Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

was over; the Royalists were defeated; travel between Oxfordshire and London was again easy. The Powells secured the collusion of the Blackboroughs, whom Milton was in the habit of visiting. On one of these occasions Mary reappeared, and in a theatrical scene flung herself on her knees before her husband, begging him to take her back. The Blackboroughs are more likely than the Powells to have thought of this approach to the young poet who had absorbed high chivalrous ideals from his early reading.¹ Reluctant though he no doubt was, Milton succumbed to this well-calculated attack: Mary resumed her position as Mrs. Milton. Within less than a year Milton was saddled with her whole family, now apparently ruined – Mr. Powell, Mrs. Powell, and at least five children.

      Biographers have not sufficiently contemplated the possibility of Milton saying No to Mary. He had decided that the marriage was irretrievably broken; the economic motivation of Mary’s return was transparently obvious; and Milton may still have had hopes of Miss Davis. His chivalrous gesture was, he may soon have realized, an error of judgment. Samson did not make the same mistake when Dalila tried a similar appeal; and Milton seems to have lost interest in the chivalric ethos.

      We can only guess at the horrors of this transformation of the house which Mary had found too quiet in 1642. Milton did his best to help the Powells financially, assisting his father-in-law to compound for his delinquency, and trying to sort out the worst of his money tangles. But guarded letters referring to the noise which surrounded him hint at something of what he suffered. We can only guess too at his relations with Mary, who bore him a son and three daughters before she died in 1652. Parker sentimentally imagined that the marriage, against all the odds, proved successful: argued even that Mary was ‘my late espoused saint’ about whom Milton wrote one of the most moving sonnets in the English language. One wonders. The description in the De Doctrina Christiana of the sordid bickerings in a marriage of incompatibles may look all the way back to 1642; or it may recall more recent experiences.² Christopher Arnold, who knew Milton in 1651, spoke later of his ‘unhappy marriage’.³ Milton did not remember the date of Mary’s death. His relation with Mary’s daughters was never easy; and when he came to make his will, the unpaid dowry still rankled. Surely he would have forgiven and forgotten if his life with Mary had been happy? Finally, there is the fact of his long silence in the years of readjustment to Mary. The first interruption in his pamphleteering, between May 1642 and August 1643, can be precisely related to the breakdown of his marriage. The second and longer interruption, from March 1645 to February 1649, may equally be related to the disaster of its resumption. Though the Powells were financially completely dependent on Milton, one doubts whether they had the tact to repress their very different political views. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates may well have been the product, among other things, of discussions in the family circle. Never again was Milton to be silent for so long, even in his blindness, until the years after the Restoration when he was working on Paradise Lost and was precluded from pamphleteering by the censorship.

V Martha Simmonds

      The case of Mrs. Attaway reminds us of the importance of women among the radical sects, and of the new opportunities which freedom of organization and discussion made possible. In New England in the sixteen-thirties Mrs. Hutchinson usurped the role of teacher and political leader hitherto confined to men. In England in the forties and fifties women took part in church government, preached, prayed, prophesied, wrote. In the Quaker movement especially they played a leading role as missionaries; two went off to convert the Grand Turk, others – who were less tolerantly received – to convert New England. Women played a prominent part in the tragedy of James Nayler, the Quaker who in 1656 made a symbolic entry into Bristol, riding on a donkey, accompanied by women singing Hosanna and strewing palms in his path. Nayler’s subsequent trial and punishment for ‘horrid blasphemy’ proved a great divide in the early history of Quakerism, leading to the ascendancy of George Fox over the ‘Ranter’ wing – the anarchic individualism which surrendered completely to the motions of the spirit. The anti-political and pacifist tendency in the movement was strengthened. Nayler might have been saved from the terrible penalties inflicted on him if more M.P.s had shared Milton’s scepticism about blasphemy as an offence.