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ОглавлениеMarriage, Divorce and Polygamy
Mother Eve, by her vice of curiosity or levity, or admirable facility rather than fatuity, was deceived by the serpent in desiring to know future things, which folly descends naturally to women.
Sir John Milton, The Figure Caster, in Rowland, pp. 19 2–3 Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.
Raphael to Adam, P.L. VIII. 577
I Seventeenth-century attitudes
It is ironical that the popular image of Milton to-day is of an austere Puritan who advocated the subordination of women. For his contemporaries it was chiefly Milton’s sexual libertinism which made them link him with the radicals. Posterity has remembered ‘He for God only, she for God in him.’ On the basis of this line, taken out of context, the poet has been blamed for failing to rise above his age in this one respect, despite all the others in which he did rise above it. Posterity has forgotten too that this line is only a poetical version of St. Paul’s ‘wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord’; ‘the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church.’1 Given Milton’s assumptions, it is difficult to see how he could have rejected St. Paul’s clear and explicit statements. What Milton says about the subordination of women is strictly Biblical, backed up in the De Doctrina Christiana by an impressive array of texts.2
Feminists were few in the seventeenth century. The liberal Grotius, whom Milton quoted in favour of divorce, and who in Adamus Exul, like Milton, made Adam’s love for Eve a major reason for the Fall, nevertheless in the same drama put words very similar to Milton’s into Eve’s mouth, and more specifically than Milton emphasized that Adam sinned through subservience to his wife.1 Historians rightly see the Baptists as a sect which helped the liberation of women. Yet in 1658 the messengers of the Abingdon Association of Particular Baptist churches discussed the question: ‘How far women may speak in the church?’ Their agreed answer was that ‘they may not so speak as that their speaking shall show a not acknowledging of the inferiority of their sex and so be an usurping authority over the man.’2 The only people in the seventeenth century who came anywhere near making women equal with men were Diggers, Ranters and Quakers, who believed that men and women were perfectible on earth, could get back behind the Fall. Milton was more orthodox in this respect, and thought that the subordination antedated the Fall of Man. In 1680 Fox said ‘Neither did God set the man over the woman whilst they kept the image of God and obeyed his voice’ in Paradise. Nevertheless, twenty-four years earlier, in Milton’s lifetime, Fox had spoken rather differently, more like the Abingdon Baptists: ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be silent…. If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home.’3 Between the two statements I have quoted Fox had himself married.
So to criticize Milton because he stated a theory of male superiority is like criticizing him because he did not advocate votes or equal pay for women. No one, to my knowledge, in the seventeenth century claimed that women were wholly equal to men, just as no one, not even Levellers, seriously proposed to give them the vote. Edwards asked, as the height of irony, whether women should have political power, together with servants and paupers. Milton’s enemy Richard Leigh was not untypical when he wrote in 1675
The wife no office seems to have
But of the husband’s prime she-slave.4
The courtly Marquis of Halifax put it more agreeably in his Advice to a Daughter (1688), but what he said was not so very different.5 Consider the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson. She was clearly a stronger character than her husband. Yet she fully accepted the subordination of her sex, praising Queen Elizabeth for ‘her submission to her masculine and wise councillors’ (!). If we could date her Memoirs with more precision we might think she had been reading Paradise Lost just before she wrote.1
Let us try to put Milton back into history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of new marriage patterns – a rejection of papal doctrines of the superiority of celibacy as well as of the traditional feudal concept which saw marriage as a property transaction, with love as something normally to be found outside marriage. The Puritan attitude towards women assumes the world of small household production, in which the wife had a position of authority over servants, apprentices and children, though in subordination to her husband. The state of matrimony was glorified, and heavy emphasis was laid on love in marriage (and therefore on monogamy), on freedom of choice in marriage (as against what Milton called the ‘savage inhumanity’ of direction of children by parents),2 on the wife as ‘help-meet’, as the junior partner in the household which contemporaries saw as a little church, a little state, a little school.3 These ideas are to be found in the Puritan guides to godliness, in the writings of William Perkins and William Gouge; they are also in Spenser and Shakespeare, in Roger Williams and Harrington.4 ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ expresses Spenser’s view of the relation of the sexes; and let us not forget The Taming of the Shrew. It was only after the family ceased to be the real productive unit in society that wives of more successful householders began to ape the habits and attitudes of their social betters, to cultivate white hands and vapours: their menfolk meanwhile gave them a sentimentalized elevation to compensate for their effective demotion from the productive process.5 The inequality was more apparent than real so long as the wife was the helpmeet of her husband in the family firm: deference to the middle-class lady only conceals her powerlessness once she has been cut off from production. Eve was a gardener.
