This was unacceptable to many orthodox theologians; Milton seems to be deliberately blurring the distinction between fallen and unfallen sexuality.1
It is, when we come to think of it, remarkable that Milton could still write ‘unpuritanically’ about sex in Paradise Lost, after the fiasco of his first marriage and the scandal over the divorce pamphlets. Modern commentators have compared his attitude to Blake, to Hardy; Paradise Lost is ‘probably the last piece of imaginative literature before Jude the Obscure to treat sexuality in serious practical detail’. The De Doctrina’s reference to ‘the human seed, the noblest and most intimate part of the body’, looks forward to D. H. Lawrence.2 ‘The frank eroticism of some of the descriptions of the naked Eve’ has been seen as a recovery of Spenser’s vision of human love and perfectibility without Spenser’s elusive allegory. The Adam and Eve who walk out of Paradise Lost hand in hand are human, practical, down-to-earthy, in a way that might not have been conceivable before Milton’s experience in the English Revolution.3
However little attention Milton’s tracts on episcopacy had attracted, he could not complain that his divorce pamphlets were ignored. Royalists naturally took advantage of what they saw as confirmation of their view that heresy led inevitably to social licence and chaos. Cowley may have referred to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Civil War, a piece of Royalist propaganda written in the summer and autumn of 1643:
The number of their wives their lusts decree;
The Turkish law’s their Christian liberty.
If he does refer to Milton, it is the earliest known hostile reaction (though unpublished).1 Respectable Puritan divines, far from sharing the libertarian outlook of the early reformers, were acutely embarrassed by Milton’s arguments. They met them either with silence or with unargued denunciation.
Milton’s old friend Thomas Young referred cautiously to his pupil in a sermon preached before the House of Commons in February 1644, warning against advocates of ‘digamy’. Milton was denounced as a licentious libertine by Herbert Palmer to the same august congregation six months later: Palmer called for action against Milton and his book. There followed attacks by William Prynne,2 by the Stationers’ Company (who denounced him to the House of Lords), by Daniel Featley, Ephraim Pagitt, Robert Baillie, Joseph Caryl (a conservative licenser who attacked Milton whilst licensing a book against him), John Bachiler (one of the most liberal of the Parliamentarian licensers, who also thought he must dissociate himself from Milton),3 Thomas Edwards and many others. Milton’s ideas were caricatured in Little Non-Such (1646),4 glanced at by Thomas Case in a sermon to the House of Commons in 1647, noticed by Edward Hyde in the same year. The ministers of Sion College denounced them; so did T.C., the anonymous A Glasse for the Times (1648), Joseph Hall, Clement Walker, Henry Hammond, James Howell, Alexander Ross, the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus, and many others.5
After the Stationers’ attack Milton was summoned before the House of Lords, but nothing seems to have happened. Edwards tells us that Milton’s views were well received by the sectarian preacher Mrs. Attaway. She took the initiative in discussing them with two gentlemen of the Inns of Court who attended her meeting. I should like to be able to prove that they were the two young sparks with whom Milton shared his ‘gaudy days’.6 Mrs. Attaway subsequently acted on what she took to be Milton’s principles by eloping with William Jenny, who like her suffered from an uncongenial spouse.7 Mrs. Attaway is an interesting figure, who has been treated rather flippantly by male historians. She encouraged free discussion after her sermons. Like Milton she was a mortalist. She believed that there was no hell save in the conscience, and that it could not stand with the goodness of God to damn his own creatures eternally. She held herself to be as free from sin as Christ was when in the flesh.1
We may suspect that Mrs. Attaway was not the only one in radical circles who read Milton with approval. John Robins the Ranter ‘gave authority unto some of his disciples, both unto men and women, to change their wives and husbands’, setting an example by changing his own. William Franklin rejected his wife and lived with Mary Gadbury, who had been deserted by her own husband.2 Hugh Peter and Laurence Clarkson were among those who spoke up in favour of divorce, and many Ranters simply rejected the tie of monogamous marriage altogether, as a fruit of the curse.3
Milton was defended by Henry Robinson and Henry Burton in 1646, and there were several later laudatory references. In 1660 ‘G.S.’ suggested that ‘the vulgar’ agreed with Milton.4 (Not only the vulgar, of course. The Earl of Rochester thought ‘denying the remedy of divorce’ was ‘an unreasonable imposition on the freedom of mankind’.5 Shadwell in Epsom Wells (1672), Farquhar in The Beaux Stratagem (1707) and Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter (1688) all contemplate divorce for incompatibility: Farquhar at least based his arguments on Milton.)
Milton was not entirely delighted by the approbation of such as Mrs. Attaway. In the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he claimed rather defensively that he had published it in English out of ‘the esteem I have of my country’s judgment, and the love I bear to my native language’. But in the Second Defence he expressed regret that he had not kept his divorce pamphlets in the decent obscurity of Latin. In 1655 he told a Dutch admirer that if these tracts were to be translated in the Netherlands he would prefer Latin to Dutch; but he did not reject the idea of translation into the vernacular.6
The ‘clamour of so much envy and impertinence’ with which The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was received, and still more the failure to answer it, surprised and upset Milton. In the second edition (1644) he supported his arguments from reason and Scripture by the authority of orthodox Protestant divines: his schoolboy delight in finding that Bucer had anticipated his arguments shows how shaken he had been – despite his professed contempt for arguments from authority. He felt, or claimed to feel, that perhaps he had been divinely inspired to recover this lost truth – a claim which he took seriously enough to repeat in his Defence of the People of England.1 The Presbyterians remained unimpressed, however, despite the fuller Scriptural exegesis of Tetrachordon and the invective of Colasterion.
So the cruel blow of the breakdown of his marriage was followed by a no less cruel outburst of reprobation and denunciation as a libertine, an advocate of sexual promiscuity. It must have been exceptionally galling for a man whose views on the sanctity of marriage were in fact far more austere than those of most Puritans and whose sensibility – already made raw by Mary’s desertion – now had salt rubbed into it. The sonnet, ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’, shows how much he was affected not only by the vituperation of the orthodox but also by his unexpected allies. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’
Again we have to guess how Milton faced life in the years between 1642 and 1645. He found consolation in agreeable feminine society – that of Boyle’s sister, the talented Lady Ranelagh, of Lady Margaret Ley, of Mrs. Katharine Thomason, wife of the Presbyterian collector of pamphlets, of Mrs. Hester Blackborough, Milton’s cousin, married to a leather-seller. Margaret Ley was ‘daughter to that good Earl’ of Marlborough, whom ‘the sad breaking of that Parliament’ of 1628–9 ‘broke’. Now wife of Captain John Hobson, she was ‘a woman of great wit and ingenuity’, and seems to have taken special care of Milton after his wife left him, as Lady Ranelagh was to be his stand-by in his blindness and widowerhood. Lady Ranelagh was an old friend and patron of Hartlib and Dury. Her house may have been the meeting-place of the Invisible College in the later sixteen-forties.2 She perhaps introduced Henry Oldenburg to Milton. In the fifties she was Milton’s near neighbour, and was ‘like a near relative’ to him. Parker even hints at a more intimate relationship, but without evidence. Milton taught her nephew and her son. She almost certainly used her considerable influence on the poet’s behalf in 1660.3
During Mary’s absence there was also a mysterious Miss Davis, so far