Wife to Mr. Milton

by Robert Graves

  This was a new thing, that rebels should be the orderly ones, and the King’s men a rabble; in the days of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade it had been clean contrariwise. And some of the Parliament men even-denied that they were “soldiers,” forasmuch as this word expresses a man who serves for pay and is content merely to obey his Prince or governor. And they would by no means be considered as mere machines, or as having forfeited all right to an opinion of their own upon the better governing of their country. They were not hireling troops, they said, nor yet forced men, but volunteers; mostly freeholders and burghers, not lavishly paid, and often with great arrears owing, yet content to continue staunchly in the service wherein they had engaged upon matter of conscience. They were generally of opinion that the duration of Parliaments ought to be limited, but that Parliament should be regularly summoned; that elections ought to be better regulated, the representation better distributed; improper privileges and the coercive power of Bishops to be removed (though the Bishops might remain, for all they cared); the King, of whom they still spoke with tender, dutiful sorrow, to be restored to his rights, but with safeguards set upon his abuse of them; the laws to be simplified and legal expenses lessened; monopolies to be set aside; tithes commuted, etc., etc. I could not hate them, nor could I even laugh at them for Roundheads, because a great part of them wore their hair long, especially the horse.

  My father with his carts and wains was forbidden to cross East Bridge from Oxford to come back to Forest Hill; and my mother was sorely distressed for his safety and in two minds whether to ask for a safe-conduct to go down to him in Oxford (which would have been granted her, I believe), or whether to hold her ground. Now, in the October before this, a soldier of the Oxford garrison, roasting a stolen pig in a hovel in Thames Street, near to the Cornmarket, had set the building a-fire; and the wind blowing strong from the north, all the wooden houses on the western side of the Cornmarket from Brocardo, or the North Gate, to Carfax were burned down. Among these was the store-house that had been our refuge in the year before; and all my father’s timber was burned with it. Knowing therefore that in Oxford we had no longer any place to call our own, and that lodgings were hardly to be found, except at excessive charges, my mother decided to remain in Forest Hill. Yet there was danger here also, for we were within range of the great guns of St. Clement’s Port; and one day, as I worked in the upper dairy-house, a cannon bullet of nine pounds weight came hissing quite over the roof and fell in the great meadow beyond.

  Colonel Sir Robert Pye, the Younger, who commanded a regiment of horse in the Parliamentary service and who in the year before had reduced Taunton to obedience, called upon my mother one day soon after. He drank wine with us in the little parlour and undertook that no harm should come either to our house or our people. With him came one of his captains, formerly a barrister of the Middle Temple and since become famous, by name Henry Ireton.

  Sir Robert had been grievously complained against by the Lady Cary Gardiner, when she had last visited us, for it was he who had assaulted and burned down Hillesden House in Buckinghamshire, the residence of her uncle, Sir Alexander Denton. This was the same house where Mun had been received charitably after his disgrace at Oxford University. My mother, who held Sir Alexander in great esteem, could not readily forgive Sir Robert and, so soon as courtesy permitted, withdrew from his presence upon some household excuse. However, Sir Robert did not at once take his leave, but remained in the parlour, and began to discourse with me upon the subject of my marriage. He was no less a Presbyterian now than when, on Twelfth Night, five years before, my Godmother Moulton had required from him a speech in praise of Bishops.

  “Madam,” said he, “your husband, Mr. Milton, in a book he has written touching the doctrine and discipline of divorce has scandalized many; and has led many astray. Among them, to my own knowledge, is the woman-preacher, Mrs. Attaway, a lace-woman, who has for some time past exercised a marvellous influence over the multitude who visit her conventicle in Coleman Street. Well, this woman has been persuaded by your husband’s book, and being married to an unsanctified husband who ‘does not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the tongue of Canaan,’ as she says, but is an honest soldier in our army—she, then, courts a fellow-preacher, one William Jenney, a married man, who falls in love with her. He likewise, finding his wife not of a matchable conversation with him, divorces her in the manner recommended by your husband, and leaves her great with child, and without a penny of money, to feed and clothe her poor children as best she can. Then Mrs. Attaway and the said Jenney declare themselves man and wife before God, and say that ‘Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.’ Now they account themselves free to stain Sergeant Attaway’s bed with adulterous sweats; thus two households are ruined, and two souls almost irrecoverably lost. Oh, the beasts, were they rightly served they should be whipped home into their right wits!”

