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Chapter 8

Milton and the Radicals

I never knew the time in England when men of truest religion were not counted sectaries.

Milton, Eikonoklastes, C.P.W., III, p. 348¹

I ‘Much arguing, much writing, many opinions’

The early sixteen-forties were a formative period for English radical thinking, and for Milton. We do not ask ourselves often enough what Milton’s life would have been like if the Long Parliament had not met in 1640. He would presumably have lived in obscurity in London, taking in a few pupils and trying out his educational theories; he might ultimately have written a poem on early British or English history, which would have been very different from Paradise Lost.

The unique fact about the years after 1640 was that the censorship broke down, church courts collapsed, and with them upper-class control over the third culture. What was revealed was fierce popular hostility to gentry and aristocracy, and to the monarchy which protected them. Evidence for this is overwhelming.² For the first time in English history the ideas of the radical underground could be freely preached, discussed and criticized: they could even be printed. A printing press in the seventeenth century was a relatively inexpensive piece of machinery, and most printers were themselves small men open to radical ideas. It took a year or two for men and women to realize what was happening, but some time before September 1643 Abraham Cowley listed antinomians, Arians and libertines among the most enthusiastic London supporters of Parliament.³ In December Robert Baillie told his Scottish friends that the Independents were growing, the Anabaptists more, the antinomians most of all. By April 1644 he was reporting even more deplorable ideas – the mortality of the soul, denial of the existence of angels and devils, rejection of all sacraments. Two months later Socinianism had been added to his list, and Roger Williams was said to be advocating no church at all. ‘Very many are for a total liberty of all religions’, Baillie reported in July. A year later there were ‘Libertines’, and by April 1646 ‘divers, from whom I least expected it, are for putting away the whole royal race.’¹

If I were writing a Miltonic epic, this would be the place for an invocation of the Muse, as we enter the new world of liberty, fecundity and plenitude which opened up in the forties. Instead, let us consider Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646), which, despite his horror and fury, gives a marvellous picture, still insufficiently analysed, of the heresies now being freely discussed by the lower classes. In the same year the respectable inhabitants of Great Burstead, Essex, petitioned against ‘a dangerous sect’ which had arisen in their parish, admitting and re-baptizing all comers, ‘setting up mechanics for their preachers, denouncing the order and ministry of the Church of England as antichristian’, disturbing public worship. They taught ‘unsound opinions’ like universal grace, the abrogation of the law, the sinfulness of repentance.² Thomas Edwards and the worthies of Great Burstead had a different angle of vision, but the scene they describe is the same as that triumphantly celebrated by Milton in Areopagitica: ‘A nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to…. Behold now this vast City, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty…. The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguered Truth than there be pens and heads there, … trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement…. The people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed,… disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discovering… things not before discovered or written of…. All the Lord’s people are become prophets.’ To re-impose a censorship on such a society would be ‘an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation’, a reproach to the common people.³

In this flux new syntheses developed rapidly. We may distinguish political groupings like the republicans (Henry Marten, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Neville), Levellers (democratic republicans, whose leaders include John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn), later the Fifth Monarchists (who not only shared the widely held belief that Christ’s second advent was imminent but felt it to be their duty to expedite it by political action). Among radical religious groups (if the distinction between religion and politics has any meaning) were Congregationalists like John Goodwin, General (Arminian) Baptists, Seekers (hardly an organized sect, but including men like Milton’s friend Roger Williams, Giles Randall, John Saltmarsh, William Walwyn, William Erbery), Behmenists, Socinians, Ranters. Ranters were hardly a sect, but Fuller and many others saw them as descendants of the Familists.¹ The name must serve to cover radical antinomians like Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. From the Ranters, partly by reaction, were to derive the Muggletonians (led by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, the two Last Witnesses of Revelation II) and the early Quakers (not yet pacifist in the sixteen-fifties, politically and socially very radical) led by George Fox and James Nayler. Ranters, Quakers and Muggletonians inherited much of the Familist tradition, and many radicals took over some Hermeticist ideas.²

The Introductions to Volumes II and IV of the Yale edition of Milton’s Complete Prose Works show how closely the evolution of the poet’s ideas was linked to the general development of radical Parliamentary thinking. The traditional orthodoxy of Calvinism was rejected: so was belief in the Trinity. New-old heresies were preached – Arminianism, millenarianism, antinomianism, mortalism, materialism. In these heresies Milton shared an interest with Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Behmenists, Muggletonians, Socinians, some Baptists, some Quakers. Milton’s reaction to the confusing flux of the mid-forties was to return to the Bible, to evolve his own Bible-based theology; the ultimate outcome was the De Doctrina Christiana.

Milton drew his ideas both from the Puritan and from the popular radical traditions. Recall once more the savage anti-clericalism of Lycidas and Milton’s repudiation of Constantine in his first pamphlet: both smack more of radical sectarianism than of orthodox Puritanism.³ As early as 1641 Milton was sneering at conservatives’ fear lest ‘we shall be all Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists. For the word “Puritan” seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore were counted such are now Brownists.’¹ In 1642 he declared that ‘the primitive Christians, in their times, were accounted such as are now called Familists and Adamites, or worse.’² This was an astonishingly liberal attitude for Milton to have taken. It is comparable with Gerard Manley Hopkins writing (in 1871, of all years) ‘horrible to say, in a manner I am a communist.’ But that was in a private letter.³ Milton mentioned Familists in the same breath with the early – and truest – Christians, in print, at a time when even Lord Brooke was carefully dissociating himself from Familism so as not to prejudice his plea for toleration. In The Reason of Church Government Milton spoke up for Arians as well as Anabaptists and Familists. By 1643 he had added anti-nomians to those on whose behalf he called for liberty. In the first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton referred to the ‘fanatic dreams’ of these sectaries; in the 1644 edition he added ‘(if we understand them not amiss)’,⁴ as though to make it clear that he was not necessarily condemning them.