Milton, an intellectual who wished to give reasons for what he believed, theorized about the male supremacy which no one denied. In the course of theorizing he shocked his contemporaries by being prepared to contemplate a situation in which the wife may ‘exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield’. Then ‘a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female.’ This, however, he regarded as an exceptional case, though taking care to note examples of outstanding women in his Commonplace Book.1 He gave his youngest daughter, born in May 1652, the name of Deborah, the inspired poetess and judge of Israel who stirred the Israelites up to take arms against their oppressors.
Milton was also attacked because ‘all his arguments … prove as effectually that the wife may sue a divorce from her husband upon the same grounds.’2 In An Apology he argued that unchastity was worse in men than in women. We must see these attitudes in the light of the Protestant concept of the priesthood of all believers, which helped to enhance the status of women, for ‘the soul knows no difference of sex’;3 women too had consciences to which God might speak direct. Protestantism did a great deal for the education of girls. They must learn to read and write, if only to be able to read the Bible. Being able to read, they read other things as well. It was the Cavalier poets who in the seventeenth century had a low view of women, and who looked back to the golden age as a time of sexual promiscuity.4 As an example of an orthodox attitude towards marriage less elevated than Milton’s, consider the discussions between the Earl of Rochester and Gilbert Burnet in 1679. Rochester objected to Christian prohibitions on extra-marital sex, and to Anglican refusal of divorce. Burnet’s reply started from the sanctity of property. ‘Men have a property in their wives and daughters, so that to defile the one or corrupt the other is an unjust and injurious thing.’5
Milton, then, was far from unique in holding that women were inferior to men. The importance of keeping them in their place was confirmed for him, as for Lucy Hutchinson, by the shocking example of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. ‘How great mischief and dishonour’, Milton reflected in Eikonoklastes, ‘hath befallen to nations under the government of effeminate and uxorious magistrates, who being themselves governed at home under a feminine usurpation’ were incompetent to rule others. In the History of Britain Boadicea was chastised for usurping a masculine role, though other women were praised: Milton presumably approved of Deborah. Salmasius’s alleged deference to his wife was used against him: ‘In vain does he prattle about liberty in assembly and market place who at home endures the slavery most unworthy of man, slavery to an inferior.’ The criticism follows logically from Milton’s Biblical position – as does his ecstatic praise of the exception who proved his rule – Queen Christina of Sweden.1 She fortunately had no husband.
We know little about Milton’s reasons for marrying. At what Charles Diodati’s death meant for him we can only guess.2 In the Epitaphium Damonis Milton reflected on the hardness and loneliness of man’s life, on the instability of human affection (lines 106–11). The loss of Diodati may help to explain Milton’s brief flirtation with celibacy as an ideal. The idealization of chastity in Comus, however we interpret it, taken together with Comus’s paean in praise of fecundity, seems to hint at unresolved tensions. The additions to the version printed in 1637 may be intended to suggest a way out: chastity is far from precluding true marriage. At the end of the Epitaphium Damonis Diodati was admitted to the heavenly Bacchic orgies because he had been chaste. Virginity as an ideal was explicitly disavowed in the divorce tracts, where Milton went out of his way to correct St. Paul: marriage was not a defilement, ‘the Apostle … pronounces quite contrary to [the] Word of God.’3 The joke in Animadversions about nunneries providing ‘convenient stowage for their withered daughters’ hardly suggests an elevated view of chastity.4 The thirty-three-year-old bachelor may have decided that it was time for him to take a wife. In April 1642, when he was twitted with aspiring to marriage with a rich widow, he announced that he would prefer ‘a virgin of mean fortune honestly bred’. Perhaps the gay and lively Mary Powell was the next one he met. The angry gods had their revenge.5
Milton’s father had lent £300, secured by a bond of £500, to the feckless Richard Powell, who lived in an Oxfordshire village a mile or two from the one in which John Milton senior had been born. There may have been a long-standing acquaintance between the two families. In June 1642 the poet went down to Oxfordshire, perhaps to collect this debt, perhaps combining the trip with a visit to relatives, perhaps with a few days working in the Bodleian Library. He returned married to the seventeen-year-old Mary, one of Richard Powell’s eleven children, and with the promise of a dowry of £1,000 (never received). We know nothing of how this happened. We may imagine the Powells as a scheming family, anxious to evade their financial obligations. We may think that Milton was anxious for marriage in the abstract. ‘He who wilfully abstains from marriage, not being supernaturally gifted’, Milton wrote in 1645, is ‘in a diabolical sin.’1
Milton had recently taken a big house in Barbican for himself and a number of boys whom he was teaching. Perhaps he already had marriage in mind. There has been much speculation about what happened, or did not happen, in the matrimonial chamber of this house. Mary may or may not have refused to consummate the marriage; certainly she found the surroundings oppressively quiet and lonely after the crowded household she had come from. The silence was punctuated by occasional cries from pupils undergoing a beating. Within ‘a month or thereabout’ of marriage Mary, who was only a child herself, had gone back home, ostensibly on a brief visit. She did not return, and the emissary whom Milton sent was rudely repulsed.
