the remedy of divorce’ was ‘an unreasonable imposition on the freedom of mankind’.5 Shadwell in Epsom Wells (1672), Farquhar in The Beaux Stratagem (1707) and Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter (1688) all contemplate divorce for incompatibility: Farquhar at least based his arguments on Milton.)
Milton was not entirely delighted by the approbation of such as Mrs. Attaway. In the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he claimed rather defensively that he had published it in English out of ‘the esteem I have of my country’s judgment, and the love I bear to my native language’. But in the Second Defence he expressed regret that he had not kept his divorce pamphlets in the decent obscurity of Latin. In 1655 he told a Dutch admirer that if these tracts were to be translated in the Netherlands he would prefer Latin to Dutch; but he did not reject the idea of translation into the vernacular.6
The ‘clamour of so much envy and impertinence’ with which The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was received, and still more the failure to answer it, surprised and upset Milton. In the second edition (1644) he supported his arguments from reason and Scripture by the authority of orthodox Protestant divines: his schoolboy delight in finding that Bucer had anticipated his arguments shows how shaken he had been – despite his professed contempt for arguments from authority. He felt, or claimed to feel, that perhaps he had been divinely inspired to recover this lost truth – a claim which he took seriously enough to repeat in his Defence of the People of England.1 The Presbyterians remained unimpressed, however, despite the fuller Scriptural exegesis of Tetrachordon and the invective of Colasterion.
So the cruel blow of the breakdown of his marriage was followed by a no less cruel outburst of reprobation and denunciation as a libertine, an advocate of sexual promiscuity. It must have been exceptionally galling for a man whose views on the sanctity of marriage were in fact far more austere than those of most Puritans and whose sensibility – already made raw by Mary’s desertion – now had salt rubbed into it. The sonnet, ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’, shows how much he was affected not only by the vituperation of the orthodox but also by his unexpected allies. ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty.’
Again we have to guess how Milton faced life in the years between 1642 and 1645. He found consolation in agreeable feminine society – that of Boyle’s sister, the talented Lady Ranelagh, of Lady Margaret Ley, of Mrs. Katharine Thomason, wife of the Presbyterian collector of pamphlets, of Mrs. Hester Blackborough, Milton’s cousin, married to a leather-seller. Margaret Ley was ‘daughter to that good Earl’ of Marlborough, whom ‘the sad breaking of that Parliament’ of 1628–9 ‘broke’. Now wife of Captain John Hobson, she was ‘a woman of great wit and ingenuity’, and seems to have taken special care of Milton after his wife left him, as Lady Ranelagh was to be his stand-by in his blindness and widowerhood. Lady Ranelagh was an old friend and patron of Hartlib and Dury. Her house may have been the meeting-place of the Invisible College in the later sixteen-forties.2 She perhaps introduced Henry Oldenburg to Milton. In the fifties she was Milton’s near neighbour, and was ‘like a near relative’ to him. Parker even hints at a more intimate relationship, but without evidence. Milton taught her nephew and her son. She almost certainly used her considerable influence on the poet’s behalf in 1660.3
During Mary’s absence there was also a mysterious Miss Davis, so far unidentified, whom Milton was said to have thought of marrying. This would presumably have been after divorcing Mary for desertion, unless the poet was already a serious advocate of second marriages without divorce.4 The Powells got to know of this plan, and ‘set all engines on work’ to restore Mary. The Civil War was over; the Royalists were defeated; travel between Oxfordshire and London was again easy. The Powells secured the collusion of the Blackboroughs, whom Milton was in the habit of visiting. On one of these occasions Mary reappeared, and in a theatrical scene flung herself on her knees before her husband, begging him to take her back. The Blackboroughs are more likely than the Powells to have thought of this approach to the young poet who had absorbed high chivalrous ideals from his early reading.1 Reluctant though he no doubt was, Milton succumbed to this well-calculated attack: Mary resumed her position as Mrs. Milton. Within less than a year Milton was saddled with her whole family, now apparently ruined – Mr. Powell, Mrs. Powell, and at least five children.
Biographers have not sufficiently contemplated the possibility of Milton saying No to Mary. He had decided that the marriage was irretrievably broken; the economic motivation of Mary’s return was transparently obvious; and Milton may still have had hopes of Miss Davis. His chivalrous gesture was, he may soon have realized, an error of judgment. Samson did not make the same mistake when Dalila tried a similar appeal; and Milton seems to have lost interest in the chivalric ethos.
We can only guess at the horrors of this transformation of the house which Mary had found too quiet in 1642. Milton did his best to help the Powells financially, assisting his father-in-law to compound for his delinquency, and trying to sort out the worst of his money tangles. But guarded letters referring to the noise which surrounded him hint at something of what he suffered. We can only guess too at his relations with Mary, who bore him a son and three daughters before she died in 1652. Parker sentimentally imagined that the marriage, against all the odds, proved successful: argued even that Mary was ‘my late espoused saint’ about whom Milton wrote one of the most moving sonnets in the English language. One wonders. The description in the De Doctrina Christiana of the sordid bickerings in a marriage of incompatibles may look all the way back to 1642; or it may recall more recent experiences.2 Christopher Arnold, who knew Milton in 1651, spoke later of his ‘unhappy marriage’.3 Milton did not remember the date of Mary’s death. His relation with Mary’s daughters was never easy; and when he came to make his will, the unpaid dowry still rankled. Surely he would have forgiven and forgotten if his life with Mary had been happy? Finally, there is the fact of his long silence in the years of readjustment to Mary. The first interruption in his pamphleteering, between May 1642 and August 1643, can be precisely related to the breakdown of his marriage. The second and longer interruption, from March 1645 to February 1649, may equally be related to the disaster of its resumption. Though the Powells were financially completely dependent on Milton, one doubts whether they had the tact to repress their very different political views. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates may well have been the product, among other things, of discussions in the family circle. Never again was Milton to be silent for so long, even in his blindness, until the years after the Restoration when he was working on Paradise Lost and was precluded from pamphleteering by the censorship.
The case of Mrs. Attaway reminds us of the importance of women among the radical sects, and of the new opportunities which freedom of organization and discussion made possible. In New England in the sixteen-thirties Mrs. Hutchinson usurped the role of teacher and political leader hitherto confined to men. In England in the forties and fifties women took part in church government, preached, prayed, prophesied, wrote. In the Quaker movement especially they played a leading role as missionaries; two went off to convert the Grand Turk, others – who were less tolerantly received – to convert New England. Women played a prominent part in the tragedy of James Nayler, the Quaker who in 1656 made a symbolic entry into Bristol, riding on a donkey, accompanied by women singing Hosanna and strewing palms in his path. Nayler’s subsequent trial and punishment for ‘horrid blasphemy’ proved a great divide in the early history of Quakerism, leading to the ascendancy of George Fox over the ‘Ranter’ wing – the anarchic individualism which surrendered completely to the motions of the spirit. The anti-political and pacifist tendency in the movement was strengthened. Nayler might have been saved from the terrible penalties inflicted on him if more M.P.s had shared Milton’s scepticism about blasphemy as an offence.
