counter-Reformation culture which attracted the courtiers of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. ‘You and your prelatical party are more truly schismatics and sectaries’, Milton was to remind them in 1660, ‘than those whom you revile by those names.’⁶

It is worth emphasizing how very radical were some of the positions which Milton adopted in his earliest pamphlets. For reasons of political discretion, perhaps, he aligned himself with the Smectymnuans. But he must already have been aware of wide discrepancies between himself and them. I shall mention later his not unfriendly reference to Familists.¹ His contemptuous dismissal of ‘the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes’ was more than resentment at financial extortion: it was part of a total rejection of any state church – not only of ecclesiastical jurisdiction but of the very existence of a separate clerical caste paid to preach. Ministers should be elected by their congregations, by plain artisans whom the defenders of prelacy call ‘the mutinous rabble’.² Milton may not yet have fully worked out the implications of this attitude: soon it was to unite him with all true radicals in the English Revolution. The issue of tithes – a state church or none – came to be the crucial issue dividing right from left.

Or take an apparently more remote and theoretical point. The opening paragraphs of Milton’s first pamphlet, Of Reformation, discuss the Emperor Constantine. The official English Protestant tradition – the tradition of Jewell and Foxe – looked back to Constantine’s reign as the epoch in which Christianity triumphed, when the state became Christian. The really radical tradition, however, saw Constantine’s reign as the beginning of the apostacy. Several criticisms are involved – the close union of church and state, the rise of prelatical episcopacy, and the endowment of the church with great wealth. Erbery dated the rise of Antichrist from the time ‘when kingdoms came to be Christian’. John Reeve thought the apostacy began towards the end of the third century A.D.³

So when Milton speaks in Of Reformation of the ‘most virgin times between Christ and Constantine’ he is aligning himself with this tradition, as against middle-of-the-road men who followed Foxe. ‘I am not of opinion to think the church … cannot subsist without clasping about the elm of worldly strength and felicity.’ Bishops ‘extol Constantine because he extolled them’. Through ‘Constantine’s lavish superstition’ the bishops set up ‘Mammon and their belly’ as their two gods.⁴ Milton returned to the same theme in 1659.⁵ The point was social as well as religious. Against the ‘large immunities’ and ‘great riches’ which Constantine had given to the clergy, against the ‘deluge of ceremonies’, Milton set ‘the homely and yeomanly’ religion of earlier Christians.⁶

In the De Doctrina Milton adopted the radical view that religion had been ‘defiled with impurities for more than thirteen hundred years’.¹ If the apostacy dates from the union of church and state, then the English Reformation cannot be seen as a great turning point. The overthrow of papal power marked an advance. But the royal supremacy was a reversion to the least desirable aspects of Caesaro-papalism, and under it the prelatical authority of bishops flourished. The real reformation, a return to the practices of the primitive church, the reformation of ordinay believers, remained to be achieved. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs depicted the common people as the main enemy of Antichrist who is also the Pope. But ‘the people’ were expected to operate under the control of their betters: the example of Constantine justified ‘tarrying for the magistrate’. In the fifteen-eighties the Brownists and Field had called for reformation without tarrying for any. Since Christ is the only king, why tarry for an earthly magistrate? Now in 1641 the learned Milton gave this popular cause a historico-philosophical case. He was followed by William Prynne, in his brief radical phase, and by the Levellers.²

Milton later tells us that it was because he had from his youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights that he felt he must intervene in the Smectymnuan controversy.³ Lycidas seems to confirm that these studies date at least from the late thirties. He may have arrived at his conclusions in his study at Horton. But nothing in the Commonplace Book suggests this: all references to Constantine that Milton copied out of books before 1641 are favourable or neutral.⁴ Wherever they came from, Milton’s conclusions reinforced those of the radical underground, and put their demands within a scheme of history. Not without reason did one of his early critics accuse Milton of associating with the ‘mutinous rabble’, and bringing ‘the very beasts of the people within the borders of the Mount’.⁵

Milton, then, like the radicals, attached less significance to the Reformation than did either party to the Smectymnuan controversy. For him the true reformers were the Waldenses and in England Wyclif and his Lollard successors, the humble Marian martyrs and the persecuted sectaries. ‘The divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif’ anticipated Luther and Calvin, whose names might never have been known if the English reformer had not been silenced.¹ Milton knew that the Protestant Reformation had always been sullied by the material interests of ‘princes and cities’. In his perspective the Reformation was only an incident, part of a rising curve which extended from Wyclif to the English Revolution.

Milton looked back with especial sympathy to ‘our first reformers’, the Waldenses, on whose behalf he wrote his glowing sonnet in 1655. He links Charles Diodati with the Waldenses by echoing the Epitaphium Damonis in the sonnet. ‘Priscamque fidem coluisse piumque’ (line 33) leads on to ‘Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old’.² From the sixteen-forties Milton was studying the history of the Waldenses. He thought that their religion might have continued ‘pure since the Apostles’; they endowed no churches and paid no tithes, maintaining their ministers ‘by alms only’. Their preachers ‘bred up themselves in trades, and especially in physic and surgery … that they might be no burden to the church’. Milton also – like John Goodwin – cited the Waldenses against pacifists, to argue that civil and religious liberty might be defended by force of arms. We shall see later the significance of these emphases. In 1649 Milton praised the Waldenses because ‘they have held the same doctrine and government since the time that Constantine with his mischievous donations poisoned … the whole church.’³

We should not, then, be too surprised that the Reformation is not mentioned in Paradise Lost: the scamper over human history in the last two books is going very fast when we get to this date. In the early sixteen-forties ‘the bright and blissful Reformation’ had seemed one stage in a movement which started with Wyclif and culminated in the English Revolution. From the perspective of post-Restoration England the Reformation seemed just another false start under the rule of Antichrist, its permanent outcome the episcopal Church of England. The Restoration had put paid to the idea of ‘continuous reformation’, and this may have lessened the tactical desirability of looking back to Protestant predecessors. Psychologically, too, it meant that the sense of a continued upward movement was lost. But the Reformation for Milton had never played a unique part in human advance. Wyclif, perhaps because he was an Englishman, was almost equally important.⁴

Lycidas, then, seems to me to lead directly on to the anti-episcopal pamphlets. Whatever consolations immortality might bring for the death of an individual, only divine intervention, the two-handed engine at the door, could remedy the apostacy of a church. ‘Of all those blessed souls which you have persecuted’, Milton told the bishops five years later, ‘and those miserable ones which you have lost, the just vengeance does not sleep.’¹ The strength of Lycidas comes from its fusion of the cultural and the personal. Until the land has ‘enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish,’ Milton could find no outlet for the creative powers which he felt within him. Neither liberty nor a voluntary self-discipline was possible: Milton lived under chaos tempered by arbitrary suppression – of a kind with which he had become familiar in the Italy which had silenced Galileo. A break-through to a different political order was needed if the frustrations of the poet and his country were to be remedied. He wanted to live in a society in which ‘adoptive and cheerful boldness’ would replace ‘servile crouchings’,² in which human dignity was possible, in which gifted laymen might preach if they wished and poets had inspiring subjects and a welcoming audience.³

But ‘adoptive and cheerful boldness’ was the consequence of ‘our new alliance with God’.⁴ The political upsurge of the sixteen-forties gave Milton his vision of Christ as ‘shortly-expected King’, of a just society to be produced by political reformation, a society in which God’s Englishmen will at last realize their destiny and the poet will find his fit audience for celebrating God’s ‘divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages’. The forties gave Milton a new vision, but he had long held an exalted view of the poet’s role, ‘to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility’. This he contrasted with ‘the corruption and bane which [our youth and gentry] suck in daily from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant poetasters’.⁵

Here we come back to the cultural crisis. Milton’s problem was to break through to his public. Spenser had written for a relatively unified audience, in which court and country were not widely separated. But since his time things had changed. ‘Drayton’s difficulty was that he tried to find a public not centred on the court. Ben Jonson, whose view of poetry was as public [as] and perhaps more professional than that of Spenser, created a form of poetry which was more courtly and aristocratic, less national, but which was socially and ethically directed none the less.’ Milton’s early poems revealed him as a son of Ben; but by the sixteen-thirties national unity no longer existed. ‘Social and ethical’ considerations necessitated parting company with Henrietta Maria and the court poets.¹

Ben Jonson had spoken of his dead son as ‘Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’. Milton went one better by claiming that the true poet ‘ought himself to be a true poem; … not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy’. None but good men can either be truly eloquent or love freedom.² Poetry and liberty are always closely linked in Milton’s thinking: so are poetry and God.

But there is another aspect of Milton’s thought which impelled him towards the radicals. The cultural crisis was also a social crisis. Historians are becoming increasingly aware of the threat of popular revolt which underlay the apparent stability of Charles I’s reign. The Tudor consensus among the ruling class had long been breaking up. All over England class bitterness was fierce. Many thought that the lower orders were ripe for revolt. The moderate Simonds D’Ewes in 1622 spoke of ‘a hoped-for rebellion’. Such hopes or anxieties were outspoken in the depression of the early sixteen-twenties.³ In the south-western counties between 1628 and 1631 there were sporadic uprisings against enclosure, and revolt was endemic there throughout the thirties. The temptation to members of the propertied class to give a lead – with all the risks that this would involve – increased with the shame of England’s non-intervention in the Thirty Years War.

In 1628 Sir Robert Cotton circulated a paper entitled The Danger wherein the Kingdome now standeth, whose object was to warn that if Parliament pushed its case against the Duke of Buckingham too hard it might unleash a revolt by ‘the loose and needy multitude,… with a glorious pretence of religion and public safety, when their true end will be only rapine of the rich’. This could be used as an argument to persuade Buckingham to come to terms with Parliament; but the bluff must not be carried too far.⁴ Such considerations may explain the collapse of the opposition when its bluff was in fact called in 1628–9. Wentworth and Noy joined the government; Eliot and Chambers were left in jail. In 1628 the London populace did indeed get out of hand, lynching the Duke of Buckingham’s astrologer, Dr. Lambe. No one was ever called to account for his death, though a heavy fine was levied on the City. Later in the year Buckingham himself was assassinated, to the joy of many more than the younger Alexander Gil. In 1630, in a funeral sermon on the Earl of Pembroke, T. Chaffinge warned of the danger of civil war between country and City, from which Spain alone would benefit.¹ This is the background to those flattering court masques in which all the problems of a divided nation are solved by the descent of a royal deity in the last scene. Twenty years later some despairing radicals turned to Fifth Monarchism in a similar spirit; the direct intervention of Jesus Christ was necessary because there seemed to be no other way of winning the reforms which they desired.

There was intense class feeling then – not only a hatred of gentry and aristocracy on the part of the lower classes, but a reciprocal contempt. Abraham Cowley, himself a merchant’s son, saw the Civil War in historical perspective as an uprising of ‘the base rout’, of ‘Kets and Cades and Tylers’.² He was quoting Charles I, who in his answer of 18 June 1642 to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions warned that, if opposition to him continued, ‘at last the common people … [will] set up for themselves, call parity and independence liberty, … destroy all rights and properties, all distinctions of families and merit’, so that eventually government would ‘end in a dark, equal chaos of confusion, and the long line of our many noble ancestors in a Jack Cade or a Wat Tyler’.³ A later Royalist song contrasted ‘the loyal gentry’ with ‘the perfidious clown’, and said of the latter

Let them, like treacherous slaves, be always bound

To pay rack rents, and only till the ground.

Another song depicted the people saying to one another

We’ll teach the nobles how to stoop

And keep the gentry down.⁴

The scrivener’s son aligned himself with the poor and middling sort against wealthy courtiers. The Lady in Comus observed that

courtesy

… oft is sooner found in lowly sheds

With smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls

And courts of princes, where it first was named

And yet is most pretended.

(321–4)

From his Cambridge days Milton had shown a good deal of contempt for mere hereditary aristocracy. High social rank was a hindrance to virtue, he thought, ‘in respect of the wealth, ease and flattery which accompanies a nice and tender education’.¹ The Lady’s socially conscious retort to Comus’s magnificent invocation of the plenitude of nature,² and the virulent attack on the established church in Lycidas, suggest that Milton, well before the Civil War, was prepared to look for allies outside his own social milieu. Like Oliver Cromwell, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, he saw ‘plain men’ who had ‘the root of the matter in them’ where his adversaries saw ‘the very beasts of the people’.³ ‘The old Puritans observed hierarchy and rank’, John Bastwick complained in 1646; not so the upstart new sectaries.⁴

In the sixteen-twenties and early -thirties many of Charles I’s most passionately sincere opponents chose emigration because they despaired of change – though no doubt most of them hoped, like the Marian exiles eighty years earlier, to return to a reformed England. Oliver Cromwell and Lord Brooke contemplated emigration: Sir Henry Vane went to New England. Opposition was carried on from the Netherlands by extreme democrats like Lilburne, at home by fanatics like Prynne, and by passive refusal to pay Ship Money. Only those led by Captain Poverty were likely to resist more actively.⁵ What made revolution possible in 1640 was the Scottish army. The terms of the Treaty of Ripon, by which Charles had to promise to pay the Scottish army in occupation of northern England, forced him to summon a Parliament. So the Scottish presence was not only a check on the King; it also enabled the Parliamentary leaders to unleash popular demonstrations in confidence that our brethren of Scotland would in the last resort co-operate to prevent the lower classes going too far. Hence the extraordinary scenes of 1640–2 when some leaders of Parliament almost encouraged London mobs and anti-Catholic mobs, turned a blind eye to anti-enclosure riots and the meetings of seditious sectaries in London. The preachers called on the lower classes to fight against Antichrist, confident that they would remain under the control of their betters. ‘I am far from the monster of a democracy,’ said Edward Bowles, chaplain successively to the Earl of Manchester and Sir Thomas Fairfax; ‘that which I call to the people for is but a quick and regular motion in their own sphere.’¹

Milton was never a democrat. But in the years between his return from Italy and the outbreak of civil war he was thinking a great deal about government and the subjects’ right of rebellion, and at least considering anti-monarchical sentiments which he did not find it expedient to express openly until 1649.² At the time of writing Areopagitica he had perhaps more confidence in God’s Englishmen than in the Scottish army or the Presbyterian clergy. Yet in 1640 things had seemed very different. The brotherly assistance of Scottish Presbyterians appeared to have revived the Protestant international which Laud had laboured to disrupt, and which the Thirty Years War had weakened, since German and Dutch Protestants could survive only under the protection of Catholic France; French Huguenots had to resign themselves to a position of permanent subordination. Perhaps for the Scots too acceptance of the English alliance was an attempt to escape from French patronage – the auld alliance – and to achieve the century-old dream of a single Protestant church uniting the whole island – a project which, Milton thought, had always hitherto been sabotaged by the papacy.³

So when Milton joined in the campaign against bishops in 1641–2, he was attacking on a very broad cultural front. He was expressing deeply felt and long pondered opinions, which potentially went well beyond the clerical Presbyterianism that he initially defended. He really believed, as he put it later, that ‘those who were esteemed religious … asserted liberty’, just as tyranny was inevitably linked with ‘false religion’.⁴ He was already aware of distinctions between his own position and that of the Presbyterians. There was nothing naive in his support for Smectymnuan opposition to episcopacy. If he was too optimistic in supposing that the Presbyterian programme in any way corresponded to his own political, religious and cultural ideals, that is the sort of mistake that arises at the beginning of any revolution, when opponents of the ruling group are united in hostility and have had no opportunity (because they have been denied freedom of discussion and of the press) to clarify and sort out their own views. Richard Baxter had never asked himself what Presbyterianism and Independency were until 1641. John Owen, another professional theologian, did not get beyond ‘opposition to episcopacy and ceremonies’ until 1643, when he began to study the congregational way.¹ Sir Edward Dering, an experienced politician, had never heard either Presbyterianism or Independency defended in the House of Commons before November 1641.² Men’s ignorance and uncertainty were glossed over by respect for the Scots whose opposition had brought Charles’s government crashing down, and for the courage of Laud’s victims – Leighton, Prynne, Bastwick, Burton and Lilburne – who included Presbyterians as well as men who would become Independents and Baptists.

It is probable that Milton, in rejecting Constantine and defending Familists, knew exactly what he was doing. By the sixteen-forties he was already questioning the institution of monarchy. So we need not take too seriously his adoption of the argument that bishops must be opposed because they threatened kingship.³ There were sound political reasons at that stage for submerging differences between the opponents of bishops. We need not reject Milton’s later claim that his concern was already ‘the liberation of all human life from slavery’.⁴ When he scented danger that slavery might be reimposed, Areopagitica made clear his priorities. His dialogue with the radicals had begun.