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.
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