Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

for a brief period prepared to court martyrdom: after 1660 one suspects that many former Ranters and Baptists reverted to the ways of their Familist predecessors and returned formally and unbelievingly to the national church. The Ranters ‘would have said as we said and done as we commanded, and yet have kept their own principle still’, said Durant Hotham, stressing this Lollard and Familist reaction as the main difference between Ranters and Quakers.¹

      With all these reservations, let me suggest some continuing ideas of the lower-class heretical culture which burst into the open in the sixteen-forties. First comes anti-clericalism, the view that a layman is as good as a parson. It may extend to seeing the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy as anti-christian, to rejection of tithes and a state church, to hostility towards universities as training centres for the clergy, to advocacy of ‘mechanic preachers’ who enjoy the spirit of God, so much more important than academic education. All these views are familiar, from Wyclif and the Lollards through Anabaptists and Familists to Levellers and sectaries in the sixteen-forties and -fifties; full documentation would be superfluous. The Familists’ ministers were itinerant craftsmen, and indeed the conditions of underground sectarianism forced the emergence of mechanic preachers. Anti-sacerdotalism was a necessity as well as an ideology. Some Lollards, and a reformer like William Tyndale, even thought that women might preach.²

      Secondly comes strong emphasis on study of the Bible, and use of its texts – as interpreted by the individual conscience – to criticize the ceremonies and sacraments of the church. Worship of images, for instance, was denounced as idolatry. Sacredness was denied to church buildings: worship and prayer could take place anywhere.³ Such criticism could be extended to secular institutions. Wyclif thought that the exercise of civil jurisdiction by the church, and in particular the use of force, was anti-christian. The rhyme ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?’, which played its part among the ‘pure Levellers’ (the words are Fuller’s) of 1381, was repeated under Edward VI; this ‘Levelling lewd text’ (Cleveland’s words) was often quoted in the sixteen-forties.¹ Sir Thomas Aston in 1641 referred to ‘the old seditious argument, that we are all the sons of Adam, born free; some of them say, the Gospel hath made them free. … They will plead Scripture for it, that we should all live by the sweat of our brows.’² John Ball and later Lollards said that property should be held in common; the idea reappeared from time to time, culminating in the Diggers of 1649–50.³

      Some specific heretical doctrines have an uncanny persistence. Here I am not attempting to be inclusive: I have picked out those only which have some relevance to Milton. From the later Lollards onwards they include the millenarianism frequently met with in lower-class underground movements; it reappeared in England in the fifteen-nineties and sixteen-forties.⁴ Many English popular heretics rejected predestination, attached greater value to works than to faith, and emphasized human freedom and effort – a sort of pre-Arminianism. This can be found among Lollards and Familists, as well as among continental Anabaptists, from whom it was taken over by the English General Baptists. A Kentish heretic, Henry Hart, ‘a froward freewill man’, wrote a treatise against predestination in Edward VI’s reign. He anticipated Milton in saying that human freedom to choose between good and evil was essential if God was to be absolved of responsibility for evil. Groups of ‘free-willers’ were to be found in Essex as well as in Kent under Edward and Mary.⁵ An Essex heretic in 1592 thought that ‘all the world shall be saved’; Thomas Edwards in 1646 attributed the idea of universal salvation to believers in the Everlasting Gospel, who included Familists, Behmenists and other radicals.⁶ Thomas Shepard’s interest in the Yorkshire Grindletonians led him to ask ‘whether that glorious state of perfection might not be the truth?’ The belief that perfection could be attained in this life had been held by London tradesmen in 1549 and 1631 and by many Familists in between. Under Elizabeth men claimed to be Christ.⁷

