by Will Durant
No one was happy long. The nephews resented Mary as an intruder. She resented Milton’s books, and missed her mother, and the “great deal of company and merriment, dancing, etc.,” which she had enjoyed in Forest Hill; “Oftimes,” says Aubrey, “she heard his nephews beaten and cry.” 54 Finding that Mary had but a few ideas, and those Royalist, Milton sank back into his books. He spoke later of a “mute and spiritless mate,” and mourned that “a man shall find himself bound fast to an image of earth and phlegm, with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society.” 55 Some inquirers into the mésalliance believe that Mary refused him consummation. 56 After a month she asked leave to visit her parents; he consented on the understanding that she would return; she went, and did not return. He sent letters to her, which she ignored; and finding no other outlet for his feelings, he wrote, and anonymously published, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (August, 1643). He dedicated it “To the Parliament of England, with the Assembly”—i.e., the Westminster Assembly that was then drawing up a confession of the Presbyterian faith. He begged the Parliament to free itself from the bondage of tradition, and to advance the Reformation by admitting other grounds than adultery for divorce. He proposed to show
that indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering and ever likely to hinder the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace, is a greater reason of divorce than natural frigidity, especially if there be no children, and that there be mutual consent. 57
He quoted the old Jewish law of Deut. XXIV, I: “When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of the house.” Christ had apparently rejected this part of the Mosaic Law: “It hath been said, Whoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement; but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery.” (Matt, V, 31–32.) Milton argued that “Christ meant not to be taken word for word,” 58 and had repeatedly avowed that he had not come to change one iota of the Mosaic Law. He struggled to make his broad interpretation cover his individual case, even to justifying divorce for inability to join in “a fit and matchable conversation”; for “the unfitness and defectiveness of an unconjugal mind” can reduce matrimony to “a worse condition than the loneliest single life,” wherein a living soul is tied to a corpse. 59
The little book sold rapidly, for it was universally denounced. Milton published in February, 1644, a second edition, eloquently enlarged and boldly signed. He replied to his critics learnedly in Tetrachordon, and in a lighter vein in Colasterion (both issued in March 4, 1645), heaping upon them his rich vocabulary of vituperation—clod, pork, boar, snout, cockbrained solicitor, brazen ass, odious and odorous fool. 60 Milton could leap in one page from the heights of Parnassus to a Tartarus of scurrility.
Having failed to secure from Parliament a change in the law of divorce, he decided to defy the law and take another wife, preferably a Miss Davis, of whom we know nothing except that she refused him. When rumor of this courtship reached Mary Powell, she decided to recapture her husband, for better or for worse, before it should be too late. One day, when Milton was visiting a friend, she came upon him suddenly, knelt before him, and begged to be restored to his bed and board. He hesitated; his friends pleaded her cause; he consented. With her, his father, and his pupils, he now took a larger house in Barbican Street. Soon Mary’s parents, impoverished by the collapse of the Royalist cause, came also to live with the poet, making such a household as must have made for madness or philosophy. Another addition arrived in 1646—Milton’s first child, Anne. Richard Powell mitigated the mess by dying (July), and John Milton senior completed a long and honorable life in the following March. The poet fell heir to two or three houses in London, some money, and perhaps some realty in the countryside. In 1647 he disbanded his school, and moved with his wife, daughter, and two nephews to High Holborn Street. A second daughter, Mary, was born in 1648.
V. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS: 1643–49
On August 13, 1644, a Presbyterian clergyman, Herbert Palmer, preaching before the two houses of Parliament, proposed that Milton’s treatise on divorce should be publicly burned. It was not, but Palmer’s complaint may have led the Stationers’ Company, composed of the English booksellers, to point out to the Commons (August 24) that books and pamphlets were violating the law requiring them to be registered and licensed by the company. This law was as old as the reign of Elizabeth, but on June 14, 1643, Parliament had reinforced it with an ordinance specifying
that no . . . book, pamphlet, paper, nor part of any such . . . shall . . . be printed . . . or put to sale . . . unless the same be first approved and licensed under the hands of such . . . persons as both or either of the . . . Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same, and entered into the Register Book of the Company of Stationers according to ancient custom. 61
Any violation was to be punished by the arrest of the authors and printers concerned.
Milton had regularly neglected to register his prose publications. Though The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce appeared two months after the ordinance, he ignored the requirements. Perhaps he was persona grata to the Parliament because he had supported it in its conflict with the King; in any case it let him alone. But that ordinance remained over his head, and over the heads of all authors in Britain. It seemed to Milton impossible that literature could prosper under such censorship. Of what use to depose a king and a censorious episcopacy if Parliament and Church were to continue inquisition over the speech of Englishmen? On November 24, 1643, he sent forth, unregistered and unlicensed, the noblest of his prose works: Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England.* Here is no invective, no vituperation; the “speech” is kept to a high level of language and thought. Milton respectfully asks Parliament to reconsider its censorship ordinance as tending to “the discouragement of all learning . . . by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil Wisdom.” And he proceeds in a famous and magnificent passage:
I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ’Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. 62
He cites the intellectual vitality of ancient Athens, where only those writings were censo
red which were atheistical and libelous; “thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of the Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself banished the territory, for a discourse beginning with his confessing not to know ‘whether there were gods, or whether not.’” Milton praises the government of ancient Rome for allowing much freedom to writers, and then sketches the growth of censorship in Imperial Rome and the Catholic Church. This licensing ordinance, he feels, smacks of “popery.” “What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only scaped the ferula to come under” another Imprimatur? 63 Governments and their licensers are fallible; let them not enforce their preferences upon the people; rather let the people choose and learn, even if by costly trial and error:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversaries, but slinks out of the race. . . . 64 Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. 65 . . . Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? 66
However, Milton does not ask for complete tolerance of publications; he believes that atheism, libel, and obscenity should be outlawed, and he refuses toleration to Catholicism because it is an enemy of the state and is itself intolerant. 67 A state otherwise free in thought and speech must, other things equal, grow into greatness.
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday bloom . . . 68
Parliament paid no attention to Milton’s plea; on the contrary, it legislated with increased severity (in 1647, 1649, and 1653) against unlicensed printing. Members of the Stationers’ Company protested that Milton had not registered the Areopagitica; the House of Lords appointed two justices to examine him; we do not know the result, but apparently he was not molested; he was a useful voice for the triumphant Puritans.
In February, 1649, only two weeks after the execution of Charles I, Milton published a pamphlet on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. It accepted the social-contract theory that the authority of a government is derived from the sovereign people, and that “it is lawful . . . for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.” 69 A month later the Council of State of the revolutionary government invited Milton to become its “secretary for foreign tongues.” He put his epic aside, and for eleven years gave himself to the service of the Puritan Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate.
VI. THE LATIN SECRETARY: 1649–59
The new regime needed a good Latinist to compose its foreign correspondence. Milton was the obvious choice; he could write Latin, Italian, and French like an ancient Roman, a Florentine, or a Parisian; and he had proved through dangerous years his fidelity to the Parliamentary cause against the bishops and the King. It was the Council, not Cromwell, that engaged him; he had no close relations with the new ruler, but he must have seen him frequently, and must have felt in his thought and writing the nearness of that awesome personality. The Council used Milton not merely to translate its foreign correspondence into Latin, but to explain to other governments, by Latin brochures, the justice of its domestic policies, and, above all, how reasonable had been the decapitation of the King.
