Wife to Mr. Milton

by Robert Graves

  My husband, I believe, wrote nothing that was strangely new upon divorce—and here I may say that, though his manner of disputation was ever his own, he was seldom the original of any new argument—yet he was industrious in reviving or refurbishing certain old notions that had been long put aside or forgotten, and made them seem novel by the crackling vehemence of his oratory. Of these notions the principal one was this, that such contrariety of mind between husband and wife as will blight the peace of marriage is a just and sufficient cause not only for their separation, but for their divorce. This notion had been advanced, though somewhat diffidently, a century before by the learned Divines appointed at the Reformation of Religion to inquire into such matters. Now that there was a grand Assembly of Divines called to Westminster by Parliament, which should order decently all matters of Church Government, my husband doubted not, by casting this doctrine at their heads, to have the law amended for his own convenience and also (as he wrote) to “stroke away ten thousand tears out of the life of men.”

  He wrote most bitterly against the unreasonableness of Canon Law, which was still in force; for though the bishops who administered it were fast in the Tower, they had not yet lost the name and dignity of their office, and indeed they remained the nominal arbiters of all questions of divorce for three years more.

  A copy of the first of these new writings by my husband was procured for me. It was named The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored, to the Good of both Sexes, from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes, to Christian Freedom guided by the Rule of Charity; wherein also many Places of Scripture have recovered their long-lost Meaning: Seasonable to be now thought on in the Reformation intended. He had not set his name to this first book, but there was no disguising of his style and manner.

  How he roared and ranted against those who would grant divorce for corporeal deficiency, but not at all for deficiency of the mind! And how he groaned against such a luckless and helpless matrimony as evidently he considered his own to be: for he wrote of two carcases chained unnaturally together, or rather a living soul bound to a dead corpse which, by a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper, would abase the mettle of his spirit and sink him to a low and vulgar pitch of endeavour in all his actions. He also wrote of me (though not directly by name) as a mute and spiritless mate, an image of earth and phlegm, who, by the unfitness and defectiveness of my unconjugal mind and the disturbance of my unhelpful and unfit society, had done violence to the reverend secret of Nature and had driven him to a worse condition than the loneliest single life.

  As I read I began to pity him in my heart for the awkward stroke that he had dealt himself by his peremptory and lofty dealings with me, and by his policy of considering his own honour and pleasure with such exactness as to leave no time for any consideration of mine. Yet so painfully did he writhe in his own miseries that, unlike the reforming Divines, he showed no pity for the woman’s case, but only for the man’s; and when he proposed, as a remedy for this unnatural bond of matrimony, that no civil or earthly power whatever should prevent a man from divorcing a woman (whether she so desired or no) or from marrying another more to his liking, I could not but reckon this as ungentlemanly.

  That a man indeed has this right, beyond all power of the Civil or Canon Law to annul, my husband thought to prove from the Book of Deuteronomy, where it is written: “When a man hath taken a wife and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, then let him write a bill of divorcement, and give it into her hand and send her out of his house.” He interpreted the uncleanness as of the mind equally with the body; and held that, though it were fitting that, before a man put his wife away, there should first be a solemn ceremony performed in the presence of the minister and other grave selected elders of his congregation; yet if then the man, being admonished, should solemnly protest the matter to be of natural irreconcilability, not of malice, he should be free of the prohibition which Christ pronounced against light divorce, and the woman must go back and leave him free to marry again.

  To those who might object that a man who marries without due inquiry into the disposition of his wife has none to blame but himself if so be he has caught a Tartar, and that he who marries in haste will have leisure to repent it, my husband replied in these words: “But let them know again that, for all the wariness that can be used, it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice, and we have plenty of examples. The soberest and best-governed men are least practised in these affairs; and who knows not that the bashful muteness of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversation. Nor is there that freedom of access granted or presumed as may suffice to a perfect understanding till too late; and where any indisposition is suspected, what more usual than the persuasion of friends that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all?” (Here I seemed to hear the good old gentleman, my father-in-law, pleading my cause.) “And, lastly, it is not strange that many who have spent their youth chastely are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch: nor is it, therefore, that for a modest error a man should forfeit so great an happiness, and no charitable means to release him; since they who have lived most loosely prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience.”

  These words of my husband’s, when I read them, brought me into a very lively remembrance of him, after that I had put him out of my mind for weeks and months past. Being now older by two years than when he had married me, and having gained a better conceit of myself, I was ill-content that he should portray me as an image of earth and phlegm, and as of a perpetually dismal and sullen temper. In my mind I fancied myself back again in his company and answering his vehement accusations of my earthiness with smiling wit and pithy sayings. And always the same thought returned: “Yet, however loud he may rail and lament, he is still my husband and he and I are indissolubly married with a golden ring, as he knows as well as I; and neither of us may by Law ever marry again in the lifetime of the other. I would to God that this were not so, for since Mun’s father is slain, Mun may follow his own inclinations; who is already an officer of note in the King’s Army, with just expectations of high preferment. Were it not for this impediment of my marriage, he would assuredly have ridden up from Oxford the other day and asked leave to marry me, and my father would have yielded me to him very cheerfully. Nor am I to be deceived as to my husband’s affections: for, I doubt not, he loves me passionately and knows in his own heart how sadly he has mistreated me, yet is too proud to acknowledge his error. He sent me away for two months to punish me; not for two years to punish himself. And I dare swear that no other woman but myself will ever please him; for, however fair of face or rational in conversations she may be, his soul is yet ensnared in the tresses of my hair, and until he has lain with me and had his whole desire of me he must continue like the unquiet spirit, spoken of in the parable, who walked abroad seeking rest, but found none.”