      Another recurrent doctrine is anti-Trinitarianism, heretical emphasis on the humanity of Christ. Some Lollards denied the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost.¹ The rapid spread of anti-Trinitarianism both in the liberty of Edward VI’s reign and in prisons under Mary gave rise to great alarm among the orthodox. In 1555 the divinity of Christ was the subject of discussions in an underground meeting in a Colchester tavern.² Between 1548 and 1612 at least eight persons were burnt in England for heresies concerning the Trinity, including Marlowe’s friend Francis Kett, grandson of the leader of the Norfolk rebels of 1549.³ Bishop Jewell at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign spoke of a ‘large and inauspicious crop of Arians and Anabaptists’ in England.⁴ One of the few avowed disciples of Servetus was minister of the Spanish Protestant congregation in London for the first five years of Elizabeth’s reign, and there were anti-Trinitarians in other foreign churches in England.⁵

      The heresy was especially associated with Familists. H.N. (Henry Niklaes, the Familist leader), Samuel Rutherford assured his readers, denied Christ to be God. Christopher Vittels, the itinerant joiner who linked Familist groups in Elizabethan England, had to recant anti-Trinitarian views.⁶ The defence of the Trinity written by the elder Alexander Gil was directed against an Anabaptist who said Christ ‘was but man only’. Written in 1597, published in 1601, it was still worth reprinting in 1635.⁷ In his Apology for the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in 1607 Thomas Rogers defended the Trinity against Servetus and H.N.⁸ Legate and Wightman, the last two heretics to be burnt in England, were both anti-Trinitarians. In 1614 a Latin edition of the Socinian Racovian Catechism was also burnt in London.⁹ Familists rejected the theology of the Atonement, the sacrifice of the cross, and some abandoned the idea of the existence of Christ. For them the word ‘Christ’ was a metaphor for the divine spark which exists in every man.¹⁰

      Another heresy which recurs among underground groups was mortalism, the doctrine that the soul either sleeps from death until the general resurrection or dies with the body. N. T. Burns has so thoroughly demonstrated the continuous existence of Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton that readers may be referred to him for evidence, though with a caution that mortalism existed in England well before the Reformation, among ‘Lollards’.¹ It was a native heresy.

      Tyndale as well as Luther was a mortalist, not least because the doctrine disproved the existence of Purgatory. Calvin opposed the doctrine, and it came to be associated with Anabaptists, radicals beyond the pale. For them it was a commonplace. Servetus was accused of mortalism, and the doctrine was taken up by Socinians. Joseph Mede, attributing mortalism to Socinians in 1638, admitted to Hartlib that it was a powerful argument against Purgatory. In England the Forty-two Articles of 1552 condemned mortalism, though the condemnation was omitted in the Thirty-nine Articles of 1562. Under Elizabeth mortalism was proclaimed by heretics who thought the resurrection occurred in this life: some believed that the soul was annihilated at death. The anti-Trinitarians Francis Kett and Edward Wightman, burnt respectively in 1589 and 1612, believed that the soul was mortal.²

      Mortalism then, like anti-Trinitarianism, was a subject of popular controversy in England at least from Edward VI’s reign onwards. A theologically unsophisticated musician like Thomas Whythorne had heard of the doctrine.³ Spenser and his friend Lodowick Bryskett were both deeply interested in the mortalist controversy.⁴ In 1599 Sir John Davies wrote a poem against the heresy, Nosce Teipsum; Microcosmos (1603), by John Davies of Hereford, also attacked it. The elder Alexander Gil, in his Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (1635), denounced the heresy, which suggests that it was widespread. It travelled to New England, where Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton were accused in the sixteen-thirties of being mortalists as well as Familists.⁵

      Mortalism could be accompanied by, or lead to, a species of materialism. The Lollard Margery Backster in 1428 anticipated Milton in a crude reference to the ultimate physical fate of bread eaten in the Eucharist, in order to show that it could hardly be the body of Christ. William Senes in 1537 declared that ‘God is here upon my hand, in my body, in this stulpe [pillar] and everywhere’ – a doctrine which Familists and Ranters were to echo.¹ Some early heretics also believed – again like the later Ranters – that ‘all comes by nature’, that matter is good in itself. Such doctrines by a natural progression can lead to anti-asceticism,