Familists and Anabaptists were the bogeymen of orthodoxy, accused of all sorts of heresies and anti-social beliefs: they were irredeemably lower-class and unrespectable. Spenser had damned them in the conventional way; Milton suggested that prelates used the unsavoury reputation of the radicals to smear all Puritans – a point often repeated without acknowledgement to Milton.⁵ Only one pamphlet spoke in defence of Familists before Milton wrote, and it may have been a papist reductio ad absurdum.⁶ Not until September 1643 did the future Leveller William Walwyn, in The Power of Love, join Milton’s courageous stand.⁷ As late as 1648 Samuel Rutherford thought it worth devoting a hundred pages of A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist to ‘A Discovery of Familism in Mr. Saltmarsh’.⁸ Milton’s was an audacious position to take up so early, and it was not one that he found in the reading recorded in his Commonplace Book. As with his rejection of Constantine, the stimulus to his thinking is likely to have come from discussions after his return from Italy. It suggests once more that we should not dismiss Milton as an intellectual unaware of what humbler men and women were thinking. Was there perhaps a Familist group in Horton/Colnbrook?¹ In The Reason of Church Government Milton may have been consciously quoting the petition which English Familists presented to James I in 1604, claiming that they were misrepresented ‘much like as it was practised in the primitive church against the Christians’.² Saurat pointed out that Milton’s diatribe in Areopagitica against Church Fathers who ‘discover more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the true opinion’, included Irenaeus and Epiphanius, who wrote mostly against the Gnostics – comparable in many ways with the Familists.³

The context in which Milton related Familists to early Christians is his criticism of those who smear and slander good men. There are two possible explanations of Milton’s attitude. One – the less likely – is that he was a Familist sympathizer himself, who made the comparison with early Christians as explicitly as he thought prudent. The other explanation is that Milton’s remark was (consciously or unconsciously) deliberately ambiguous: conservative slander of Familists reminded him of attacks on the early Christians, but he did not need to commit himself on whether the similarity extended any further: perhaps he himself did not know. We shall meet again with equivocations which may be tactical or may be genuinely revealing of Milton’s ambiguous relationship to the third culture.⁴

There is a good book to be written one day on the subject of taverns and ale-houses as centres of political information and organization during the English Revolution. Henrician Anabaptists, Marian and Elizabethan Familists used ale-houses as bases for proselitization.⁵ James I allowed the traditional village sports on Sundays because he feared that otherwise men would go to ale-houses and there talk sedition.⁶ In 1641 religion was ‘the common discourse and table-talk in every tavern and ale-house’. News-sheets were read aloud in taverns, so that the illiterate could know what was going on: taverns were distribution centres for pamphlets and news-books. In the early forties information was disseminated to supporters of Parliament in London through ‘daily tavern clubs in each ward’. It was convenient that Isaac Penington, leader of the London Puritans and father of Milton’s friend, ran an ordinary. Baptists, Levellers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers and the precursors of the Royal Society all met in taverns. The Rota Club in 1659–60 alternated between a coffee-house and a tavern. Men competed to ‘make themselves famous’ in the society of taverns and ale-houses, as they no doubt did in Charles II’s reign in the coffee-houses and ‘twopenny clubs’ for mechanics. In the revolutionary decades smoking was still rather a naughty new habit: for Ranters and others it was a means of heightening consciousness akin to drug-taking in our own society.¹ We should not read anything of this into the evening pipe which Milton enjoyed, but we may assume that the author of Areopagitica would be familiar with the tavern society of ‘the mansion house of liberty’ in which these exciting discussions were going on. ‘Where there is much desire to learn,’ Milton wrote, ‘there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making…. What some lament of, we should rather rejoice at…. Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries.’²

For the Scots Samuel Rutherford and Robert Baillie, for Daniel Featley, former rector of Milton’s church, All Hallows, Bread St., for Thomas Edwards, Herbert Palmer, Alexander Ross, William Prynne, Ephraim Pagitt, and for countless other conservative Parliamentarians the heresies which were appearing in print seemed blasphemous and intolerable. Milton was named by Edwards, Baillie and Pagitt in their lists of dangerous heretics; he was unmistakably referred to by others. He was associated in the minds of enemies of the radicals with their heresies. Milton did not reject the association. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he suggested that the ‘fanatic dreams (if we understand them not amiss)’ of Anabaptists, Familists and antinomians derived ‘partly if not chiefly from the restraint of some lawful liberty’.³ In his sonnet ‘On the new forcers of conscience’ he aligned himself with

Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent

Would have been held in high esteem with Paul

but who

Must now be named and printed heretics

By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call.¹

This sonnet was written two years later than Areopagitica, but it suggests that the passage which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter is the positive to which Edwards’s Gangraena is the negative.