In April, 1649, soon after his induction into office, Milton joined with other employees of the Council in suppressing royalist and Leveller publications against the new regime. 70 Censorship was now more severe than at any time in England’s history, following the general rule that censorship increases with the insecurity of the government. The man who had written the most eloquent appeal ever made for freedom of the press was now looking at censorship from the view of the ruling power. We should note, however, that in the Areopagitica Milton had allowed that “it is of the greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.” 71
As John Lilburne was an especially troublesome Leveller, Milton was instructed by the Council to write a reply to his radical pamphlet, New Chains Discovered. We do not know if he carried out this assignment. But he himself tells us 72 that he was “ordered” to answer the Eikon Basilike. He complied by publishing (October 6, 1649) a book of 242 pages, entitled Eikonoklastes (“Image Breaker”). Doubting but assuming that the Eikon Basilike was what it purported to be, the work of Charles I, Milton took up step by step the royalist argument, and countered it with all the force he could muster. He defended the policy of Cromwell throughout, justified the execution of the King, and expressed his scorn of the “inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble . . . , a credulous and helpless herd, begotten to servility . . . and enchanted with . . . tyranny.” 73
Charles II, fretting on the Continent, paid Europe’s greatest scholar, Claude Saumaise, to come to the defense of the dead King. “Salmasius” hurriedly composed the Defensio Regia pro Carolo I, which appeared at Leiden in November, 1649. He described Cromwell and his followers as “fanatical scoundrels . . . , the common enemy of the human race,” and called upon all kings, for their own sake, to
fit out an armament for the extermination of these pests . . . Surely the blood of the great King . . . calls to its revenge all monarchs and princes of the Christian world. Nor can they appease his spirit more worthily than by restoring to his full rights the legitimate heir . . . , reseating him on his paternal throne . . . and slaying, as victims at the tomb of the saintly dead, those most outrageous beasts who conspired for the murder of so great a king. 74
Cromwell, fearing that this attack by a scholar of European fame would intensify the resentment, general on the Continent, against his government, asked Milton to answer Salmasius. The Latin secretary labored at the task for almost a year, working at it by candlelight despite his doctor’s warning that he was slowly becoming blind. One eye was already useless. On December 31, 1650, appeared Joannis Miltoni, Angli, pro Populo Anglicano Defensio contra Claudii Salmasii Defensionem Regiam. It began by taunting Salmasius for selling his services to Charles II, and went on to show that Salmasius only four years earlier had written against episcopacy, which now he defended.
O you venal and fee-taking agent! . . . O the sneak and turncoat! . . . You, silliest of blockheads, are worthy of the fool’s staff itself for thinking to persuade kings and princes to war with such puerile arguments . . . Do you then, without wit, without genius, a mouther and a pettifogger, born only to rifle and transcribe good authors, imagine that you can produce anything of your own that will live—you, whose foolish writings, bundled up with yourself, the next age, believe me, will consign to oblivion? Unless perchance this Defensio regia of yours shall owe something to the Answer to it, and shall therefore, though already for some time neglected and laid to sleep, be again taken up 75
—which is precisely what has happened. Salmasius had idealized Charles I, Milton degrades him. He suspects Charles of having abetted the Duke of Buckingham to poison his father, James I; he accuses the dead King of “all kinds of viciousness” with the said Duke; he charges Charles with kissing women at the theater, and of publicly fondling the breasts (papillas) of virgins and matrons. 76 Salmasius had called Milton many names; Milton retaliates by describing Salmasius as a fool, beetle, ass, liar, slanderer, apostate, idiot, ignoramus, vagabond, slave. He taunts Salmasius with being dominated by his wife, chides him for Latin errors, invites him to hang himself, and guarantees him admission to hell. 77 Thomas Hobbes, viewing the rival books from some perch of philosophy, declared himself unable to decide whose language was best, or whose arguments were worse. 78 The Council of St
ate gave Milton a vote of thanks.
Salmasius received a copy of Milton’s Defensio while at the court of Queen Christina in Stockholm. He promised, but delayed, to reply. Meanwhile Milton passed from foreign to domestic affairs. In 1649 he moved to a house in Charing Cross to be nearer his work. There his wife bore a son, who soon died, and, in 1652, a daughter, Deborah, whose birth cost the mother’s life. In that year Milton’s blindness became complete. Now he wrote one of his greatest sonnets—“When I consider how my light is spent.” The Council continued him as Latin secretary, providing him with an amanuensis.
In his darkness he suffered another loss: the republic that he had so fervently hailed collapsed (1653) into a military monarchy, and Cromwell, “Protector,” became in effect king. Milton resigned himself to these developments with the remark that “the ways of Providence are inscrutable.” 79 He continued to admire Cromwell, and praised him as “the greatest and most glorious of our countrymen, . . . the father of your country,” and assured him that “in the coalition of human society nothing is more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason, than that the highest mind should have the sovereign power.” 80
He was soon called upon to defend the Protector against a powerful indictment. In 1652 there had appeared a book whose very title was a battle cry: Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parracidas Anglicanos—The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides. It began with a description of Milton as “a monster hideous, ugly, huge, bereft of sight, . . . a hangman, . . . a gallows bird.” It compared the execution of Charles I with the crucifixion of Christ, and reckoned the regicide the greater crime. 81 It scorned the religious professions of the “usurpers”: