of £500, to the feckless Richard Powell, who lived in an Oxfordshire village a mile or two from the one in which John Milton senior had been born. There may have been a long-standing acquaintance between the two families. In June 1642 the poet went down to Oxfordshire, perhaps to collect this debt, perhaps combining the trip with a visit to relatives, perhaps with a few days working in the Bodleian Library. He returned married to the seventeen-year-old Mary, one of Richard Powell’s eleven children, and with the promise of a dowry of £1,000 (never received). We know nothing of how this happened. We may imagine the Powells as a scheming family, anxious to evade their financial obligations. We may think that Milton was anxious for marriage in the abstract. ‘He who wilfully abstains from marriage, not being supernaturally gifted’, Milton wrote in 1645, is ‘in a diabolical sin.’1
Milton had recently taken a big house in Barbican for himself and a number of boys whom he was teaching. Perhaps he already had marriage in mind. There has been much speculation about what happened, or did not happen, in the matrimonial chamber of this house. Mary may or may not have refused to consummate the marriage; certainly she found the surroundings oppressively quiet and lonely after the crowded household she had come from. The silence was punctuated by occasional cries from pupils undergoing a beating. Within ‘a month or thereabout’ of marriage Mary, who was only a child herself, had gone back home, ostensibly on a brief visit. She did not return, and the emissary whom Milton sent was rudely repulsed.
Meanwhile civil war had broken out. The Powells were Royalists, living in a Royalist area; Milton an ardent Parliamentarian. Oxford became the King’s headquarters, so communications were difficult. If the Powells were cunning schemers, they may have calculated that now they had a chance of bilking altogether on their debt. Or they may suddenly have found their son-in-law’s political views, tolerable six months earlier, insupportable now that fighting had actually broken out. Or Mary may just have said No. We do not know.
We can likewise only guess at the effect on the poet of the breakdown of his marriage; it must have been traumatic. No man enjoys that sort of blow to his pride. We may suspect that Milton was aware of an element of incompetence on his side which did not please him. But equally important were the consequences for his way of thinking. Marriage had proved no more satisfactory than chastity as a solution to his sexual problems. The anonymous biographer tells us that Milton had already reflected a good deal about marriage before his own personal problem arose, and had adopted his own version of the Puritan and Shakespearean ideal – that marriage should be a union of two minds, that mutual solace and delight was as important an object of marriage as the procreation of children. And Milton had already speculated, in the abstract, on the desirability of divorce where a couple proved mutually incompatible: it was the natural corollary of the new emphasis on marriage as a voluntary union of like-minded people, though not all who cherished the ideal pushed this logic as far as Milton did.1 For a century and more the relation of the sexes had been the subject of eager discussion, as the vernacular printed Bible was studied, and as attempts were being made to impose the monogamous family on to populations many of which had never hitherto really accepted it; and this at a time when the opening up of Asia, Africa and America to European trade revealed whole civilizations in which monogamy was not the rule.2
Against this background of speculation Milton suddenly had to face the failure of his own marriage. The life which was to have been a true poem was jarred by a piece of cacophonous prose. Milton’s ideas about divorce were not suddenly adopted because of his own predicament; but his predicament certainly sharpened his thinking on the subject, and the urgency of his writing.
Milton’s ideas on divorce, as on much else, go back to the thinking of the early Protestant reformers. They were not his sources, but he was to find to his delight that they (and Wyclif too) had anticipated some of his conclusions. Not to mention More’s Utopia, an impressive list could be drawn up of early Protestant divines who sanctioned divorce – Tyndale, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer, Osiander, Paraeus. Advocacy of divorce was one of the charges against the Marian martyr Bishop Hooper in 1555. Cranmer’s The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws insisted that the grounds for divorce should be the same for both sexes.3 Milton also noted in his Commonplace Book that Bodin was in favour of divorce – for incompatibility. This position was, however, more characteristic of radical Protestants, especially Anabaptists.4
The Anglican church remained more conservative on the subject of divorce than other reformed churches. Judicial separation a thoro et mensa could be obtained, sometimes for reasons other than adultery; but not divorce permitting remarriage. Things were tightening up from the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Some Puritans had advocated divorce – Perkins (for desertion, and where one of the spouses was an unbeliever, as well as for adultery), Rainolds, Silver-tongued Smith (who thought it was ‘the physic of marriage’ – but for adultery only), Stock and Joseph Hall (both for adultery only). A radical like Robert Browne was more liberal, allowing divorce ‘for religion and conscience’, and in 1605 it was claimed that members of Francis Johnson’s congregation in Amsterdam ‘accused themselves of adultery so that they might be rid of their wives’, so easy was it to obtain a divorce.1 Divorce was also easier in New England. The Socinian Racovian Catechism authorized believers to desert an obstinately unbelieving spouse.2 In 1576 there had been agitation in Parliament for matrimonial cases to be taken away from the church courts and transferred to the common law. That would be the logical consequence of ceasing to regard marriage as a sacrament and treating it as a civil contract. This seemed obvious common sense to Milton: it was recommended again by Hugh Peter in 1651, and finally carried into effect by the Barebones Parliament in 1653.3 Under their act Milton was married to his second wife by a J.P. In August 1653 an attempt had been made to insert a divorce clause in the marriage bill before Parliament.
Milton decided in 1643 to write on the subject of divorce, in the general interest, not merely with respect to his own case. He did so with fantastic, reckless courage, flying in the face of received respectable opinion in England. He displayed the same sort of courage in isolation later in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and The Ready and Easy Way, though it is difficult to be absolutely certain in any of these cases just how far Milton was aware of his isolation.
The opening passage of his first divorce pamphlet, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, suggests that others as well as Milton had expected that after the defeat of episcopacy ‘man’s nature would find immediate rest and releasement from all evils. But … such as have a mind large enough to take into their thoughts a general survey of human things would soon prove themselves in that opinion far deceived.’4
Milton had learnt from his own experience that ‘the strongest Christian’ who found himself ‘bound fast … to an image of earth and phlegm … will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against divine Providence.’ The ‘pain of loss’ in such cases was ‘in some degree like that which reprobates feel’. It might lead to ‘thoughts of atheism’.1 Already the ways of God to men had to be considered and explained before they could be justified. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was published in August 1643. A second edition followed within six months, and two more in 1645. The Judgment of Martin Bucer,2 in July 1644, together with Tetrachordon and Colasterion (March 1645) completed the series.
Milton’s problem was to explain away Christ’s apparent flat prohibition of divorce on any grounds other than adultery. To do this he went back to first principles. Whereas previously he had claimed that the Bible was easy for simple men to understand, now he argued that ‘there is scarce any one saying in the Gospel but must be read with limitations and distinctions to be rightly understood’; interpreting the Bible calls for ‘a skillful and laborious gatherer’.3 Above all, we must not ‘enslave the dignity of man’ by setting ‘straiter limits to obedience than God had set’. ‘The ways of God … are equal, easy and not burdensome:
