Milton was never a democrat. But in the years between his return from Italy and the outbreak of civil war he was thinking a great deal about government and the subjects’ right of rebellion, and at least considering anti-monarchical sentiments which he did not find it expedient to express openly until 1649.2 At the time of writing Areopagitica he had perhaps more confidence in God’s Englishmen than in the Scottish army or the Presbyterian clergy. Yet in 1640 things had seemed very different. The brotherly assistance of Scottish Presbyterians appeared to have revived the Protestant international which Laud had laboured to disrupt, and which the Thirty Years War had weakened, since German and Dutch Protestants could survive only under the protection of Catholic France; French Huguenots had to resign themselves to a position of permanent subordination. Perhaps for the Scots too acceptance of the English alliance was an attempt to escape from French patronage – the auld alliance – and to achieve the century-old dream of a single Protestant church uniting the whole island – a project which, Milton thought, had always hitherto been sabotaged by the papacy.3
So when Milton joined in the campaign against bishops in 1641–2, he was attacking on a very broad cultural front. He was expressing deeply felt and long pondered opinions, which potentially went well beyond the clerical Presbyterianism that he initially defended. He really believed, as he put it later, that ‘those who were esteemed religious … asserted liberty’, just as tyranny was inevitably linked with ‘false religion’.4 He was already aware of distinctions between his own position and that of the Presbyterians. There was nothing naive in his support for Smectymnuan opposition to episcopacy. If he was too optimistic in supposing that the Presbyterian programme in any way corresponded to his own political, religious and cultural ideals, that is the sort of mistake that arises at the beginning of any revolution, when opponents of the ruling group are united in hostility and have had no opportunity (because they have been denied freedom of discussion and of the press) to clarify and sort out their own views. Richard Baxter had never asked himself what Presbyterianism and Independency were until 1641. John Owen, another professional theologian, did not get beyond ‘opposition to episcopacy and ceremonies’ until 1643, when he began to study the congregational way.1 Sir Edward Dering, an experienced politician, had never heard either Presbyterianism or Independency defended in the House of Commons before November 1641.2 Men’s ignorance and uncertainty were glossed over by respect for the Scots whose opposition had brought Charles’s government crashing down, and for the courage of Laud’s victims – Leighton, Prynne, Bastwick, Burton and Lilburne – who included Presbyterians as well as men who would become Independents and Baptists.
It is probable that Milton, in rejecting Constantine and defending Familists, knew exactly what he was doing. By the sixteen-forties he was already questioning the institution of monarchy. So we need not take too seriously his adoption of the argument that bishops must be opposed because they threatened kingship.3 There were sound political reasons at that stage for submerging differences between the opponents of bishops. We need not reject Milton’s later claim that his concern was already ‘the liberation of all human life from slavery’.4 When he scented danger that slavery might be reimposed, Areopagitica made clear his priorities. His dialogue with the radicals had begun.
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