Masson and nineteenth-century biographers perhaps too easily assumed that Milton was recognized in his own day as a great poet and a great man, too easily assumed that everybody read Areopagitica. But Parker carried reaction against this much too far when he suggested in Milton’s Contemporary Reputation that no one really read or knew about Milton until one day in February 1649 he was suddenly invited to become the republican Council of State’s Secretary for Foreign Tongues and polemicist-in-chief. (On Parker’s thesis one wonders why Milton received the invitation.) I believe that Milton had a very considerable reputation before 1649, among the radical wing of the Parliamentarians. I fear that one reason why Parker missed this was that he had a strong dislike for radicals and ‘rabble-rousers’. So he looked in the wrong places.² Milton himself tells us that he was ‘loaded … with entreaties and persuasions’ to write Areopagitica, by ‘many who honour ye’ (Parliament). He was expressing ‘the general murmur’, ‘the common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others’.³ His divorce pamphlets and Areopagitica were received with hostility or – even more damning – by a conspiracy of silence among conservative Puritans and Parliamentarians. But among radical reformers – Baptists, Socinians, Levellers, Ranters and many others – there is evidence, if we look for it, that Milton was read and appreciated.

Milton himself was not an extreme radical, Leveller, Digger or Ranter.⁴ He agreed with these groups on some issues, but only on some. What I suggest is that this is the milieu in which we should set Milton. He very soon parted company with Young and the Presbyterians, and he never aligned himself with any other group. He remained the great eclectic, the asserter of Christian doctine who was a member of no church. But if we look for analogies with Milton’s ideas among the radicals we shall easily find them.

II The radical milieu

In Gangraena Thomas Edwards denounced Further Errors Nos. 47–9 – that all officers ought to be elected by the people, that the House of Commons had the supreme power, that the people were sovereign, that all men were born equal and had natural rights to liberty and property, and that precedents were not binding.¹ Views like these were soon to be proclaimed by the ‘civil heretics they call the Levellers’.² Milton was closer to them than to that reluctant republican Oliver Cromwell. Milton’s political theories were expressed with force and eloquence, but they were for the most part not original. He pointed out to the Presbyterians in 1649 that the ideas they cried out upon as subversive in fact derived from sixteenth-century Calvinists. Both Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates drew on traditions of radical thinking that were common to Independents, Levellers and others. William Sedgwick, for instance, described kings as ‘deputies and commissioners’ just as Milton did.³ Milton’s statement, first made in 1641 and repeated in The Tenure, that all men since Adam are born free, had been – as we have seen – a traditional lower-class reading of the Bible ever since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and no doubt earlier.⁴

Milton agreed with the Leveller leaders in rejecting the communist theories which Diggers, some Ranters and the author of Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649) preached. He agreed with Levellers (and Diggers) in their opposition to tithes, their rejection of monarchy and the House of Lords, their belief that magistrates should be elected, and that resistance to tyranny was not only a right but a duty.⁵ Like them he thought too much government a greater danger than too little, and like them he accepted the desirability of legal decentralization; like them he adopted a radical version of the Norman Yoke theory.⁶ In his Commonplace Book he collected many favourable references to Alfred and Edward the Confessor: he longed for an Alfred ‘to rid us of this Norman gibberish’. In Of Reformation he associated prelates with the Norman Yoke. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates picked up his earlier reference to ‘their gibberish laws,… the badge of their ancient slavery’. In Eikonoklastes he bewailed men’s readiness ‘with the fair words and promises of an old exasperated foe … to be stroked and tamed again into the wonted and well-pleasing state of their true Norman villeinage’.¹ This looks forward to lines in Samson Agonistes:

My nation was subjected to your lords.

It was the force of conquest; force with force

Is well ejected when the conquered can.

Edwards’s Further Error No. 50 was Richard Overton’s famous phrase ‘Whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered or were enforced to yield unto, we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitances, molestations or arbitrary power.’² Filmer quoted an echo of this from Milton: ‘If at any time our forefathers, out of baseness, have lost anything of their right, that ought not [to?] hurt us, they might if they would promise slavery for themselves, for us certainly they could not, who have always the same right to free ourselves that they had to give themselves to any man in slavery.’³ Similarly Milton’s suggestion that ‘to take away from the people the right of choosing government takes away all liberty’ is virtually identical with Rainborough’s famous words in the Putney Debates: ‘Every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.’⁴

Milton was sarcastic about lawyers whilst still at Cambridge – in the First Elegy and the Seventh Prolusion as well as in his Commonplace Book; he repeated his jibes in Of Education. He noted Savanarola’s preference for ‘the spirit rather than the letter of the law’, and consistently rejected arguments from precedents, authorities and any similar ‘crochet of the law’.⁵ Against mere legalism he appealed to the law of nature and the Law of God: like John Cook he argued that Charles I was condemned by ‘the unanimous consent of all rational men in the world, written on every man’s heart with the pen of a diamond in capital letters’.⁶ This took the Levellers’ argument in a direction which they did not wish to travel; but it was a Leveller argument.

Overton appears to refer to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in Mans Mortalitie.⁷ There is much similarity between the arguments of Walwyn’s The Compassionate Samaritane and Areopagitica. In their turn Lilburne and Overton seem to have been influenced by Milton’s tract. The Yale editors show how close Milton was to Leveller sentiments in the Digression to his History of Britain, probably written in 1647–8 though not published until 1681.¹ In 1649 he parted company with the Levellers, but he still used many Leveller arguments in The Tenure, Eikonoklastes and A Defence of the People of England. He never attacked them, even though invited to do so by the Council of State.² He was not slow to accept an invitation, issued on the same day, to attack Irish Royalists. Lilburne in 1652, Sexby in 1657, quoted Milton with approval still. His break with the Levellers came partly on tactical grounds: there was no basis of support in the country for the Leveller democratic programme.³

It has been said that under the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance Milton would have been liable to five capital charges and eight involving life imprisonment.⁴ Like so many people who make telling points, M. A. Larson has been accused of exaggeration. Let us halve his estimate, and have Milton liable to only two and a half executions, imprisonment for only four lives; it still gives us an idea of the dangers that beset him. That Parliament’s Blasphemy Ordinance was not fully enforced is quite another matter: the reason for this was the popular reaction to it which Milton himself and brave men like him helped to create. Against this background of orthodox Puritanism’s fears and suspicions let us consider some of Milton’s heresies.

