My attempt to survey in this chapter the underground traditions which existed before 1640 is, I am well aware, incomplete; when more work has been done on the subject it may also turn out to be unsatisfactory. But I am sure that the ideas which surfaced in the forties had a long pre-history, and are important for our understanding of Milton’s thinking (and not only of his). The rest of this book will try to demonstrate the latter point.1
As if the womb of teeming truth were to be closed up, if she presume to bring forth aught that sorts not with their unchewed notions and suppositions.
Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), C.P.W., H, p. 224
I tried to suggest in Chapter 4 some reasons for Milton’s violent reaction against the Laudian régime. It outraged him as poet and intellectual no less than as Puritan and led him, once his pen was liberated, to say things about bishops which seem exaggerated to those who are acquainted only with their harmless twentieth-century successors. Take Charles I’s Book of Sports, for instance, which encouraged the traditional rural games on Sundays. Sentimentalists have deplored Puritan vehemence against this; but the frolics which occurred at wakes and church ales could end in murder, and more often did end in illegitimate conception.1 The attempt to suppress these pagan survivals should be seen as part of a move to spread a new ethos to the dark corners of the countryside. In Milton’s Nativity Ode Christ drives out demons just as Protestants were striving to drive out saints and fertility gods. The Book of Sports symbolizes the difference between the two cultures.2
It is in this context that we should see Milton’s participation in the attack on episcopacy which followed the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640. The old régime collapsed at once: Strafford was tried and executed, Laud was imprisoned, episcopacy itself was challenged. The manifesto of the anti-episcopal party was An Answer to An Humble Remonstrance by Joseph Hall (March 1641). The name on the title-page was Smectymnuus, composed from the initials of the authors (Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen and William Spurstowe), the clerical leaders of the Presbyterian party. The Smectymnuan controversy led to Milton’s five anti-episcopal pamphlets. Of Reformation appeared in the month of Strafford’s execution, May 1641, Of Prelatical Episcopacy and Animadversions upon The Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus within the next two months, the longer The Reason of Church Government at the beginning of 1642 and An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions in April.
Parker plausibly suggested that Milton was invited to intervene in the controversy because he was known from his Cambridge days as the master of a boisterous and flippant manner which sober divines like the Smectymnuans could hardly use themselves. Spurstowe and Newcomen had been undergraduates when Milton delivered his Speech at a Vacation Exercise. There are interesting parallels between the Sixth Prolusion and some passages in Animadversions.’1 Milton no doubt learnt some tricks from the Marprelate Tracts of 1589, which were reprinted in the early sixteen-forties and whose slashing irreverence would appeal to him.
In the anti-episcopal pamphlets, alongside much routine propaganda, we can trace Milton’s special interest in the cultural and moral consequences, as he saw them, of episcopacy. He believed, or said he believed, that the bishops’ intention in plucking men ‘from their soberest and saddest thoughts, and instigating them by public edict to gaming, jigging, wassailling and mixed dancing’ on Sundays was to ‘prepare and supple us either for a foreign invasion or domestic oppression’. ‘To make men governable’, the prelates’ ‘precepts mainly tend to break a national spirit and courage by countenancing upon riot, luxury and ignorance.’ The ‘tympany of Spaniolized bishops’ have ‘hamstrung the valour of the subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home’. The communion table ‘stands like an exalted platform upon the brow of the choir, fortified with bulwark and barricado, to keep off the profane touch of the laics, whilst the obscene and surfeited priest scruples not to paw and mammock the sacramental bread as familiarly as his tavern biscuit. And thus the people, vilified and rejected by them, give over the earnest study of virtue’, and commit ‘the whole managing of our salvation’ to the priests. A ‘servile and thrall-like fear’ has replaced ‘the adoptive and cheerful boldness which our new alliance with God requires’.2
The bishops have become the praetorian guard of tyranny; ‘faithful and freeborn Englishmen’ emigrate to New England. Instead of imposing the sort of discipline which would make men industrious and conscientious, bishops use church courts for exploitation. ‘Their ceremonies and their courts’ are ‘two leeches … that still suck and suck the kingdom.’ It was not only that the lowest classes liked ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’ and hated true discipline; the courts were undertaking functions which were not their business. Excommunication was prostituted ‘to prog and pander for fees, or to display their pride and sharpen their revenge, debarring men the protection of the law’. Antichrist, as Milton put it, was Mammon’s son. ‘Jurisdictive power in the church,’ he concluded, ‘there ought to be none at all’. John Selden agreed with him. So does the modern world.1
In his Commonplace Book Milton had already been noting the dangers ‘to both King and country’ of clerical flatterers, and the desirability of separating church and state. He noted the uses of religion to rebels: and that their enemies unjustly charged reformers with sedition, ‘as happens to-day’. What he found quite intolerable was the contempt with which the bishops treated the common people whom they had endeavoured to keep in ignorance. ‘While none think the people so void of knowledge as the prelates think them, none are so backward and malignant as they to bestow knowledge upon them’, as witness their suppression of sermons and of marginally annotated Bibles. Pluralism left many ‘waste places’ in darkness. If ‘the poor mechanic’ had difficulty in distinguishing ‘between faithful teachers and false’, it was because ‘his ear was unaccustomed to good teaching.’ And ‘now with a most inhuman cruelty they who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.’2
The Laudian ceremonies infuriated Milton, and many others, to an extent with which it is difficult to sympathize emotionally in our Laodicean age, so much less passionate about symbolism. The crucial phrase for understanding is Milton’s reference to the Laudian altar as a ‘table of separation’. For the radicals Holy Communion was not a sacrifice mediated by a priest whose magic alone could turn bread and wine into body and blood; it was the shared celebration of a congregation of equal believers, symbolized by their sitting around a table. If the minister (the word means servant) had any role at all, it was to serve bread and wine to the congregation. The Laudian insistence on railing off the altar was thought to imply the Catholic doctrine of the real presence, and (like the surplice and other vestments) to mark the priest as a being superior to the congregation. Thus under apparently trivial disputes over communion rails and the ‘piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies’ there lurked disputes about human (or Christian) equality. Milton was criticizing the withdrawal of the church from the people.1
Milton and those who felt like him feared that Laudian rule was taking England back to Catholicism. This seemed to be true in ceremonies. It seemed also to be true in Laud’s determined attempt to elevate the status of the clergy, bringing bishops into the government, making clergymen J.P.s, trying to recover alienated church property and to increase the emoluments, political influence and prestige of the clergy as a whole.2 Censorship and the prerogative courts were used to silence radical Protestant criticism. Meanwhile Laud was trying to extend the authority of bishops over Presbyterian Scotland, and was severing long-standing connections with continental Protestants,