Milton, an intellectual who wished to give reasons for what he believed, theorized about the male supremacy which no one denied. In the course of theorizing he shocked his contemporaries by being prepared to contemplate a situation in which the wife may ‘exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield’. Then ‘a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female.’ This, however, he regarded as an exceptional case, though taking care to note examples of outstanding women in his Commonplace Book.1 He gave his youngest daughter, born in May 1652, the name of Deborah, the inspired poetess and judge of Israel who stirred the Israelites up to take arms against their oppressors.
Milton was also attacked because ‘all his arguments … prove as effectually that the wife may sue a divorce from her husband upon the same grounds.’2 In An Apology he argued that unchastity was worse in men than in women. We must see these attitudes in the light of the Protestant concept of the priesthood of all believers, which helped to enhance the status of women, for ‘the soul knows no difference of sex’;3 women too had consciences to which God might speak direct. Protestantism did a great deal for the education of girls. They must learn to read and write, if only to be able to read the Bible. Being able to read, they read other things as well. It was the Cavalier poets who in the seventeenth century had a low view of women, and who looked back to the golden age as a time of sexual promiscuity.4 As an example of an orthodox attitude towards marriage less elevated than Milton’s, consider the discussions between the Earl of Rochester and Gilbert Burnet in 1679. Rochester objected to Christian prohibitions on extra-marital sex, and to Anglican refusal of divorce. Burnet’s reply started from the sanctity of property. ‘Men have a property in their wives and daughters, so that to defile the one or corrupt the other is an unjust and injurious thing.’5
Milton, then, was far from unique in holding that women were inferior to men. The importance of keeping them in their place was confirmed for him, as for Lucy Hutchinson, by the shocking example of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. ‘How great mischief and dishonour’, Milton reflected in Eikonoklastes, ‘hath befallen to nations under the government of effeminate and uxorious magistrates, who being themselves governed at home under a feminine usurpation’ were incompetent to rule others. In the History of Britain Boadicea was chastised for usurping a masculine role, though other women were praised: Milton presumably approved of Deborah. Salmasius’s alleged deference to his wife was used against him: ‘In vain does he prattle about liberty in assembly and market place who at home endures the slavery most unworthy of man, slavery to an inferior.’ The criticism follows logically from Milton’s Biblical position – as does his ecstatic praise of the exception who proved his rule – Queen Christina of Sweden.1 She fortunately had no husband.
We know little about Milton’s reasons for marrying. At what Charles Diodati’s death meant for him we can only guess.2 In the Epitaphium Damonis Milton reflected on the hardness and loneliness of man’s life, on the instability of human affection (lines 106–11). The loss of Diodati may help to explain Milton’s brief flirtation with celibacy as an ideal. The idealization of chastity in Comus, however we interpret it, taken together with Comus’s paean in praise of fecundity, seems to hint at unresolved tensions. The additions to the version printed in 1637 may be intended to suggest a way out: chastity is far from precluding true marriage. At the end of the Epitaphium Damonis Diodati was admitted to the heavenly Bacchic orgies because he had been chaste. Virginity as an ideal was explicitly disavowed in the divorce tracts, where Milton went out of his way to correct St. Paul: marriage was not a defilement, ‘the Apostle … pronounces quite contrary to [the] Word of God.’3 The joke in Animadversions about nunneries providing ‘convenient stowage for their withered daughters’ hardly suggests an elevated view of chastity.4 The thirty-three-year-old bachelor may have decided that it was time for him to take a wife. In April 1642, when he was twitted with aspiring to marriage with a rich widow, he announced that he would prefer ‘a virgin of mean fortune honestly bred’. Perhaps the gay and lively Mary Powell was the next one he met. The angry gods had their revenge.5
Milton’s father had lent £300, secured by a bond of £500, to the feckless Richard Powell, who lived in an Oxfordshire village a mile or two from the one in which John Milton senior had been born. There may have been a long-standing acquaintance between the two families. In June 1642 the poet went down to Oxfordshire, perhaps to collect this debt, perhaps combining the trip with a visit to relatives, perhaps with a few days working in the Bodleian Library. He returned married to the seventeen-year-old Mary, one of Richard Powell’s eleven children, and with the promise of a dowry of £1,000 (never received). We know nothing of how this happened. We may imagine the Powells as a scheming family, anxious to evade their financial obligations. We may think that Milton was anxious for marriage in the abstract. ‘He who wilfully abstains from marriage, not being supernaturally gifted’, Milton wrote in 1645, is ‘in a diabolical sin.’1
Milton had recently taken a big house in Barbican for himself and a number of boys whom he was teaching. Perhaps he already had marriage in mind. There has been much speculation about what happened, or did not happen, in the matrimonial chamber of this house. Mary may or may not have refused to consummate the marriage; certainly she found the surroundings oppressively quiet and lonely after the crowded household she had come from. The silence was punctuated by occasional cries from pupils undergoing a beating. Within ‘a month or thereabout’ of marriage Mary, who was only a child herself, had gone back home, ostensibly on a brief visit. She did not return, and the emissary whom Milton sent was rudely repulsed.
Meanwhile civil war had broken out. The Powells were Royalists, living in a Royalist area; Milton an ardent Parliamentarian. Oxford became the King’s headquarters, so communications were difficult. If the Powells were cunning schemers, they may have calculated that now they had a chance of bilking altogether on their debt. Or they may suddenly have found their son-in-law’s political views, tolerable six months earlier, insupportable now that fighting had actually broken out. Or Mary may just have said No. We do not know.
We can likewise only guess at the effect on the poet of the breakdown of his marriage; it must have been traumatic. No man enjoys that sort of blow to his pride. We may suspect that Milton was aware of an element of incompetence on his side which did not please him. But equally important were the consequences for his way of thinking. Marriage had proved no more satisfactory