Meanwhile civil war had broken out. The Powells were Royalists, living in a Royalist area; Milton an ardent Parliamentarian. Oxford became the King’s headquarters, so communications were difficult. If the Powells were cunning schemers, they may have calculated that now they had a chance of bilking altogether on their debt. Or they may suddenly have found their son-in-law’s political views, tolerable six months earlier, insupportable now that fighting had actually broken out. Or Mary may just have said No. We do not know.
We can likewise only guess at the effect on the poet of the breakdown of his marriage; it must have been traumatic. No man enjoys that sort of blow to his pride. We may suspect that Milton was aware of an element of incompetence on his side which did not please him. But equally important were the consequences for his way of thinking. Marriage had proved no more satisfactory than chastity as a solution to his sexual problems. The anonymous biographer tells us that Milton had already reflected a good deal about marriage before his own personal problem arose, and had adopted his own version of the Puritan and Shakespearean ideal – that marriage should be a union of two minds, that mutual solace and delight was as important an object of marriage as the procreation of children. And Milton had already speculated, in the abstract, on the desirability of divorce where a couple proved mutually incompatible: it was the natural corollary of the new emphasis on marriage as a voluntary union of like-minded people, though not all who cherished the ideal pushed this logic as far as Milton did.1 For a century and more the relation of the sexes had been the subject of eager discussion, as the vernacular printed Bible was studied, and as attempts were being made to impose the monogamous family on to populations many of which had never hitherto really accepted it; and this at a time when the opening up of Asia, Africa and America to European trade revealed whole civilizations in which monogamy was not the rule.2
Against this background of speculation Milton suddenly had to face the failure of his own marriage. The life which was to have been a true poem was jarred by a piece of cacophonous prose. Milton’s ideas about divorce were not suddenly adopted because of his own predicament; but his predicament certainly sharpened his thinking on the subject, and the urgency of his writing.
Milton’s ideas on divorce, as on much else, go back to the thinking of the early Protestant reformers. They were not his sources, but he was to find to his delight that they (and Wyclif too) had anticipated some of his conclusions. Not to mention More’s Utopia, an impressive list could be drawn up of early Protestant divines who sanctioned divorce – Tyndale, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer, Osiander, Paraeus. Advocacy of divorce was one of the charges against the Marian martyr Bishop Hooper in 1555. Cranmer’s The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws insisted that the grounds for divorce should be the same for both sexes.3 Milton also noted in his Commonplace Book that Bodin was in favour of divorce – for incompatibility. This position was, however, more characteristic of radical Protestants, especially Anabaptists.4
The Anglican church remained more conservative on the subject of divorce than other reformed churches. Judicial separation a thoro et mensa could be obtained, sometimes for reasons other than adultery; but not divorce permitting remarriage. Things were tightening up from the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Some Puritans had advocated divorce – Perkins (for desertion, and where one of the spouses was an unbeliever, as well as for adultery), Rainolds, Silver-tongued Smith (who thought it was ‘the physic of marriage’ – but for adultery only), Stock and Joseph Hall (both for adultery only). A radical like Robert Browne was more liberal, allowing divorce ‘for religion and conscience’, and in 1605 it was claimed that members of Francis Johnson’s congregation in Amsterdam ‘accused themselves of adultery so that they might be rid of their wives’, so easy was it to obtain a divorce.1 Divorce was also easier in New England. The Socinian Racovian Catechism authorized believers to desert an obstinately unbelieving spouse.2 In 1576 there had been agitation in Parliament for matrimonial cases to be taken away from the church courts and transferred to the common law. That would be the logical consequence of ceasing to regard marriage as a sacrament and treating it as a civil contract. This seemed obvious common sense to Milton: it was recommended again by Hugh Peter in 1651, and finally carried into effect by the Barebones Parliament in 1653.3 Under their act Milton was married to his second wife by a J.P. In August 1653 an attempt had been made to insert a divorce clause in the marriage bill before Parliament.