First, religious toleration, the greatest of all evils, Thomas Edwards thought. This included the right of assembly, the right of free discussion, and by extension liberty of printing, with which Milton was especially concerned. This was common ground to sectaries, Levellers and others leftwards. Milton’s point in An Apology against a Pamphlet, that heresies were a consequence of the darkness in which the bishops had kept the people, was echoed by William Sedgwick in a sermon preached in 1643 ‘before sundry of the House of Commons’. ‘When we have more light’, the preacher said, ‘we shall consent [i.e. agree] quickly.’⁵ Areopagitica is the most eloquent pamphlet on this subject, but its arguments had been anticipated by Walwyn and Henry Robinson, and were to be repeated by many others. This position led some (though not Milton) to reject the very idea of heresy and blasphemy as punishable offences. Milton has been described, justly, as the first great English writer to urge his readers not to react automatically to smear and bogey words like ‘sect’, ‘schism’, ‘heretic’ or ‘blasphemer’.¹ But he had been preceded by John Goodwin’s Imputatio Fidei (1642); Selden, Agricola Carpenter and many others were to repeat the point.

Toleration of the tender consciences of university-educated divines was one thing: in the early forties Presbyterians and Independents might have agreed on that. But when unlettered laymen began to usurp the pulpit that was something quite different. The acid test of radicalism came to be anti-clericalism, rejection of any distinction between clergy and laity, of any special clerical caste. The separatists Barrow and Greenwood had repudiated the word ‘layman’ as popish. A true church, they thought, could exist without ministers; any layman might preach.² ‘New Presbyter is but old priest writ large’, Milton told the Presbyterian clergy. As so often he was putting into epigrammatic form a radical commonplace. ‘So antichristian and dividing a term as clergy and laity,’ said no less a person than Oliver Cromwell; ‘a term unknown to any save the antichristian church’, William Dell echoed him.³

From this attitude followed the doctrine denounced by Thomas Edwards, not only that laymen might preach but that ‘a poor plain countryman’ with the spirit of God was better than ‘the greatest philosopher, scholar or doctor’ without it.⁴ This was the religious equivalent of Cromwell’s russet-coated captain, who knew what he fought for and loved what he knew, and was therefore preferable to a gentleman who had rank and nothing more. From his first pamphlet Milton insisted that the essentials of Christianity were simple and easy to understand. ‘A plain unlearned man that lives well by that light which he has is better and wiser and edifies others more’ than ‘a learned hypocrite’. Any congregation might elect its own minister, any believer might preach. This looks forward to Christ’s attitude towards learning in Paradise Regained, and to Milton’s ‘We are all equally priests in Christ’ in the De Doctrina Christiana, where ‘philosophizing academics’ are attacked. A religious service should be a discussion, in which ‘the weakest of the brethren should have an opportunity’ to take part.⁵ In 1644 Milton envisaged higher education for lawyers and medical doctors, but not for the clergy.⁶

The logic of all this was rejection of a state church, and in particular of ‘the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes’, ‘wrung out of men’s purses to maintain a disapproved ministry against their consciences’.¹ From the ‘blind mouths’ of Lycidas, through Areopagitica’s rejection of the legend that ‘the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy’, down to The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), Milton’s attitude was consistent. Abolition of tithes was necessary to guarantee real religious liberty. If no clerical caste with legally fixed maintenance, then no training of such a caste at the universities. In 1659 Milton echoed Dell to write: ‘It is a fond error, though too much believed among us, to think that the university makes a minister of the Gospel.’² Oxford and Cambridge colleges were largely financed by impropriated tithes, and university divines by pluralism. As early as Areopagitica Milton had mocked ‘the complaint and lamentation of prelates’ that learning would be ‘for ever dasht and discouraged’ if pluralism were abolished, and he repeated the point in relation to tithes in The Likeliest Means of 1659.³ The wail was often heard in between.

Tithes proved to be a dividing sword among the radicals, symbolized by the claim that Oliver Cromwell had promised to abolish them but failed to carry out this promise when he had the power to do so: instead he came down in favour of a state church. No Parliament ever voted down tithes, not even the Bareboncs Assembly, not even the restored Rump in 1659, of which Milton hoped so much. Far too many vested interests were involved. Nor were even the sectaries unanimous. Some Baptist ministers were prepared to accept livings in the Cromwellian church. Those who opposed ‘hirelings’ with the same passion as Milton were Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, most Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, the extreme radicals.

