Wife to Mr. Milton

by Robert Graves

  The victory at Naseby I heard celebrated with the loud acclamations of the London populace, the ringing of church bells and the whining chant of psalms in the streets and alleys. A few days later the prisoners taken in the battle were marched through the City streets, to the number of near 4,000, with a parade of captured standards, which were afterwards hung up in Westminster Hall. I did not care to watch the rout, for my heart was sore for the poor souls and I could not have abided to hear them hissed at and derided in their passage through the streets. When they were secured in the artillery ground of Tothill Fields, Parliament granted them a safe return to their homes if they would undertake to live peaceably for the future. Yet their confidence in the King’s cause was such that by far the greater number refused to renege; they were shipped off as indentured servants to the colonies.

  I had taken my two wounded officers to their homes in Bishopsgate, each of whom tried to convert me to his religious tenets, one being an Anabaptist who had a broken shoulder, and the other a rank Socinian with a festered foot. The Anabaptist told me, among other things, how many secret well-wishers to Parliament were to be found in Oxford, from the rank of Colonel downwards, who gave constant information to General Fairfax of what passed in the city. Each man would leave his letter at certain houses, thrusting it in at a hole in a glass window as he untrussed in the street; which letters were at once conveyed over the works by men in the disguise of town gardeners, to a certain stinking ditch, two miles off, where an agent of Parliament was watching to receive them. After parting company with these officers I went by water to Westminster, to the house of Sir Robert Pye, M.P., the Elder, the same who held the mortgage upon our Manor. At this house Mr. Agar waited upon me, and made much of me and rejoiced in my return, and told me that his kinsman Mr. Abraham Blackborough had a fair chamber prepared against my coming. Then, with Trunco, I went by coach to Mr. Blackborough’s, which was the same house in the Lane of St. Martin’s le Grand where my brothers and sisters were lodged three years before this; but we went after dark, because it was intended that no rumour should reach my husband that I was harboured there; and as I was forbidden to show myself at the window, so Trunco was also forbidden to reveal my true name to the servants.

  Mr. Blackborough, a pleasantly satirical gentleman, told me that my husband in his daily walk Citywards in the afternoon would oftentimes stop at this house to enquire whether any new pamphlets were come in; for Mr. Blackborough had a passion for buying pamphlets and my husband found it more convenient to read them at leisure at Mr. Blackborough’s than hurriedly at the book-sellers’ of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he might be rudely told “either buy or begone!” and where no chair nor table was provided for his comfort. If he came on the next day, as was hoped, Mr. Blackborough would encourage him with a talk of a very fair work entitled Matrimony at Pleasure and having particular reference to himself. “When your husband comes in,” said he, “if I find him in a pleasant mood, I will give you the cue by raising my voice and saying, ‘Now, sir, the pamphlet awaits your perusal!’ and then I will leave the stage to you. But, Madam, from his discourse on a hundred occasions, I judge that he has so fixed an aversion from you, which I might name a passionate disgust—for whatever small imperfections you may have he sees through a multiplying glass—that it will be no easy matter for you to achieve a reconcilement with him. However, in the very excess of his embitteration lies your opportunity: for by long brooding upon the matter he has convinced himself that you resemble the Gorgon Medusa, with snakes for hair, and vulpine features, and a cold petrifying eye; and therefore the surprise of finding you to be, in fact, altogether different from his morbid imaginings will make your task not altogether impossible.”

  “How do you advise me to bear myself towards him?” I asked. “For, to deal honestly with you, I come back not because I am drawn by any great love of him, nor because I once erred and now repent of the fault, but because, to my mind, a wife’s fated place is with her husband even though he be a bad one—and Mr. Milton is a better husband, I believe, than many that there are. Besides, as I told Colonel Sir Robert Pye, I did not leave my husband of my own motion, but was sent away by him on a two-months’ vacation to my father’s house. Then, the troubles intervening, I have now these three years been prevented from returning to him, and he (as I suppose) from coming to fetch me, merely by the accidents of war.”

  “That may well be your view of the case, Madam,” he answered, “but you will not find it by any means acceptable to him in his present mood. For he has been told that your father considers it a blot upon his escutcheon to have married his daughter to a ‘Roundhead traitor’; which name he much resents, from the pride that he has not only in the great Cause of Liberty, but in the handsomeness of his long hair. I counsel you therefore to salve the sores of his injured pride by as sweet a flow of repentant tears as you can pump up from the fountains of your eyes, and to abase yourself upon the floor before him as flat as any Welsh griddle-cake; and I advise you, too, to accept submissively any impositions that he may lay upon you in his stiff, pedagogical manner. For, to deal freely with you, while I admire his learning and parts beyond measure, I suspect him to be a very simpleton in domestic affair.”

  “My mother has much the same opinion of him as yourself, sir,” said I, “and has given me much the same advice. I will be guided by you both, and I am sincerely grateful to you, sir, for all your kindness.”

  Well, the next afternoon at about two o’clock, watching the passers-by from behind the window curtain, at last I descried my husband approaching, with his brisk step and his cane carried at the trail, like a pike. He appeared very cheerful and ran nimbly up the steps of our house to knock at the door.

  Presently I heard his foot on the stair, and his remembered voice and rolling discourse sounded from the adjoining room. He was, I think, upon a new scheme, which filled his mind at this time, for the founding of novel military academies where the well-born youth should be trained in all arts and useful sciences as rulers of the yeomanly and proletarian parts of the nation. I overheard him when he shouted and said that the Universities were nurseries of superstition and idleness, almost beyond hope of reformation. Mr. Blackborough was humouring him with “You are right, sir!” and “Very true, sir!” and it came to me that doubtless what my husband had meant, when he wrote of his need for a wife of fit and matchable conversation, was that I had never given him his “You are right, Husband,” and “Very true, Husband!” when he expatiated to me at tedious length upon such subjects as these.

  While now I waited for my cue, I dwelt in my mind upon all the saddest things that I could recall from histories and plays, as the death of Hector and the blinding of King Lear, to put me artificially into the necessary frame of spirit; but none would serve my purpose, until I remembered my little white spaniel bitch, named Blanche, which was given me on my seventh birthday—how by a carelessness of my own in playing with her she had broke her leg and whined piteously; and how my brother James had put her out of pain by the discharge of his fowling-piece. At this my eyes began to prick and the tears to flow. Then the door opened seasonably and Mr. Blackborough cried out: “Now, sir, the pamphlet awaits your perusal. I hope you will read it with joy; and, what is more, I warrant the pages to be still uncut.”

  I advanced, with faltering steps, weeping, and with my hands clasped upon my bosom. My husband gazed at me with astonishment, taking an eager step towards me, but then bethought himself and recoiled in dismay. I knelt down submissively upon the mat and abased my head, so that my hood tumbled off and showed him my hair. I began to sob persuasively and to mutter broken words, especially “Oh, forgive, forgive me!” which were, indeed, the very ones I had used to my poor whining Blanche. Then, all together in a knot, in came old Mr. Milton, and my sister-in-law, Mrs. Agar, and the Widow Webber, mother to Mr. Christopher Milton’s wife. They had waited together in another room, and now unanimously pleaded with my husband, begging him to forgive me who was so young, so fair,
and so contrite. Only Mr. Blackborough stood a little apart from the rest, with a sour-sweet grin as he watched the scene played out. The old gentleman begged my husband not to take it ill that I had left the promised portion behind me; for this was no fault of mine, and if he dealt honestly with me, he might be sure that my father would in the event deal honestly with him.

  My husband stood amazed and irresolute, but they all wept with me, even the old gentleman, and he could not harden his heart when his father wept. He raised me up from the floor and took me in his arms to comfort me, but did not yet kiss me. Then the company stole away, on their tip-toes for silence, one by one, and left us together.

  I begged my husband to assure me that he had forgiven me, and I put the whole blame for my frowardness upon my mother, as she had desired me to do, and continued with my facile weeping until he said at last: “It is God’s will that I should forgive you. It comes not easily, so enormous is the wrong that you have done me, so hateful your ingratitude. Yet who can stand against the commandment of God? Therefore: Woman, I forgive you!’”

  “You will receive me back as your wife?” I asked in low, choking voice. “I am still a maid, and have learned my lesson, and will render you every obedience from this time forward for the remainder of my life.”

  He answered, recovering himself: “I will take you back presently; but not yet, for I must have time to make proper preparation, and to be assured that you are sincere in your repentance, and that you are not come here maliciously to father on me the brat of some licorish Cavalier captain or sergeant-major.”

  “I am content to wait,” said I, drying my tears with my handkerchief. “I will wait twenty years, if only you will receive me back at the last.”

  Then he set upon my lips a kiss of love and hate intermingled, and recalled his kinsfolk and told them of his reconcilement with me. They rejoiced and praised his wisdom and magnanimity, and took their leave of us in marvellous contentment. I was astonished at my own facility for play-acting, and hated myself as an abject, a wretch, a plain liar, and shrank conscientially from the grave, ironical congratulations of the good Mr. Blackborough.

  My husband told me that he had lately undertaken the education of seven more boys, besides the five that he already taught (and not the small fry of the parish, neither, but the sons of noblemen and gentlemen of merit) who would lodge with him. Wherefore, since he was resolved to have his bedchamber to himself and only to admit me into it upon occasion, there would for a while be no room for me in his house. However, he said that he had already found a house more suitable to his purposes, namely one of twelve rooms situate in the Barbican, a street that leads out of Aldersgate, where he proposed to settle at Michaelmas. He commanded me to wait patiently for three months, and undertook that if I pleased him by my demeanour, and if the Widow Webber (with whom I should lodge in the meanwhile at her house in St. Clement’s Churchyard, off the Strand) gave him a good report of me, then he would sign an Act of Oblivion, and enter into a firm treaty of peace with me.

  Yet I believed that it irked him to abandon his grand design of marriage with Dr. Davis’s daughter (who was pointed out to me in the street one day, and was, I own, far handsomer of feature than I), and the more so because she flouted him—for he hated to be flouted or crossed; however, abandon it he did, and resigned himself to a renewal of marriage with me.

  Thereafter he wrote no more upon divorce, declaring that he had written enough to serve his purpose, and wished to be remembered by posterity for other books, not for these only. Instead, he busied himself with his History of England from the Earliest Times, written after the pithy model of Tacitus’s histories, and with the collecting of his poems, in English, Italian, Greek, and Latin, for their publication. It was wonderful how jealous he seemed that no verse that he had ever written should be forgotten, not even his two or three college exercises on the theme of Gunpowder Plot, and the two elegies on dead bishops of which Mr. Pory had spoken, and the rhymed translations he had made, while yet a schoolboy, of the Psalms of David. Yet upon the title-page, when the book was printed, appeared a modest quotation from an Eclogue of Virgil’s:

  Bind me the green field-spikenard on my brow,

  Lest ill tongues hurt the bard who is to be!

  His meaning was, that the spikenard should be stop-gap until he had earned the laurel or green ivy by his grand dramatic poetry.

  To Trunco he was land. Some months before my return to him, he had found Jane Yates to be treacherous and a petty thief of pewter and linen, and when he learned that she had sold some of the books from his library to a bookseller in Little Britain he suddenly dismissed her, though upon the old gentleman’s plea for mercy he did not have her committed for trial. Then, after one Mrs. Catherine Thomson had managed awhile for him, not very well but honestly at least, he employed Trunco in his kitchen, and at a good wage when he found how much money she saved him every month by her wise management, and how much relish she gave even to simple meats by her judicious dressing of them. For before she came, the hardiest of his pupils had dared to complain openly of the victuals set before them.

  The Widow Webber treated me no less affectionately than if I had been Thomasine Milton, her daughter, who since Reading was taken by Parliament had gone with her husband to live at Exeter. Mr. Christopher was then a Commissioner of the King to sequester estates of Parliamentarians; and the widow herself secretly favoured His Majesty, which was a prime cause of her showing kindness to me, for she knew that my family were of her opinion. By my husband’s desire, she kept me pretty close in the house, not allowing me to go out by myself even so far as the baker’s shop that lay four doors away—yet she contrived always to give me pleasant employment, so that I should not brood, and when I went out walking with her she took me often into the houses of her friends, who were livelier company than I had hoped to meet. They all consented that London was become horribly dull: no theatres, no horse-racing, no bear-baiting, no masques, even the suburban maypoles pulled down, the churches made as gloomy as jails, the mercers’ and drapers’ shops in mourning, hardly a chaise to be seen in all Hyde Park, the whole Town dead after nine o’clock at night. Money I had none, and it irked me not to have so much as sixpence to lay out upon coloured ribbons which the pedlar with a stealthy glance about him (because of the Ban and Anathema put by the Church upon all pretty toys) drew out from his pack to tempt me withal.

  My husband came to the house almost every day and usually brought books suitable for my reading, and discoursed with me pleasantly; but never passed a night with me in my chamber. I found him far less severe than before in his notions of how a husband should rule his wife. “The wife,” said he, “is not to be held as a servant, but to be received graciously into her husband’s empire; though not equally; yet largely, as his own image and glory.” And, in a book, he had even written that where the wife exceeds her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly acknowledges the same, why then, let the wiser govern the less wise, as is natural!

  While I was with the widow I had the sad intelligence that Captain Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Lady Cary’s husband, was slain in a skirmish near Aylesbury. She was then with child, and great hopes were held that she would bear a boy to perpetuate the line; but it proved a girl, and the poor Lady Cary is ever since slighted and despised by the Gardiners as having failed them.

  Chester was again besieged, after an intermission of some months, but Sir Mun held it steadfastly for the King. In September the Prince Rupert surrended the city of Bristol to General Fairfax, a little too easily, which earned him the King’s severe displeasure. In the same month his Majesty, going up to the relief of Chester, was routed before the walls with sad loss. Then, though the garrison was much dismayed for lack of powder and provisions, yet Sir Mun would not yield, and there was much praise given him by the Widow and her acquaintances for his staunchness. At last I heard it confidently reported by a young gentlewoman that Sir Mun was lately married; but who his wife might be she knew not.
This news struck me with a dull pain, yet somewhat reconciled me to my condition. I supposed the wife to be Doll Leke.

  I dreamed of Mun, on the last night before I was taken to my husband’s new house in the Barbican. He was lying alone in his bed, and looked very sorrowfully at me, and asked me: “How, sweetheart, can you hope for happiness now? Or how can I? Yet one day we shall meet again, in spite of all, and be happy together.”

  I will make no particular account of my bridal night, except to say that my husband omitted none of the concomitant pleasures prepared for me on the former occasion, not even the gold dust upon the coverlet; and that my mother was right, perhaps, when she denied hevirgins the right to wed any but widows. However, he had his will of me and I did nothing to displease him, and so great was his self-love that he could remark no absence of love in me while I was submissive to him. He commanded me to keep silence while he caressed me, lest by any loose or unlucky word I might break the spell and profane the sacred rite of which himself was priest and I the willing sacrifice.

  Enough of this. He got me with child soon enough, and then caressed me no more, but made me sleep apart from him. He required me, for love of him, to accept a strange new course of life. I must lie at night upon a mattress of straw, not upon feathers, and eat coarse food, and wash myself only in cold water, and read no books but such as told of battles and dangerous enterprises. He also made an armoury of my bedchamber, bringing in swords and pikes and pistols, the walls he hung with red and pinned over with many escutcheons; and he took me often to watch the exercises in the Artillery Garden and in St. Martin’s Fields. This was not from any unkindness in him, but from a maggot that he had. For he hoped by these artificial means to beget a son, renowned for his hardiness, who would become a great Captain-General; and that thus an old prophecy might be fulfilled, which was translated from Greek into Latin by one Gildas, in the time of Claudius Cæsar, to the effect that all the world should be subdued at last by the British race. This prophecy, beginning;