  This doctrine of my husband’s, though (as I say) no new one, was beyond expression distasteful to the Westminster Assembly. When an Extraordinary Day of Humiliation was appointed in London, because of the King’s victories in Cornwall, and when upon that day a learned Presbyterian, Mr. Herbert Palmer, was called upon to preach before the two Houses of Parliament, Mr. Palmer singled out my husband’s book as the most impudent of any that year published and the most deserving to be burned. In this sermon, preached against Toleration and Liberty of Conscience, my husband was ranked among polygamists and advocates of doctrines so monstrous that no sane person could embrace them.

  When this sermon was published, with other tracts, among them one of Mr. Prynne’s, charging my husband with libertinism, lawlessness, heresy and atheism, he defended himself very fiercely in his Tetrachordon and his Colasterion, shooting out his quills like a royal porpentine. Then, when the St
ationers’ Company complained against him to the Parliament that his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce had been published contrary to the Parliamentary Ordinance which required that no book should be published without a licence, then he turned in rage against this new infringement of his liberty and addressed Parliament with a book called Areopagitica, pleading for the liberation of the Press. For my husband was ever conscious of his superior learning and detested that the judgment of his own books, as being either good or bad, should be in the hands of unlearned men of common capacity, with liberty to strangle them at birth after a hasty view.

  So I pass on to the New Year of 1645, a year memorable to me on many sad accounts, and a strange one; one which began publicly with the beheading of Archbishop Laud, after a trial for treason that had lasted for four years. That year brought the early stirrings of a third power which, presently, intervening in the dispute between a Prelatical King and his Presbyterial Parliaments of Westminster and Edinburgh, first broke the power of the King and then by threats and main force broke the power of the Presbyterians, too, both in England and Scotland, and ruled in their stead. This power was resident in the English Army of the New Model, which was first formed in the winter of 1644–5, and which in Oxford the wits drolled against as the “New Noddle,” consisting of 14,000 foot in coats of Venice red and 7,600 buff-coated horse, and a serviceable train of artillery. As I have already told, it had been resolved in London that the King could not be brought to reason unless the command of the forces of Parliament were taken from the hands of sick, old or irresolute persons, how worthy so ever, and entrusted to the young, healthy and resolute. It was resolved, too, that reliance must be put not in levies compelled to serve for a season, whose only thought was a speedy return to the shop or the plough, but in soldiers of all the year round who would voluntarily make war their profession; and that three ill-clothed, ill-armed and disorderly armies must be reduced into one which should suffer from none of these defects, but might be counted upon to give a good account of itself against any force that the King might bring together.

  The Earl of Essex11 having lost the confidence of Parliament by his unkind desertion of General Skippon’s army in Cornwall, the young Sir Thomas Fairfax, son of the Lord Fairfax, was appointed Captain-General, and General Skippon his Major-General of Foot. There was no officer appointed at first to be Lieutenant-General of Horse, but presently this appointment fell to General Cromwell, as the person fittest to command, though by the Self-Denying Ordinance all Members of Parliament had been required to relinquish their commissions in the service.

  General Skippon assisted Sir Thomas Fairfax when he scrutinized the list of officers for their fitness to command. When a choice was made from those of the former armies, a very great number, most of them Scots, who had done long service in foreign parts were set on the shelf; and commissions were renewed to no more than a dozen such. Whereat, when a very great outcry and complaint was raised, General Skippon answered that the Dutch and Swedish services were ill schools for this present war, and that veteran officers were in general without zeal in the service, neglectful of their soldiers, inclined to the abuse and plunder of inoffensive country people, inadvertent of the enemy’s motions, and either unwilling or unable to learn that an English war, if it were ever to have an end, must be waged decently in an English fashion. And he said that the fifteen hundred or more veteran officers who served in the Royal Army were so many thorns in the King’s flesh or pebbles in his shoe.

  Contrary to what has been alleged by the King’s party, the officers nominated for the New Model were for the most part noblemen or gentlemen of good birth and attainments; nevertheless, Generals Fairfax and Skippon did not scruple to entrust the command of regiments to men of low birth if they were the fittest for his purpose—as to Colonels Okey, Pryde and Ewer, whose trades had been ship’s-chandler, drayman and servingman, but who had done experimental service and shown their martial skill in a multiplicity of battles and sieges and skirmishes. General Fairfax would not take the commission that was offered him by Parliament, until it were amended: for it ran like all the others “…for the Defence of the King’s Person….” This he accounted hypocrisy, because a bullet could not distinguish between King and commoner; and that clause was therefore omitted from all the other commissions.

  In this Army, which was well-managed, well-paid and victorious in almost every battle that it fought, there sprang up so great an esteem of soldierly qualities, as courage, endurance, cleanliness, comradely love and the like, that uniformity of religious doctrine was no longer considered a matter of chief importance; and when the Presbyterial ministers who had marched with the armies now forsook the military life, as too arduous, and betook themselves to a quieter way, the troops were left to the ministrations of four or five bolder spirits, all of them Secretaries, as Peters, Dell, Saltmarsh, “Doomsday” Sedgwick and the rest, who cared nothing for the smoke of powder or the hum of bullets, and themselves dealt death in battle.

  As the martial discipline was severe and regular, and the officers forbade all riot and licentiousness as unworthy of good soldiers, so it was natural that a relaxation and vent of their confined spirits should be found in religious speculation and visions over the camp-fire at night, and in occasional drum-head preachments of the most fanciful extravagance, by sergeants and corporals and common soldiers; where-unto, if they stopped short of plain atheism and disowned Popery and Prelaty, such toleration was accorded that, in the same troop of one hundred horse, one might number sectaries of thirty different schisms, such as Anabaptists, Old Brownists, Traskites, Anti-Scripturists, Familists, Soul-Sleepers, Questionists, Seekers, Chiliasts, Sebaptists, and even Divorcers of the sect of John Milton. Strange it was then that a soldier might with impunity address God the Father in so familiar a fashion that it would make any ordinary man sweat cold and his skin rise into goose-flesh; yet if he were but half so bold with the Lieutenant of his troop or company he would be cashiered by order of a court-martial and have his tongue bored clean through with a red-hot needle.

  Some regiments of foot stood fast by their presbyterial opinions (as did their Scottish allies, who tig-tagged about the country under colour of making war); but the horse, who were the glory of the Army, for their hardiness and boldness, were almost every man of Independent judgment and jested against the Presbyters as “Priest-biters” and against the Scots as “Sots” who were always in the rearward in any enterprise. The National Covenant they scorned as a thing imposed upon our nation by these same Sots, and asked sneeringly: “Was the Holy Ghost indeed conveyed from Edinburgh to London in a cloak-bag?” The Assembly of Presbyterial Divines at Westminster was the butt of their sharpest scorns—against “Dry-Vines” and “Dissembly Men.”

  This new-fangled army came against Oxford in the Spring of 1645, from Windsor where it had mustered; with great store of cannons, shells, hand-grenades, gunpowder, spades, pickaxes and scaling ladders. But first General Cromwell, riding out from Watlington upon St. George’s Day (which happened to be a market-day at Oxford) with 1,500 horse, made an assault upon the Earl of Northampton’s regiment, that lay at Islip. He came up by way of Wheatley and passed through Forest Hill in the evening, his troopers armed only with pistols and swords, and wearing high-crowned felt hats, buff coats, great loose cloaks, breeches of grey cloth, and calves-leather boots. At the first alarm our dragoons jumbled away from the town—for their stomachs would not serve them to stand it out—and galloped to Islip to warn the Earl. My father was in Oxford at the market with Zara and two of my young brothers, William and Archdale. In his absence, my mother stood at the gate of the house to answer any question that might be asked; but it seems that the Parliament soldiers who had been quartered on us in the first year of the war had given a good report of us, and there was no plundering or other mischief done us.

  My mother sighingly exclaimed to me, when she saw the good order in which the soldiers rode, that she reckoned one troop of those plain prick-eared rascals t
o be worth a whole squadron of the lace-coated Royal horse; and she was justified in this, for the next day in an encounter at Islip, of which we heard the confused roar carried down the wind, a great slaughter was made of the Earl of Northampton’s regiment in a chase of four miles, and about 500 horses taken and 200 prisoners and the Queen’s Standard. Moreover, Bletchingdon House was seized, and without bloodshed, because of the ladies come there on a visit to the young wife of Colonel Windebank, its commander (who was the same gentleman who had brought me from London): for General Cromwell had threatened to grant no quarter if the house were put to storm.

  Colonel Windebank, being set at large, returned to Oxford, where he was tried by a court-martial and found guilty of faint-heartedness and shot to death in Merton College, dying very bravely; I think that had the Queen been at the King’s side she would have constrained him to reprieve the Colonel, forasmuch as what he had done was for the honour of the ladies, fearing the deep barbarousness of General Cromwell’s mind. Yet, the Parliamentarians in general used their prisoners civilly, as being fellow-Englishmen and Englishwomen, and abstained from unnecessary plunder; whereas, many of the King’s officers and soldiers, notably those commanded by the Prince Rupert, used indiscriminate barbarities learned in the German wars. They would strip a man to his skin before they slew him; and when Bolton in Lancashire was taken, there was massacre, ravishment, and horrid cruelties, the like of which had never before been seen in England since pagan times.