Instead of a regular beneficed clergy, Milton came to advocate itinerant preachers, maintained by voluntary contributions.⁴ This nostrum of the radicals was tried out by the Commissions for Propagating the Gospel in Wales and in the North Parts in the early fifties. The experiment was unpopular with conservatives; quarrels over it had something to do with the fall of the Rump in 1653. Milton’s sonnet to Oliver Cromwell in 1652 aimed at persuading him to resist conservative pressure for preservation of a state church, as another sonnet praised Vane for supporting a freer system. In 1659 Milton hoped to see the itinerant system backed up by local lay preachers. His proposals recall the organization of the Baptists and the Society of Friends: even more perhaps they look forward to the Methodists (just as Of Education looks forward to the Dissenting Academies).¹

Milton rejected not only ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’, but all ‘coercive jurisdiction in the church’. He thought not only that the Pope was Antichrist, but that bishops were more antichristian than the Pope. Like John Saltmarsh, he thought that any state church was necessarily antichristian. When he made Antichrist Mammon’s son Milton may even have hinted at social interpretations akin to those of Gerrard Winstanley.² Milton pointed out that Christ used force only once – to drive money-changers out of the Temple. The coercive power of the secular magistrate in religious matters Milton similarly denied.³ ‘Since God became flesh’, John Reeve told the Lord Mayor of London in 1653, ‘no civil magistrate hath any authority from above to be judge of any man’s faith, because it is a spiritual invisible gift from God.’⁴ Milton would have agreed with the conclusion. Repudiation of a state church divided sectaries from Episcopalians and Presbyterians; denial of the authority of the magistrate brought about a division somewhere farther to the left. In each case Milton came to be with the more radical party.

If there is no distinction between clergy and laity, ordinary people have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. This led to what Edwards called anti-Scripturism – criticism of the contradictions of the Bible, denial that it was the Word of God.⁵ Milton did not go so far as Clement Writer, Walwyn, some Ranters and the Quaker Samuel Fisher.⁶ But – unlike Edwards – he would have insisted on the principle that the individual had a right and indeed a duty to study the Bible for himself, not taking his religion at second hand from Pope, church or priest. He likewise insisted that ‘the spirit of God, promised alike and given / To all believers’ was the test for interpreting the letter of the Bible. Such ‘spiritual illumination … is common to all men.’⁷ The distinction is a narrow one between this position and the Ranter and Quaker view that the spirit within believers was superior to the letter of Scripture, overriding it.

Milton’s belief that worship is discussion, that the spirit in man is more important than any ecclesiastical authority, that each of us must interpret the Bible for himself, thus aligns him with Ranters, Quakers, anti-nomians: so does his conviction that men and women should strive to attain perfection on earth, even though Milton did not think they could ever succeed. His ultimate belief in the necessity of good works for salvation, the consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, aligns him with Arminians of the left like John Goodwin, General Baptists and Quakers, whilst his total rejection of sacramentalism and a state church puts him at the opposite pole to the Laudian ‘Arminians’ of the right. Milton accepted the heresy of adult baptism, at a time when the medical reformer William Rand thought that Henry Lawrence’s publication of his Treatise of Baptism was a more courageous act than risking his life on the field of battle.¹ This links Milton with Socinians and Anabaptists, though he seems to have joined no Baptist congregation. His decisive rejection of Sabbatarianism also puts him beyond the pale of ‘respectable’ Puritanism.²

Milton was a radical millenarian long before Fifth Monarchism was thought of: he equated monarchy with Antichrist. In 1641 he associated his belief that Christ’s kingdom ‘is now at hand’ with his confidence in the potentialities of free and democratic discussion.³ He had a vision of England as leader of an international revolution, which links him both with the Fifth Monarchists and with the pre-pacifist George Fox, who in 1657 rebuked the English army for not yet having sacked Rome.

Milton agreed with Servetus, Socinians and Ranters in many of his views on the Trinity, with Servetus, Socinians, some Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and Muggletonians in his mortalism. Milton’s heresies on divorce linked him in the minds of contemporaries with Ranters and libertines. His emphasis on the absolute authority of conscience meant that believers were redeemed from the curse, freed from the law. This led him to the very verge of antinomianism which the Ranters overstepped. Milton’s emphasis throughout his writings on the light/darkness antithesis links him with Clarkson, Bauthumley and other Ranters, and with the Quakers; it looks back to Hermeticist and alchemical writers culminating in Robert Fludd. Milton’s insistence that Adam and Eve made love before the Fall links up with Ranter attitudes to sex; the fact that they laboured before the Fall associates him with popular traditions drawn on by the Diggers. That hell was an internal state (whether or not it was a geographical location as well) goes back to Marlowe and beyond, and is found in Boehme, Wither, Overton.¹ To many of the radicals Milton must have seemed one of them, as he did to Edwards, Baillie, Pagitt, Ross, Fuller.

Once this point has been established, as I think it can be, it appears superfluous and rather foolish to hunt for the sources of Milton’s ideas only in the writings of classical philosophers or early Christian theologians. It is possible that Milton, a very learned man, might have got from Plato, Seneca, Origen, Lactantius or the Cabbalists ideas that were current among his radical contemporaries. But this assumes an isolated Milton: it is at least worth reminding ourselves what ideas were current in London taverns at this time. Milton would certainly have read Gangraena before associating himself so firmly with Edwards’s victims.² No doubt the poet’s exceptionally wide reading gave an extra dimension to his theology, and this often led him to conclusions different from those of his radical contemporaries. But all around him men and women were eagerly and freely debating these matters, verbally and in print. Milton acclaimed the debate in Areopagitica; he took part in it, both in his published tracts and in his dialogue with himself in De Doctrina Christiana.