Milton decided in 1643 to write on the subject of divorce, in the general interest, not merely with respect to his own case. He did so with fantastic, reckless courage, flying in the face of received respectable opinion in England. He displayed the same sort of courage in isolation later in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and The Ready and Easy Way, though it is difficult to be absolutely certain in any of these cases just how far Milton was aware of his isolation.
The opening passage of his first divorce pamphlet, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, suggests that others as well as Milton had expected that after the defeat of episcopacy ‘man’s nature would find immediate rest and releasement from all evils. But … such as have a mind large enough to take into their thoughts a general survey of human things would soon prove themselves in that opinion far deceived.’4
Milton had learnt from his own experience that ‘the strongest Christian’ who found himself ‘bound fast … to an image of earth and phlegm … will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against divine Providence.’ The ‘pain of loss’ in such cases was ‘in some degree like that which reprobates feel’. It might lead to ‘thoughts of atheism’.1 Already the ways of God to men had to be considered and explained before they could be justified. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was published in August 1643. A second edition followed within six months, and two more in 1645. The Judgment of Martin Bucer,2 in July 1644, together with Tetrachordon and Colasterion (March 1645) completed the series.
Milton’s problem was to explain away Christ’s apparent flat prohibition of divorce on any grounds other than adultery. To do this he went back to first principles. Whereas previously he had claimed that the Bible was easy for simple men to understand, now he argued that ‘there is scarce any one saying in the Gospel but must be read with limitations and distinctions to be rightly understood’; interpreting the Bible calls for ‘a skillful and laborious gatherer’.3 Above all, we must not ‘enslave the dignity of man’ by setting ‘straiter limits to obedience than God had set’. ‘The ways of God … are equal, easy and not burdensome: nor do they ever cross the just and reasonable desires of men.’4 Milton was consistent in expecting greater freedom, more Christian liberty, under the Gospel than under the Mosaic law. If therefore Christ’s words seem stricter than God’s law in the Old Testament, we must approach them very carefully and with an assumption that they do not mean what they appear to. Perhaps ‘fornication’ means something less precise than we would think: perhaps something more like ‘a wife’s constant contrariness, faithlessness and disobedience’, ‘a constant alienation and disaffection of mind’. ‘Uncleanness’ may mean ‘any defect, annoyance, or ill quality in nature, which to be joined with makes life tedious’. So Milton doubted not ‘with one gentle stroking to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of man’.5 Since marriage is a union of minds, not merely of bodies, it must be freely entered into and freely dissoluble: the marriage contract is analogous to the church covenant, or the contract between king and people. The liberty of Christian men (and women) to live moral lives according to conscience depends on their being freed from external encumbrances. Milton’s emphasis on Christian freedom in divorce may have been the first step in his advance to Arminianism.6
Milton restored to his own satisfaction ‘that power which Christ never took from the master of the family’. The right of divorce ‘cannot belong to any civil or earthly power against the will and consent of both parties, or of the husband alone’. It was an essential part of Milton’s high conception of the dignity of man. This right of divorce applies in cases of permanent incompatibility of temperament – ‘indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind arising from a cause in nature unchangeable’, since loss of mutual solace and peace is a more important reason for divorce than ‘the accident of adultery’. ‘Marriage must give way to … any really irresistible antipathy’, Milton concluded in the De Doctrina. He never paid detailed attention to the question of women’s rights in divorce, though on the title-page of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he announced that the pamphlet was ‘to the good of both sexes’. He threw in phrases like ‘mutual consent’, and said that the law must ‘take care that the conditions of divorce be not injurious’. Nor did he consider the problem of children very deeply, though aware that they were likely to suffer from matrimonial discord. In the De Doctrina he argued that the possibility of divorce is advantageous to a woman, even if it is at the discretion of her husband.1
Milton certainly did not intend to provide ‘divorce at pleasure’, as his enemies suggested; but he laid himself open to the charge by his failure to think out the mechanics of divorce. He never determined how selfish men could be prevented from taking advantage of the freedom which Milton felt to be necessary for the elect. His main interest was to establish – re-establish, Milton would say – the rights of masters of families ‘to dispose and economize’, which in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he saw as ‘the root and source of all liberty’.2 Subjection of wives to husbands was conventionally accepted in the seventeenth century as an image of the political subjection of peoples to rulers.3 Milton’s view that the institution of marriage can be idolized is parallel to his view that monarchy can be idolized. Both must be subordinate to the liberty of Christian men.
A curious and possibly revealing point – Milton more than once associated usury and divorce. Usury, ‘so much as is permitted by the magistrate and demanded with common equity, is neither against the Word of God nor the rule of charity’: it is right if it is entered into with the right motives of conscience. So with divorce. In the De Doctrina Christiana Milton gave ‘usury, divorce, polygamy and the like’ as matters in which the regenerate must be left free to decide for themselves according to conscience.1 The scrivener’s son approached all these matters from the point of view of the head of a business household.
In Milton’s final divorce pamphlet he advanced a more general argument. The Fall had social consequences: private property and inequality replaced universal equality, political power protected social inequality. ‘In the same manner and for the same cause … our imperfect and degenerate condition of necessity required this law [of divorce] among the rest.’ ‘In the beginning, had man continued perfect, it had been just that all things should have remained as they began to Adam and Eve’, including community of property and indissoluble marriage. ‘But who will be the man shall introduce this kind of commonwealth, as Christianity now goes ?’ The marriage of true minds is an attempt to get back behind the Fall: the marriage of incompatible minds must therefore be dissoluble because it had never been a true marriage. Forcing incompatible partners to remain together negates marriage’s potential realization of divine harmony, its recapturing of Eden. It is ‘an act of blasphemy’. ‘The world first rose out of chaos’ by God’s ‘divorcing command’: it is not for the church or the magistrate to bring chaos back again, but to renew the world ‘by the separating of unmeet consorts’.2
Milton’s ideas were not startlingly original. His emphasis on mutual solace as the sole or principal end of marriage had been anticipated by Thomas Gataker among others. To say that he was ‘the first great protagonist in Christendom’ of divorce by mutual consent3 ignores Bucer, and may seriously underestimate the unpublished tradition which Ranters, Muggletonians and Quakers inherited from the Familists, of marriage and divorce by mutual declaration before the congregation.4 Milton was putting together ideas which were under discussion among his radical contemporaries. What was new was the courage with which he faced the logical consequences of these ideas. Since marriage is not a sacrament but a civil contract, it could in Milton’s view be terminated by notification to the magistrate, though the husband should first state his case before his minister and some elders of the church in order to establish his good faith. Milton attacked both the common law’s exclusive stress on adultery as the sole ground for divorce, and the ‘cold restrictiveness of the Puritan ethic as it appeared in its extreme form among the Presbyterians’.1 A right to divorce is necessary to preserve love. ‘Places of prostitution will be less haunted, the neighbour’s bed less attempted.’2
Women may divorce their husbands for adultery or heresy, though Milton appears to think women much more likely to have the incurable temperamental defects which render marriage null. But if the divorce tracts dwell on women’s alleged defects, and on the inferiority of their position, let us recall how devastating Mary’s desertion must have seemed to the poet. Paradise Lost does something to redress the balance. Milton corrects the commentators in giving Adam’s wife the name Eve (‘mother of all living’) before the Fall, perhaps to enhance the status of sexuality and motherhood.3 The lines
Emparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden,
(P.L. IV. 506–7)
go a little beyond Genesis, even if the words are Satan’s.
It is obvious to the most casual reader of Paradise Lost that there are tensions between the authoritarian male dominance proclaimed in many of the narrator’s and Raphael’s comments on the one hand, and some of Adam’s words and actions on the other. Unfallen Adam expresses ‘vehement desire’, ‘transport’, ‘passion’ in Eve’s presence (VIII. 525–31), and appears to recognize her as in some respects his superior. He describes himself as torn between his theoretical awareness of male superiority (‘For well I understand in the prime end / Of nature her the inferior’ – VIII. 540–1) and his ‘awe’ before Eve’s beauty and her ‘greatness of mind’ (VIII. 557). This is strengthened by the give-away line ‘thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise’, spoken by Raphael (VIII. 577). Milton insists that Eve is capable of intellectual conversation (VII. 48–58). And – going beyond anything in the Biblical text or the commentaries – Adam is prepared to back his judgment by preferring death with Eve not only to loneliness without her but to the society of any other woman.