  “I am truly sorry to hear of this, your Worship,” said I. “But though my husband has assured me that, being of one flesh with him, I may in no wise escape damnation if he be damned, yet I cannot in conscience find myself answerable to God for what he may write in his books.”

  “Not directly answerable perhaps,” he replied. “Yet I believe you to be the procatarctical cause—I mean that extrinsic cause which, though unwittingly, excites the principal cause to action. For had you not removed from your husband upon a quarrel, as the common report is, and been here environed by the sons of Mars, he would never have brooded upon these matters, nor would his wits have turned to almost an atheistical frenzy.”

  “Common report is here more than commonly at fault, your Worship,” I answered, “if I be accused of removing from my husband upon a froward impulse. For, though I confess that my husband had fault to find with my Forest Hill manner of guitar-playing, yet upon my word, I did not quarrel with him (as he will himself assure you) but was sent peaceably back to this house for the summer holidays. Then the war ensuing, and my husband being by the King held a traitor, he could not venture to Forest Hill to fetch me back; and my father was unwilling to hazard my chastity between the armies. So at Forest Hill perforce I remain.”

  “I am glad to hear this account from you,” said he, “which I cannot reject for untrue. But what now hinders your return?”

  “Two things,” I replied. “My father’s absence in Oxford, and my husband’s insistence that the £1,000 portion promised him in his marriage contract be paid him right down on the nail at the same time when I return to him.”

  “As to the first hindrance,” said he, “though it may seem unkind in you to depart suddenly without a farewell to your father, yet consider this. Your first duty is to your husband, from whom you have been separated by the accident of war: you must now go to him as speedily as possible, lest you incur the charge of wilful desertion, and in this I undertake to assist you. Nay, more, if you are unwilling, I will even command and constrain you to go to him. As for the money, your father is not here, and evidently therefore he cannot send it; and your husband must wait until such time as we take Oxford and fetch your father home. To be sure, I think it unlikely that your father’s estate, being caught, as it were, between the upper and the nether millstone, will yield even a small part of the marriage portion agreed upon; however, that fault lies not at your door.”

  I thanked Sir Robert for his solicitude and kindness but answered: “Your Worship, what you say is true, beyond denial. But I would have you remember that my husband is a very proud, choleric man, and if I were to come to London it is likely enough that he would not receive me again, and then I am utterly undone. For I believe that the small fault that he found in me has ulcerated in his mind and I am become to him a sort of monster, rather to run at with a charged pike than to salute with affectionate kisses.”

  Then for the first time Captain Ireton spoke. He was a reserved, saturnine gentleman, with a small face like a cat’s, and known to my father from the time that he was a Bachelor of Arts at Oxford University, and used to course
game with him. When I looked upon Captain Ireton he put me in mind of the old adage, “The cat knows well whose beard he licks”; yet I did not mistrust him on that account, but only wondered why Sir Robert had discoursed before him so freely upon a private matter. Said he: “You will pardon my boldness, Mrs. Milton, but it was I who brought Sir Robert here, not he me. My friend Mr. Agar, who married your husband’s sister and whose step-sons (I learn) are taught by Mr. Milton, is greatly concerned in this matter. For Mr. Agar is a God-fearing man and admires your husband in almost every particular except only as touching his new doctrine of divorce, which he detests. It seems now that your husband has written in a book, called Tetrachordon, published a few weeks since, that if the Law will not yield him that right of divorce which he pants after, why then he gives fair warning of his intention to follow his own conscience: he declares that the Law, not he, must bear the censure of the consequences.”

  “That is a very petulant decision,” said I, “and will do him no good.”

  Captain Ireton said again: “I would not have you think, Mistress, that I am evilly disposed against your husband or would turn your heart against him. I confess that I agree with him in this matter of free consciences, and am no Presbyterian, as is Sir Robert here; nevertheless I am always vexed when I see an honest man, for his conscience’s sake, performing any act of plain folly. Well, I will deal freely with you, Madam: your husband has won the admiration of a Doctor Davis, a Welsh physician, who has a daughter famed for her wit and beauty and who is ready to bestow her upon your husband, after he shall have cast you off by a private bill of divorcement; and though the gentlewoman herself is averse to the motion, she must obey her father blindly, just as you obeyed yours when he married you to Mr. Milton. This is very true that I tell you; God knows I lie not. Now, I am not one to bandy idle compliments, but this lady is not so fair as you are by one-half, and as for wit, I judge you to be a woman of spirit and discernment in no way her inferior. To be brief: Mr. Agar has begged me, if I pass this way, to warn you of what liquor is brewing in your vat, and to urge your return before your husband commits a rash act (matching old Lamech, who was the prime bigamist and corruptor of marriage) and drags a very honest, pretty gentlewoman into the mire with him. Nor is Mr. Agar disinterested in this: for clearly if your husband brings into his house, as its mistress, a woman who is no more his wife than the Queen is mine, it will be to Mr. Agar’s sorrow and scandal, and he will be obliged to remove his two step-sons, your nephews, from your husband’s charge.”

  While Captain Ireton was yet speaking my mother returned, and I said to her very calmly: “Madam, these two officers are come to warn me of my husband’s intention to discard me and take another wife, and have chalked out the way I should go. Colonel Pye has been good enough to offer his services in the matter of conducting me safely to London, and will take no refusal. Since, then, I have no wish to be publicly whored, and since I find no impediment to my returning, except only that no marriage-portion can go with me, return I will—by your leave—for I conceive that my duty obliges me to it. Moreover, I can say before these officers what I could not say before our friends of the contrary party: this, that whether King or Parliament be in the right concerns me not, being but a woman, but certain it is that the Army of Parliament is by far the better ordered, the better clothed, the better mounted, and the better disciplined, and cannot but prevail over the King’s. I foresee therefore that my father will never recover the money wrung and screwed from him under the name of loans, nor yet the great sum owed to him for the billeting of troops and for the wood sold to the King’s Quarter-Master-General; for the receipts that he holds will be worthless paper if the King be defeated. Yet he can hope for no remission of the private debts owed by him—as the great debt he owes to Sir Robert Pye, the Elder—and therefore he will be ruined. If now I return to my husband and contrive to please him, I shall be able, I trust, to provide shelter and food for you if ever you be cast adrift by the King’s defeat.”

  My mother at first made many objections, but at last saw the justice of my reasoning. She gave her consent, upon Sir Robert’s solemn assurance that no harm would come to me and that, if my husband rejected me, he would have me brought safe home again. I asked Captain Ireton where I should lodge in London while Mr. Agar prepared a reconciliation between myself and my husband, and he undertook that Mr. Agar would see me well lodged. Then I asked when might I be convoyed to London, and Colonel Pye told me: “To-morrow morning, if you wish, for I am sending two wounded officers to their homes and you shall dress their wounds for them on the way in payment of your fare.”

  “At your service, sir,” said I, cheerfully, but in truth with a sinking heart: for what Captain Ireton had told me about Dr. Davis’s daughter put me in a perplexity. It seemed that I would be forced now to pretend more love for my husband than in truth I felt, if I wished to be his wife again; and to do so went against my womanly conscience. Yet I was faced with Hobson’s choice: “this or nothing.”

  When the two officers had departed the house, my mother used me very kindly. “Marie,” said she, “you are a better daughter to me than ever I supposed. Go, with my blessing, to that mad dog your husband—who cares not how he bites, nor whom—and let me see whether you cannot charm him back into sanity with good words. I give you leave to tell him that your frowardness in not returning with that sour woman of his, when he commanded you, was forced upon you by myself, and that you now repent grievously, being overcome by the godly suasions of Colonel Pye. My advice to you is this: abase yourself before him; go on your belly like the serpent; eat dust; assuage his wrath with guile. But so soon as ever he has broken his contract with Dr. Davis and has received you to his bosom at last, why then you are at liberty to rise up again, springing upon his shoulders and making bloody his sides with your spurs.”

  “And may our maid Trunco go with me, Madam?” I asked.

  She answered: “With all my heart, though in taking Trunco from me, you rob me again of the cheerfullest and best woman that ever I had.”

  So I gathered together my ends and awls and packed them in my coffer: everything I possessed except my vellum book, which I left in my mother’s charge, but took the key with me. Once more it was good-bye to merry sweet Forest Hill, where I was born, and ho! for that nasty, musty, fusty, dusty, rusty City of London, the birth-place of my husband, which I must learn to love, even against my natural inclination!

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I Am Got with Child; and My Father Is Ruined

  In the short siege of Oxford at this time undertaken by the Army of the Captain-General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, two great misfortunes happened to my family; whereof I had no intelligence until a year later, and so can keep their discovery until my next chapter. Meanwhile, I may recount that by May 21st, 1645, the city was so straitened that no more provisions could come in; and that General Fairfax’s men built at Marston a new bridge over the Cherwell River, whereat Colonel Sir William Legge, the Governor, fearing an assault, was constrained to drown the meadows and to fire houses in the suburbs to make his defence more secure. Yet there were weak places in the circuit of works, especially to the northward, and the sentries were not so wide awake, nor the arms kept in such good order as when Sir Arthur Aston had been Governor.12 For Sir Arthur, who was a Papist, had been a very severe, vigilant officer and fined, or confined, his men for drunkenness as though they had been Roundheads, and forbade all tippling after tattoo. Moreover, the citizens, now that they were paid in promises only, not at all in money, and suffered great inconvenience from the soldiers quartered upon them, and saw that the King’s cause was tottering, grew restless and showed themselves backward and sullen in the work demanded of them.

  However, in the event, the city was not put to the storm; for when General Fairfax learned, a week later, that the King had left Oxford and was gone into the North to raise the siege of Chester (where Sir Mun was hard pressed), he likewise raised the siege of Oxford and followed after him; and no
t long after, on June 14th, His Majesty was caught and routed at Naseby, a village near the town of Daventry, from which defeat he never afterwards recovered, though it was by no means the last battle of this war, and though Oxford held out for better than a year afterwards.

  Naseby fight was a very hotly-contested one, in which the Prince Rupert totally routed General Ireton’s horse on the one wing, and General Cromwell totally routed the horse opposed to him on the other; and the main bodies charged each other with incredible fierceness, coming to blows with the butt-ends of their muskets. The battle-cry in the Parliament Army was “God our Strength”; and in the King’s it was “Queen Marie.” General Skippon was shot through the side most grievously, the bullet carrying into the wound a piece of his breast-plate and some shreds of his shirt; and General Ireton was run through the thigh with a pike and into the face with a halberd, and his horse shot under him. General Cromwell was also in great peril, being worsted in single combat with a captain of the King’s horse, who with a blow of his broad-sword cut the ribbon that secured General Cromwell’s headpiece, and then pitched it off his head and would have cloven him to the chin with a second stroke had not his party ridden to the rescue; then a trooper, in the very nick, threw him a headpiece of his own, which General Cromwell catched and clapped upon his head (though the wrong way about) and so wore it the rest of the day. The King himself managed the fight on the other side, very magnanimously and expertly, as was confessed even by his enemies, and exposed himself no less courageously than any other man upon the field; but it was not to be his luck to die in battle.

  It passed wonder how few were the slain in so many hours of bitter fighting, front to front over a space of one mile, not above six hundred men of the King’s army of 7,500 nor above two hundred men of the New Model army, which was of double the size. This caused the battle to be belittled in comparison with those fought at Edgehill and Marston Moor and elsewhere, for he is generally accounted the best commander who sheds most blood; thus was Pompey styled “the Great” (a title denied to Julius Cæsar), forasmuch as Pompey in his battles had slain or lost more than two million men, Julius only a bare million. In these late wars of our own, by the bye, steel killed far more than gunpowder (though gunpowder caused the more dismay among ill-trained troops); and disease, especially the camp fever and the small-pox, more than both steel and gunpowder together.