Ejection of Scandalous and Malignant Ministers.—A somewhat wholesale process, described in such terms by the winning side, had been going on, everywhere within the sway of Parliament, for several months. It was part, indeed, of a more general process, for the sequestration to the use of Parliament of the estates of notorious Delinquents of all kinds, which had been the subject of various Parliamentary ordinances. [Footnote: Commons Journals from March 1612-3 onwards. For sequence of proceedings and dates, see Index to Journals, Vol III.sub cocc."Delinquents." See also the main sequestrating ordinances (March 31 and Aug. 19, 1643) in Scobell's collection.] By these ordinances a machinery for the work of sequestration had been established, consisting of a central committee in London, and of committees in all the accessible counties. The special application of this machinery to clerical delinquents had come about gradually. From the very beginning of the Parliament (Nov. 1640) there had been a grand Committee of the Commons, of which Mr. White, member for Southwark, was chairman, for inquiring into the scandalous immoralities of the clergy, and an acting Sub- committee, of which Mr. White also was chairman, for considering how scandalous ministers might be removed, and real preaching ministers put in their places. By the action of these committees month after month— receiving and duly investigating complaints brought against clergymen, either of scandalous lives or of notoriously Laudian opinions and practices—a very large number of clergymen had been placed on the black books, and some actually ejected, before the commencement of the war. But, after the war began, sharper action became necessary. For now the Parliament had to provide for what were called "the plundered ministers" —i.e.for those Puritan ministers who, driven from their parsonages in various parts of the country by the King's soldiers, had to flock into London, with their families, for refuge and subsistence. A special Committee of the Commons had been appointed (Dec. 1642) to devise ways and means for the relief of these "godly and well-affected ministers;" and, as was natural, the proceedings of this Committee had become inter- wound with those of the Committee for the ejection of scandalous ministers—Mr. White at the head of the whole agency. And so, in the Commons, we hear ultimately of such determinations as these respecting "scandalous ministers:"—July 3,1643: "Ordinance to be prepared to enable the Committees (for sequestration) in the several counties to sequester their livings;"—July 27: "the Committee for plundered Ministers to consider of informations against them and to put them to the proof;"— Sept. 6: "Deputy Lieutenants and Committees in the counties empowered to examine witnesses against them." The result was the beginning of that "great and general purgation of the clergy in the Parliament's quarters" about which there was such an outcry among the Royalists at the time, and which, after having been a rankling memory in the High Church heart for seventy years, became the main text of Walker's famous folio of 1714 on "The Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England in the Grand Rebellion." According to that book, and to Royalist tradition, it was a ruthless persecution and spoliation of all the best, the most venerable, and the most learned of the clergy of England. Fuller, however, writing at the time, and corroborated by Baxter, represents the facts more fairly. Not a few of the clergy first ejected, he admits, were really men of scandalous private character, and were turned out expressly on that account; others, who were turned out for what was called their "false doctrine," or obstinate adherence to that Arminian theology and ceremonial of worship which the nation had condemned, might regard themselves as simply suffering in their turn what Puritan ministers had suffered abundantly enough under the rule of Laud; and, if gradually the sequestration extended itself beyond these two categories of "scandalous ministers" and "ministers of unsound faith," and swept in among "malignants" generally, or those whose only fault was that they were prominent adherents to the King, what was that but one of the harsh natural vengeances of a civil war? At the beginning of the purgation, at all events, Parliament professed carefulness and even leniency in its choice of victims. A fifth of the income of every ejected minister was reserved to his wife and family; and, in order that the public, and even the Royalists, might judge of the equity with which Parliament had proceeded in so odious a business, Mr. White, the chairman of the committees on clerical delinquency, put forth in print (Nov. 19, 1643) his "First Century of Scandalous Malignant Priests," or statement of the cases of one hundred of the sequestered clergy, chiefly in London and the adjacent counties, with the reasons of their ejection. At the time when Mr. White (thenceforward known as "Century White") put forth this pamphlet, the number of the ejected must have already considerably exceeded one hundred, or perhaps even three hundred; and, as the war went on, and sequestration became more and more co-extensive with "malignancy," the number swelled till, as is calculated, some 1,500 or 1,600 clergymen in all, or about a sixth part of the total clergy of England, were thrown out of their livings. [Footnote: Commons Journals of dates July 3, July 27, and Sept. 6, 1643; White'sFirst Century, Fuller's Church History (ed. 1842), III. 458, 460; Neal's Puritans, III. 23-34. Sec also Hallam's Const. Hist. (10th ed.), II. 164-166.]
Filling up of Vacant Livings by the appointment of New Ministers.—For the sequestered livings there were, of course, numerous candidates. Not only were there the "plundered" Puritan ministers, most of them congregated in London, to be provided for; but there were the young Divinity scholars growing up, for whom, even in a state of war, or at least for such of them as took the side of Parliament, it was necessary to find employment. Obviously, however, some order or method had to be adopted in the exercise of the large patronage of vacant livings which had thus come suddenly into the hands of Parliament. The plundered ministers could not be thrust promiscuously, or by mere lottery, into such livings as were vacant. They had all, certainly, the qualification of being already ordained; but there were different sorts of persons among them, and some with very little to recommend them except their distress. It was essential that there should be some examination or re-examination of all such petitioners for new livings, in order that the unfit should not be appointed, and that the others might be provided for according to their degrees of fitness. Accordingly, at the request of the two Houses, the Westminster Assembly (Oct. 1643) appointed two-and-twenty of its Divines to be a committee for examining and reporting on the qualifications of all such petitioners for livings as might be referred to it by Parliament. About the same time a provisional arrangement was made for the more difficult matter of ordaining new candidates for the Ministry. The whole question of Ordination having yet to be argued and settled in the Assembly (seeantè, p. 20), it was felt on all hands that some temporary arrangement was imperative. Accordingly, by the advice of the Assembly, the whole business of deciding who were fit to be ordained, and of duly ordaining such, was entrusted by Parliament to certain committees or associations of godly ministers, themselves already ordained, appointed for certain centres and districts. The chief Ordaining Committee was, of course, that for London and the country round. This committee, to which was assigned not only the ordination of new ministers for its important district, but also the ordination of all chaplains for the army and navy, consisted of twenty-three associated Presbyters (ten Divines of the Assembly and thirteen parish-ministers of London not in the Assembly), of whom seven were to be a quorum. Whosoever, not already ordained, should presume to preach publicly or otherwise exercise the ministerial office without having been ordained by this association, or one of the others, or at least without a certificate of having been approved by the Examining Committee of the Assembly, was to be reported to Parliament for censure and punishment. The London Divines were enjoined to be careful whom they admitted into their pulpits. In short, it was the object of both the Parliament and the Assembly to proclaim their determination that, while the question of Church-government was being considered, some decent rule of practical order should be carefully observed, and England should not be allowed to lapse, as the loyalists were giving out, into a mere anarchy of ranters, preaching cobblers, and every fool his own parson. [Footnote: Neal, III. 88-90, and 138-141.]
