Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/347

Rh MILTON 329 comes in the middle was no other than the Scottish Thomas Young who had been Milton s domestic preceptor in Bread Street. Having returned from Hamburg in 1628, he had been appointed to the vicarage of Stowmarket in Suffolk, in which living he had remained ever since, with the reputation of being one of the most solid and learned Puritans among the English parish clergy. The famous Smectymnuan pamphlet in reply to Hall was mainly Young s. What is more interesting is that his old pupil Milton was secretly in partnership with him and his brother-Smectymnuans. Milton s hand is discernible in a portion of the original Smectymnuan pamphlet; and he continued to aid the Smectymnuans in their subsequent rejoinders to Hall s defences of himself. It was more in Milton s way, however, to appear in print independently; and in May 1641, while the controversy between Hall and the Smectymnuans was going on, he put forth a pamphlet of his own. It was entitled Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England and the Causes that have hitherto hindered it, and consisted of a review of English ecclesiastical history, with an appeal to his countrymen to resume that course of reformation which he considered to have been prematurely stopped in the preceding century, and to sweep away the last relics of papacy and prelacy. Among all the root-and-branch pamphlets of the time it stood out, and stands out still, as the most thorough-going and tremendous. It was followed by four others in rapid succession, to wit, Of Prelatical Episcopacy and whether it may be deduced from the Apostolical Times (June 1641), Animadversions upon the Remonstrant s Defence against Smectymnuus (July 1641), The Reason of Church Govern ment urged against Prelaty (February 1641-42), Apology against a Pamphlet called a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions, &c. (March 1641-42). The first of these was directed chiefly against that middle party which advocated a limited Episcopacy, with especial reply to the arguments of Archbishop Ussher, as the chief exponent of the views of that party. Two of the others, as the titles imply, belong to the Smectymnuan series, and were castigations of Bishop Hall. The greatest of the four, and the most important of all Milton s anti-Episcopal pamphlets after the first, is that entitled The Reason of Church Government. It is there that Milton takes his readers into his confidence, speaking at length of himself and his motives in becoming a controversialist. Poetry, he declares, was his real vocation ; it was with reluctance that he had resolved to &quot; leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes &quot; ; but duty had left him no option. The great poem or poems he had been meditat ing could wait ; and meanwhile, though in prose-polemics he had the use only of his &quot; left hand,&quot; that hand should be used with all its might in the cause of his country and of liberty. The parliament had advanced in the root-and-branch direction so far as to have passed a bill for the exclusion of bishops from the House of Lords, and compelled the king s assent to that bill, when, in August 1642, the further struggle between Charles and his subjects took the form of civil war. All England was then divided into the Royalists, supporting the king, and the Parliamentarians, adhering to that majority of the Commons, with a minority of the Lords, which sat on as the parliament. While the first battles of the civil war were being fought j with varying success, this parliament, less impeded than | when it had been full, moved on more and more rapidly j in the root-and-branch direction, till, by midsummer 1643, ; the abolition of Episcopacy had been decreed, and the question of the future non-prelatic constitution of the Church of England referred to a synod of divines, to meet at Westminster under parliamentary authority. Of Milton s life through those first months of the civil war little is known. He remained in his house in Aldersgate Street, teaching his nephews and other pupils ; and the only scrap that came from his pen was the semi-jocose sonnet bearing the title When the Assault ivas intended to the City. In the summer of 1643, however, there was a great change in the Aldersgate Street household. About the end of May, as his nephew Edward Phillips remembered, Milton went away on a country journey, without saying whither or for what purpose ; and, when he returned, about a month afterwards, it was with a young wife, and with some of her sisters and other relatives in her company. He had, in fact, been in the very headquarters of the king and the Royalist army in and round Oxford ; and the bride he brought back with him was a Mary Powell, the eldest daughter of Richard Powell, Esq., of Forest Hill, near Oxford. She was the third of a family of eleven sons and daughters, of good standing, but in rather embarrassed circumstances, and was seventeen years and four months old, while Milton was in his thirty-fifth year. However the marriage came about, it was a most unfortunate event. The Powell family were strongly Royalist, and the girl herself seems to have been frivolous, unsuitable, and stupid. Hardly were the honeymoon festivities over in Aldersgate Street when, her sisters and other relatives having returned to Forest Hill and left her alone with her husband, she pined for home again and begged to be allowed to go back on a visit. Milton consented, on the understanding that the visit was to be a brief one. This seems to have been in July 1643. Soon, however, the intimation from Forest Hill was that he need not look ever to have his wife in his house again. The resolution seems to have been mainly the girl s own, abetted by her mother ; but, as the king s cause was then prospering in the field, it is a fair conjecture that the whole of the Powell family had repented of their sudden connexion with so prominent a Parliamentarian and assailant of the Church of England as Milton. While his wife was away, his old father, who had been residing for three years with his younger and lawyer son at Reading, came to take up his quarters in Aldersgate Street. Milton s conduct under the insult of his wife s desertion was most characteristic. Always fearless and speculative, he converted his own case into a public protest against the existing law and theory of marriage. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Restored, to the good of both Sexes, was the title of a pamphlet put forth by him in August 1643, without his name, but with no effort at concealment, declar ing the notion of a sacramental sanctity in the marriage relation to be a clerically invented superstition, and arguing that inherent incompatibility of character, or contrariety of mind, between two married persons, is a perfectly just reason for divorce. There was no reference to his own case, except by implication; but the boldness of the speculation roused attention and sent a shock through London. It was a time when the authors of heresies of this sort, or of any sort, ran considerable risks. The famous Westminster Assembly of Divines, called by the Long Parliament, had met on the appointed day, July 1, 1643; the Scots, in consenting to send an army into England to assist the parliament in their war with the king, had proposed, as one of the conditions, their Solemn League and Covenant, binding the two nations to endeavour after a uniformity of religion and of ecclesiastical discipline, with the extirpation of all &quot; heresy, schism, and profane- ness,&quot; as well as popery and prelacy; the Solemn League and Covenant had been enthusiastically accepted in England, and was being sworn to universally by the Parliamentarians ; and one immediate effect was that four eminent Scottish XVI. 42