In his ultimate lack of respect for Parliament Milton was closer to the Fifth Monarchists than to republicans or Levellers: yet he was no Fifth Monarchist.8 The Levellers had carried the myth of Anglo-Saxon freedom, which Sir Edward Coke had used to idolize the common law, to conclude ‘our very laws were made by our conquerors’ and should be rejected: Milton went even further and argued that Parliament was ‘a Norman or French word, a monument of our ancient servitude’: the name should be abolished, and perhaps the thing too.9 Milton never accepted Ranter antinomianism, nor the early Quaker doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the inner light. He referred to the Blasphemy Act of 1650, directed mainly against Ranters, as ‘that prudent and well-deliberated act’.10 He never abandoned his belief that the Bible contained truths necessary for salvation. He parted company with Socinians in attributing divinity to Christ. On some of these questions Milton drew fine distinctions which we shall be examining later.11
In this chapter 1 have been advancing a thesis. My object was to emphasize the intellectual milieu from which Milton’s ideas arose, to suggest affinities between his ideas and those of his radical contemporaries, not to claim identity. Often his views developed in conscious disagreement with those of Levellers or Ranters or Socinians. If we think of two eccentric circles, one representing the ideas of traditional Puritanism, the other those of the radical milieu, Milton’s ideas form a third circle, concentric to neither of these but overlapping both.1 But the bubbling ferment of discussion and speculation going on in the sixteen-forties should not be left out of any attempt to understand Milton’s own thinking. Perhaps the London radicals were, if not better teachers than Origen, Lactantius and Arius – to none of whom Milton subscribed slave – at least a more immediate influence and stimulus.
Down to 1642 Milton’s career had been an almost consistent success story. He developed slowly, but at Cambridge he won the affection and respect of undergraduates and dons alike. He was dissatisfied with the education he received there, but thanks to his father’s generosity he was able to spend many years educating himself more satisfactorily, culminating in his journey to Italy – a privilege usually restricted to sons of the aristocracy. In Italy his reception had bolstered his self-confidence as well as directing his thoughts towards politics. He slowly came to realize that he might become a great poet, and to believe that in this role he could serve his church and his country even better than in the pulpit. Finally, in 1641–2 he had the satisfaction of seeing the hated Laudian régime overthrown. This promised to open up a new era of liberation for England and perhaps for the world, to prepare for a society in which the poet would be listened to and honoured as God’s spokesman to his people. His dedicated life seemed to be justifying itself: he could look back on thirty-four years of what might not unreasonably be called true poetry.
Then, in the moment of apparent triumph, things started to go wrong. In 1642 he married Mary Powell. This marriage, contracted with poetic ideals and expectations, was a disastrous failure. A similar disappointment awaited his political hopes. In the New Jerusalem ‘ignorance and ecclesiastical thraldom … under new shapes and disguises begins apace to grow upon us.’ (Those were Milton’s last published words before Areopagitica, in which he declared that ‘bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.’)2 The pamphlets in which Milton had tried to salvage his high ideal of matrimony by associating it with divorce for incompatibility of temperament were attacked as incitements to promiscuity and libertinism by clergymen who clearly had not read them.1 His name was dragged through the mud. He was denounced to Parliament. The poet came down to earth with a bump. This is our next subject.
Marriage, 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