Such an approach enables us to side-step many scholarly, not to say scholastic, discussions – such as whether Milton is or is not properly described as an Arian.³ Milton claimed to base all his views on Scripture only. Although his strong prepossessions enabled him to argue away certain crucial Biblical texts which he did not like, he would never have followed any thinker, orthodox or heretical, against his own reading of the Bible. That would have signified being a heretic in the truth, adopting an implicit faith.⁴

III Overlapping circles

Few of Milton’s views were original. But the vigour and eloquence with which he expressed them, and the circumstances in which he expressed them, call for comment. To say that ‘language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known’ is in one sense the conventional Baconian doctrine that things are more important than words. Yet Milton extends the point to argue that ‘any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only’ is as estimable as a university pedant. So even the ‘élitist’ Of Education unexpectedly echoes Milton’s defence of mechanic preachers, his preference for ‘a homely and yeomanly religion’.¹

In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton had insisted that men must be liberated from the tyranny of custom, of accepted ideas. ‘Error supports custom, custom countenances error.’ Custom’s defenders decried free reasoning ‘under the terms of humour and innovation’. This line of argument had often been repeated since the authoress or author of Haec Vir in 1620 had said ‘Custom is an idiot.’² But to defend innovation and liberty of speculation in 1643 was to defend the right of the lower classes to challenge the assumptions of their betters. It led Milton within six years to the ultimate revolutionary position, defence of regicide. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates also starts with an attack on the ‘tyranny of custom’.³ The traditional humanist emphasis on the superiority of reason and virtue to mere birth is used in Eikonoklastes to justify regicide: ‘it were a mad law that would subject reason to superiority of place.’⁴ Milton went well beyond orthodox Puritanism in his belief that the whole Mosaic law was abolished, moral as well as ceremonial; that Christians are emancipated from Sabbath observance, and that the words ‘blasphemy and heresy’ are mere bugbears.⁵

In the late forties a whole range of certainties had broken down. King Charles had gone: was King Jesus coming? Church courts, ‘the bawdy courts’, had disappeared: what restraints on moral behaviour were henceforth legitimate? The press was free, assembly was free: what limits, if any, should there be to liberty of speculation? Was Christianity itself open to question? Such problems worried or attracted large numbers of ordinary men and women in London, the Home Counties, East Anglia and the army. We may call them Seekers so long as we do not thereby imply any unity of outlook among the large numbers who were dissatisfied with traditional forms and beliefs. Their discussions, unrestrained by the presence of social superiors or by the discipline of a traditional education, led to a proliferation of wild heresies. ‘The new upstart wantons that deny God’s ordinance, or new notionists,’ said a pamphleteer of 1649, were ‘full of whimsies’.⁶

We know something of what went on from the autobiographies of Ranters, Quakers, Muggletonians, Bunyan and many others. Such men, in the words of a Cromwellian ordinance of March 1654, ‘contended against magistracy, against ministry, against Scriptures and against ordinances, … running after fancies and notions’. They justified themselves ‘under the notion of liberty’, saying that ‘the magistrate hath nothing to do… in… these things.’¹ Milton operated at a more sophisticated level than Fox or Bunyan, Reeve or Clarkson. But he knew of the discussions and speculations which went on in London congregations and taverns, and I would guess that he participated in them.² He certainly disapproved of the ordinance from which I have just quoted, since it confirmed the existence of a state church and set up Triers to judge the doctrines of ministers.

In 1649 Clement Walker described Milton as ‘a libertine’, who ‘will be tied to no obligation to God or man’. In 1660 he was called a ‘Christian libertine’; seventeen years later, ‘a great agent for libertinism’.³ As the word was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was accurate enough. Calvin attacked the Libertines of his Geneva for saying that they had found the way back to the state of Adam before the Fall – a Paradise within them, happier far.⁴ Samuel Rutherford, denounced in Milton’s sonnet, in 1648 criticized Familists for saying that God is ‘the being of things’; Henry Niklaes, the founder of Familism, he described as ‘a blasphemous libertine’ because he said that ‘God hath godded us with him’ – a phrase frequently used by Ranters in the sixteen-fifties, as well as by ‘the Maids of Aldgate’ whom Milton defended in Colasterion. Many thought mortalism a mere excuse for libertinism. William Lilly, on the other hand, used the word as a synonym for ‘free men’: English help to the Dutch had ‘wholly made them libertines and weakened ourselves’. For Rutherford libertines included those who condemned the condemnation of heretics, and who made ‘conscience, not the Word of God, their rule’. He described William Dell as a libertine, and no doubt would have added Milton if he had read the De Doctrina Christiana – or even Areopagitica.⁵

We recall Milton’s possession from the late fifties (and we do not know for how long earlier) of a manuscript of Jean Bodin’s Heptaplomeres, so subversive and critical of Christianity, that it was not published, even in Latin, until the nineteenth century. It circulated in manuscript and copies were very difficult to come by. (Did Milton obtain his copy on his Italian journey, as his friend Nathan Paget appears to have acquired Familist and Behmenist manuscripts during his stay in the Netherlands?¹) From Heptaplomeres – a disputation between spokesmen for all religions and none – Milton could have found confirmation of many of his ideas – the desirability of religious toleration, rejection of the decalogue and the Trinity, climatic theories. He would not have gone so far as some of the Biblical criticisms in Bodin’s work, but he might have been interested in the idea that ‘each of us is his own Adam’. The suggestion that the Genesis story is ‘a pretty allegory’ would be more likely to appeal to Gerrard Winstanley than to Milton.²

Milton’s ideas also have many links with the Hermetic tradition, and especially with his Buckinghamshire neighbour Robert Fludd, the great synthesizer of this tradition.³ Milton seems to have possessed a copy of the Hermetic writings. He refers several times to ‘thrice-great Hermes’ – in the undergraduate De Idea Platonica, and in II Penseroso. Hermetic influences have been found in At a Vacation Exercise, and in the Third and Seventh Prolusions. Frances Yates suggests that the Hermetic trance is described at length in Il Penseroso.⁴ Milton twice refers to John Dee, and in Areopagitica there may be an echo of Giordano Bruno.⁵ More important perhaps is the parallelism of Milton’s thought with that of the Hermeticists. Though this body of ideas embraces magic, alchemy and astrology, it is completely devoid of ritualism or sacramentalism.⁶

Milton’s daemons in II Penseroso and the Seventh Prolusion, and the Attendant Spirit in Comus (called Daemon in the manuscript – like Comus himself),⁷ may or may not be Hermetic: likewise the ‘millions of spiritual creatures’ who ‘walk the earth unseen’ in Paradise Lost (IV. 677–8) and the ‘demonian spirits’ of Paradise Regained.⁸ But the corporeality of angels links with this tradition, as Fludd himself tells us. The names of some of Milton’s angels come from Fludd who, like Milton, gave Satan’s name before the Fall as Lucifer. Milton’s phrases in Paradise Lost, ‘potable gold’ and ‘vegetable gold’ may refer to Fludd’s experiments. Messiah was armed in ‘radiant urim’, the stone that in Fludd’s philosophy mediates between God and the material world.¹ Like Milton, Fludd used mathematical arguments against the Trinity, and speculated on whether light was created or eternal.² Fludd has something very like Milton’s theory of creation. He referred directly to Hermes Trismegistus, and also drew on the related Paracelsan tradition.³ Milton later championed the Paracelsan view that like cures like, as against the Galenic theory, which he had earlier espoused, that contraries cure.⁴

I shall have many occasions in the following pages to cite parallels between Milton’s thought and that of Hermeticism, particularly as mediated by Fludd.⁵ Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism and materialism, for instance, may be linked with this tradition, as well as with the ideas of radicals like the Leveller Richard Overton, or John Goodwin, a fellow defender of regicide, or the Socinians Paul Best and John Bidle. Maurice Kelley is right to emphasize that Milton was not a lone seeker in theology but rather ‘part of a small, unorganized but vigorous movement that manifested itself openly in the second half of the sixteen-forties’. He is equally right to argue that scholars should be looking for Milton’s sources among post-Reformation radicals rather than among Greek Fathers;⁶ though we may note that Milton’s favourite early Christian writer, Lactantius, was influenced by Hermes.⁷

I tried once to list those sects and radical groups which shared any of Milton’s radical views: anti-clericalism, millenarianism, antinomianism, anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism, materialism, hell internal. I was a little startled by the result: the group closest to Milton was the Muggletonians, followers of John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, who in 1652 were commissioned by God as the Two Last Witnesses foretold in Revelation II. This was very salutary. I have in my time criticized other historians for treating the radicals of the English Revolution as a ‘lunatic fringe’. Yet I had always placed the Muggletonians outside my pale of sanity. I was wrong. A religious group which survived for three hundred years among solid London artisans cannot be dismissed as mad. Reeve and Muggleton moved in London radical circles, the circles from which Ranters, Quakers and such emerged: early London Quakers saw the Muggletonians as perhaps their most serious rivals. Muggletonians preserved, fossilized, many of the ideas of this Seeker milieu of the fifties, the milieu from which many of Milton’s ideas seem to derive.

The curve of Milton’s political career quite surprisingly follows that of the Quakers: his support for Cromwell in 1649 and 1653, his growing disillusion under the Protectorate, his rejection of all organized churches, the traumatic effect on him of the Restoration, leading to apparent political quietism and withdrawal from politics whilst still hoping for ultimate divine revenge. Many others followed a similar course. Milton’s friend Roger Williams early denied ‘any true church in the world’. He ‘will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all’.¹ In 1648 the near-Socinian John Bidle asked ‘whether any public worship was justified, or a papal usurpation?’ Walwyn could not ‘associate in a church way, … not knowing any persons to be so qualified as ministers of the Gospel ought to be’, though in 1649 he still had hopes for the future.² Winstanley found rest ‘in no outward form of worship’. Ranters thought that men no longer needed ‘such lower helps from outward administrations’ once Christ had come into their hearts. Giles Randall and other Seekers, Clarkson and many Ranters, John Gratton in his pre-Quaker days, refused to go to any church.³

‘Better no ministry than a pretended ministry’, was the view attributed to William Erbery by John Webster. ‘In this darkness’ of the apostacy ‘he had rather sit down and wait in silence than be beholding to the pretended light and direction of deceivable guides.’ Erbery moves parallel to Milton in many respects. He was ‘ever entire to the interest of this Commonwealth’; he was accused of being a Socinian; he was a passionate foe to any state church, any intolerance. He expected to see God and his saints ruling on earth and judging the world. Like Milton, he rejected Fifth Monarchism; his attitude to the Ranters was – and was thought by contemporaries to be – ambiguous.⁴

John Reeve was another who believed that all visible worship was done away with by Christ, ‘that the invisible worship of the invisible God may take place in the hearts of his people for ever.’ There had been no true worship since Constantine’s day. ‘Inward, spiritual silent praying and praising’ should now replace ‘outward praying, preaching, fasting … to be seen of men’.¹ When Lodowick Muggleton after the Restoration advised his followers to ‘keep all at home … as long as the powers of the nation doth forbid you to go to any meetings’, rather than attend the parish church, he added that there was no ‘necessity for any public meetings at all’.² Perhaps closest of all to Milton was Colonel Hutchinson, who when he was asked after the Restoration where he went to church replied, ‘Nowhere.’ To the question ‘How he then did for his soul’s comfort?’ he replied, ‘Sir, I hope you leave me that to account between God and my own soul.’³