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe
(IX. 908–16)
— with that cry still ringing in our ears, how can we take seriously Milton’s attempt to restore traditional male superiority by blandly observing that Adam was ‘fondly overcome by female charm’? Milton’s heart here has reasons that his reason does not know:1 as Empson realized, the emotion underlying the poem is far more subversive than the ostensible argument. Milton went beyond Genesis when he made Adam ask for a helpmeet, and proclaim the equality of the sexes to the Creator himself:
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Given and received
(VIII. 383–6)
After the Fall, it was Eve who first repented and through her love saved Adam (X. 909–46). The contradiction between the traditional sexual morality to which Milton pays lip-service and the morality of Adam’s heart has its analogies with the division in Milton himself between the second and third cultures. Both in the divorce tracts and in the De Doctrina he is extraordinarily ‘un-Puritan’ and broad-minded about ‘casual adultery’. He is contrasting mere physical adultery with the graver offence of spiritual adultery. But few Puritans would have dismissed the former as ‘but a transient injury’, ‘soon repented, soon amended’, which can be forgiven ‘once and again’.2 (Did Mary have something to forgive which took place during her absence?) Edwards would have seen here confirmation that Milton was a libertine. When Raphael blushingly admitted that angels interpenetrate, he said nothing about monogamy. Milton is defending natural sexuality against traditional Puritanism.
Our maker bids increase: who bids abstain
But our destroyer?
(P.L. IV. 748–9)
Abstinence as such is no virtue. Milton in this one point is with the Ranters. After describing Eve’s nakedness, Milton attacked ‘dishonest shame, … sin-bred, … mere show of seeming pure’ (P.L. IV. 313–16). Telling us that Adam and Eve made love before the Fall, he added:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
(P.L. IV. 744–7)
This was unacceptable to many orthodox theologians; Milton seems to be deliberately blurring the distinction between fallen and unfallen sexuality.1
It is, when we come to think of it, remarkable that Milton could still write ‘unpuritanically’ about sex in Paradise Lost, after the fiasco of his first marriage and the scandal over the divorce pamphlets. Modern commentators have compared his attitude to Blake, to Hardy; Paradise Lost is ‘probably the last piece of imaginative literature before Jude the Obscure to treat sexuality in serious practical detail’. The De Doctrina’s reference to ‘the human seed, the noblest and most intimate part of the body’, looks forward to D. H. Lawrence.2 ‘The frank eroticism of some of the descriptions of the naked Eve’ has been seen as a recovery of Spenser’s vision of human love and perfectibility without Spenser’s elusive allegory. The Adam and Eve who walk out of Paradise Lost hand in hand are human, practical, down-to-earthy, in a way that might not have been conceivable before Milton’s experience in the English Revolution.3
However little attention Milton’s tracts on episcopacy had attracted, he could not complain that his divorce pamphlets were ignored. Royalists naturally took advantage of what they saw as confirmation of their view that heresy led inevitably to social licence and chaos. Cowley may have referred to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Civil War, a piece of Royalist propaganda written in the summer and autumn of 1643:
The number of their wives their lusts decree;
The Turkish law’s their Christian liberty.
If he does refer to Milton, it is the earliest known hostile reaction (though unpublished).1 Respectable Puritan divines, far from sharing the libertarian outlook of the early reformers, were acutely embarrassed by Milton’s arguments. They met them either with silence or with unargued denunciation.
Milton’s old friend Thomas Young referred cautiously to his pupil in a sermon preached before the House of Commons in February 1644, warning against advocates of ‘digamy’. Milton was denounced as a licentious libertine by Herbert Palmer to the same august congregation six months later: Palmer called for action against Milton and his book. There followed attacks by William Prynne,2 by the Stationers’ Company (who denounced him to the House of Lords), by Daniel Featley, Ephraim Pagitt, Robert Baillie, Joseph Caryl (a conservative licenser who attacked Milton whilst licensing a book against him), John Bachiler (one of the most liberal of the Parliamentarian licensers, who also thought he must dissociate himself from Milton),3 Thomas Edwards and many others. Milton’s ideas were caricatured in Little Non-Such (1646),4 glanced at by Thomas Case in a sermon to the House of Commons in 1647, noticed by Edward Hyde in the same year. The ministers of Sion College denounced them; so did T.C., the anonymous A Glasse for the Times (1648), Joseph Hall, Clement Walker, Henry Hammond, James Howell, Alexander Ross, the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus, and many others.5
After the Stationers’ attack Milton was summoned before the House of Lords, but nothing seems to have happened. Edwards tells us that Milton’s views were well received by the sectarian preacher Mrs. Attaway. She took the initiative in discussing them with two gentlemen of the Inns of Court who attended her meeting. I should like to be able to prove that they were the two young sparks with whom Milton shared his ‘gaudy days’.6 Mrs. Attaway subsequently acted on what she took to be Milton’s principles by eloping with William Jenny, who like her suffered from an uncongenial spouse.7 Mrs. Attaway is an interesting figure, who has been treated rather flippantly by male historians. She encouraged free discussion after her sermons. Like Milton she was a mortalist. She believed that there was no hell save in the conscience, and that it could not stand with the goodness of God to damn his own creatures eternally. She held herself to be as free from sin as Christ was when in the flesh.1
We may suspect that Mrs. Attaway was not the only one in radical circles who read Milton with approval. John Robins the Ranter ‘gave authority unto some of his disciples, both unto men and women, to change their wives and husbands’, setting an example by changing his own. William Franklin rejected his wife and lived with Mary Gadbury, who had been deserted by her own husband.2 Hugh Peter and Laurence Clarkson were among those who spoke up in favour of divorce, and many Ranters simply rejected the tie of monogamous marriage altogether, as a fruit of the curse.3
Milton was defended by Henry Robinson and Henry Burton in 1646, and there were several later laudatory references. In 1660 ‘G.S.’ suggested that ‘the vulgar’ agreed with Milton.4 (Not only the vulgar, of course. The Earl of Rochester thought ‘denying the remedy of divorce’ was ‘an unreasonable imposition on the freedom of mankind’.5 Shadwell in Epsom Wells (1672), Farquhar in The Beaux Stratagem (1707) and Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter (1688) all contemplate divorce for incompatibility: Farquhar at least based his arguments on Milton.)
Milton was not entirely delighted by the approbation of such as Mrs. Attaway. In the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he claimed rather defensively that he had published it in English out of ‘the esteem I have of my country’s judgment, and the love I bear to my native language’. But in the Second Defence he expressed regret that he had not kept his divorce pamphlets in the decent obscurity of Latin. In 1655 he told a Dutch admirer that if these tracts were to be translated in the Netherlands he would prefer Latin to Dutch; but he did not reject the idea of translation into the vernacular.6
The ‘clamour of so much envy and impertinence’ with which The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was received, and still more the failure to answer it, surprised and upset Milton. In the second edition (1644) he supported his arguments from reason and Scripture by the authority of orthodox Protestant divines: his schoolboy delight in finding that Bucer had anticipated his arguments shows how shaken he had been – despite his professed contempt for arguments from authority. He felt, or claimed to feel, that perhaps he had been divinely inspired to recover this lost truth – a claim which he took seriously enough to repeat in his Defence of the People of England.1 The Presbyterians remained unimpressed, however, despite the fuller Scriptural exegesis of Tetrachordon and the invective of Colasterion.
So the cruel blow of the breakdown of his marriage was followed by a no less cruel outburst of reprobation and denunciation as a libertine, an advocate of sexual promiscuity. It must have been exceptionally galling for a man whose views on the sanctity of marriage were in fact far more austere than those of most Puritans and whose sensibility – already made raw by Mary’s desertion – now had salt rubbed into it. The sonnet, ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’, shows how much he was affected not only by the vituperation of the orthodox but also by his unexpected allies. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’
Again we have to guess how Milton faced life in the years between 1642 and 1645. He found consolation in agreeable feminine society – that of Boyle’s sister, the talented Lady Ranelagh, of Lady Margaret Ley, of Mrs. Katharine Thomason, wife of the Presbyterian collector of pamphlets, of Mrs. Hester Blackborough, Milton’s cousin, married to a leather-seller. Margaret Ley was ‘daughter to that good Earl’ of Marlborough, whom ‘the sad breaking of that Parliament’ of 1628–9 ‘broke’. Now wife of Captain John Hobson, she was ‘a woman of great wit and ingenuity’, and seems to have taken special care of Milton after his wife left him, as Lady Ranelagh was to be his stand-by in his blindness and widowerhood. Lady Ranelagh was an old friend and patron of Hartlib and Dury. Her house may have been the meeting-place of the Invisible College in the later sixteen-forties.2 She perhaps introduced Henry Oldenburg to Milton. In the fifties she was Milton’s near neighbour, and was ‘like a near relative’ to him. Parker even hints at a more intimate relationship, but without evidence. Milton taught her nephew and her son. She almost certainly used her considerable influence on the poet’s behalf in 1660.3
During Mary’s absence there was also a mysterious Miss Davis, so far unidentified, whom Milton was said to have thought of marrying. This would presumably have been after divorcing Mary for desertion, unless the poet was already a serious advocate of second marriages without divorce.4 The Powells got to know of this plan, and ‘set all engines on work’ to restore Mary. The Civil War was over; the Royalists were defeated; travel between Oxfordshire and London was again easy. The Powells secured the collusion of the Blackboroughs, whom Milton was in the habit of visiting. On one of these occasions Mary reappeared, and in a theatrical scene flung herself on her knees before her husband, begging him to take her back. The Blackboroughs are more likely than the Powells to have thought of this approach to the young poet who had absorbed high chivalrous ideals from his early reading.1 Reluctant though he no doubt was, Milton succumbed to this well-calculated attack: Mary resumed her position as Mrs. Milton. Within less than a year Milton was saddled with her whole family, now apparently ruined – Mr. Powell, Mrs. Powell, and at least five children.
Biographers have not sufficiently contemplated the possibility of Milton saying No to Mary. He had decided that the marriage was irretrievably broken; the economic motivation of Mary’s return was transparently obvious; and Milton may still have had hopes of Miss Davis. His chivalrous gesture was, he may soon have realized, an error of judgment. Samson did not make the same mistake when Dalila tried a similar appeal; and Milton seems to have lost interest in the chivalric ethos.
We can only guess at the horrors of this transformation of the house which Mary had found too quiet in 1642. Milton did his best to help the Powells financially, assisting his father-in-law to compound for his delinquency, and trying to sort out the worst of his money tangles. But guarded letters referring to the noise which surrounded him hint at something of what he suffered. We can only guess too at his relations with Mary, who bore him a son and three daughters before she died in 1652. Parker sentimentally imagined that the marriage, against all the odds, proved successful: argued even that Mary was ‘my late espoused saint’ about whom Milton wrote one of the most moving sonnets in the English language. One wonders. The description in the De Doctrina Christiana of the sordid bickerings in a marriage of incompatibles may look all the way back to 1642; or it may recall more recent experiences.2 Christopher Arnold, who knew Milton in 1651, spoke later of his ‘unhappy marriage’.3 Milton did not remember the date of Mary’s death. His relation with Mary’s daughters was never easy; and when he came to make his will, the unpaid dowry still rankled. Surely he would have forgiven and forgotten if his life with Mary had been happy? Finally, there is the fact of his long silence in the years of readjustment to Mary. The first interruption in his pamphleteering, between May 1642 and August 1643, can be precisely related to the breakdown of his marriage. The second and longer interruption, from March 1645 to February 1649, may equally be related to the disaster of its resumption. Though the Powells were financially completely dependent on Milton, one doubts whether they had the tact to repress their very different political views. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates may well have been the product, among other things, of discussions in the family circle. Never again was Milton to be silent for so long, even in his blindness, until the years after the Restoration when he was working on Paradise Lost and was precluded from pamphleteering by the censorship.
The case of Mrs. Attaway reminds us of the importance of women among the radical sects, and of the new opportunities which freedom of organization and discussion made possible. In New England in the sixteen-thirties Mrs. Hutchinson usurped the role of teacher and political leader hitherto confined to men. In England in the forties and fifties women took part in church government, preached, prayed, prophesied, wrote. In the Quaker movement especially they played a leading role as missionaries; two went off to convert the Grand Turk, others – who were less tolerantly received – to convert New England. Women played a prominent part in the tragedy of James Nayler, the Quaker who in 1656 made a symbolic entry into Bristol, riding on a donkey, accompanied by women singing Hosanna and strewing palms in his path. Nayler’s subsequent trial and punishment for ‘horrid blasphemy’ proved a great divide in the early history of Quakerism, leading to the ascendancy of George Fox over the ‘Ranter’ wing – the anarchic individualism which surrendered completely to the motions of the spirit. The anti-political and pacifist tendency in the movement was strengthened. Nayler might have been saved from the terrible penalties inflicted on him if more M.P.s had shared Milton’s scepticism about blasphemy as an offence.
