loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe
(IX. 908–16)
— with that cry still ringing in our ears, how can we take seriously Milton’s attempt to restore traditional male superiority by blandly observing that Adam was ‘fondly overcome by female charm’? Milton’s heart here has reasons that his reason does not know:1 as Empson realized, the emotion underlying the poem is far more subversive than the ostensible argument. Milton went beyond Genesis when he made Adam ask for a helpmeet, and proclaim the equality of the sexes to the Creator himself:
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Given and received
(VIII. 383–6)
After the Fall, it was Eve who first repented and through her love saved Adam (X. 909–46). The contradiction between the traditional sexual morality to which Milton pays lip-service and the morality of Adam’s heart has its analogies with the division in Milton himself between the second and third cultures. Both in the divorce tracts and in the De Doctrina he is extraordinarily ‘un-Puritan’ and broad-minded about ‘casual adultery’. He is contrasting mere physical adultery with the graver offence of spiritual adultery. But few Puritans would have dismissed the former as ‘but a transient injury’, ‘soon repented, soon amended’, which can be forgiven ‘once and again’.2 (Did Mary have something to forgive which took place during her absence?) Edwards would have seen here confirmation that Milton was a libertine. When Raphael blushingly admitted that angels interpenetrate, he said nothing about monogamy. Milton is defending natural sexuality against traditional Puritanism.
Our maker bids increase: who bids abstain
But our destroyer?
(P.L. IV. 748–9)
Abstinence as such is no virtue. Milton in this one point is with the Ranters. After describing Eve’s nakedness, Milton attacked ‘dishonest shame, … sin-bred, … mere show of seeming pure’ (P.L. IV. 313–16). Telling us that Adam and Eve made love before the Fall, he added:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
(P.L. IV. 744–7)
This was unacceptable to many orthodox theologians; Milton seems to be deliberately blurring the distinction between fallen and unfallen sexuality.1
It is, when we come to think of it, remarkable that Milton could still write ‘unpuritanically’ about sex in Paradise Lost, after the fiasco of his first marriage and the scandal over the divorce pamphlets. Modern commentators have compared his attitude to Blake, to Hardy; Paradise Lost is ‘probably the last piece of imaginative literature before Jude the Obscure to treat sexuality in serious practical detail’. The De Doctrina’s reference to ‘the human seed, the noblest and most intimate part of the body’, looks forward to D. H. Lawrence.2 ‘The frank eroticism of some of the descriptions of the naked Eve’ has been seen as a recovery of Spenser’s vision of human love and perfectibility without Spenser’s elusive allegory. The Adam and Eve who walk out of Paradise Lost hand in hand are human, practical, down-to-earthy, in a way that might not have been conceivable before Milton’s experience in the English Revolution.3
However little attention Milton’s tracts on episcopacy had attracted, he could not complain that his divorce pamphlets were ignored. Royalists naturally took advantage of what they saw as confirmation of their view that heresy led inevitably to social licence and chaos. Cowley may have referred to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Civil War, a piece of Royalist propaganda written in the summer and autumn of 1643:
The number of their wives their lusts decree;
The Turkish law’s their Christian liberty.
If he does refer to Milton, it is the earliest known hostile reaction (though unpublished).1 Respectable Puritan divines, far from sharing the libertarian outlook of the early reformers, were acutely embarrassed by Milton’s arguments. They met them either with silence or with unargued denunciation.
Milton’s old friend Thomas Young referred cautiously to his pupil in a sermon preached before the House of Commons in February 1644, warning against advocates of ‘digamy’. Milton was denounced as a licentious libertine by Herbert Palmer to the same august congregation six months later: Palmer called for action against Milton and his book. There followed attacks by William Prynne,2 by the Stationers’ Company (who denounced him to the House of Lords), by Daniel Featley, Ephraim Pagitt, Robert Baillie, Joseph Caryl (a conservative licenser who attacked Milton whilst licensing a book against him), John Bachiler (one of the most liberal of the Parliamentarian licensers, who also thought he must dissociate himself from Milton),3 Thomas Edwards and many others. Milton’s ideas were caricatured in Little Non-Such (1646),4 glanced at by Thomas Case in a sermon to the House of Commons in 1647, noticed by Edward Hyde in the same year. The ministers of Sion College denounced them; so did T.C., the anonymous A Glasse for the Times (1648), Joseph Hall, Clement Walker, Henry Hammond, James Howell, Alexander Ross, the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus, and many others.5
After the Stationers’ attack Milton was summoned before the House of Lords, but nothing seems to have happened. Edwards tells us that Milton’s views were well received by the sectarian preacher Mrs. Attaway. She took the initiative in discussing them with two gentlemen of the Inns of Court who attended her meeting. I should like to be able to prove that they were the two young sparks with whom Milton shared his ‘gaudy days’.6 Mrs. Attaway subsequently acted on what she took to be Milton’s principles by eloping with William Jenny, who like her suffered from an uncongenial spouse.7 Mrs. Attaway is an interesting figure, who has been treated rather flippantly by male historians. She encouraged free discussion after her sermons. Like Milton she was a mortalist. She believed that there was no hell save in the conscience, and that it could not stand with the goodness of God to damn his own creatures eternally. She held herself to be as free from sin as Christ was when in the flesh.1
We may suspect that Mrs. Attaway was not the only one in radical circles who read Milton with approval. John Robins the Ranter ‘gave authority unto some of his disciples, both unto men and women, to change their wives and husbands’, setting an example by changing his own. William Franklin rejected his wife and lived with Mary Gadbury, who had been deserted by her own husband.2 Hugh Peter and Laurence Clarkson were among those who spoke up in favour of divorce, and many Ranters simply rejected the tie of monogamous marriage altogether, as a fruit of the curse.3
Milton was defended by Henry Robinson and Henry Burton in 1646, and there were several later laudatory references. In 1660 ‘G.S.’ suggested that ‘the vulgar’