Visitation of the University of Cambridge.—While the scandalous and malignant among the parish clergy were being sequestered and ejected, it was not to be expected that Parliament would spare the Universities. Oxford, for the present, was beyond reach; but Cambridge was within reach. Was it to be endured that, while the town of Cambridge was the very centre of the Associated Eastern Counties, the most zealously Parliamentarian region in all England, the University should be a fortress of malignancy, with many of its Heads of Houses and Fellows notoriously disaffected to Parliament, and showing their disaffection by sermons, publications from the University press, continuance of the forbidden usages and symbolisms in the College chapels, and such other acts of contumacy? For a long time Parliament had been asking itself this question. As early as June 10, 1643, the subject of "some effectual means of reforming" the University of Cambridge, "purging it from all abuses, innovations, and superstitions," and dealing with conspicuous malignants in it, had been under discussion in the Commons. There had been a reluctance, however, to proceed too rapidly, or so as to incur the Royalist reproaches of "invasion of University rights" and "ruin of a great seat of learning." Hence, whatever dealings with the University had been necessary had been left very much to the discretion of the ordinary agencies representing Parliament in the Associated Counties, at the head of which, since Aug. 1643, had been the Earl of Manchester. There was even a Parliamentary ordinance (Jan. 6, 1643-4) explaining that, whatever sequestration there might be of the revenues of individual delinquents in the University, every regard was to be paid to the property of the University as such, and not an atom ofitshould be alienated. By this time, however, it was felt that the malignancy of the University must be dealt with more expressly. Accordingly, on the 22nd of January there was passed "an Ordinance for regulating the University of Cambridge and for removing of scandalous Ministers in the several Associate Counties." By this ordinance it was provided that, "whereas many complaints are made by the well-affected inhabitants of the associated counties of Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Lincoln, that the service of the Parliament is retarded, the enemy strengthened, the people's souls starved, and their minds diverted from any care of God's cause, by their idle, ill-affected and scandalous clergy of the University of Cambridge and the Associated Counties" and whereas "many that would give evidence against such scandalous ministers are not able to travel to London," therefore the Earl of Manchester should be commissioned to take the necessary steps in the University and the Counties themselves. He was to appoint Committees who were to have "power to call before them all Provosts, Masters, and Fellows of Colleges, all students and members of the University, and all ministers in any county of the Association, and all schoolmasters;" and, after due inquiry by these Committees, he was to have power "to eject such as he shall judge unfit from their places, and to sequester their estates, means and revenues, and to place other fitting persons in their room, such as shall be approved of by the Assembly of Divines." A very important ordinance, as we shall see in due time. [Footnote: Commons Journals, June 10, 1643, and Jan. 20, 1643-4; Lords Journals, Jan. 6 and Jan. 22, 1643-4; and Neal, III. 105-107.]
The reader need hardly be reminded by what authority all these acts and changes in the system of England were decreed and carried into effect. Since the beginning of the war the government of England, except where the King's troops were in possession, had been in the two Houses of Parliament sitting at Westminster; but since July 1643 it may be said rather to have been in these two Houses of Parliamentwiththe Assembly of Divines. What the reader requires, however, to be reminded of is the smallness numerically of this governing body. The House of Lords, in particular, though still retaining all its nominal dignity and keeping up all its stately forms, was a mere shred of its former self. About 29 or 30 persons, out of the total Peerage of England, as we reckoned (Vol. II. pp. 430-31), had avowed themselves Parliamentarians; so that, had all these been present, the House of Lords would have been but a very small gathering. But, as a certain number even of these were always absent on military duty or on other occasions, it was seldom that more than 14 or 15 Peers were present in the House around Lord Grey of Wark on the woolsack as elected Speaker. Sometimes, when the business was merely formal, the number sank to 4 or 5; and I do not think the Lords Journals register, during the whole time with which we are now concerned, a larger attendance than 22. That was the number present on the 22nd of January, 1643-4, when the ordinance for visiting Cambridge University was passed. [Footnote: As the Lords Journals give the names of the Peers present each day, very accurate information on this subject is obtainable from them.] In the Commons, of course, the attendance was much larger. When a "whip" was necessary, between 200 and 300 could be got together. Thus on the 25th of September, 1643, which was the day of inaugurating the Covenant, 220 were present; and on the above-mentioned 22nd of January, 1643-4—an important day for various reasons—as many as 280 made their appearance, while it was calculated that 100 were absent in the Parliamentary service. [Footnote: Parl. Hist. III. 199.] Usually, however, the attendance was much less numerous. On a vote taken Nov. 26, 1643, the division showed 59 against 58, or 117 present; and this appears to be rather above the mark of the attendance in general.—On the whole, one may say that the business of the nation in the interest of Parliament was carried on habitually during those important months by some 12 or 15 Parliamentarian Peers, and some 100 Commoners, keeping up the forms of the two Houses, and having for their assessors, and in part for their spurs and tutors, the 60 or 80 Puritan Divines who sat close at hand in the Jerusalem Chamber.
Was all this to last? Whether it was to last or not depended not a little on the conduct of the Parliament itself, but greatly more on the conduct of the generals and armies that held up its banners in various parts of England. And how, since our last glimpses of the state of the war in the dark month of Hampden's death and the month following that (June and July 1643), had the war been going on? Much as before. What do we see? A siege here and a siege there, a skirmish here and a skirmish there, ending sometimes for the Parliament, but as often for the King; amid all these sieges and skirmishes no battle of any magnitude, save the first Battle of Newbery (Sept. 20, 1643), where Lord Falkland, weary of his life, was slain, and also the Royalist Earls of Carnarvon and Sunderland, but otherwise the damage to the King was inconsiderable; Essex still heavy and solemn, an excellent man, but a woful commander-in-chief; little Sir William Waller still the favourite and set up against Essex, but confidence in him somewhat shaken by his recent defeats; the Fairfaxes in the north, and others in other parts, doing at best but respectably; Cromwell, it is true, a marked man and always successful wherever he appeared, but appearing yet only as Colonel Cromwell! "For the present the Parliament side is running down the brae," wrote the sagacious Baillie, Sept. 22, 1643; and again, more pithily, Dec. 7, "They may tig- tag on this way this twelvemonth." The only remedy, Baillie thought—the only thing that would change the sluggish "tig-tagging" of Essex and the English into something like what a war should be—was the expected coming-in of the Scots. For this event the English Parliamentarians also longed vehemently. "All things are expected from God and the Scots" is Baillie's description of the feeling in London in the winter of 1643-4. For, though the bringing in of a Scottish force auxiliary to the English army had been arranged for in the autumn—though it was for that end that the English Parliament had sent Commissioners to Edinburgh, had accepted Henderson's "Solemn League and Covenant," and had admitted Scottish Commissioners into the Westminster Assembly—yet the completing of the negotiations, and the getting together and equipping of the Scottish army for its southward march, had been a work of time. About Christmas 1643 it was understood that the Scots were in readiness to march; but the precise time when they might be expected to cross the border was yet in anxious conjecture. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 83, 99, 104-5, and 114-15.]
It was an unusually severe winter, cold and snowy. The Londoners, in especial, deprived of their coal from Newcastle, felt it severely. Baillie particularly mentions the comfortable hangings of the Jerusalem Chamber, and the good fire kept burning in it, as "some dainties in London" at that date, and duly appreciated by the members of the Assembly. [Footnote: Ibid. II. 106.] Among the printed broad-sheets of the time that were hawked about London, I have seen one entitled "Artificial Fire; or, Coal for Rich and Poor: this being the offer of an excellent new Invention." The invention consists of a proposal to the Londoners of a cheap substitute for coal, devised by a "Mr. Richard Gesling, Ingineer, late deceased." Mr. Gesling's idea was that, if you take brickdust, mortar, sawdust, or the like, and make up pasteballs thereof mingled with the dust of sea-coal or Scotch coal, and with stable-litter, you will have a fuel much more economical than coal itself. But, though this is the practical proposal of the fly-sheet, its main interest lies in its lamentation over the lack of the normal fuel. "Some fine-nosed city dames," it says, "used to tell their husbands, 'O husband! we shall never be well, we nor our children, whilst we live in the smell of this city's sea-coal smoke! Pray, a country-house for our health, that we may get out of this sea-coal smell!' But how many of these fine-nosed dames now cry, 'Would to God we had sea-coal! Oh! the want of fire undoes us! O the sweet sea-coal fires we used to have! how we want them now: no fire to your sea-coal!'… This for the rich: a word for the poor! The great want of fuel for fire makes many a poor creature cast about how to pass over this cold winter to come; but, finding small redress for so cruel an enemy as the cold makes, some turn thieves that never stole before—steal posts, seats, benches from doors, rails, nay, the very stocks that should punish them; and all to keep the cold winter away." [Footnote: Folio sheet dated 1644 (i.e.winter of 1643-4), in British Museum Library: Press-mark, 669, f.]—If on no other account than the prospect of a re-opening of the coal-traffic between Newcastle and London, what joy among the Londoners when the news came that, on Friday the 19th of January, 1643-4, the expected Scottish army had entered England by Berwick! They had entered it, toiling through deep snow, 21,500 strong, and were already—God be praised!—spreading themselves over the winter-white fields of the very region where the coal lay black underground. At their head who but old Field-marshall Leslie, now Earl of Leven, Scottish commander-in-chief for the third time, and tolerably well acquainted already with the North of England? Second in command to him, as Lieutenant-general of the Foot, was William Baillie, of Letham, in this post for the second time; and the Major-general, with command of the horse was David Leslie, a third Gustavus-Adolphus man, and, though a namesake of the commander-in-chief, only distantly related to him. The marquis of Argyle accompanied the invaders, nominally as Colonel of a troop of horse; and among the other colonels of foot or horse were the Earls of Cassilis, Lindsay, Loudoun, Buccleugh, Dunfermline, Lothian, Marischal, Eglinton, and Dalhousie. The expenses of the army, averaging 1,000_l._ per diem (6_d._ a day for each common foot-soldier, 8_d._ for a horse-soldier, and so on upwards) were, by agreement, to be charged to England. [Footnote: Rushw. V. 604-7; Parl. Hist. III. 200, 201; Baillie, II. 100 and 137.]
The condition on which the Scots had consented thus to aid the English Parliament must not be forgotten. It was the agreement of the two nations in one and the same religious Covenant. In all the negotiations that had been going on between London and Edinburgh, the Scots had always assumed the fulfilment of this condition on the part of the English. And, so far, we have seen, it had already been fulfilled. Since September 1643, when Henderson's Covenant had first been proposed to the English Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, and the Commons and the Westminster Divines had set the example by swearing to it collectively in one of the London churches, "the Covenant" had been a phrase familiar to the English mouth. In all the miscellaneous activity of the Parliament for the detection and disabling of "Malignants," there had been no instrument more effective or more commonly used. There were other tests and oaths by which the "malignants" might be distinguished from the "well-affected"; but the taking or not taking of the Solemn League and Covenant was the test paramount. Wherever the Parliament had power it had been in operation. Since December 20, for example, it had been the law that no one could be a Common Councilman of the City of London who had not subscribed to the Covenant. Still, in this matter of subscription to the Covenant, the English, both as the larger nation and as the less accustomed to Covenants, had remained considerably in arrear of the Scots; and, when the Scots actually did make their appearance in England, there was a sudden refreshing of the memory of the English Parliament on the subject, and a sudden exertion to make up the arrears. "The Scots are among us on the supposition that we have all taken the Covenant; and lo! we have not yet all taken it," was virtually the exclamation of the Parliament. Accordingly, that all might be brought in, that there might be no escape, and that there might remain to all time coming a vast register of the names of the Englishmen then living who had entered into this solemn league with their Scottish neighbours, there was passed, on the 5th of February, 1643-4, a new and conclusive ordinance on the subject. By this ordinance it was enacted that true copies of the Covenant should be sent to the Earl of Essex and other commanders of the army, and to all governors of towns, &c., to the intent that it might be sworn to by every man in the army; also that copies should be sent into all the counties, so that they should punctually reach every parish and every parish- minister—the instructions being that every minister should, the next Lord's day after the certified copy of the Covenant reached him, read it aloud to his congregation, discourse and exhort upon it, and then tender it to all present, who should swear to it with uplifted hands, and afterwards sign it with their names or marks. All men over eighteen years of age, whether householders or lodgers, were to take it in the parishes in which they were resident; and the names of all refusing, whether ministers or laymen, were to be reported. [Footnote: See Ordinance in Lords Journals, Feb. 5, 1643-4.] Nay, by an arrangement about the same time, the action of the Covenant was made to extend to English subjects abroad. Notwithstanding all this stringency, there is reason to believe that not a few soldiers in the army, and not a few ministers and others, contrived, in one way or another, to avoid the Covenant, without being called to account for the neglect. Where a minister otherwise unexceptionable, or an officer or soldier of known zeal and efficiency, had scruples of conscience against signing, the authorities, both civil and military, appear in many places to have exercised a discretion and winked at disobedience or procrastination.—The case of the Earl of Bridgewater may here be of some interest, on its own account, and as illustrating what went on generally. The Earl, known to us so long as "the Earl of Milton'sComus" had been living in retirement as an invalid during the war, his wishes on the whole being doubtless with the King, but his circumstances obliging him to keep on fair terms with the Parliament. The test of the Covenant seems to have sorely perplexed the poor Peer. "He says some things in the Covenant his heart goes along with them, and other things are doubtful to him; and therefore desires some time to consider of it." Such was the report to the Lords, Wednesday Feb. 7, 1643-4, by the Earls of Rutland and Bolingbroke, who had been appointed to deal with him and other absent Peers in the matter. "He shall have time till Friday morning next," was the entry ordered to be made. On the Friday named there is no mention of the subject in the Lords Journals; but on Saturday the 10th Lords Rutland and Bolingbroke were able to report that it was all right. Two days had convinced the Earl that signing would be best for him. [Footnote: Lords Journals of dates cited.]
Besides this universal imposition of the Covenant by Parliamentary ordinance upon all who had hitherto neglected to take it, there was another immediate effect of the presence of the Scots in England. The two nations being now in arms for the same cause, the fortunes of each nation depending largely on the conduct of the other, and the two national armies indeed having to co-operate strategically, there required to be some common directing power, intermediate between the English Parliament in Westminster and the Scottish Estates in Edinburgh, representing both, and acting for both in all matters of military concern. The Scots, on their part, had made provision accordingly. Besides appointing a stationary Committee of the Estates to manage matters from Edinburgh, and another Committee to be with the Scottish army as a kind of Council to the Earl of Leven, they had nominated (Jan. 9, 1643-4) a Special Commission of four persons to go to London with full powers to represent the views and interests of Scotland in the enterprise in which it was now conjoined with England. These were—the EARL OF LOUDOUN, High Chancellor of Scotland; LORD MAITLAND (already in London as Scottish Commissioner to the Westminster Assembly); SIR ARCHIBALD JOHNSTONE OF WARRISTON (due in London at any rate as a Commissioner to the Assembly); and MR. ROBERT BARCLAY, Provost of Irvine in Ayrshire. These Commissioners having presented their Commission to the English Parliament, Feb. 5, the Parliament were moved to appoint some of its trustiest men from the two Houses to be an English Committee of Consultation with the Scottish Commissioners, and in fact to form, along with them, a joint "Committee of the Two Kingdoms." Such an institution was not at all to the taste of Lord General Essex, inasmuch as it trenched on his powers as commander- in-chief. Some opposition was therefore offered. On the whole, however, the argument that the two kingdoms ought to be "joined in their counsels as well as in their forces" proved overpowering; and on the 16th of February an ordinance was passed appointing the following persons (7 Peers and 14 Commoners) to be a Committee for the purpose named—the EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND, the EARL OF ESSEX, the EARL OF WARWICK, the EARL OF MANCHESTER, VISCOUNT SAYE AND SELE, LORD WHARTON, LORD EGBERTS, WILLIAM PIERREPOINT, SIR HENRY VANE, Senr., SIR PHILIP STAPLETON, SIR WILLIAM WALLER, SIR GILBERT GERRARD, SIR WILLIAM ARMYN, SIR ARTHUR HASELRIG, SIR HENRY VANE, Junr., JOHN CREWE, ROBERT WALLOP, OLIVER ST. JOHN, SAMUEL BROWNE, JOHN GLYNN, and OLIVER CROMWELL. Six were to be a quorum, always in the proportion of one Lord to two Commoners, and of the Scottish Commissioners meeting with them two were to be a quorum. There can be no doubt that the object was that the management of the war should be less in Essex's hands that it had been. [Footnote: Lords Journals of dates Feb. 5 and 16, 1643-4; and Baillie, II. 141, 142]
The name of JOHN PYM may have been looked for in the Committee. Alas! no longer need his name be looked for among the living in this History. He had died on the 8th of December, 1643, when the Scots were expected in England, but had not yet arrived. He was buried magnificently in Westminster Abbey, all the Lords and Commons attending, and Stephen Marshall preaching the funeral sermon. England had lost "King Pym," her greatest Parliamentary man. No one precisely like him was left. But, indeed, he had done his work to the full; and, had he lived longer, he might have been loved the less! [Footnote: Rushworth V. 376; Parl. Hist. III. 186-7; and Baillie, II. 118.]
We left Milton in his house in Aldersgate Street in or about 1643, waiting for the promised return of his recently-wedded wife at Michaelmas, and meanwhile comfortable enough, with his books, his pupils, and the quiet companionship of his old father. We are now seven or eight months beyond that point in our general History. What had happened in the Aldersgate household in the interval? A tremendous thing had happened. Milton had come to desire a divorce from his wife, and had written and published a Tract on Divorce, partly in the interest of his own private case, but really also with a view to suggest to the mind of England, then likely to be receptive of new ideas, certain thoughts on the whole subject of the English law of Marriage which had resulted from reflection on his own experience. Here is the story:—
"Michaelmas [Sept. 29, 1643] being come," says Phillips, "and no news of his wife's return, he sent for her by letter, and, receiving no answer, sent several other letters, which were also unanswered; so that at last he despatched down a foot-messenger [to Forest Hill] with a letter, desiring her return. But the messenger came back not only without an answer, at least a satisfactory one, but, to the best of my remembrance, reported that he was dismissed with some sort of contempt. This proceeding, in all probability, was grounded upon no other cause but this—viz.: that, the family being generally addicted to the Cavalier party, as they called it, and some of them possibly engaged in the King's service, who by this time had his head-quarters at Oxford and was in some prospect of success, they began to repent them of having matched the eldest daughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opinion, and thought it would be a blot on their escutcheon whenever that Court should come to flourish again. However, it so incensed our author that he thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again, after such a repulse; so that he forthwith prepared to fortify himself with arguments for such a resolution, and accordingly wrote," &c. Here Phillips goes on to enumerate Milton's various Divorce Tracts, the first of which in order of time was hisDoctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Aubrey corroborates Phillips, but has little on the subject but what he may have picked up from gossip. "She was a … Royalist, and went to her mother near Oxford: he sent for her after some time, and I think his servant was evilly entreated,"—such are Aubrey's brief notes of the facts; after which come his own reflections on the rupture: "Two opinions do not well on the same bolster;" and "What man, especially contemplative, would like to have a young wife environed and stormed by the sons of Mars, and those of the enemy party?" Finally Wood, in hisFasti, does little more than repeat Aubrey: "Though he sent divers pressing invitations, yet he could not prevail upon her to come back;" whereupon "he, being not able to bear this abuse, did therefore, upon consideration, after he had consulted many eminent authors, write the said book of Divorce, with intentions to be separated from her." [Footnote: Phillips's Memoir; Aubrey's Lives; and Wood's Fasti Oxon. I. 482-3.]
On all grounds Phillips's authority is the best. And yet there are difficulties in his account. According to that account, it was the non- return of Milton's wife at or about Michaelmas (Sept. 29) 1643, and not only her non-return then, but her obstinate and repeated refusal to return after that date, and the insulting conduct of her family to the messenger he finally sent to urge her return, that roused Milton's indignation, put the thought of divorce into his mind, and induced him to write his first Divorce Tract. If so, the tract could hardly have been ready till some weeks after Michaelmas 1643—say, till about Christmas of the same year. There is proof, however (and I do not think it has been observed before), that Milton's first Divorce Tract was already published and in circulation two monthsbeforethe Michaelmas in question. The proof is not, where we might expect it, in the books of the Stationers' Company; for the Tract, like all Milton's previous pamphlets, was published by him, rather defiantly, without the required legal formalities of licence and registration. But there is a precious copy of it in Thomason's great collection of pamphlets, called "the King's Pamphlets," in the British Museum. The title in that copy is as follows: "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restor'd, 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." Underneath this title there follows on the title-page the quotation "Matth. xiii. 52. Every Scribe instructed to the Kingdome of Heav'n is like the Maister of a house which bringeth out of his treasurie things old and new;" and at the foot of the title-page is the legend "London, Printed by T. P. and M. S. in Goldsmiths' Alley: 1643." [Footnote: Copy in British Museum Library Press mark, 12. G.F. 17 119.] This printed legend alone would all but determine the publication to have been prior to Christmas 1643; but the question is set at rest by a manuscript note on the title-page, "Aug. 1st." The note was put there by, or by the direction of, the collector, Thomason, to indicate the day on which the copy came into his hands, and is to be relied on implicitly. The Tract, it will be observed, was anonymous; but the words "Written by J. Milton," penned on the title-page by the same hand that penned the date "Aug. 1st," show that the authorship was no secret from the all-prying Thomason. In short, on evidence absolutely conclusive, Milton's first Divorce Tract was in print and on sale in London on the 1st of August, 1643, or two months before Phillips's fatal Michaelmas. [Footnote: This may be the place for a word or two about the collector of those Pamphlets in the British Museum among which I have had so frequently to range for the purposes of this work, and to which, like other inquiries into English History from 1610 to 1660, I owe more items of information than I can count.—George Thomason was a London bookseller of the Civil War time; his place of business being the "Rose and Crown" in St. Paul's Churchyard. He was of Royalist sympathies; but his hobby was to collect impartially all the pamphlets, broad-sheets, &c., that teemed from the press on both sides, and not only those that teemed from the English press, but also all published abroad that bore on current English questions. He began this labour in 1641, and pursued it indefatigably till after the Restoration; so that, at his death in or about 1666, he left a collection of about 33,000 pamphlets, &c. on English affairs, published between 1638 and 1662. The making of this collection had been the delight of his life; it had been his anxiety that no single tract, or printed scrap of any interest, should escape him. When he began to collect in 1641, he had taken pains to obtain copies of publications of the immediately preceding years; and after that his work had been facilitated by the notoriety of his passion for collecting. Booksellers and authors (Milton for one) seem occasionally to have sent copies of their pamphlets to Thomason. "Exact care hath been taken," he himself tells us in the Introduction to a MS. catalogue of his treasures, "that the very day is written upon most of them that they came out;" and this care of his has fixed the dates of many publications that would else have been unknown or but vaguely known.—For farther particulars of this interesting person, an account of the shifts to which he was put to save his collection from the chances of Parliamentarian pillage, and a history of the fortunes of his collection till it came to be part of the Library of King George III., and so of the British Museum, see Edwards'sMemoirs of Libraries(1859), Vol. I pp, 456-460.—I may add that I have seen a pencil jotting in Thomason's hand on one of the fly-leaves of his collection as fresh and legible, after 220 years, as if it had been written yesterday.]
One of two suppositions therefore:—(1.) If Phillips is right in his statement that Milton's first Divorce Tract was caused by the obstinate refusal of his wife to return to him, and the insulting conduct of her family in detaining her and laughing at his letters and messages, then Phillips's dates in the whole matter of the marriage must be a little wrong. "About Whitsuntide it was (May 21, 1643) that my uncle left us in Aldersgate Street, on what turned out to be his marriage journey; in about a month's time he returned, bringing his wife, and some of her relations, with him (June 1643); the relations stayed about a week, during which there was much feasting and merriment; for about a month after they were gone the newly-married wife remained with my uncle; but then (late in July or early in August 1643), tired of a philosophical life, and pining for the society of home, she contrived a request from her family to have her with them during the rest of the summer—to which my uncle consented, on the understanding that she was to come hack about Michaelmas (Sept. 29, 1643)." Such, re-expressed in words for the nonce, is Phillips's account as we have already given it. But, as the Divorce Tract was published August 1, 1643, it is clear that, if the cause of that Tract was the persistent, protracted, and contemptuous absence of his wife, then Phillips's memory must have been at fault, and he must have somewhat post-dated the marriage itself. The marriage in that case must have been before Whitsuntide 1643; and the return of the wife to her relations, her refusal to come hack, and Milton's chagrin and anger so occasioned, must have been matters not of after Michaelmas 1643, but of at least a month or two before the August of that year. This is quite a tenable supposition; for there are other inaccuracies in Phillips, and the register of the place and date of Milton's marriage with Mary Powell has not been found. (2) On the whole, however, Phillips's recollections about the marriage are so circumstantial, and there is such a likelihood of their being true, that, until contradictory records shall be produced, it seems right to accept his dating. But then his explanation of the cause of his uncle's speculations about divorce must be wrong. The cause in that case cannot have been the obstinate refusal of his wife to return; for the Divorce Tract must have been written and ready for the press while she was still with him in the Aldersgate Street house (July 1643), and it was actually out (Aug. 1) before she can have reached her father's house at Forest Hill on her granted two months of leave till Michaelmas. What are we to make of this discrepancy? One is puzzled. That a man should have occupied himself on a Tract on Divorce ere his honeymoon was well over—should have written it perseveringly day after day within sound of his newly-wedded wife's footsteps and the very rustle of her dress on the stairs or in the neighbouring room—is a notion all but dreadful. And yet to some such notion, if Phillips's dating is correct, we seem to be shut up. But, if so, more is involved than Phillips knew. The cause of Milton's thoughts about divorce, in that case, must have been the agony of a deadly discovery of his wife's utter unfitness for him when as yet she had not been two months his wife. It must have been the unutterable pain of the dis-illusioned bridegroom, the gnawing sense of his irretrievable mistake, The vision must then pass before our minds of scenes in the Aldersgate Street house, the reverse of the happily connubial,beforethat sudden departure of the bride back to her father's home, and leading to that incident perhaps rather violently. One seems to hear the sound of differences, of conflicting opinions about this and that, of weeping girlish wilfulness opposed to steady and perhaps too austere prohibitions. "Well, then, I will go back to my mother: I am sure I wish I had never——": "Go": And so the parting may have come about, not wholly by her arrangement, but harshly and with some quarrel on his part. There are not wanting subsequent facts that might lend a plausibility to this version of the story. [Footnote: Milton's mother-in-law, having occasion, seven years afterwards (1651), to advert to her daughter's return home so soon after her marriage, distinctly attributed it to Milton himself. The words are, "He having turned away his wife heretofore for a long space upon some other occasion." I do not think Mrs. Powell was a very accurate lady, and she had no fondness for Milton; but the words seem to imply more than a mere passive consent of Milton to his wife's proposal to revisit her family.] Yet it is the other that one would wish to be true, and that would fit in most naturally with the facts as a whole. That version is that Milton, good-naturedly and perhaps taken by surprise, allowed his wife to go home for two months at her own request, or the request of her relatives, before he had been three months married, and that it was the insult of her nonreturn that revealed to him his mistake in her, and drove him into his speculations about divorce. Only, then, we repeat, Phillips's dating of the marriage and its incidents requires amendment.
In any case the first edition of Milton'sDoctrine and Discipline of Divorcewas out in London on the 1st of August, 1643. [Footnote: The supposition is always open that, by some oversight, Thomason misdated his copy, putting "Aug." for a much later month. But this is the unlikeliest thing of all.] It was a pamphlet of forty-eight small quarto pages, with an extra page supplying two omitted passages. The text was printed continuously, without division into chapters; at the end.
Both in matter and in manner the Tract was one of the boldest that had ever been submitted to the reading of England. Its thesis is laid down near the beginning in these terms: "That indisposition, unfitness, or contrarity 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." This thesis Milton sets himself to argue in all sorts of ways—from natural reason and expediency; from the Scripture doctrine of marriage as it might be gathered from the Mosaic Law and the right interpretation of texts in the Old and New Testaments, notwithstanding one or two individual texts (like that of Matth. v. 31, 32) that had been hackneyed and misunderstood by mere literalists; and from opinions or indications of opinion on the subject that might be found in the works of some of the Protestant Reformers, and other eminent writers. His conclusion was that the notion of the indissolubility of marriage, or even the modified law of England and of other countries, authorizing divorce only for certain gross reasons, were mere relics of superstitious tradition, the concoction of the Canonists and Sacramentalists in the ages of sacerdotal tyranny, unworthy of more enlarged views of justice and liberty, and a canker and cause of incalculable misery in the heart of modern society. Again and again he indicates his consciousness that in announcing this conclusion, and trying to rouse his fellow-countrymen to the necessity of at once including a revision of the Marriage Law in the general Reformation then in progress, he is performing a great public service. Thus, at the very opening: "By which [the precedent of certain liberal hints on the subject by Hugo Grotius], and mine own apprehension of what public duty each man owes, I conceive myself exhorted among the rest to communicate such thoughts as I have, and offer them now, in this general labour of Reformation, to the candid view both of Church and Magistrate; especially because I see it the hope of good men that those irregular and unspiritual courts have spun their utmost date in this land, and some better course must now be constituted. He, therefore, that by adventuring shall be so happy as with success to ease and set free the minds of ingenuous and apprehensive men from this needless thraldom; he that can prove it lawful and just to claim the performance of a fit and matchable conversation no less essential to the prime scope of marriage than the gift of bodily conjunction, or else to have an equal plea of divorce as well as for that corporal deficiency; he that can but lend us the clue that winds out this labyrinth of servitude to such a reasonable and expedient liberty as this—deserves to be reckoned among the public benefactors of civil and human life, above the inventors of wine and oil." [Footnote: This passage is from the first edition; it is not nearly so full in the second.] As such a benefactor, such a champion of a neglected truth and a suppressed human liberty, the anonymous writer offers himself. He knows that he stands alone at present, but he trusts to the power of demonstration addressed to the mind of England, then newly awakened and examining all institutions to their roots.
There is not a word of avowed reference to his own case throughout; and yet from first to last we are aware of young Mary Powell in the background. Inability for "fit and matchable conversation": this is that supreme fault in a wife on which the descant is from first to last, and from which, when it is plainly ingrained and unamendable, the right of divorce is maintained to be, by the law of God and all civil reason, the due deliverance. Hopeless intellectual and spiritual incompatibility between husband and wife: it is on this, though not in these exact words, that Milton harps again and again as in his view the clearest invalidation of marriage, the frustration of the noblest and most divine ends of the institution; an essentially worse frustration, he dares to say in one place, than even that conjugal infidelity which "a gross and boorish opinion, how common soever," would alone resent or recognise. It is marvellous with what richness of varying language he paints to the reader the horrible condition of a man tied for life to a woman with whom he can hold no rational or worthy conversation. "A familiar and co- inhabiting mischief"; "spite of antipathy to fudge together and combine as they may, to their unspeakable weariness and despair of all sociable delight"; "a luckless and helpless matrimony"; "the unfitness and effectiveness of an unconjugal mind"; "a worse condition than the loneliest single life"; "unconversing inability of mind"; "a mute and spiritless mate"; "that melancholy despair which we see in many wedded persons"; "a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper"; "ill-twisted wedlock"; "the disturbance of her unhelpful and unfit society"; "one that must be hated with a most operative hatred"; "forsaken and yet continually dwelt with and accompanied"; "a powerful reluctance and recoil of nature on either side, blasting all the content of their mutual society"; "a violence to the reverend secret of nature"; "to force a mixture of minds that cannot unite"; "two incoherent and uncombining dispositions"; "the undoing or the disheartening of his life"; "the superstitious and impossible performance of an ill-driven bargain"; "bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it oft happens, to an image of earth and phlegm"; "shut up together, the one with a mischosen mate, the other in a mistaken calling"; "committing two ensnared souls inevitably to kindle one another, not with the fire of love, but with a hatred irreconcilable, who, were they severed, would be straight friends in any other relation"; "two carcases chained unnaturally together, or, as it may happen, a living soul bound to a dead corpse"; "enough to abase the mettle of a generous spirit and sink him to a low and vulgar pitch of endeavour in all his actions": such are a few specimens of the phrases with which the tract abounds. [Footnote: Some of the phrases quoted occur in passages added in the second edition; but it is not worth while to distinguish those. Most of the phrases, and those of the same, occur in the third edition.] But one passage may be quoted entire:—
"But some are ready to object that the disposition ought seriously to be considered before. But let them know again that, for all the wariness 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 discerning 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? And, lastly, it is not strange though 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 a happiness, and no charitable means to release him; since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience; whenas the sober man, honouring the appearance of modesty, and hoping well of every social virtue under that veil, may easily chance to meet … often with a mind to all other due conversation inaccessible, and to all the more estimable and superior purposes of matrimony useless and almost lifeless; and what a solace, what a fit help, such a consort would be through the whole life of a man is less pain to conjecture than to have experience."
Oh! and is it come to this? Then, as now, nothing so common as that such mischances of marriage, heard of by the world, and the rather if published by the sufferers or one of them, should be received only as excellent amusement for people round about. It is as if the one thing intrinsically and unceasingly comic in the world, for most people, were the fact that it consists of man and woman, as if the institution on which human society is built and by which the succession of earth's generations is maintained, were the one only subject, with most people, for nothing else than laughter. Even now perhaps our disposition to jocosity on this subject, not sufficiently entertained by incidents of our own day, will range back to that case of Milton and Mary Powell two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, and join in the gossip which it then began to circulate through the town. In the lobby of the House of Commons it must have been heard of: it may have given a relish to the street-talk of reverend Presbyterian gentlemen talking home together from the Assembly "Only a month or two married; his wife gone home again; and now, instead of proper reticence about what can't he helped, all this hullaballoo of a new doctrine about Divorce! Just like him!" This and such-like is what we seem to overhear; this and such-like is what Milton did overhear; not much more than this and such-like are most of us prepared to say even now when we read the story. And yet the story is surely worth more. One fails to see, after all, that it yields only matter for jest and the repetition of commonplaces. What are the facts? Two human beings, long dead and gone, but then alive and with the, expectation of many years of life before them, had hardly been banded together in church when they found, or thought they found, that their union was for their mutual misery. The one was a poor country-girl in her teens, ruing the fate to which she had committed herself, but with no weapons for her relief but her tears, her terror, and the mitigation of refuge in her father's house.Hercase is to be pitied; shame if it isnot! The other was a man extraordinary—so extraordinary that even now we try to follow him in fancy in his walks through the London streets, and any bit of old wall his arm may have touched is a sacred antiquity, and we regard the series of thoughts that was in his mind through any month, or series of months, as something of prime interest in the spirit of the past, a prize that we would give gold to recover. Well, here was one series of thoughts that was in this man's mind for months and months, and that left effects, indeed, to his life's end. He was moody in his house; he walked moodily in the streets; we can hear him muttering to himself, we can see his teeth clenched. Morning and evening, day after day, he is in a great despair. And why? Because he has made the most fatal mistake a man can make, and is gazing on, morning and evening, day after day, into the consequences. Lo! into that life which he had hoped to make worthy of the God who gave it, a pattern life, a great poem within hose azure fitness other poems should arise to spin their gleaming courses—into this life what had he imported? Not the solace and bliss of a kindred soul's society, which had been his intent and dream; but a darkness, a disturbance, a marring melancholy, a daily and hourly debasement, a coinhabiting mischief! It was enough, he says, to drive a man "at last, through murmuring and despair, to thoughts of Atheism." But was there no remedy? Ah! in the very power of putting this question lay the advantage of the strong man over the weak Oxfordshire girl. He could reason, he could delve into the subject, he could revolve it intellectually. What if the plight in which he found himself were no necessary and irremediable evil? What if the permanence of marriage once contracted between two persons utterly unsuitable for each other were no decree of God, no real requirement of religion or of social well-being, but a mere superstitious and fallacious tradition, a stupid and pernicious convention among men? Once on this track, there was light for Milton. Out of his own private mishap there came the suggestion of a great enterprise. He would thunder, if not the mishap itself, at least its public significance, out upon the world. He would rouse his countrymen on the whole subject of the Law of Marriage. Who knew but his voice might be heard? Who knew but that, were it loud enough, there would be a response of assent from the whole land, and his new idea of Divorce, albeit the proclamation of only one man, might be carried, with other things, in the current Reformation? There ran a touch of this sanguine temper, this faith that any ideal might easily be made actual, through all Milton's life; and it appeared now most conspicuously. His idea, he was aware, was new; but only let his demonstration be sufficiently thorough, only let him succeed in disturbing the existing apathy and setting the thoughts of the nation astir on the subject, "and then," what?—"then I doubt not but with one gentle stroking to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of men." [Footnote: This phrase is in one of the inserted passages in the second edition.] Alas! after the hurricane of two hundred years the tear-drops still hang, multitudinous as ever, amid the leaves of that poor forest!
"Just like him" I have imagined to have been a comment on this new appearance of Milton by some gossip of the day who may have known a little of him personally. Really, though not as intended, the comment would have been just. This whole action of Milton, consequent on his unhappy marriage, was deeply characteristic. And yet there was perhaps no one then living from whom such a course of action could less have been expected. From all that we know of the youth and early manhood of Milton, we should certainly have predicted of him, with whatever heterodoxy in other matters, yet a life-long orthodoxy on the subject of marriage. Think of him as we have seen him heretofore, the glorious youth, cherishing every high ethical idealism, walking as in an ether of moral violet, disdaining customary vice, building up his character consciously on the principle that he who would be strong or great had best be immaculate. Think of him as the author ofComus; or think of him as he had described himself some years later in one of his Italian Sonnets:—
"Young, gentle-natured, and a simple wooer,Since from myself I stand in doubt to fly,Lady, to thee my heart's poor gift would IOffer devoutly: and, by tokens sure,I know it faithful, fearless, constant, pure,In its conceptions graceful, good, and high.When the world roars, and flames the startled sky,In its own adamant it rests secure,As free from chance and malice ever found,And fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse,As it is loyal to each manly thingAnd to the sounding lyre and to the Muse.Only in that part is it not so soundWhere Love hath set in it his cureless sting."
When he wrote thus, to what did he look forward, and to what might others have looked forward for him? A career, it was probable, of speculative dissent from his contemporaries in many things, and of undaunted courage in the vindication of such dissent, but hardly of dissent from the established moralities of the marriage-institution. Had he been happily married, had he found himself united at last to one such as his dreams had figured, who so likely to have persevered fondly in the traditional doctrine of marriage, to have maintained the mystic sanctity and the necessary permanence of the marriage-bond, and to have launched denunciations against all who dared to tamper with this article of the established ethics? But, as it had chanced otherwise, it was not the less characteristic that he himself had been the audacious questioner, the champion of a heresy. Driven by his own experience to investigate, his speculative boldness had brought him at once to a conclusion the novelty of which would have made others hesitate, but had no terrors for him. For (and here was his difference from most men, here was what may be called a Miltonic peculiarity) he would take no benefit from such private dispensation as a man might pass for his own relief in such a case, his neighbours winking at it so long as he did not disturb the forum. Hewoulddisturb the forum! What "Milton" did should be done openly, should be avowed, should be lawful! Others, circumstanced as he now was, might, if they liked—and there were examples all round, and especially in that Bohemian world of wits and men of letters with which he might be classed, though he abjured the brotherhood—others might, if they liked, adopt a policy of silence and acquiescence, hypocritically bowing to their fate, but taking out their protest in secret consolations! No such policy for him! The word "illicit" and his name should never be brought into conjunction! Whateverhedid should be according to a rule of right, clear to his own conscience, and held aloft in his hand under the whole roof of Heaven! And, if such a rule, ratified between himself and Heaven, should chance to conflict with one of the moralities of the existing code of men, there was but one course for him. He would assail the so-called "morality"; he would blast it out of the beliefs of men; he would perform for his fellows the service of their liberation, along with himself, from a useless and irrational thraldom! Or, if that work should prove too hard and toilsome, at least he should have published his own rule in opposition to the general superstition, and should walk on, as he had resolved always to walk, unabashed in the daylight.
It was in August 1643, as we have seen, that Milton put forth anonymously hisDoctrine and Discipline of Divorce. From that time, on through the rest of the autumn of 1643 and the winter of 1643-4, we are to fancy him in his house in Aldersgate Street, with his father and his pupils for his companions, and his thoughts much occupied, like those of other Englishmen, with the course of public events. On the whole, the Parliament had no greater admirer than Milton; and there were particular men in the Parliament that were after his own heart. From the Westminster Assembly, too, he seems to have expected good. So far as he had formed views as to the desirable form of Church-government for England, these views, as we have seen (Vol. II. pp. 376-382), might be described as an expectant Presbyterianism, not positively fixed and determined at all points, but kept conveniently fluid. Accordingly, his sympathies, at first, may well have been with the Presbyterians of the Assembly; among whom he could reckon, at any rate, his old tutor Young, and his other friends and fellow-labourers in the Smectymnuan controversy. Or, if some things among the tenets of the small Independent minority had begun to gain upon him, he seems still, through the winter of 1643-4, to have looked forward to some compromise that should be acceptable to England and yet tend to that conformity between the two kingdoms which the Scots desired, and to the furtherance of which they had pledged England by Henderson's international League and Covenant. At all events, Milton did, some time after September 1643, subscribe to this League and Covenant with the rest of his Parliamentarian countrymen. There are words of his own which vouch the fact. [Footnote: In the dedication to Parliament of hisTetrachordon, published March 1644-5, he uses these words, "That which I saw and was partaker of, your vows and solemn covenants."]
A moody time though the autumn of 1643 and the winter of 1643-4 must have been for Milton, there was some relaxation for him in society more general than that of his wife-deserted household. "Our author," says Phillips, "now as it were a single man again, made it his chief diversion now and then in an evening to visit the Lady Margaret Ley, daughter to the—Ley, Earl of Marlborough, Lord High Treasurer of England, and President of the Privy Council to King James the First. This lady, being a woman of great wit and ingenuity, had a particular honour for him, and took much delight in his company; as likewise her husband, Captain Hobson, a very accomplished gentleman." Phillips seems to be sufficiently accurate in this account, but a few details may be added:—
A man still well-remembered in England, though he had been dead fifteen years, was James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough, he had attained to that dignity only in his old age, having advanced to it through a long previous career. Born about 1552, the younger son of a Wiltshire squire, he had passed from Oxford to the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, and had attained to high eminence in his profession before the death of Elizabeth. Emerging from her reign, aged about fifty, he had been appointed by James to an Irish Chief Judgeship (1604); then brought back to England, knighted (1609), baroneted (1620), and made Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench (1621); and finally raised by the same King to the great office of Lord High Treasurer of England, and to a peerage with the title of Baron Ley of Ley in Devonshire (1624). In recognition of his long services, Charles, in the first year of his reign (Feb. 5, 1626-7), had created for him, when he was almost seventy-four years of age, the Earldom of Marlborough in his native Wiltshire. While thus promoting him, however, Charles appears not to have found him a minister such as he and Buckingham wanted. He had accordingly removed him from the High Treasurership in 1628, on the ground of his old age, but in reality to make way for the more compliant Lord Weston, and had shelved him into the less important office of Lord President of the Council. He had died at Lincoln's Inn, March 14, 1628-9, exactly four days after that ominous dissolution of Charles's third Parliament which announced his determination to have done with Parliaments and begin the reign of "Thorough." The death of the old peer at such a juncture had apparently the less been forgotten by reason of a tradition that the political anxieties of the juncture had had something to do with it. Now, at all events, in the days of the Long Parliament and the Civil War, there was still some respectful recollection of the old Earl of Marlborough as one of the best-liked ministers of James's reign and of the first years of Charles's. "He was a person of great gravity, ability, and integrity; and, as the Caspian Sea is observed neither to ebb nor flow, so his mind did not rise or fall, but continued the same constancy in all conditions." The words are Fuller's, and they probably express the character of the Earl that had come down among his countrymen. [Footnote: Dugdale's Baronage (1676), Vol. II. pp. 451, 452; Wood's Athenæ, II. 441, 443; Clar. Hist. (one vol. ed. 1843), p. 20; Fuller's Worthies,Wiltshire(ed. 1840), III. 328-9.]
The Earl had been three times married; but he had left a family only by his first wife—Mary, daughter of John Petty, of Stoke-Talmage, co. Oxon., Esq. Eleven children had been the issue of this marriage:—to wit (according to Dugdale), "three sons—Henry, James, andWilliam; and eight daughters—Elizabeth, married to Morice Carant, of Looner, in com. Somers., Esq.;Anne, to Sir Walter Long, of Draycot-Cerne, in com. Wilts., Knight;Mary, to Richard Erisy, of Erisy, in com. Cornw., Esq.;Dionysia, to John Harington, of Kelneyton, in com. Somers., Esq.;Margaret, to … Hobson, of … in the Isle of Wight, Esq.;Hesther, to Arthur Fuller, of Bradfield, in com. Hertf., Esq.;Martha, died unmarried; andPhoebe, to … Biggs, of Hurst, in com. Berks., Esq." [Footnote: Dugdale,vt. supra.] All these children, it would appear, had been born, and most of them married and settled in life, before their father's promotion to the peerage, and while he was yet only James Ley, or Sir James Ley, the eminent lawyer. Indeed, his promotion to the Earldom in his old age had been, in part, a compliment to his third wife- -Jane, daughter of Lord Butler of Bramfield, whose mother was a sister of the Duke of Buckingham; and it had been specially provided, in the patent of the Earldom, that it should descend, by preference, to his heirs by that lady. That lady having failed, however, to produce heirs, the benefits of the Earldom had reverted to the Earl's family by his first wife, Mary Petty. His eldest son by that wife, Henry Ley, had, accordingly, succeeded him in the title. But this Henry, second Earl of Marlborough, had died in 1638; and the actual Earl at the time with which we are now concerned (1643) washisson, James, a youth of only some three-and-twenty years, but already serving as a general officer of artillery in the army of the King. He seems, indeed, to have been one of the finest young fellows on that side; and he had a career before him which was to entitle him, at his death in 1665, to this notice in a summary of his character by Clarendon: "He was a man of wonderful parts in all kinds of learning, which he took more delight in than his title." [Footnote: Clar. Life, ed. 184 p. 1141.] For the present, however, it is with the good ladies his aunts, the surviving daughters of the first Earl, that we have to do; or rather only with the fifth of them—the Lady Margaret Ley, the friend of Milton. The husbands of at least two of her sisters (Long of Wilts., and Erisy of Cornwall) being among the Parliamentarians of the Long Parliament, it can hardly be doubted that this lady's husband—Dugdale's "… Hobson of … in the Isle of Wight, Esq.," and Phillips's "Captain Hobson, a very accomplished gentleman"— was also a Parliamentarian, though of less wealth and note, and not in Parliament. Otherwise, Lady Margaret's house in London could hardly have been one of Milton's evening resorts. What kind of "Captaincy" her husband held, compatible with his being domiciled in London in 1643-4, it might be difficult now to ascertain. Suffice it that hewasso domiciled, and that his wife could receive guests not merely as Mrs. Hobson, "a woman of great wit and ingenuity," but as Lady Margaret Ley, the daughter of a well-remembered Earl.
It is not from Phillips alone that we hear of Milton's friendship with the Lady Margaret. Milton has himself commemorated it in one of his Sonnets:—
Daughter to that good Earl, once PresidentOf England's Council and her Treasury,Who lived in both unstained by gold or fee,And left them both, more in himself content,Till the sad breaking of that ParliamentBroke him, as that dishonest victoryAt Chæronea, fatal to liberty,Killed with report that old man eloquent:Though later born than to have known the daysWherein your father flourished, yet by you,Madam, methinks I see him living yet;So well your words his noble virtues praiseThat all both judge you to relate them trueAnd to possess them, honoured Margaret."
The "old man eloquent" is Isocrates, the Athenian orator, whose patriotism made him refuse to survive the defeat of the Athenians and Thebans by Philip of Macedon at Chæroncia, This comparison of the lady's father to the famous Greek is perhaps the most poetical turn in the Sonnet. For the rest, it tells us something about the lady herself. She must have been somewhat, if not considerably, older than Milton; for, though Milton had been twenty years old at the time of the good Earl's death, and might therefore well remember his Treasurership and Presidency of the Council, he speaks of knowing the days wherein the old peer had flourished chiefly through the Lady Margaret's talk about him and them. Her conversation, it would therefore seem, ran much upon her father and his private and political virtues; and Milton listened respectfully, seeing much in the lady herself of what she praised in her sire. Perhaps Milton would talk to her freely in return of his own concerns. The Lady Margaret Ley, and her husband, Captain Hobson, were probably in his confidence on the subject of his marriage misfortune. The Sonnet was unquestionably written in 1643 or 1644. [Footnote: It was printed in the first or 1645 edition of Milton's Poems, and it is placed last in the series of Sonnets there contained. The draft of it in the Cambridge Book of Milton's MSS. is in Milton's own hand—the title "To the Lady Margaret Ley" being likewise his hand.]
A younger and unmarried lady must then also have been among Milton's acquaintances. How else can we account for this other Sonnet?
"Lady, that in the prime of earliest youthWisely hast shunned the broad way and the green,And with those few art eminently seenThat labour up the hill of heavenly truth,The better part, with Mary and with Ruth,Chosen thou hast; and they that overween,And at thy glowing virtues fret their spleen,No anger find in thee, but pity and ruth.Thy care is fixed, and zealously attendsTo fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light,And hope that reaps not shame. Therefore be sureThou, when the Bridegroom with his feastful friendsPasses to bliss at the mid hour of night,Hast gained thy entrance, Virgin wise and pure."
This Sonnet, to which the heading "To a Virtuous Young Lady" is now prefixed in the editions of Milton, had no such heading prefixed in his own copy. [Footnote: In the Cambridge MSS. there is a draft in Milton's own hand immediately before the draft of the Sonnet to Lady Margaret Ley. In the edition of 1645 the Sonnet was printed in the same order and without a heading. In the MS. draft there are several erasures and corrections. Thus Milton had originally written "blooming virtue" in as if with reference to the personal appearance of the young lady; but in the margin he substitutes the present reading, "growing virtues."] Who the young lady was that so won upon Milton at this critical time, and seemed to him so superior to the more commonplace of her sex, we are left uninformed. There is a conjecture on the subject, which may afterwards appear. It is clear, meanwhile, that the poor absent Mary Powell may have suffered not only from her own defects, but also from the opportunity of some such contrast.
The Divorce subject continued to occupy Milton. His tract had been rapidly bought, and had caused a sensation. Through the cold winter of 1643-4, while the Parliament and the Assembly were busy, and the auxiliary Scottish army was expected, a good many people had leisure to read the strange production, or at least to look into it, and be properly shocked. It seems to have been about this time, for example, that James Howell, the letter-writer, came, upon a copy. Or rather the copy must have come upon him; for the poor man, now past fifty years of age, and ousted from his clerkship to the Privy Council, was in the Fleet Prison for debt, and dependent for his subsistence there on translations, dedications and poems to friends, and all sorts of literary odds and ends. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 745, and Cunningham's London ArticleFleet Prison.] In one of his rambling pieces, afterwards published in the form of Letters, mostly without dates, and addressed to friends from feigned places, he thus gives what I take to be his impression of Milton's tract when it first reached him in the Fleet: "But that opinion of a poor shallow-brained puppy, who, upon any cause of dissatisfaction, would have men to have a privilege to change their wives, or to repudiate them, deserves to be hissed at rather than confuted; for nothing can tend more to usher in all confusion and beggary throughout the world: therefore that wiseacre deserves," &c. [Footnote: Howell's Familiar Letters Book IV, Letter 7, addressed "To Sir Edward Spencer, knight," (pp 453-457 of edit. 1754.) The letter is dated "Lond. 24 Jan.," no year given; but the dates are worthless, being afterthoughts, when the Letters were published in successive batches.] As Mr. Howell's own notions about marriage and its moralities were of the lightest and easiest, his severe virtuousness here is peculiarly representative. More interesting on its own account is the opinion of another contemporary—no other than Milton's late antagonist Bishop Hall. In Hall'sCases of Conscience(not published till 1649) he thus describes the impression which Milton's Divorce pamphlet had made upon him when he first read it in its anonymous form: "I have heard too much of, and once saw, a licentious pamphlet, thrown abroad in these lawless times in the defence and encouragement of Divorces (not to be sued out; that solemnity needed not; but) to be arbitrarily given by the disliking husband to the displeasing and unquiet wife, upon this ground principally, That marriage was instituted for the help and comfort of man: where, therefore, the match proves such as that the wife doth but pull down aside, and, by her innate peevishness and either sullen or pettish and froward disposition, bring rather discontent to her husband, the end of marriage being hereby frustrate, why should it not, saith he, be in the husband's power, after some unprevailing means of reclamation attempted, to procure his own peace by casting off this clog, and to provide for his own peace and contentment in a fitter match? Woe is me! to what a pass is the world conic that a Christian, pretending to Information, should dare to tender so loose a project to the public! I must seriously profess that, when I first did cast my eyes upon the front of the book, I supposed some great wit meant to try his skill in the maintenance of this so wild and improbable a paradox; but, ere I could run over some of those too well-penned pages, I found the author was in earnest, and meant seriously to contribute this piece of good counsel, in way of reformation, to the wise and seasonable care of superiors. I cannot but blush for our age wherein so bold a motion hath been, amongst others, admitted to the light. What will all the Christian Churches through the world, to whose notice these lines shall come, think of our woeful degeneration, &c."? [Footnote: Hall's Works (edit. 1837), VII. 467.] Hall, it will be seen, had noted the literary ability of the pamphlet, while amazed by its doctrine.
Neither Howell's nor Bishop Hall's opinion can have reached the author of the pamphlet till long after the date now in view. But other opinions to the same effect had been reaching him. Especially, it seems, the pamphlet had caused a fluttering among the London clergy. The consequence had best be told by himself. "God, it seems, intended to prove me, whether I durst alone take up a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, and found I durst. My name I did not publish, as not willing it should sway the reader either for me or against me. But, when I was told that the style (which what it ails to be so soon distinguishable I cannot tell) was known by most men, and that some of the clergy began to inveigh and exclaim on what I was credibly informed they had not read, I look it then for my proper season both to show a name that could easily contemn such an indiscreet kind of censure, and to reinforce the question with a more accurate diligence, that, if any of them would be so good as to leave railing, and to let us hear so much of his learning and Christian wisdom as will be strictly demanded of him in his answering to this problem, care was had he should not spend his preparations against a nameless pamphlet." [Footnote: This passage, fitting in here with chronological exactness, occurs in Milton'sJudgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce, published in July 1644.] In other words, he resolved to abandon the anonymous. His pamphlet, easily traced to him from the first by its Miltonic style, had been sold out, or nearly so; people generally, but clergymen especially, were saying harsh things about it, and about him as its author; but some of these critics, he authentically knew, had never read the pamphlet, and others were making a point of the fact that it had appeared without its author's name. Well, there should be an end of that! He would put forth a second edition of the pamphlet, and avow the authorship! And this he would do rather because, since the publication of the first edition, he had been looking farther into the literature of the question, and could now fortify his own reasoned opinion with authorities he had been but dimly aware of, or had altogether overlooked.