If Milton was known to and trusted by London radicals, this would help to explain Edward Phillips’s story that at one time his uncle was proposed as Adjutant-General to Sir William Waller’s army. Biographers since Masson have tended to dismiss this, perhaps because they related it to 1645, when Waller indeed had a vacancy for an Adjutant-General, but when he was an extinct volcano: there is no reason why Milton should want to be employed by him then. Masson suggested 1643, when London radicals were running Waller as a win-the-war leader against the conservative and dilatory Essex. Some of them may have approached Milton as a possible civilian aide, or commissar, for Waller’s army, which they were hoping completely to remodel. The fact that Waller’s star sank rapidly and that he later revealed himself as little less conservative than Essex himself would explain why the project fizzled out. If I am right, Milton was not interested in a military career as such; he might have been persuaded to undertake this particular job at this particular time. It was presumably City radicals who urged Milton to write Areopagitica. Hartlib for one knew Waller well.⁴

Lest I be misunderstood, I repeat that I do not think Milton was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behmenist. Rather I suggest that we should see him living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views which he could not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted him.¹ In the De Doctrina Christiana Milton criticized those (Fludd, Richard Overton, Ranters, Diggers) who equate God and nature;² and those (Ranters, Behmenists) who attribute sin to God.³ He was prepared to allow the magistrate some restrictive power in religion which sectaries denied him.⁴ Unlike most radicals (except the Muggletonians) Milton had no objection to judicial oaths;⁵ unlike Lilburne and the Quakers he could see nothing wrong with hat honour.⁶ Bowing ‘to superior spirits is wont in heaven’, we are told in Paradise Lost (III. 737) – though, with typical ambiguity, the example Milton gives is Satan. Milton praised equality, but opposed ‘the absurdity of equalling the unequal’; ‘each person should be cared for according to his rank and eminence.’ He no more shared the Leveller confidence in democracy than he shared the Digger distrust of private property. He denied the equality of the Irish, proclaimed by some Levellers, and the equality of women, proclaimed by very few indeed.⁷

In his ultimate lack of respect for Parliament Milton was closer to the Fifth Monarchists than to republicans or Levellers: yet he was no Fifth Monarchist.⁸ The Levellers had carried the myth of Anglo-Saxon freedom, which Sir Edward Coke had used to idolize the common law, to conclude ‘our very laws were made by our conquerors’ and should be rejected: Milton went even further and argued that Parliament was ‘a Norman or French word, a monument of our ancient servitude’: the name should be abolished, and perhaps the thing too.⁹ Milton never accepted Ranter antinomianism, nor the early Quaker doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the inner light. He referred to the Blasphemy Act of 1650, directed mainly against Ranters, as ‘that prudent and well-deliberated act’.¹⁰ He never abandoned his belief that the Bible contained truths necessary for salvation. He parted company with Socinians in attributing divinity to Christ. On some of these questions Milton drew fine distinctions which we shall be examining later.¹¹

In this chapter 1 have been advancing a thesis. My object was to emphasize the intellectual milieu from which Milton’s ideas arose, to suggest affinities between his ideas and those of his radical contemporaries, not to claim identity. Often his views developed in conscious disagreement with those of Levellers or Ranters or Socinians. If we think of two eccentric circles, one representing the ideas of traditional Puritanism, the other those of the radical milieu, Milton’s ideas form a third circle, concentric to neither of these but overlapping both.¹ But the bubbling ferment of discussion and speculation going on in the sixteen-forties should not be left out of any attempt to understand Milton’s own thinking. Perhaps the London radicals were, if not better teachers than Origen, Lactantius and Arius – to none of whom Milton subscribed slave – at least a more immediate influence and stimulus.

Down to 1642 Milton’s career had been an almost consistent success story. He developed slowly, but at Cambridge he won the affection and respect of undergraduates and dons alike. He was dissatisfied with the education he received there, but thanks to his father’s generosity he was able to spend many years educating himself more satisfactorily, culminating in his journey to Italy – a privilege usually restricted to sons of the aristocracy. In Italy his reception had bolstered his self-confidence as well as directing his thoughts towards politics. He slowly came to realize that he might become a great poet, and to believe that in this role he could serve his church and his country even better than in the pulpit. Finally, in 1641–2 he had the satisfaction of seeing the hated Laudian régime overthrown. This promised to open up a new era of liberation for England and perhaps for the world, to prepare for a society in which the poet would be listened to and honoured as God’s spokesman to his people. His dedicated life seemed to be justifying itself: he could look back on thirty-four years of what might not unreasonably be called true poetry.

Then, in the moment of apparent triumph, things started to go wrong. In 1642 he married Mary Powell. This marriage, contracted with poetic ideals and expectations, was a disastrous failure. A similar disappointment awaited his political hopes. In the New Jerusalem ‘ignorance and ecclesiastical thraldom … under new shapes and disguises begins apace to grow upon us.’ (Those were Milton’s last published words before Areopagitica, in which he declared that ‘bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.’)² The pamphlets in which Milton had tried to salvage his high ideal of matrimony by associating it with divorce for incompatibility of temperament were attacked as incitements to promiscuity and libertinism by clergymen who clearly had not read them.¹ His name was dragged through the mud. He was denounced to Parliament. The poet came down to earth with a bump. This is our next subject.